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Hispanic American Historical Review 80.3 (2000) 589-592



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Book Review

The Hernando de Soto Expedition:
History, Historiography, and 'Discovery' in the Southeast

Florida's Indians from Ancient Times to the Present

Colonial Period

The Hernando de Soto Expedition: History, Historiography, and 'Discovery' in the Southeast. Edited by Patricia Galloway. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997. Illustrations. Maps. Tables. Notes. Index. xvi, 457 pp. Cloth, $60.00.

Florida's Indians from Ancient Times to the Present. By Jerald T. Milanich. Native Peoples, Cultures, and Places of the Southeastern United States. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1998. Plates. Photographs. Illustrations. Maps. Bibliography. xi, 194 pp. Paper, $19.95.

Postmodernist historiography finally is bearing fruit for parts of the Southeast. Hernando de Soto is being revisited but, this time, his epic entrada and its subsequent narratives are being viewed as they came to be: couched firmly in their own social and literary matrices. This new work, edited by Patricia Galloway, was conceived as a "historiographical prolegomenon to the study of the expedition and especially of the people whose lives it touched" (p. x). The former objective has been achieved admirably; the latter depends on interpretation. Taken together, the analyses offered here by nineteen scholars and writers should constitute the preface to any serious consideration of the Soto narratives as historical documents; I agree with the editor's conclusion that these narratives "tell us as much or more about their authors and the contexts in which they were written as they do about actual expedition events" (p. xiii). Neither history nor historians, however, are products of a perfect world.

The fact that such an examination has not occurred thus far is as much a projection of a Western "mental landscape," mirroring "the unquestioned Good Thing that is the [End Page 589] perfected democratic ideal" as were the four narratives recounting the entrada themselves (p. 411). (The Cañete fragment is only mentioned, not discussed.) The essays examine various or all of the narratives along with the entrada itself, loosely from perspectives of literary criticism; the concept, logistics, and some legal aspects of the expedition; treatment of the Native Americans (the shortest and least realized section); and Euro-American historiography and the subjectivity of "commemorative history."

The essays vary in length and depth of treatment but most add materially to our understanding of a variety of topics of value to Latin Americanists and, at least indirectly, to Native Americanists. Lee Dowling's excellent critique of the Inca Garcilaso's literary sources, for example, treats the author's Classical style, his ability to formulate plot, and his search for the most effective form "for the transmission of his urgent message of racial moral equality" (p. 105). Soto's finance structure is concisely outlined by Ignacio Avellaneda, whose fine understanding of Spanish finance systems was lost to us with his untimely death. Technical aspects of the expedition, some of which have been the subjects of confusion or controversy in the past are examined, from the state of cartography and navigation (Robert S. Weddle) to estimates of a league in Mexico and Florida (Ross Hassig).

The core expression of the editor's rationale appears in her opening to part 3, in which she considers the strengths and weaknesses of the disciplines that have been applied to the Soto narratives and suggests a new and collaborative paradigm for interpretation, within the context of the Annales model. Centrality in this process is given to written accounts "rehabilitated" through textual criticism (pp. 291-92). Oral traditions held by the descendents of the Native peoples themselves still have almost no place in this paradigm. Ethnographers have, thus far, collected only "myth and legend" and all other discourse still awaits "extremely sensitive analytical techniques (that also remain to be developed)" (p. 290-91), José Rabasa's nod to the "degraded view of Amerindian cultures" and the continuing "culture of conquest" that is "being perpetrated today against indigenous communities" notwithstanding (p. 402).

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