Native American Log Cabins in the Southeast ed. by Gregory A. Waselkov

Abstract

Reviewed by: Native American Log Cabins in the Southeast ed. by Gregory A. Waselkov Tara Mitchell Mielnik Gregory A. Waselkov, ed. Native American Log Cabins in the Southeast. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press; 2019. ISBN 978-1-62190-504-2 Hardcover: 236 pages Interactions between Euro-Americans and Native Americans in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, particularly in the Southeast, have often focused on tense interpersonal relationships, frequently due to disputes over incompatible settlement and land-use patterns. Following the establishment of the new nation, federal policy toward Native Americans typically had two priorities: one, the assimilation of natives to the prevailing dominant white culture and two, dispossession of jointly held native lands to facilitate private property ownership by the expanding population of again mostly white American citizens. Existing scholarship on assimilation is heavily focused on cultural elements such as language, religious practices, dress, and other forms of material culture. The study of the evolution and assimilation of housing practices of native populations has often been overlooked. The anthology Native American Log Cabins in the Southeast comprises nine separate essays in a volume edited by Gregory Waselkov to explore residential building patterns of the tribal populations of Creek, Catawba, Cherokee, and Chocktaw. The book addresses the influence of Euro-American log building traditions from the time of European permanent settlements in the late eighteenth century through the era of the Indian removal in the 1820s and 1830s. The authors of these essays are comprised of professional archaeologists and anthropologists with extensive experience, who have used evidence in the archaeological record in Alabama, Georgia, the Carolinas, and elsewhere in the Southeast to examine the evolving housing practices of Native American housing in the region. This book examines the exponential rise in the Native American adoption of notched-log cabins around 1800 across the region. The two main technological prerequisites for log cabin construction were available well prior to 1800: iron axes that were needed for gathering larger and longer poles required for log cabin construction, and draft animals such as oxen that were needed for maneuvering and positioning of large logs. Why Native Americans of the Southeast undertook a radical and widespread cultural change in rapidly embracing the log cabin around 1800 is the central question that unites the essays in this volume. Earlier scholarship addressing the rise of log cabin building within southeastern native communities is premised upon the assumption that Native Americans embraced the log cabin as a superior alternative to their own longstanding forms of ephemeral housing. This scholarship leaned toward a teleological narrative, one that posited that Native Americans were exposed to log cabin construction through increased contact with whites and blacks and thus adopted this new form of housing through sheer proximity and exposure to this novel form of architecture and because of its superiority. This new collection of essays contests these earlier claims and proposes a much more nuanced account, one which defies simplistic narratives of assimilation because of propinquity. The essays in Native American Log Cabins in the Southeast assert an absence of any evidence to support the claim that log cabins had any significant advantage over native domestic dwellings in terms of the logistics of energy, resources, and labor required to build them. Further, the authors emphasize that the space of the log cabin was not particularly efficient [End Page 75] in meeting the Native Americans' domestic needs. The book illustrates how Euro-American material culture was adopted gradually beginning with a few Christian converts and the political elite. Subsequently, the wider population, who were neither Christian nor influential, followed quickly en masse. The essays propose that the uprooting of native populations from their ancestral lands triggered a material, cultural, and sociopolitical rupture in their lives and that the adoption of the log cabin was an adaptive response to this rupture rather than an acceptance as a superior building type. As highlighted by Craig Sheldon in his chapter "Historic Upper Creek Architecture," for many native populations, the shift to log construction in the 1820s onward after eight centuries of wattle-and-daub construction was a change from transient housing types to more permanent types such as the notched-log single-pen and dogtrot...