From Chicaza to Chickasaw: The European Invasion and the Transformation of the Mississippian World, 1540-1715

Introduction

Introduction This book is about the history of the American South during the first 200 years of European colonization. It is a story about the collision of two asymmetrical worlds— ​the emerging modern world of Europe and its American colonies and the centuries-­old Mississippian world of the American South. In the telling of this history, Native polities and people, rather than European ones, take central place. Also centered is the attempt to reconstruct something about the lives of Southern Indians between the time of the earliest Spanish exploration in the sixteenth century to the early decades of the eighteenth century (ca. 1540–1715 c.e.). Within this large, regional context, our focus through these tumultuous years is on the Chickasaw Indians. Admittedly , the story sometimes gets quite sketchy because of limited historical and archaeological evidence, and our focus shifts at these times to other peoples in the South, where the evidence is stronger and the reconstruction clearer. Still, the Chickasaw story can serve as an introduction to a largely unfamiliar historical terrain of people and places of the early contact-­era South. The concept of a “world” is not new. A “world” is a geographic area and a historical era including various polities within that time and space and the network of political, economic, cultural, and social relationships that exist between them. This network of relationships includes phenomena such as war, peace, détente, hierarchy, power, subordination, dominance, exchanges, trade, and so on. A “world” is not a discrete geographical unit because its borders can be porous and it can be connected to quite distant places. The “Atlantic world” is a well-­known world construct, as are the “Mediterranean  2 Introduction world” and the “modern world system.” But the “Mississippian world” is a lesser-­known one. In the early sixteenth century in the South, Indian life was lived out in a purely Indian world, whereas in 1715 it was lived out on the edge of an expanding and conflict-­ridden European world and in a new social landscape that included not only Indians but also Europeans and Africans . The meeting of these two worlds was not peaceful or orderly, and it was marked by warfare, violence, struggle, disease, and hardship for all involved. And there can be little doubt that eventually the European world prevailed over the Mississippian world. But the meeting also opened new opportunities , new possibilities, and new ways of doing things for both Natives and newcomers. Over the course of time, the result was a transformation of both worlds and a melding of them into a single, colonial one. Scholars now understand that the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were a time of profound social transformation among the Native people of the southern United States. The people who stood on either side of this great transformational divide were organized into quite different kinds of societies. The Indians of the eighteenth-­century South are familiar to most people, and their descendants are recognized today as Creek, Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Catawba, and so on. We now know that these societies formed out of survivors of the polities of the precontact Mississippian world— ​the Coosa, Mabila, Pacaha, Chicaza, Cofitachequi, and others— ​as they broke apart in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. We still do not have a completely adequate vocabulary to describe the Native societies of the eighteenth century. They have been called “confederacies,” “tribes,” “nations,” and so on. We now generally call them “coalescent societies” because they were all, to varying degrees, coalescences of people from different societies, cultures, and languages who relocated and banded together after the fall of individual polities.1 The eighteenth-­century Chickasaws were one such coalescent society. On the other side of this historical divide, at the time of earliest European contact, the ancestors of the eighteenth-­century Chickasaws and most other Southern Indians were organized into what archaeologists call “chiefdoms,” which are a particular kind of political and social type characterized by a ranked social order of elites and commoners. Chiefdoms were the prevailing political unit in much of the South during the time known as the Mississippi Period (900 c.e. to 1700 c.e.). The people of this era built the earthen pyramidal mounds that one can still see throughout much of the South and Midwest. In 1540–41 the Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto spent a winter 3  Introduction at Chicaza, a chiefdom in present-­day northeast...