Southeastern Native American History

1993 Account of the Northern Conquest and Discovery of Hernando de Soto, by Rodrigo Rangel.  In The De Soto Chronicles: The Expedition of Hernando de Soto to North America in 1539-1543, ed. by L.A. Clayton, V.J. Knight, Jr., and E.C. Moore, pp. 247-306.  University of Alabama Press, Tuscaloosa.

Previous researchers have extended the range of
the American bison (Bison bison) to include the state of
Georgia, yet there have not been any verifiable osteological
remains of bison found at archaeological sites in the state.
A critical examination of the data used to establish this
range demonstrates that much of it is based on unsubstantiated historical accounts, toponyms that were believed to be evidence of the historical occurrence of bison, and unverifiable nineteenth-century accounts of osteological evidence. Credible accounts indicate that the Spanish did not find any evidence of bison in Georgia in the sixteenth century,
but by the early eighteenth century bison had migrated into
an area of South Carolina adjacent to the upper Savannah
River and into the lower Chattahoochee River basin.
Eighteenth-century British settlers also reported buffalo in
the Coastal Plain, but evidence suggests they may have mistaken feral Spanish cattle for bison. This assessment of the
evidence indicates that bison did not range into Georgia
until the late seventeenth century, possibly due to reduced
predation by hunters after the demographic collapse of Mississippian societies. They were therefore only present in the
upper Savannah River and lower Chattahoochee River basins
for a brief period of time.

Nearly five hundred and sixty years have passed since the ethics of the conquest of the New World were debated by theologians and philosophers at Valladolid, Spain.  The debates were prompted by Bartolomé de las Casas, a Dominican Friar who had owned land and slaves in South America, but had lost faith in the colonial endeavour due to the abysmal treatment of the native population by Spanish Conquistadores and Clergy.

The debate hinged upon two Papal Bulls (decrees), which explicitly stated that non-Christian peoples were sub-human, and that the lands they occupied were "Terra Nullius," to be claimed by Christian Kings to hold dominion over indefinitely.

These two Bulls are still active, and they inform land rights, as well as the way in which indigenous peoples and societies are treated by Western nations.

The United Nations Declaration of Rights of Indigenous Peoples established human rights for these populations, yet their territories are still encroached upon or seized for sale to private corporations, and indigenous peoples worldwide continue to be marginalised and mistreated.

Ethnohistorical and archeological data, including
historical descriptions of warclubs and warclub use,
ethnographic reports, Southeastern myths, Mississippian
iconography, skeletal fractures of Mississippian burials,
and archaeological specimens of warclubs are analyzed in
order to determine the significance of warclubs in
Mississippian and early historic Southeastern Indian
societies. Warclub types and techniques of use are
examined, and evidence of their use as a symbol of the
status of Mississippian military elites and chiefs is
presented. The warclub is also analyzed as a symbol in
Southeastern cosmology, especially of the Thunder deity,
which was used to symbolize the status and cosmological
authority of warriors and chiefs. Persistence into the
historic period of the symbolic use of warclubs in the Green
Corn Ceremony, the ball game, and the Redstick uprising, as
well as their use in warfare, is examined. A synthesis of
this data supports the view that Mississippian warfare was
fueled by competition for status within societies, that
warclubs were the primary symbol of warfare and the
cosmologically sanctioned status of the warrior, and that
they symbolized the cosmologically charted role of the
warrior to compete for status and participate in warfare.

While many Indian societies in the Carolinas disappeared into the multi-colored
fabric of Southern history before the mid-1700s, the Catawba Nation emerged
battered, but ethnically viable, from the chaos of their colonial experience.
Later, the Nation’s people managed to circumvent Removal in the 1830s and
many of their descendants live in the traditional Catawba homeland today. To
achieve this distinction, colonial and antebellum period Catawba leaders
actively affected the cultural survival of their people by projecting a bellicose
attitude and strategically promoting Catawba warriors as highly desired
military auxiliaries, or “ethnic soldiers,” of South Carolina’s imperial and state
militias after 1670. This paper focuses on Catawba militarism as an adaptive
strategy and further elaborates on the effects of this adaptation on Catawba
society, particularly in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. While largely
ethnohistorical in content, potential archaeological aspects of Catawba
militarism are explored to suggest avenues for future research.

In this this dissertationBrown presents data on three years of excavations (1974-76) at the French Fort St. Pierre (1719-1729) and neighboring early18th-century Indian sites. He looks at the effects of French contact during two periods of time, the missionary period and the trader period, and considers what the observed material acculturation might actually mean with regard to change and continuity in native lifeways.

Despite intensive study by John R. Swanton, in the early twentieth century, of social organization in the towns of the early Creek Confederacy, we are left with certain puzzling features. The article outlines two of them. First, despite the remarkable attention paid to clans and clanship, the nature of local, corporate kin groups was never clearly resolved. Second, despite evidence of a strong separation between the matrilineal organization, on the one hand, and the town council on the other, Swanton gives numerous examples where the two seem impossibly commingled. The article offers thoughts toward resolving both puzzles.

Though they had been vital agents in the backwoods diplomacy of the eighteenth century, through colonial warfare and treaties, Virginia politically and militarily subjugated the Iroquoian- speaking Nottoway as “tributaries” of the English Crown. Two Nottoway “Indian Towns” were surveyed and the surrounding lands held “in trust.” Eventually, the House of Burgesses appointed “Trustees” to assist with select tribal land sales and the management of monetary distributions. Situated in Southampton County, Virginia, the antebellum Nottoway community was politically active: they petitioned the legislature, governors, and county courts to intercede on matters related to the mismanagement of their funds, distribution of property, illegal seizure, and treaty obligations. In contrast, by the end of the century, the Nottoway were described by contemporaries as “very few left in the county,” all reservation lands had been allotted, and their trustees dismissed. This paper explores Indian–white interactions within Southampton’s antebellum political economy. The financial relationship between the tribe and their trustees is analyzed, as are the catalysts for Nottoway land sales and reservation allotment. The role of matrilineal leadership figures in Nottoway Trustee discourse and a series of asymmetries that emerged as the result of the tribe’s engagement with the capitalist system are considered. This essay also examines Southampton’s competition for control of Indian land and monetary capital in order to explicate the underlying causes of socio-cultural transformation. The prime mover of this change was economic, as community members struggled with their trustees for control of Indian resources and became more fully engaged in the cash-crop economy of the region.

In the decade prior to removal, the Chickasaws allowed Presbyterian missionaries to set up a school on their lands in order to gain the benefit of a western education for their children and potential allies in the struggles they were inevitable going to have with the expanding United States. Here, native children were being exposed to missionary tactics to "civilize" them and convert them into idealized Anglo-American-like farmers. This meant exposure to developing capitalist ideas and practices regarding work and gender. Archaeological investigations were performed for the first time this past summer.

"James Grant, the first governor of the British province of East Florida, arrived at St. Augustine in 1763 with a determination to prioritize Indian diplomacy. To this end, Grant devised what he called a “new system” for the management of Indian affairs. This “new system,” actually relied on traditions of gift exchange and reciprocity long used by Southeastern Indians, which Grant learned while serving in the Anglo-Cherokee War of 1760-1761. However, it was innovative in the sense that it represented a commitment by a member of the British colonial establishment to engage, understand, and employ Native diplomatic practice in his administration. Grant served as an anomaly during an era in which most imperial officials attempted to scale back their engagement with Native diplomatic practice, initiating an ultimately futile effort to impose their will upon Native peoples from the Great Lakes to Georgia. His policies outline a separate path which British colonial administration may have taken during the contentious era leading up the American Revolution."

1993 Relation of the Island of Florida, by Luys Hernandez de Biedma.  In The De Soto Chronicles: The Expedition of Hernando de Soto to North America in 1539-1543, ed. by L.A. Clayton, V.J. Knight, Jr., and E.C. Moore, pp. 221-46. University of Alabama Press, Tuscaloosa.

This first volume of a two volume set represents the result of six years of additional research beyond my 1992 dissertation, and presents a detailed analysis of the emergence, structure, and function of the 17th-century colonial system of Spanish Florida, focusing on the Timucuan chiefdoms of the northern peninsular interior of Florida.  The volume explores not only the internal details of indigenous Timucuan chiefly social organization and political economy, but also the over-arching political structure of the military and Franciscan jurisdictions of Spanish Florida, as well as the geographic and demographic infrastructure and the underlying economic basis of the Florida mission system, including a detailed description of the repartimiento labor draft and the sale of surplus corn from the mission provinces, as well as the emergence of private enterprise in the mission provinces (ISBN: 978-0813068398).

1992 Revised Aboriginal Ceramic Typology for the Timucua Mission Province, A.D. 1597-1656.  Appendix D to Excavations on the Franciscan Frontier: Archaeology at the Fig Springs Mission, by Brent R. Weisman, pp. 188-205. University of Florida Press, Gainesville.

Long before the indigenous people of southeastern North America first encountered Europeans and Africans, they established communities with clear social and political hierarchies and rich cultural traditions. Award-winning historian Gregory D. Smithers brings this world to life in Native Southerners, a sweeping narrative of American Indian history in the Southeast from the time before European colonialism to the Trail of Tears and beyond.

In the Native South, as in much of North America, storytelling is key to an understanding of origins and tradition—and the stories of the indigenous people of the Southeast are central to Native Southerners. Spanning territory reaching from modern-day Louisiana and Arkansas to the Atlantic coast, and from present-day Tennessee and Kentucky through Florida, this book gives voice to the lived history of such well-known polities as the Cherokees, Creeks, Seminoles, Chickasaws, and Choctaws, as well as smaller Native communities like the Nottoway, Occaneechi, Haliwa-Saponi, Catawba, Biloxi-Chitimacha, Natchez, Caddo, and many others. From the oral and cultural traditions of these Native peoples, as well as the written archives of European colonists and their Native counterparts, Smithers constructs a vibrant history of the societies, cultures, and people that made and remade the Native South in the centuries before the American Civil War. What emerges is a complex picture of how Native Southerners understood themselves and their world—a portrayal linking community and politics, warfare and kinship, migration, adaptation, and ecological stewardship—and how this worldview shaped and was shaped by their experience both before and after the arrival of Europeans.

As nuanced in detail as it is sweeping in scope, the narrative Smithers constructs is a testament to the storytelling and the living history that have informed the identities of Native Southerners to our day.

REVIEWS & PRAISE
“Native Southerners tries to rectify prejudices and limitations by focusing on the histories of Indian tribes in the South with an emphasis upon their own stories. Gregory D. Smithers’s use of oral histories is a highlight of his work, and he also covers the ongoing reality of climate change in the development of southern tribes. Many themes emerge, but one—the endless effort to maintain communal identity in the face of colonization, disease, and displacement—is most powerful.” —Tim Kaine, U.S. Senator from Virginia


“Native Southerners is a journey through centuries of southern Native American history. This thoughtful and sensitive narrative offers a compelling perspective on the clashes between Natives and Europeans, which forever changed the lives of the southern Native population.” —Lynette Allston, Chief of the Nottoway Indian Tribe of Virginia


“Ranging from Virginia to Indian Territory and covering the era of paramount chiefdoms to the post-Removal years, Native Southerners will be the go-to book for teachers and researchers for many years to come. An indispensable work for all scholars of southern Indians.” —Angela Pulley Hudson, author of Creek Paths and Federal Roads: Indians, Settlers, and Slaves and the Making of the American South

“Indigenous actors and voices are front and center in this graceful narrative of the Native South, testifying to their survival and adaptability even as waves of aggressive settlers sought their removal and extinction. Native Southerners is well suited for the classroom and a handy reference for specialists.” —Andrew K. Frank, author of Before the Pioneers: Indians, Settlers, Slaves, and the Founding of Miami

From the Introduction:
"Neyuheruke 300 is the official commemoration of a tragic battle that occurred on March 21-23, 1713 - thirty miles from the site of East Carolina University. The commemoration is a collaborative venture between the University and the sovereign Tuscarora Nation now located in the State of New York. The East Carolina campus is located on what was for a thousand years the Tuscarora homeland.
The goals of the commemoration are
-to celebrate the thousand year period prior to 1713 when the Tuscarora peoples lived on the lands that are new eastern North Carolina;
-to lament the consequences of a battle that drove the Tuscarora Nation out of North Caorlina;
-to mediate with all Tuscarora people today on the history, living traditions, and memory of the Carolina territory as the perennial symbolic homeland in the Tuscarora imagination; and
-to join hands in this commemoration in peace and mutual understanding."

2017 What's in a Phase? Disentangling Communities of Practice from Communities of Identity in Southeastern North America.  In Forging Southeastern Identities: Social Archaeology, Ethnohistory, and Folklore of the Mississippian to Early Historic South, ed. by Gregory A. Waselkov and Marvin T. Smith, pp. 117-156.  University of Alabama Press, Tuscaloosa.

How can social entities derived from spatial and temporal patterning in material culture be reconciled with social entities derived from documentary accounts based on the assertions of both colonial and indigenous informants?  How can archaeologists and ethnohistorians translate their independently-derived conceptions of the social landscape for one another? Using the Southeastern U.S. as a backdrop, this paper explores fundamental ontological and methodological differences between how we perceive and construct these social entities using material and documentary data, highlighting the rarely-challenged assumption that ceramic assemblages are reasonable indicators of the political or ethnic identity of their makers.  Practice theory and social learning theory are employed to suggest that archaeologists should focus on reconstructing historic landscapes of ceramic practice in order to evaluate the precise relationship between practice and identity as expressed in archaeological materials.