Colonial Southeastern Indian History

Abstract

DESPITE GARY B. NASH'S 1974 INSISTENCE THAT DISCUSSIONS OF EARLY America include red, white, and black, for the next fifteen years early American history and the history of American Indians during the colonial period remained, for the most part, separate literatures. (1) A generation ago the historical literature on Indians also followed fairly stark regional differentiations based on both cultural/linguistic groups and colonial jurisdictions. Not only were Spanish Florida and French Louisiana historiographically separate from the southern English colonies, but the Chesapeake and the Lowcountry were as well, with each of those coastal regions separated from its backcountry. Such divisions reflected the fact that some colonial boundaries roughly followed political and cultural parameters of the Indian nations among whom the Europeans colonized. (2) French, Spanish, and English source materials lie in different countries' archives, written in different languages. English colonial sources are further dispersed into state and local archives. Despite the ready availability of Spanish accounts (in both Spanish and English) of sixteenth-century entradas--as well as of sources for late-sixteenth- and early-seventeenth-century contact between English colonists and Algonquian Indians at Roanoke and in the Chesapeake--for much of the interior South and the Lowcountry, the period between the Spanish entradas of the sixteenth and the return of European explorers and traders in the late seventeenth constituted a lost century for historians. Clearly enormous changes took place during that century, but the nature of those changes remained obscure. The lack of European written sources to describe the interior of the continent during those hundred years left traditional historians at a loss to explain how the interior Southeast at the start of the eighteenth seemed completely transformed from the one described by sixteenth-century Spanish explorers. English writers from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries trying to understand the shifting Indian demographic and political maps often found themselves baffled, which did nothing to help twentieth-century historians reading them. (3) During the 1970s and the beginning of the 1980s, early American Indian history (much of it focused on the Chesapeake and New England) emphasized the violence of Europeans in their encounter with Indians. Francis Jennings demanded in 1975 that we understand the colonial period as a story of conquest. (4) In 1983 Richard White argued in The Roots of Dependency that Euro-Indian relations in various parts of North America had in common the attempt ... by whites to bring Indian resources, land, and labor into the market. (5) Although White scrutinized Choctaw motives and agency, his argument, as his title suggests, stresses Indians' ultimate dependency on economic forces they did not control. Much of the work on southeastern Indians since then has continued grappling with the questions he raised. The separation of early American history from the history of American Indians (and early Americanists' inattention not only to American Indian historiography but also to Indians in their own source material) provoked calls during the late 1980s from James Axtell and James H. Merrell for colonial historians to recognize the central place of American Indians in the history of English colonies. (6) J. Frederick Fausz's work on the merging and emerging worlds of European colonists and Indians in the Chesapeake illustrates the integration of Indian and colonial politics. His 1988 article published in a volume aimed at colonial (rather than Indian) historians reinforces the point made by Axtell and Merrell. (7) Thereafter, armed with new techniques and questions, many historians in the last two decades have taken up the challenge to integrate American Indian and colonial American history and have done so more fully in the Southeast than elsewhere. …