The Southeast, Then and Now

Anthropologists and Indians in the New South. Edited by Rachel A. Bonney and J. Anthony Paredes. (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2001, xii + 286 pp., foreword, introduction, notes, references, index, maps, tables, figures. $29.95 paper.)

The Transformation of the Southeastern Indians, 1540–1760. Edited by Robbie Ethridge and Charles Hudson. (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2002, xxxix + 369 pp., preface, introduction, notes, bibliography, index, maps, tables, figures. $50.00 cloth.)

The Indian Slave Trade: The Rise of the English Empire in the American South, 1670–1717. By Alan Gallay. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002, xviii + 444 pp., preface, introduction, afterword, notes, index, tables, figures. $35.00 cloth.)

The anthropological and historical literatures of the Native American southeast have been enriched by the addition of these three new volumes. As Fogelson points out in his introduction to Anthropologists and Indians in the New South, the Native American southeast has traditionally received less than its fair share of attention in the worlds of academia and popular culture. But taken together, Bonney and Paredes, Ethridge and Hudson, and Gallay address a number of pressing substantial, methodological, and ethical questions in Southeastern studies. These readings are particularly helpful in pointing out some of this culture area's most important sources of heterogeneity and change against the background of its continuities across time and space. Such questions are well addressed by looking at these volumes as a group because together they cover the first two centuries since European contact as well as the contemporary period.

This collection of readings brings new thinking, for example, to the question of how the peoples and town sites recorded by early explorers like De Soto relate to more recent and contemporary populations. We are also led to reconsider the relationship between the social complexity and hierarchy represented by the southeast's Mississippian social and cultural institutions (chiefdoms, religious hierarchies, etc.) and the egalitarianism and local autonomy characterizing other groups and periods, such as the eighteenth-century Cherokees described by Rodning in Ethridge and Hudson. One of the most important continuities in the southeast is its identity as an agricultural mecca: just as Mississippian towns thrived on a rich subsistence base of maize horticulture supported by the fertile environment of the southeast, so too European Americans utilized the area's lush soils to undertake plantation agriculture on a massive scale. How has this abundance provided continuity in the face of changing sociopolitical landscapes? And how have Southeastern Indian groups responded to their dispossession of this resource?

We learn from juxtaposing Bonney and Paredes with Ethridge and Hudson that many trends and conditions have persisted in the southeast since contact but that their specific forms have changed greatly. Biology, or "race," has been continuously politically mobilized in the southeast but in association with a series of diverse issues from slavery to colonialism to internal colonialism to tribal recognition and enrollment. Attempts at the practical application of cultural knowledge formerly served the interests of trade, missionization, and military alliances but now occur increasingly in service to community-driven goals. Over the centuries, one of the most nuanced shifts has been in the dominant society's perceptions of and attitudes toward Southeastern Indians. Despite the impressive physical presence of many of the Southeastern tribes when they were first contacted (e.g., their mounds, palisaded villages, and the visual symbolism associated with the Southeastern ceremonial complex), invisibility and distance became important attributes for many Southeastern Native Americans soon after contact. This may have been especially true for escaped slaves or for those avoiding enslavement. Bonney and Paredes, conversely, tell a story of Indians in apparent reemergence through the processes of cultural revitalization and legal acknowledgment. The Native peoples of the southeast may now be seen as emerging from the invisibility of purported extinction and assimilation. Some Southeastern groups still remain obscure to the dominant society because of their remote geographic locations and/or because of ignorance of the fact that their cultures persist (e...