Yuchi Indian histories before the removal era

Abstract

Yuchi Indian Histories Before Removal Era. Edited by Jason Baird Jackson. (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2012. Pp. xxxiv, 246. $30.00, ISBN 978-0-8032-4041-4.) In Yuchi Indian Histories Before Removal Era, Jason Baird Jackson has brought together an impressive collection of essays to fill historiographical void on Yuchi history. Rather than depicting Yuchis as subset of Creek Indians as past historians and anthropologists have done, Jackson and other authors in this book argue that Yuchi cultural distinctiveness and political autonomy, both in past and in present, warrant recognition of Yuchis as separate people. This interdisciplinary collection, born out of 2004 panel on Yuchi history at American Society for Ethnohistory, presents theories on Yuchi history and culture from ethnologists, linguists, archaeologists, anthropologists, and historians. Seemingly spinning gold from straw, authors use close reading, careful analysis, and comparative perspectives to draw compelling evidence from sparse historical and archaeological record that Yuchis in eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were culturally distinct from their neighbors, resistant of political domination by other groups, and diplomatically connected within Southeast. Jackson argues that this investigation into the almost completely unexamined case of Yuchi people provides productive vantage point on ... broader questions of diversity in culture and political interactions in colonial Southeast, especially among native peoples (p. xv). Organized chronologically, chapters in this collection span from time in linguistic past around 4,000 B.C.E. to efforts to remove Yuchi Indians from Florida along with Seminoles during Second Seminole War (1835-1842). Building on each other's work, these scholars present synthesis of currently available on Yuchi Indians by teasing out brief references in historical documents and linking them to archaeological record to provide basis for further inquiry. By bringing together these ideas, this collection is intended to inspire what might become robust Yuchi national historiography, including monographs on Yuchi history and culture (p. xvi). As an interdisciplinary study, this book fuses together several approaches to Yuchis. While authors refer to one another and show awareness of how their ideas intersect, many of chapters retain disciplinary specificity and jargon that might not be easily accessible to readers who are not specialists in that field. Other essays make concerted effort to define terms for lay audiences. Mary S. Linn describes Yuchi as a language isolate seemingly unconnected to all other languages in Southeast and beyond (p. 1). Describing current state of efforts to detennine Yuchi's genetic relationships with other languages, Linn argues that innovative research might eventually reveal Yuchi's linguistic and deep historical roots (p. 24). Anthropologist John E. Worth notes how first historical reference to Yuchis in Juan Pardo's 1567 expedition through Southeast, when paired with later eighteenth-century sources, opens up possibilities for understanding Yuchi town locations and political standing among their neighbors before eighteenth century. …