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In the literature on colonial North America, scholars commonly contrast the English colonists, who courted the Indians through trade goods while holding them at a distance, with the French, who converted the Indians to Christianity and themselves to native life. Historians and anthropologists alike tend to discount Spanish and Indian interaction, regarding it as marginal to the central story—that of the French and English. Yet the Spanish presence in eastern North America lasted more than three centuries, irrevocably altering the lives of thousands of Spanish-speaking colonists and many thousands of American Indians. An examination of the ways Spanish and native cultures adapted to one another in the New World can provide a third model to lay against the better -known French and English ones. In the Spanish model, Indians accepted vassalage along with Christianity and were turned, through the agency of their own leaders, into a labor reserve. It was a system the Spanish applied with success throughout Central and South America wherever they encountered natives who were agricultural, sedentary, and with leaders they could co-opt. In due course they brought the system to North America to use in the self-contained polity of the provinces of Florida. This chapter introduces the native leadership of those provinces and examines the means by which Indians and Spaniards shared authority, as well as the reasons why authority could be seen as something to share. Spaniards arrived in the Southeast with a sober respect for the formalities of conquest, developed over centuries of reconquering Spain from the Moors and generations of experience in the New World. The sweatiest of entradas into unknown territory was a matter of order and record, with banners flying and notaries at the ready. If the entrada resulted in the extension of the king’s domains, the royal coat of arms was left as evidence in every town, mounted on the council house.1 Religious entradas were equally formal, Ruling “the Republic of Indians” in Seventeenth-Century Florida amy turner bushnell    ruling “the republic of indians” and more than a little military looking when the friars had an armed escort and carried the cross painted on a banner.2 Anywhere the friars gained access they erected a cross, added a saint to the town’s name, and gave directions for building a church.3 To raise a cross was to found a visita, or a stop on the missionary circuit, which in the course of time could develop into a doctrina complete with resident friars.4 Indians, recognizing the symbols of occupation, often signaled a rebellion by pulling down coats of arms and crosses and burning them.5 Besides the secular and church officials, a third power existed in the provinces of Spanish Florida, that of the region’s chiefs, who survived the foreign invasion to become integral to the governmental system that developed out of it. Their underlying, continuing authority could well have been symbolized by the ball poles of their towns. Raising a ball pole in the Southeast was tantamount to founding a town, which was not so much a place as a corporate entity. Although the townsite had to be relocated periodically as the fertility of surrounding soil became exhausted and firewood gave out, the town’s playing field and ball pole remained in place as a sign of ownership and continuity.6 Aware that the Indian ball game had nonChristian significance, some of the friars would have had the natives take down their ball poles and raise crosses, but other Spaniards said that the playing leagues and the gatherings for games were necessary to the functioning of native government.7 As always, what the chiefs had to say on the subject remains open to question . Although some of them became literate in their own languages, they did not often resort to writing.8 Officers and friars occasionally wrote for a chief’s signature, and interpreters were used to translate their statements for recording by notaries, yet one can seldom be sure of what a native ruler really said, much less what he or she had in mind.9 Nevertheless, we cannot allow the difficulty of the sources to make us underestimate the importance of these rulers or omit them from the provincial picture. It had not been easy to bring them into line. In the sixteenth century the Spanish tried an array of tactics: wholesale enslavement, wars, trade alliances , conversion with and without force, and intermarriage. The first official expedition to touch...

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