Choctaw Women in a Chaotic World: The Clash of Cultures in the Colonial Southeast. By Michelene E. Pesantubbee. (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2005. Pp. 208. Cloth, $39.95; paper, $21.95.)Research and writing about American Indian in the colonial period is a challenging task. European documentary sources rarely discuss Native directly except in biased, often derogatory ways, and the written evidentiary data are scattered far and wide in published and archival collections. This shortage of evidence can be overcome using ethnohistorical methodology to incorporate archeological data, anthropological theory, and Indian oral traditions, languages, and perspectives. Just as American history can longer be written without paying attention to women, to ignore Native and gender roles in writing the histories of Indian people due to an alleged lack of sources is an omission that can longer be tolerated. Indian experienced life differently than their male counterparts, sometimes even speaking their own female-only dialect, and their roles and perspectives in cultural change and persistence need to be better understood. Still, monographs focusing on Indian women's history have only recently begun to appear. Booklength attention to southeastern Indian women, for example, is a relatively recent phenomenon with books on Cherokee by Devon Mihesuah (1993), Wilma Mankiller (1993), Sarah HiU (1997), Theda Perdue (1998), and Carolyn Johnston (2003) being the sole representatives in the field. Michelene Pesantubbee's new book on Choctaw during the colonial era addresses the need in this literature to consider the experiences of non-Cherokee in the South.Pesantubbee, a religious studies professor at the University of Iowa and of Choctaw descent, employs a traditional scholarly approach to her history of Choctaw women. The book begins with brief descriptions of how the Choctaws settled in central Mississippi based on published accounts of Choctaw origin stories. After establishing the broad cultural parameters of the role of within Choctaw society, Pesantubbee then supplies a chronological narrative that emphasizes Choctaw interaction with Europeans, especially the French. Most of this narrative can be found in other histories of the Choctaws as Pesantubbee focuses on the wars, trade, and diplomacy that characterize that intercultural relationship. The author places a greater emphasis on the role of French Catholic missionaries among Indians in the lower Mississippi Valley than many other scholars, but she does not identify any specific Catholic impact on the Choctaws beyond her supposition that the differing gender expectations of missionaries and Indians no doubt had an impact on how Choctaw society perceived and treated women (85). That impact on Choctaw women, Pesantubbee argues, was inherently negative. There is little dispute that European diseases, the British-sponsored Indian slave trade of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, and the deerskin trade of the entire eighteenth century forced Choctaws and other southeastern Indians to reconfigure various aspects of their cultures and societies. To say that change was automatically harmful or that Choctaws were incapable of resisting it, however, portrays Choctaws as only victims in a story that is actually much more complicated. …