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Native Southerners: Indigenous History from Origins to Removal by Gregory D. Smithers

2020; Southern Historical Association; Volume: 86; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/soh.2020.0089

2325-6893

Paul Kelton,

Diverse Historical and Scientific Studies

Reviewed by: Native Southerners: Indigenous History from Origins to Removal by Gregory D. Smithers Paul Kelton Native Southerners: Indigenous History from Origins to Removal. By Gregory D. Smithers. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2019. Pp. x, 259. Paper, $29.95, ISBN 978-0-8061-6228-7.) Gregory D. Smithers attempts to do what most historians would consider impossible: write the history of a vast region, home to numerous and diverse Native communities; cover a broad sweep of time, from Indigenous origins to the 1830s; incorporate Native voices and perspectives, not as relics of the past, but as living stories that give the region a deeper meaning; and do so in less than two hundred pages of text. One would have to go back to at least the publication of J. Leitch Wright’s The Only Land They Knew: The Tragic Story of the American Indians in the Old South (New York, 1981) to find a similar undertaking, but Wright focuses mostly on the period before the American Revolution. One would really have to go back to R. S. Cotterill’s The Southern Indians: The Story of the Civilized Tribes before Removal (Norman, Okla., 1954). But these books cannot compare with what Smithers has managed to accomplish. Smithers skillfully utilizes an immense library of books and articles that have been produced over the past few decades. Archaeologists, historians, and anthropologists, often with a spirit of mutual interest and collaboration, have investigated a seemingly exponential number of new questions and topics. Scholars now know more about the nature of the chiefdom societies that dominated the South before Europeans arrived: we appreciate how they had history before that arrival; how they crafted stories and practices to sustain themselves in a changing environment; and how they went through cycles of growing, devolving, and rebuilding. Historians now understand more fully the shattering impact that the arrival of Europeans had as slave raids and epidemics remade the social landscape. We understand the various conflicts between Natives and newcomers as more complex than simple explanations revolving around cultural clashes. Smithers teachers his readers all of the above while moving them steadily and quickly ahead in time. Scholars view Native polities of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as complicated and diverse, from petite nations of a few hundred people to larger coalescent societies built on regional clusters, moieties, towns, and clans. We know the Native Southeast was composed not only of the Cherokees, Creeks, Choctaws, Chickasaws, and Seminoles but also of Catawbas, Yuchis, Occaneechis, Lumbees, Saponis, Natchez, Houmas, Caddos, and others. All of these were actors in creating new worlds of exchange and diplomacy that characterized the region. Historians now more fully appreciate that, no matter how entangled European empires and Native polities became, the Southeast was Native ground in which the claims of Britain, France, or Spain remained contested and stunted. We also appreciate how devastating the American Revolution was and how extensively the logic of settler colonialism pervaded the early American republic. Settler colonialism democratized white populations but marked Indigenous peoples for [End Page 439] elimination. But historians also know that diasporic Indigenous peoples rebuilt their lives in Indian Territory, while Native communities remained in southern states and continue to this day to fight for recognition and sovereignty. The history of the Native South, as Smithers demonstrates, did not end with the Trail of Tears. One hopes the story that Smithers sketches sounds familiar to historians of the South. If it does not, such historians should pick up a copy of Native Southerners: Indigenous History from Origins to Removal, read it, and revise their lectures accordingly. Even if this narrative sounds familiar, southern historians now have a go-to survey, which is accessible to nonspecialists, students, and a general reading audience. Paul Kelton Stony Brook University Copyright © 2020 The Southern Historical Association