In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Ethnohistory 47.3-4 (2000) 777-790



[Access article in PDF]

Review Essay

“Conquest or Progress!”:
Old Questions and New Problems in the Ethnohistory of the Native Southeast

James Taylor Carson, Queen’s University


The Brainerd Journal: A Mission to the Cherokees, 1817–1823. Edited and introduced by Joyce B. Phillips and Paul Gary Phillips. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998. xix + 584 pp., foreword, introduction, illustrations, tables, notes, index. $55.00 cloth.)

History of the Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Natchez Indians. By H. B. Cushman. Edited by Angie Debo. Introduction by Clara Sue Kidwell. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999. 503 pp., foreword, index. $15.95 paper.)

Contact Points: American Frontiers from the Mohawk Valley to the Mississippi, 1750–1830. Edited by Andrew R. L. Cayton and Frederika J. Teute. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998. vii + 391 pp., maps, bibliography, conference program, index. $49.95 cloth, $18.95 paper.)

American Indians in the Lower Mississippi Valley: Social and Economic Histories. By Daniel H. Usner Jr. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998. xii + 189 pp., maps, illustrations, table, notes, index. $45.00 cloth.)

The Tree That Bends: Discourse, Power, and the Survival of the Maskókî People. By Patricia Riles Wickman. (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1999. xviii + 296 pp., illustrations, maps, tables, appendixes, notes, bibliography, index. $29.95 paper.) [End Page 777]

Timucuan Chiefdoms of Spanish Florida: Volume 1, Assimilation; Volume 2, Resistance and Destruction. By John E. Worth. (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1998. Volume 1: xxvi + 280 pp., foreword, illustrations, maps, tables, notes, bibliography, index. $49.95 cloth; volume 2: xiv + 272 pp., foreword, illustrations, maps, tables, notes, bibliography, index. $49.95 cloth.)

A New Order of Things: Property, Power, and the Transformation of the Creek Indians, 1733–1816. By Claudio Saunt. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999. xiv + 298 pp., illustrations, maps, index. $49.95 cloth, $17.95 paper.)

The Night Has a Naked Soul: Witchcraft and Sorcery among the Western Cherokee. By Alan Kilpatrick. (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1997. xviii + 160 pp., illustrations, maps, bibliography, index. $28.95 cloth.)

The Enduring Seminoles: From Alligator Wrestling to Ecotourism. By Patsy West. (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1998. xvi + 150 pp., foreword, illustrations, maps, bibliography, index. $24.95 cloth.)

Cherokee Women: Gender and Culture Change, 1700–1835. By Theda Perdue. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998. xi + 252 pp., notes, index. $40.00 cloth.)

In June 1820, Rev. William Chamberlain traveled to the Cherokee Nation town of Chatooga to deliver a few sermons on behalf of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions. Upon his arrival he found the town deeply divided over the location of a school. The aggrieved party complained to Chamberlain that the chief had located a new mission school on his side of town among his followers. Chamberlain insisted that all of the inhabitants of Chatooga should benefit from the school and that it should be situated for the convenience of everyone. In the end the chief relented before the missionary’s arguments. He moved the school across a creek, three miles closer to the complainants’ homes.

The question over the school’s location is typical of the misunderstandings among Cherokees and between Cherokees and missionaries that fill the pages of The Brainerd Journal: A Mission to the Cherokees, 1817–1823. Editors Joyce B. Phillips and Paul Gary Phillips have transcribed and annotated the original journals and made accessible to the public a detailed source on the contact experience. For every instance of neighborliness and friendship there are sharp conflicts and misunderstandings. Lying at the root of them all are two different conceptions of god, faith, culture, and [End Page 778] the world. That the two groups managed to get along tolerably well for a little more than two decades suggests that they shared a certain amount of common ground as well, namely a desire for education and, on the part of the Cherokees, access to new forms of power.

The cultural encounters recorded by the missionaries stationed at Brainerd capture in a the span of a few...

pdf

Share