The Yamasee Indians: From Florida to South Carolina ed. by Denise I. Bossy

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Yamasee Indians: From Florida to South Carolina ed. by Denise I. Bossy D. Andrew Johnson The Yamasee Indians: From Florida to South Carolina. Edited by Denise I. Bossy. (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2018. Pp. xx, 348. $75.00, ISBN 978-1-4962-0760-9.) Through historical circumstance and the strategies that they adopted for coping with colonialism and the ensuing social disruptions, the Yamasees became one of the most important peoples in contact with European colonizers in late-seventeenth-and early-eighteenth-century North America. The Yamasees are currently known for two things: their role as favorite partners of English traders from Carolina in the trade in indigenous enslaved peoples and deerskins, and their violent reaction against English colonialism in the Yamasee War in 1715. The Yamasee Indians: From Florida to South Carolina dives deeper into the Yamasees as people navigating historical contexts and persevering, even as neighboring peoples lost their collective identities and social formations. This collection began as a conference of historians and archaeologists that was organized by Denise I. Bossy and archaeologist Chester DePratter in April 2015—the three-hundredth anniversary of the beginning of the Yamasee War. The resulting anthology is well worth the effort. Broken into three sections, The Yamasee Indians details “Yamasee Identity,” “Yamasee Networks,” and “Surviving the Yamasee War.” Each section is roughly chronological, and when combined, they piece together a history of the Yamasees from their early colonial beginnings in the piedmont of modern Georgia to removal in the 1830s. Part 1, “Yamasee Identity,” begins with an excellent essay by Amy Turner Bushnell. In “Living at Liberty: The Ungovernable Yamasees of Spanish Florida,” Bushnell argues that, between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Yamasees shifted alliances, moved towns, and altered their economic production in order to maintain their liberty. Bushnell’s contribution, along with the second essay, by archaeologist Keith Ashley, serves as a foundation for the essays that follow. Ashley’s concern is the early years of Yamasee identity formation, and he argues that the peoples who adopted the Yamasee name were refugees who fled the piedmont of modern Georgia to Florida in the face of Chichimeco (Westo) attacks during the late seventeenth century. They subsequently refused to submit to Spanish missionaries’ social practices, instead opting for political autonomy. The Yamasees, then, were at first a sociopolitical movement that led to ethnogenesis between the 1660s and 1680s. The final two essays in the first section (by Eric C. Poplin and Jon Bernard Marcoux and by Alexander Y. Sweeney) use archaeological evidence to trace cultural change and continuity among Yamasees as they moved from the piedmont to Spanish missions, then north toward Carolina. Poplin and Marcoux argue that Yamasee women adopted the pottery styles of other peoples living in the Spanish missions and took these styles with them to Carolina. However, there are traceable differences between decorative motifs used by the Lower (formerly piedmont) and Upper (Florida inhabitants who joined the exodus) Yamasee towns near Carolina. Nevertheless, Sweeney argues that “the Yamasee were able to retain a variety of their traditional cultural practices” (p. 100). Yamasees built houses as they had for generations and, despite years of European attempts at Christianization, maintained their burial practices. [End Page 884] The second section, “Yamasee Networks,” begins with Bossy’s article about a 1713 trip that a Euhaw Yamasee “prince” took to England to be educated by the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel. Bossy argues that this trip was an attempt at “spiritual diplomacy,” a strategy the Yamasees used to “build a new strand in the web of spiritual and political alliances” between themselves and the Anglican missionaries (p. 155). Next, Jane Landers argues that the Yamasees forged ties with Africans beginning in the late seventeenth century, finding a shared enemy in “English oppression,” and “in 1715 they rose together in revolt” (p. 163). Steven C. Hahn follows with an essay on the decades-long war between Yamasees and some Lower Creeks that began in 1716. Hahn convincingly argues that the Yamasees who moved to the vicinity of St. Augustine, Florida, remained important geopolitical actors long after 1715; in fact, “this war did not ‘end’ until most...