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

Abstract

Listen

Translate article

Scholars once referred to the years spanning 1540 to 1715 as part of the forgotten centuries in the Native American history of the South. In recent years, however, archaeologists, anthropologists, and historians have shed more light on this period's history, and Robbie Ethridge has done a service in compiling and synthesizing all the new work into one much-needed volume. She has also contributed some original research of her own, and the book as a whole represents a refreshing conceptualization. Ethridge's theme is one of transformation: she shows how southern Native Americans, from Mississippian times to the early eighteenth century, changed and restructured their societies under the weight of a European invasion. Within what she calls the Mississippian shatter zone, natives faced the devastating Hernando de Soto expedition in the 1540s, the advent of horrific Old World diseases, the introduction of the Spanish mission system, and periodic entanglement in colonial wars as the Spanish, French, and English fought for control of the region. Yet Ethridge claims that European trade, notably the Indian slave trade, served as the most destructive force and greatest impetus for change among southern natives. She helps illustrate this fact by using the Chickasaws—descendants of the Mississippian chiefdom of Chicaza—as a focus group. In reaction to the turmoil going on around them and the need for European trade goods (including guns), the Chickasaws became a “militaristic slaving society” (p. 155), preying on neighboring tribes to supply the Europeans with captive laborers. Here Ethridge makes another important contribution to our understanding of Indian life in the South by tying the collapse of the Mississippian chiefdoms and the creation of the coalescent Indian confederacies of the eighteenth century—including Choctaws, Creeks, and Chickasaws—to the emerging world economy in which the South was a “strategic outpost” supplying the core capitalist countries of Europe, most notably England, with “labor and resources” (p. 90). Too often, historians have neglected the world systems concept as an integrating technique that enables world and American history to be linked together for a better understanding of each.