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In his foreword to the 1873 edition of Antiquities of the Southern Indians, author Charles Colcock Jones thanked the friends who had helped him assemble a “cabinet” of the “arts and manufactures” of the southern tribespeople . Jones used the contents of this cabinet—“relics” and assorted old papers—to construct his history of Native Americans in the South.1 In the following five chapters, many of the same objects that found their way into Jones’s “cabinet”—pipes, plats and surveys of mounds, maps, honorific titles of address inscribed on treaty documents or recorded in council books— have again been taken down from the felt-lined shelf and, one by one, carefully reexamined. Understood not only as artifacts but also as evidence of perishable historical events, they provide a new perspective on interaction between people and peoples during a specific time in the colonial Southeast . Each reminds us of the complicated psychological scalings, from personal meetings to public rituals, that general labels such as “culture contact ” can often conceal. The maps drawn in the clear hand of Chickasaw graphic style; the “earth-dwelling” mounds; and the gender-based grammar of formal diplomatic greeting between the French and the southern tribes all provide glimpses of the elusive connection between symbol and life in the colonial Southeast. What was understood between natives and colonists through exchanged information—whether for mutual gain or for the darker, one-sided goals of commercial or political advantage—was just as easily misunderstood or even manipulated. Patricia Galloway suggests that the French learned just enough about Choctaw kinship to be counterproductive in the very negotiations they had hoped to sway through alternating expressions of familiarity and power. Choosing to present themselves metaphorically as the fathers of the tribe, the French were received as such by the Choctaws, who “proceeded to treat them as their matrilineal society taught them they should: as kind, indulgent nonrelatives who had no authority over them.” In Choctaw society the French would have commanded more real respect—or at least enIntroduction tom hatley    gendered less damaging confusion—by taking on the identity of true Choctaw authority figures, such as uncles on the mother’s side.2 Galloway’s essay suggests the importance of understanding not only what was said at councils but also the unintended “non-verbal leakage”—the gestures and glances that accompany all human communication. Further, Galloway reminds us that kinship and gender must be seen as structures of social organization and also as critical variables in negotiation and other political affairs usually regarded as the domain of Euro-American-style male authority.3 Indigenous diplomacy employed the calumet ceremony, part of a ritual of greeting, to enable individuals from different societies—such as French officials—to become fictional kin, thereby creating a social basis for negotiation and trade. Ian Brown, in an essay new to this collection, traces the prehistoric origins of this custom through the numerous archaeological finds of the red stone bowls of the calumet pipe. The earliest French to reach the midcontinent, in the late seventeenth century, found calumet ceremonialism to be rich in symbolism, representing a “laying down of arms” and a symbolic “armor” that protected travelers in a hostile landscape. Peacemaking has received less attention than war making in the histories, and Brown’s work, about creative rather than destructive energy, ultimately points toward the fragility of the former.4 However useful the calumet was to the never numerous French during encounters with potential enemies, their enthusiastic embrace of this Native American ceremony quickly dissipated its symbolic power. Abuse of the ceremony by duplicitous French officials, and efforts by French colonists to mass-produce the pipes soon undermined the ritual’s sacred character, transforming it “from an inviolable contract to a formulaic ritual of little real consequence.” While knowledgeable spiritual leaders might, on occasion, address European inquisitiveness about the calumet ceremony and other native beliefs , questions sometimes were not asked or not answered for a reason. For instance, no evidence of the long residence of the southeastern tribes was more substantial than the “mounds” scattered across the region. It was convenient for whites interested in undermining native claims of ancient residence in the land to ask tribespeople two questions about them: Did you build them? Do you know who did? The answer was usually negative on both counts; possibly for reasons of privacy, politeness, or hostility, tribespeople predictably ended the conversations at this point. part three, symbols and society [3.135.183.187] Project MUSE...

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