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

In From Chicaza to Chickasaw, Robbie Ethridge tells the history of the American South during the first 200 years of European contact. To explain dramatic changes that occurred for Indians across the South, she concentrates on the transformation the Chickasaws experienced between 1540 and 1715. Building on R. Brian Ferguson and Neil L. Whitehead's concept of the "tribal zone" in War in the Tribal Zone, Ethridge defines the American South as the "Mississippi Shatter Zone" due to the destabilization and restructuring of southeastern native societies after the arrival of Europeans and their diseases. Using archaeological and documentary evidence, she demonstrates how Indian societies of the Mississippian world collapsed, reorganized, and created a new world.

Ethridge begins her book in 1540 when the people of the Chicaza chiefdom encountered Hernando de Soto. The 1540-1541 battle between the Spanish soldiers and Chicaza warriors demonstrates that war held the Mississippian world together. The battle gives insight into Mississippian warfare, the warrior ethic, and politics among the people of Chicaza and shows connections between Chicaza warfare and art, politics, and religion. Indeed, the five-month-long battle between the Spanish and Chicaza portended the beginning of European invasion and the dramatic metamorphosis of the Mississippian world (p. 42).

After de Soto's arrival, the northeast region of the Mississippian world underwent fundamental reorganization as a result of population loss due to either disease or military confrontation. The transformation that many chiefdoms experienced—which included the sharp decline of the native hierarchy, increased political unrest, and the migration of Mississippian people into small farming communities—created the Mississippi Shatter Zone and led to the widespread internal instability that many indigenous communities in the Mississippian world experienced.

The creation of the shatter zone was absolute, Ethridge argues, when Europeans began a commercial trade in Indian slaves. The introduction of a nascent capitalist system caused the ultimate collapse and transformation of the Mississippian world due to the widespread violence and warfare that emerged. She details how early Iroquois, Occaneechi, and Westo communities were "organized militaristic slavers" who wrought great change within the region (p. 93). Although it is doubtful that Chickasaws saw much interaction with slaving communities like the Westos, the slave raiding of the eastern region sent shock waves throughout the lower South to the Mississippi River Valley, as smaller groups coalesced with larger groups for protection and survival.

Detailing the southern Indian slave raiding campaign that occurred in the late 1600s, Ethridge shows how Chickasaws took advantage of the Indian slave system, which expanded from the eastern seaboard to beyond the Mississippi River. Chickasaws became "militaristic Indian slavers" who raided groups like the Caddos and Quapaws. The Indian slave system intensified in the early 1700s with the Chickasaws playing a pivotal role in native slave raiding because of their geographic location on the Upper Trading Path.

By the early eighteenth century, commercial trade and imperial interests motivated armed resistance in the American South. In the Tuscarora War of 1711, the Tuscarora Indians rebelled against abuse, tensions, and fears that developed from the slave trade. The Yamasee War of 1715 was the most pivotal episode of southern Indian resistance and resulted in the collapse of the Indian slave trade. Shortly after the Yamasee War, a colonial South emerged in which Indian trade centered on deerskins. In an environment where smaller native groups coalesced with larger societies (Catawba), Ethridge stresses that Indians made a new world for themselves in which they were heavily involved in a nascent global economic system, and thus the transformation was complete.

Ethridge has done an exceptional job detailing the metamorphosis of southeastern Indian communities heavily involved in the Indian slave trade. While she briefly acknowledges that taking captives was part of the Mississippian world, it is important to recognize that southeastern Indians took captives before the Europeans' arrival...