Native Polities Research Articles

Intelligence operations, Indigenous cultures, and early U.S. Ambassadors to Native American polities

ABSTRACT This article extends scholars’ recent integration of the history of U.S.-Indigenous relations into the history of American foreign relations by addressing the state’s attempts to acquire information about Native people’s ways of perceiving reality. My focus is on the intertwined careers in policymaking and scholarship of Henry Rowe Schoolcraft. Schoolcraft used his position as U.S. ambassador (‘Indian agent’) to the Ojibwe people to become the government’s leading expert on Indigenous cultures. The cultural information officials like Schoolcraft gathered was tightly connected to matters of national security, with significant implications for both international relations and the discipline now known as anthropology.

Remaking North American Sovereignty: State Transformation in the 1860s

Although tightly focused on a short time span of just a decade, this provocative collection of essays makes bold and refreshingly innovative claims about the historical nature of sovereignty, the nation-state, and modern political identity in North America. Readers of HAHR will be familiar with the calls to include Mexico and Latin America in a continental and hemispheric framework for the historiography of the Age of Revolution and state formation. However, this volume refocuses on the political crises, civil wars (or lack thereof in Canada), and new social contracts emerging in the 1860s by reconfiguring perspectives away from the Atlantic and toward the interior and Pacific landscapes that dominated the North American continent. As the dean of nineteenth-century US history, Steven Hahn, writes in the collection's first essay, “an ‘inside out’ and ‘southside north’ perspective may also allow us to see . . . patterns of development most important to nineteenth-century American capitalism” (p. 33).Perhaps more than those for other edited volumes of essays, the introduction for Remaking North American Sovereignty also takes on the weighty theoretical and historical questions: What is sovereignty? What is the state? What is the nation? Frank Towers importantly presents his working definitions of these concepts, which are more familiarly debated in scholarship on the Age of Revolution and less so in scholarship on the mid to late nineteenth century. This volume, then, asks “how . . . did new understandings of national identity and new definitions of citizenship come to pass in the 1860s and 70s, and in what ways did these transformations . . . cross political boundaries?” (p. 13). The introduction alone gives much food for thought about adopting a more capacious temporal and spatial understanding of modern state formation.The editors neatly divide the book into three sections, titled “Making Nations,” “Indigenous Polities,” and “The Complications of the Market.” Part 1 includes work by scholars Steven Hahn, Andrew Smith, Pablo Mijangos y González, and Robert Bonner. Collectively, these essays tackle this seminal decade “from the inside out,” exploring the overlapping influences and synchronous actions of Mexican, Canadian, and US national consolidation projects amid civil wars, regional conflict, and, in the case of Canada's Confederation, efforts to maintain ties to the “mother country.” As Mijangos y González importantly points out, these “parallel trajectories. . . . responded to global trends and above all to regional dynamics that explain the simultaneous nature” of national consolidation (p. 75).Containing the work of Jane Dinwoodie, Ryan Hall, and Marcela Terrazas y Basante, part 2 focuses on Indigenous states. These authors build on recent efforts by scholars of Native North America to insert into the existing, teleological national histories of Canada, Mexico, and the US Native polities the powerful Great Plains nations, who “imagined territory as a permeable space with porous borders that permitted mobility, and as a source of resources to be appropriated” (p. 153). Highlighting the dynamic political and economic forces emanating out of the vast interior plains, these essays seek to elevate Indigenous actions and calculations to the diplomatic level, thus answering a call made most forcefully by historian Brian DeLay.Focusing on the expansion of capitalism and its role in modern state formation, the final section includes prominent scholars who have pioneered on this topic: Christopher Clark, Mary P. Ryan, and Benjamin H. Johnson. Each essay focuses closely on the ways that the local conditions on the ground—whether the “family farms” identified by Clark, the local municipalities such as San Francisco detailed by Ryan, or the borderland communities of northwest Mexico analyzed by Johnson—shifted in response to the momentous progress of political and economic consolidation (p. 195).The other refreshing aspect of this volume is its provocative conclusion (not always included in such edited works) prodding the reader to fully embrace a continental perspective both spatially and temporally. Indeed, one can push this further (as some have) to take a more hemispheric perspective, revealing the tug of Latin America on its Northern neighbors. Returning to Steven Hahn is instructive: “looking further to the inside and the south, we may even see that it was in the great Mexican Revolution—mostly ignored by scholars of the United States—that the long nineteenth century first gave way to the twentieth” (p. 33).

Tangled in the Web: Communication, Power, and the Virgin Soil Hypothesis

Tangled in the Web:Communication, Power, and the Virgin Soil Hypothesis Jonathan DeCoster (bio) Catherine M. Cameron, Paul Kelton, andAlan C. Swedlund, eds. Beyond Germs: Native Depopulation in North America. Tucson: The University of Arizona Press, 2015. xii + 276 pp. Foreword, acknowledgments, contributors, index. $29.95. Alejandra Dubcovsky. Informed Power: Communication in the Early American South. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2016. x + 287 pp. Illustrations, map, notes, acknowledgments, index. $39.95. Most of us view our hyper-connected, web-enabled world with some degree of ambivalence. We are overwhelmed by information of uncertain reliability, our consumption puts us at the mercy of global markets and corporations, and any airplane may carry the next pandemic. While these may seem like quintessentially modern concerns, in Informed Power: Communication in the Early American South, Alejandra Dubcovsky shows us that these are in fact very old problems. Dubcovsky uses the idea of the network—a pattern of connections that links people and places together—as a lens through which to make sense of the complex interactions among multiple European and native polities in the American Southeast, from the Mississippian chiefdoms of the 13th century through the 1730s. Through her close examination of communication networks and their role in certain key historical events, we see Indians, Europeans, and Africans dealing with competing or unreliable news, using their networks to obtain or distribute trade goods, and ultimately, articulating and projecting power throughout the region. While the technology has changed, the underlying concerns are familiar. Dubcovsky's work adds to a growing body of work on what she calls the "Early South," a revision that seeks to move beyond the "Old South" and its paradigmatic Antebellum slave plantations. Like Robbie Etheridge's From Chicaza to Chickasaw (2010) and Christina Snyder's Slavery in Indian Country (2010), Informed Power benefits from a lengthening of chronology and broadening of focus. First, by extending its lens back before the arrival of Europeans in the 16th century, the South appears from the outset as a Native landscape [End Page 545] connected by networks of exchange. This changes our understanding of the colonial period, as Native nations remained numerous and powerful (and would well into the 19th century), and occupied a central role in colonial affairs. For example, Dubcovsky's attention to the longer history of Euro-Indian interaction leads her to conclude that it was relations with Indians that drove the British towards African slavery. She argues that the Yamasee War between British colonists and multiple South Carolina tribes reoriented the colony away from the Indian trade, while simultaneously opening up lands for a new source of profit, rice cultivation. This, plus reduced supply of enslaved Indians, led to that colony's plantation complex. Dubcovsky brings skill and creativity to the task of understanding what was going on beyond the knowledge of Europeans in Indian country, using archaeological and linguistic evidence to infer the native world that is absent from the written sources. The other key feature of scholarship with what might be called an "Early South" orientation is a vision that ranges beyond the British colonies. Here Dubcovsky also brings considerable skill. She is equally at home in the Spanish archives as she is in the British, and this allows her to see what the English and Spanish colonists did and did not know about each other, and how they sought to gather their information. Her description of the Yamasee War, for example, emerges from both British and Spanish perspectives, as English colonists "waded through these conflicting, fear-filled reports" on the strength of Yamasee and Creek raiders, while at the same time, Spanish officials learned to decipher a Yamasee delegation's use of knotted strips of deerskin as a communication method (pp. 166, 171). Recognizing, however, that these public communications were complex and often contradictory, Dubcovsky also attempts to reconstruct the internal politics of the Creek and Cherokee towns as they debated whether to support the Yamasees and join the Spaniards, to assist the English of South Carolina, or even try to pursue both policies simultaneously. She sketches in detail the negotiations and communications engaged in by local leaders (Native and European) eager to preserve...

Why You Can’t Teach United States History without American Indians

Why You Can’t Teach United States History without American Indians emerged from the symposium of the same name at the Newberry Library in May 2013. The authors, though mainly historians, represent an interdisciplinary group committed to getting American history college instructors to “recast their survey history classes” toward the centrality of American Indians to US history (1). The editors intend that the work will “offer college teachers a toolbox of articles to help them transform their approach” (2). To this end, the book’s three parts offer two main types of essays: historiographic critiques and informative pieces that offer topics for consideration in survey courses.Part 1, “U.S. History to 1877,” consists of two critiques and seven topical presentations. The two critical essays decry the absence of Native polities in maps historically and presently in textbooks—unless, that is, they depict the reservation period, thereby creating a “declension narrative” at odds with the agency of Native nations (22–23). Moreover, the preponderant absence of Indians in college textbooks leads to neglect of the story of contention for homeland and of dispossession that also should reveal Native survival and sovereignty. Textbook maps require revision highlighting “Indian presence and possession” to “be more accurate as well as a superior teaching tool” (71).The Indian-focused topical pieces in part 1 include three describing historical processes and four describing events. The process articles call for greater recognition of Indian history in the North Atlantic trade conducted in the sixteenth century, in the dislocation caused by the Doctrine of Discovery and Manifest Destiny, and in slavery both as slaves and as owners. The articles featuring events explain the importance of looking at Indians in Bacon’s Rebellion, the California gold rush, and the Civil War and at women playing roles in the American Revolution. These essays go beyond victimization and project Native agency.Part 2, “U.S. History since 1877,” possesses a greater balance of three critiques and four topical essays. The critiques explain that textbooks should add diplomacy and survivability to treatment of the western Indian wars. Also, textbooks would better present Native history by “positioning the American Indian self-determination movement in the era of civil rights” and by positioning the struggle for American Indian religious freedom alongside the “larger story of religious resurgence in America” (197, 227). Two of the topical considerations delve into the reading revolution in Native America and the use of primary sources to analyze Native participation in the New Deal. The other topical considerations cover the more general topics of Indian movement to cities and the impact on Indian Country of the power consumption that has fueled suburbanization.Part 3, “Reconceptualizing the Narrative,” comprises three critical essays. The concept of teaching American history with a colonialism theme pervades two of the articles. The first maintains that settler colonialism keeps Native Americans central to the narrative. The second explains the usefulness of a focus on imperialism and the indigenous response to it for viewing American history with a global comparative perspective. The third notes that typical surveys omit Native sovereignty as part of the federalism experience and calls for rectifying this omission to generate a more complete study.This book makes a definitive case for thorough treatment of American Indian history in the survey narrative. College instructors who already draw on this history will want to recommend the text to colleagues who do not. Secondary teachers also should find it relevant. The critiques prove useful both for framing instruction and for incorporating historiographic analysis in the classroom. The topical essays provide subjects for enriched study. Some essays are more compelling than others, but all warrant consideration with respect to teaching the survey. The very gathering of these essays under a clear title calling for inclusion of American Indians in survey courses bears historiographic significance. One of the book’s editors, Jean M. O’Brien, provides an apt conclusion: “The fundamental truth is that, of course, you can teach U.S. history without Indians—it happens all the time, [but] you shouldn’t teach U.S. history without Indians . . . if you want to get the story right” (115).

That Which Belongs to All: Khipus, Community, and Indigenous Legal Activism in the Early Colonial Andes–ERRATUM

In recent years, scholars from a variety of fields have advanced the idea that native legal activism worked as one of the most widespread and effective strategies for the defense of communal assets, political autonomy, and customary law in early colonial Peru. Indigenous claimants, petitioners, and legal intermediaries begin to appear in the historical record just ten years after the initial encounter at Cajamarca in 1532. After embracing Iberian legal culture in the early 1540s, individuals of noble Inca descent began to engage with local and metropolitan courts, preparing letters, reports, petitions, and proofs of services and merit aimed at securing their status within the new order. Native lords (caciques) and communities of non-Inca origin joined as active litigants and petitioners in the late 1540s, hiring advocates and solicitors and sending their own delegations to tend to their legal affairs in Lima, seat of a royal court of appeal. During the two decades that followed the promulgation of the New Laws (1542), which granted these courts of appeal or audiencias in the Americas the right to assess and revise Indian tributary quotas, Lima experienced an explosion of litigation by native polities requesting a reduction of their fiscal burdens and caciques seeking confirmation of their chiefly rank. Lawsuits pertaining to lands and pastures, town boundaries, and lordship (cacicazgo) rights soon ensued. In the early 1560s, the first Andean caciques crossed the Atlantic on behalf of their communities and reached the still-itinerant Habsburg court. Indigenous groups quickly became expert litigators in secular and ecclesiastical courts. Their legal activism continued unabated throughout the Habsburg era.

A Time and a Place: The Geography of British, French, and Aboriginal Interactions in Early Nova Scotia, 1726–44

British Nova Scotia in the early eighteenth century had overlapping geographic identities. French officials and settlers called the region Acadia, while Native polities inhabited their homelands as they had for thousands of years. The Mi’kmaq lived in Mi’kma’ki, the Wulstukwiuk and Passamaquoddy were sustained by the Wulstuk River, and the Abenaki Dawnland stretched across what is now Maine. During a period of relative peace from 1726 to 1744, these Native and non-Native groups monitored settlements, movements, and borders to prevent any unacceptable displays of territorial authority. In so doing, they created shared spaces of interaction: economic (fishing and trading), diplomatic (negotiating and gift-giving), and religious (worshipping and communing). Sovereignty remained elusive and European settlements were pales, but exchanges took place at various seasonal or temporary sites that allowed various groups to maintain peace, air grievances, and balance territorial control. These sites were created, supported, and allowed to dissolve as necessary. British officials did not always employ these sites effectively, whereas the French benefited from a longer history of interaction with the Native groups, who remained the dominant force in the region. Imperial claims to sovereignty were tempered locally by officials who recognized that their limited authority was a boon to peace.

The Inextricable Connection between Historical Consciousness and International Law: New Imperialism, the International Court of Justice and its Interpretation of the Inter-Temporal Rule

European colonial powers impaired the sovereignty of the native ruler, breached their obligations under the treaties they concluded with native polities and violated customary international law. On the basis of customary international law, European States were bound to observe their obligations towards and the rights of African nations. More concretely, European States had a legal duty to observe the obligations they consented to in cession and protectorate treaties with African rulers. But they failed to do so. The excessive interpretation and employment of sovereign rights on the side of the European colonial powers after the conclusion of cession and protectorate treaties disrespected sovereignty and, subsequently, property of the original population of Africa. African rights of dominium had to make way for European rights of imperium. The article addresses the origins of the problematic of establishing responsibility and available remedies for historical wrongs comprised in the doctrine of inter-temporal law. It questions what the inter-temporal rule involves in the context of international law and how it is and should be applied with regard to the illegal nature of Africa's colonization. As will be shown, the doctrine of inter-temporal law underlines the relation between international law and a proper understanding and awareness of the history of international law in general and of legal disputes in particular.

5. IMPERIAL SPACES IN PEKKA HÄMÄLÄINEN'S THE COMANCHE EMPIRE

ABSTRACTThis review focuses on Pekka Hämäläinen's characterization and analysis of the Comanche empire as a spatial category in The Comanche Empire and discusses how this work relates to broader discussions about space and power in borderlands and imperial histories. Although empires have long been central actors in borderlands histories, “empire” has not necessarily been a category of spatial organization and analysis and certainly not one used to describe spaces controlled by Native peoples. By contrast, while Hämäläinen emphasizes the imperial characteristics of the economic, political, and cultural dimensions of Comanche history (as other contributors to this forum discuss), he also uses “empire” to characterize Comanche dominance spatially. Hämäläinen helps us to rethink the spatial dynamics that both shaped and were produced by the encounters between Comanches and Spaniards, French, Mexicans, Americans, and other Native peoples in the Great Plains during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. By analyzing how Comanches came to control vast stretches of the southern plains, The Comanche Empire challenges our assumptions about how Native polities and imperial powers (and groups like the Comanches that Hämäläinen argues were both) thought about territorial claims and how they employed more nuanced spatial strategies to assert their authority, extend their cultural influence, and control trade and resources.

Queer Critique and Federal Indian Policy

Queer Critique and Federal Indian Policy J. Kēhaulani Kauanui (bio) When Did Indians Become Straight? Kinship, the History of Sexuality, and Native Sovereignty. By Mark Rifkin. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. 440 pages. $99.00 (cloth). $35.00 (paper). Many American studies scholars are familiar with the landmark decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in Johnson v. McIntosh, 21 U.S. (8 Wheat.) 543 (1823), which held that private citizens could not purchase lands from Native Americans. The case is the first in what has come to be known as the “Marshall Trilogy,” named after Chief Justice John Marshall, which also includes Cherokee Nation v. Georgia and Worcester v. Georgia. The trio is a staple in nearly every case relating to the question of tribal nations’ exercise of self-determination. In McIntosh, the court laid out the foundations of the “doctrine of discovery,” which created the concept of “aboriginal title” to land but denied Indian tribes the same rights to land as the European colonizers because under the Law of Nations based on this doctrine, Indians are “an inferior race of savages.” As Native legal scholars have pointed out, the court perpetuated a racist judicial language of Indian savagery to define Indian rights.1 And, as McIntosh remains authoritative precedent in contemporary case law, the language of racial inferiority still undergirds U.S. federal Indian policy that undermines Native sovereignty. For some, it may at first seem surprising to relate this legal history with the history of sexuality, but Mark Rifkin’s brilliant new book makes the connection utterly persuasively. When Did Indians Become Straight? Kinship, the History of Sexuality, and Native Sovereignty, Rifkin’s second monograph, explores the complex relationship between contested U.S. notions of normality and shifting forms of Native peoples’ governance and self-representation. In the title of the book, he asks the question “when did Indians become straight?” to suggest that “straight is something that native peoples might be (forced to) become,” which “opens the possibility that they may have been, and still may be, something else” (313). The book deals with the topic through a literary lens focused on historical materiality, not fixated on literary form. Rifkin, a non-Native scholar, [End Page 163] examines a wide range of texts (including captivity narratives, fiction, government documents, and anthropological debates) to produce an interdisciplinary cultural and literary history that shows both how Euro-American discourses of sexuality have included Native peoples in ways that degrade indigenous social formations and how Native intellectuals have written back to reaffirm their peoples’ sovereignty and self-determination. Rifkin’s book features Native writers in several different periods whose interventions have insisted on the “coherence and persistence of native polities by examining the ways traditions of residency and social formations that can be described as kinship give shape to particular modes of governance and land tenure” (8). However, he does not offer kinship systems as a privileged model of contemporary sovereignty; instead, he marks how the enclosure of Native peoples into what he terms “Euramerican discourses of sexuality” provides a central matrix through which the sphere of politics is defined. He asserts that this “kind of queer analysis that extends beyond discussion of the policing homoeroticism and gender expression, then, can aid in developing an immanent critique of the dimensions and effects of imperial superintendence, foregrounding the role of discourses of sexuality in U.S. regulation of what will count as native governance, as well as the related self-censuring that can guide native representations of tradition and sovereignty” (25). In grappling with the questions of sexual and gender expression as he addresses the use of the discourse of tradition, he identifies and theorizes how Native peoples reckoned with what he theorizes as “the bribe of straightness,” a dynamic that “includes arguing for the validity of indigenous kinship systems (Native family formations, homemaking, and land tenure) in ways that make them more acceptable/respectable to whites, disavowing the presence of sexual and gender practices deemed perverse within Euramerican sexology” (23). He explains that “in this way, the circulation of practices and principles as tradition can engage in processes of (hetero)normalization even as it may challenge other historic...

INTRODUCTION

This special issue proposes that dialogue between Native studies and queer studies can contribute to our understanding of the U.S. nation-state, Native polities and peoplehood, and the complex role of culture(s) in political expression and identification. Native and queer studies have, together and separately, worked to theorize and defend various kinds of diversity as well as individual and collective self-representation in the face of totalizing state legalities and ideologies, and this special issue is devoted to the intersections of those sometimes consonant, sometimes dissonant, interventions. In the introduction, each of the issue's three editors writes about his or her own “take” on the import of the collection. Daniel Heath Justice (Cherokee) places the collection in the context of Native lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and two-spirit activism, and the scholarship that has grown out of that activism. He warns that times may well be getting worse rather than better for this kind of scholarship and activism, and encourages readers to understand the collection as a rallying call to further and more complex and critical work. Bethany Schneider places the collection in the context of the history of U.S. Indian policy, arguing that readers may well need a primer in how the state has furthered the project of genocide through the violent control of Native genders and sexualities. Mark Rifkin explains why the collection, with its particular focus on the state, seemed so important at this particular moment, and discusses the excitements and troubles of the interface between Native and queer studies. He introduces the essays and asks readers to imagine what it might look like to indigenize queer studies.

Go-betweens and the Colonization of Brazil, 1500-1600

Go-betweens and the Colonization of Brazil, 1500-1600

The Westo Indians: Slave Traders of the Early Colonial South

The Westo Indians, who lived in the Savannah River region during the second half of the 17th century, are mentioned in few primary documents and only infrequently in secondary literature. There are no known Westo archaeological sites; no artifacts can be linked to the group; and no more than a single word of their language is known to us today. Yet, from the extant evidence, it is believed that the Westos, who migrated from around Lake Erie by 1656, had a profound effect on the development of the colonial South. This volume reproduces excerpts from all 19 documents that indisputably reference the Westos, although the Europeans referred to them by a variety of names. Most of the information was written by Lords Proprietors who never met the Westos, or by a handful of Carolinians who did. But the author is able to chart a highly plausible history of this Native group who, for a period, thrived on the Southern frontier. The narrative traces their northeastern origins and how the Erle conflicts with the Five Nations Iroquois in the Beaver Wars forced them southward, where they found new economic opportunities in the lucrative slave trade. At the height of their influence, between 1659 and 1680, it is believed the Westos captured and sold several thousand Indians from Spanish Florida, often trading them for guns. Eventually, their military advantage over the Indians of the lower South was compromised by the rise of powerful confederacies of native peoples, who could acquire equivalent firearms from the Europeans. Even though the aggressive Westos declined, they had influenced profound change in the southeast. They furthered the demise of chiefly organization, helped to shift the emphasis from agricultural to hunting economies, and influenced the dramatic decrease in the number and diversity of native polities. Bowne has ferreted out an amazing amount of information on this previously very poorly known people. He makes a compelling case that the appearance of the Westos in the Southeast, and their encouragement of the slave trade, were critically important events in the colonial history of the region, an argument that...is careful, insightful, and well documented. - Gregory A. Waselkov, author of Old Mobile Archaeology

Post-Colonial Studies of Native America.A Review Essay

Twenty years ago a work entitledThe Nations Withinexamined the political structures that keep Native polities embedded within the United States, and the legal armature that sovereignty principles might provide for future activism (Deloria and Lytle 1984). The Native nations are still “within,” in the political sense, but they are “out” in public discourses; activism has given sovereignty claims more standing that all but dreamers would have imagined in 1984. During the same period, however, federal Indian policies have alternatively buttressed and undercut the power of tribal leadership, just as they have on other continents where imperial powers have cultivated “Native authorities.” Such destabilizing shifts impel scholars of Native political, economic, and cultural histories to examine less visible violence and inequalities that underlie political institutions, particularly those that remain as evident constructions of power change.

Whose frontier? The Mexican‐United States border in perspective

Giving preference to Spanish and Mexican primary sources and recent Mexican historiography, this essay examines the oft‐repeated statement that Mexico lost half or more of her territory to the United States between 1848 and 1853. The European‐African conquest of what is now Mexico was a gradual process starting in 1519 and ending in the early years of the twentieth century with the surrender of rebel groups of Mayas, Yaquis, Apaches, and others. The boundary fixed by the Adams‐Onis treaty in 1819, separating the territorial pretensions of Spain and the United States, passed through existing native polities which were quite independent of either power. At the beginning of the war of 1846–48 the Mexican government controlled approximately 656,400 square miles, of which roughly 45,000 square miles in Alta California, Sonora, Nuevo Mexico and Tamaulipas were annexed to the United States between 1848 and 1853. Subsequently, the Indians on both sides of the new frontier were subdued or exterminated and their lands were occupied by Anglo and Hispano colonists. The present land area of Mexico, 761,680 square miles, is appreciably greater than in 1846. During the past century‐and‐a‐half, the human population of the area between the 1819 and 1853 treaty lines has soared from about 672,000 in 1846 to almost sixty million today, of whom about a quarter are of ‘Hispanic’ origin, most of them recent migrants from Mexico.

The Forgotten Centuries Indians and Europeans in the American South, 1521-1704 (review)

The Forgotten Centuries Indians and Europeans in the American South, 1 521-1704 Edited by Charles Hudson and Carmen Chaves Tesser University of Georgia Press, 1994 472 pp. Cloth, $50.00; paper, $25.00 Reviewed by Sarah H. Hill, independent scholar in Adanta, Georgia. A graduate of the Institute for the Liberal Arts at Emory University, she has recendy completed Weaving New Worlds: A History ofSoutheastern Cherokee Women and TheirBasketry, to be published in July of 1997. In this rich and dense volume, Charles Hudson and Carmen Chaves Tesser have brought together anthropologists, archaeologists, and historians to reconstruct the world of southeastern interior American Indians in die two centuries between initial Spanish contact and the English founding of Charles Town. These are forgotten centuries, according to the editors, that are missing from surveys of American history as well as from the memories of eighteenth-century southeastern natives. While the latter is an assumption that cannot be tested, the former is regrettably true. The editors attribute such pervasive historical amnesia to diverse sources, including the bias of Anglocentric historians, special research problems associated widi records of these two centuries, and a traditional lack of collaboration between anthropologists and historians. This publication brings to the forefront the forgotten centuries of Native and European American history and renders obsolete the tide of the book. The volume is an invaluable resource for scholars and students of the American South. Divided into four sections, seventeen articles include the most recent scholarship on Spanish explorations, new models ofsocial systems, and lucid summaries of knowledge accumulated in the past decade. The sections and essays widiin them are arranged chronologically by subject from the earliest sixteenth-century Spanish abduction of Native Americans to eighteenth-century Native formation ofnew polities. The organization underscores the dramatic change among interior Natives that the papers detail. The first section, "Exploration of the Southeast," relies most heavily on published and unpublished Spanish documents to trace early Spanish expeditions and the interior groups they confronted. AnthropologistJohn Scarry establishes the framework for the entire volume in "The Late Prehistoric Southeast." By sketching varied environmental zones, Scarry verifies the complexity of Native Reviews 91 societies that successfully adapted to them before developing into chiefdoms in the Mississippian period. Three subsequent papers in the first section reconstruct routes ofSpanish explorers. In two consecutive essays ("Lucas Vaquez de Ayllon's Discovery and Colony" and "Narvaez and Cabeza de Vaca in Florida"), historian Paul Hoffman continues his work ofexplicating the confused explorations ofthe earliest conquistadors, whose landing sites and journey routes await archaeological verification. Anthropologist Charles Hudson presents his long-anticipated reconstruction of the route of the Hernando de Soto expedition of 1 5 39 to 1 543, which will engender lively debate among geographers, archaeologists, and historians for some time. Hudson does not argue his case in this volume, but clearly delineates the proposed route for others to examine. The first section's final essay, by archaeologistJohn Worth, examines late Spanish military expeditions in the interior Southeast from 1 597 to 1628. These litde-known or -reported entradas marked the last contact between interior Indians and the Spanish military. Worth's articulate contribution indicates the kinds of information that can be gleaned from previously untranslated Spanish documents. While the first section concentrates on Spanish explorations, four essays in the second draw from archaeological data to focus on the Native polities the Spanish encountered. "The Southeastern Indian Chiefdoms" begins with anthropologist Randolph Widmer's fundamental model for "The Structure of Southeastern Chiefdoms." In the absence ofadequate ethnographic data, such models can help interpret incomplete and contradictory records. The remaining essays in the second section undertake the reconstruction of specific chiefdoms and collectively document differences between Mississippian polities in different areas of the Southeast. These articles also reveal the kinds of disagreements about chiefdom size, location, and primacy that engage contemporary scholars. Combining Spanish documents and historical analyses with archaeological data,John Scarry's second essay details the emergence and dissolution of"The Apalachee Chiefdom: A Mississippian Society on the Fringe ofthe Mississippian World." Focusing on the interior Piedmont, archaeologist Mark Williams utilizes a decade of research to explicate the formation, consolidation, and abandonment of the Oconee Province chiefdom. Questions...

Continuity and change: De Soto and the Apalachee

The expedition of Hernando de Soto has been touted as one of the primary factors of the demise of the native societies in the Southeast. European steel and infectious disease were the reputed agents of their destruction. While the de Soto entrada battled many of the native polities it encountered, recent studies suggest that the consequences were less disruptive in some places than previously thought. Indeed, changes were already in progress when the Europeans arrived. Evidence from the excavation of the Governor Martin site in northern Florida indicates that the Apalachee who received Franciscan missionaries in the 17th century were little different from those encountered by de Soto in 1540. The impact of European diseases on the native cultures was clearly significant; however, it would be imprudent to invoke monocausal explanations without exploring other factors that could have contributed to the social and demographic changes experienced by these societies.

Chiefly Behavior: Evidence from Sixteenth Century Spanish Accounts

Following the argument that sixteenth‐century Spanish explorers were treated by Native Americans of the Southeast as paramount chiefs, we attempt to describe appropriate protocol toward paramount chiefs according to native values. We argue that paramount chiefs in the Southeast may have travelled through their domain on a periodic basis. After an elaborate greeting ritual, there were other formal expressions of hospitality. Visiting paramounts could expect to be supplied with food, housing, tribute, burden bearers, and transportation via canoe. De Soto was supplied with guides as he passed through native polities, but this behavior may not have been necessary for native paramounts. De Soto was also supplied with women, but it is not clear if this was standard behavior of a chief toward a paramount, or if the Spaniards had demanded women.

Transitions in Power: Centralization of Wanka Political Organization under Inka Rule

Transitions in Power: Centralization of Wanka Political Organization under Inka Rule

Trade Politics and Native Polities in Iroquoia and Asante

The expansion of Western influence during and after the fifteenth century was a pervasive phenomenon. European seamen, traders, and settlers set off one of the most widespread and complex processes of cultural contact and transfer in human history. Students of acculturation are thus presented with a unique opportunity for controlled observation, that of keeping one variable—the culture of Western Europe—relatively constant while allowing others to range widely. European traders carried much the same cultural baggage, material and conceptual, whether they travelled to the Americas, Asia, or the East Indies, but the cultures they encountered and with which they interacted covered a wide spectrum of human conditions.

Political Organization and Land Tenure among the Northeastern Indians, 1600-1830

Previous articleNext article No AccessPolitical Organization and Land Tenure among the Northeastern Indians, 1600-1830Anthony F. C. WallaceAnthony F. C. Wallace Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Volume 13, Number 4Winter, 1957 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/soutjanth.13.4.3629094 Views: 11Total views on this site Citations: 9Citations are reported from Crossref Journal History This article was published in the Southwestern Journal of Anthropology (1945-1972), which is continued by the Journal of Anthropological Research (1973-present). PDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Michael Warren Murphy On the Ecomateriality of Racial-colonial Domination in Rhode Island, (Sep 2021): 161–189.https://doi.org/10.1108/S0198-871920210000038009Paul Corcoran John Locke on Native Right, Colonial Possession, and the Concept of Vacuum domicilium, The European Legacy 23, no.33 (Dec 2017): 225–250.https://doi.org/10.1080/10848770.2017.1416766Daniel R. Mandell, Xavier Blandin Les town meetings de Nouvelle-Angleterre et les populations indigènes : Stockbridge, Massachusetts, 1730-1775, Participations N° 15, no.22 (Dec 2016): 123–147.https://doi.org/10.3917/parti.015.0123MATTHEW BABCOCK Territoriality and the Historiography of Early North America, Journal of American Studies 50, no.33 (Mar 2016): 515–536.https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021875816000529Chip Colwell-ChanthaphonhJami Powell Repatriation and Constructs of Identity, Journal of Anthropological Research 68, no.22 (Dec 2015): 191–222.https://doi.org/10.3998/jar.0521004.0068.202Erin Hogan Fouberg Understanding Space, Understanding Citizenship, Journal of Geography 101, no.22 (Mar 2002): 81–85.https://doi.org/10.1080/00221340208978475James Tully Aboriginal Property and Western Theory: Recovering a Middle Ground, Social Philosophy and Policy 11, no.22 (Jun 2009): 153–180.https://doi.org/10.1017/S0265052500004477Stephen Cornell The transformations of tribe: Organization and self‐concept in Native American ethnicities, Ethnic and Racial Studies 11, no.11 (Jan 1988): 27–47.https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870.1988.9993587Kit W. Wesler Trade Politics and Native Polities in Iroquoia and Asante, Comparative Studies in Society and History 25, no.44 (Jun 2009): 641–660.https://doi.org/10.1017/S0010417500010653