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CHAPTER ONE Preliminary Reflections In most parts of North America, open conflict between the Native Americans and the European-Americans has ended. The clash of cultures begansoonafter Europeans setfoot ashore. It has continued for four centuries in forms as diverse as frontier atrocities and congressional debate. Over the conflict between invaders and beleaguered, there hangs a pall of tragic inevitability. On every frontier in the New World, in South America, Mexico, Florida, Virginia, New England, and Canada, friendly coexistence turned into violence. With very few exceptions, the outcomewasthe same-subjugationof the Native Americans. In the encounter the Native Americans lost high percentages oftheir population to virulent plagues, lost almost all control over their occupied lands, lost the ability to determine their ecological niche, lost the cultural momentum that was theirs in 1500, and in many cases, lost their heritage. An appalling number of Native American societies simply ceased to exist. So many societies ofthe Eastern Woodlands became extinct so early that even the historical and ethnographic records are virtually blank. For their part, the Europeans gained continents, all the wealth contained therein, an extraordinary number ofnew agricultural plants, a few new diseases, and a new sense of destiny. The tragic story ofthis exchange is a matter of history in most places, and that fact has permitted the Euro-Americans a new interest in the cultural heritage they displaced. In the last decade many volumes ofinformation about Native Americans, living and dead, have rolled off the presses. Anyone who offers a contribution to that flood owes the public some explanation of why another book should appear, what purpose it might serve. This volume is about the Native Americans of the Southeast, from the Carolinas to the Plains. Except for a few pockets here and there, Native Americans are no longer on that land. They were finally "Removed," as the rhetoric of the day put it, in the 1840s. Their struggle with the Europeans and 30 Euro-Americans had been going on since the early sixteenth century, and it ended in Oklahoma and Texas after three centuries of diplomacy, warfare, trading, and disease. To be sure, the survivors have emerged with a vigorous new social adaptation to their circumstances, and the conflict continues in the courts, but the old Native American world ofthe Southeast is gone. The societies ofthe Southeast are inherently interesting, because they had formed some of the most complicated social systems on the continent, and anthropologists and historians are still arguing over how they worked. In the four centuries before the Europeans appeared, the Southeast was the scene of population expansion accompanied by movement of peoples and ideas over a large area. They developed individual cultural characteristics while exchanging goods and ideas with neighbors. Architectural arrangements ofpyramidal mounds and an explosion oficonographic art forms in shell, wood, and copper are material clues to the complexity ofthe cultures in the Southeast. Powerful chiefdoms created cultural spheres centered on river basins. They were participants in an exchange network which included the Caribbean, Mexico, the Southwest, the Upper Mississippi Valley, and the Northeast. For anyone interested in the development of cultures and the processes of cultural dynamics , the Southeastern peoples are of permanent interest. From the grimmer side, any study of the processes of acculturation and frontier patterns cannot ignore the tragedy of the Southeast. The multitude of difficulties involved in studying the Native American Southeast-inadequate historical documentation, late gathering ofethnographic data, rapid acculturation by the inhabitants, the complexity caused by the long-term presence of competing European powers, the obscurity of the location of materials-only increases the rewards in understanding. This book, I hope, will help more people to surmount those difficulties and attain some understanding of those past societies. There is also a sense in which the old Southeast is part of a larger picture. Most ofthe tribes we now associate with the Plains moved to that region only in recent centuries. Fromearlier, moreeastern locationsthey participatedin some ofthesamesuperculturalphenomenawhich linkedotherwiseculturallydivided societies in the Southeast. In some cases the Southeastern tradition can shed light on a Plains practice, and vice versa. Most people do not much care for comparative examination of their cultural traditions, because that approach seems to deny the uniqueness of the local culture. Many Cherokee may feel uncomfortable with discussion ofthe antecedents ofone of their sacred myths, in the same way that many Christians resent being told that Biblical narratives had ancestors in Mesopotamia. The discovery ofsuch relationships, however, only serves to highlight the achievements of each...

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