Practicing Ethnohistory

An essential reader on the practice and methodology of ethnohistory.

At the beginning of the eighteenth century, over twenty different American Indian tribal groups inhabited present-day Mississippi. Today, Mississippi is home to only one tribe, the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians. In Mississippi's American Indians, author James F. Barnett Jr. explores the historical forces and processes that led to this sweeping change in the diversity of the state's native peoples. The book begins with a chapter on Mississippi's approximately 12,000-year prehistory, from early hunter-gatherer societies through the powerful mound building civilizations encountered by the first European expeditions. With the coming of the Spanish, French, and English to the New World, native societies in the Mississippi region connected with the Atlantic market economy, a source for guns, blankets, and many other trade items. Europeans offered these trade materials in exchange for Indian slaves and deerskins, currencies that radically altered the relationships between tribal groups. Smallpox and other diseases followed along the trading paths. Colonial competition between the French and English helped to spark the Natchez rebellion, the Chickasaw-French wars, the Choctaw civil war, and a half-century of client warfare between the Choctaws and Chickasaws. The Treaty of Paris in 1763 forced Mississippi's pro-French tribes to move west of the Mississippi River. The Diaspora included the Tunicas, Houmas, Pascagoulas, Biloxis, and a portion of the Choctaw confederacy. In the early nineteenth century, Mississippi's remaining Choctaws and Chickasaws faced a series of treaties with the United States government that ended in destitution and removal. Despite the intense pressures of European invasion, the Mississippi tribes survived by adapting and contributing to their rapidly evolving world.

Sources and Methods in Indigenous Studies is a synthesis of changes and innovations in methodologies in Indigenous Studies, focusing on sources over a broad chronological and geographical range. Written by a group of highly respected Indigenous Studies scholars from across an array of disciplines, this collection offers insight into the methodological approaches contributors take to research, and how these methods have developed in recent years. The book has a two-part structure that looks, firstly, at the theoretical and disciplinary movement of Indigenous Studies within history, literature, anthropology, and the social sciences. Chapters in this section reveal that, while engaging with other disciplines, Indigenous Studies has forged its own intellectual path by borrowing and innovating from other fields. In part two, the book examines the many different areas with which sources for indigenous history have been engaged, including the importance of family, gender, feminism, and sexuality, as well as various elements of expressive culture such as material culture, literature, and museums. Together, the chapters offer readers an overview of the dynamic state of the field in Indigenous Studies. This book shines a spotlight on the ways in which scholarship is transforming Indigenous Studies in methodologically innovative and exciting ways, and will be essential reading for students and scholars in the field.

In The Great Power of Small Nations, Elizabeth N. Ellis (Peoria) tells the stories of the many smaller Native American nations that shaped the development of the Gulf South. Based on extensive archival research and oral histories, Ellis’s narrative chronicles how diverse Indigenous peoples—including Biloxis, Choctaws, Chitimachas, Chickasaws, Houmas, Mobilians, and Tunicas—influenced and often challenged the growth of colonial Louisiana. The book centers on questions of Native nation-building and international diplomacy, and it argues that Native American migration and practices of offering refuge to migrants in crisis enabled Native nations to survive the violence of colonization. Indeed, these practices also made them powerful. When European settlers began to arrive in Indigenous homelands at the turn of the eighteenth century, these small nations, or petites nations as the French called them, pulled colonists into their political and social systems, thereby steering the development of early Louisiana. In some cases, the same practices that helped Native peoples withstand colonization in the eighteenth century, including frequent migration, living alongside foreign nations, and welcoming outsiders into their lands, have made it difficult for their contemporary descendants to achieve federal acknowledgment and full rights as Native American peoples. The Great Power of Small Nations tackles questions of Native power past and present and provides a fresh examination of the formidable and resilient Native nations who helped shape the modern Gulf South.

This book presents a bold, multifaceted interpretation of early English imperial actions by examining the ways in which English empire-builders and travelers interacted with Indigenous and African peoples during the long process of colonization in the Americas. Ignacio Gallup-Díaz argues that early English imperial actors were primarily motivated by practical concerns rather than abstract ideologies—from reacting to, learning from, and avoiding the ongoing Spanish and Portuguese imperial projects to the dynamic collision of English imaginings of empire with the practical realities of governing non-European peoples. The text includes an appendix of primary sources that allows students and instructors to engage with English imperial thinking directly. Readers are encouraged to critically examine English accounts of this period in an attempt to see the Indigenous and African peoples who are embedded in them. European Expansion and Representations of Indigenous and African Peoples provides an invaluable new framework for undergraduate students and instructors of early American history, Atlantic history, and the history of race and imperialism more broadly.

Colonial Mississippi: A Borrowed Land offers the first composite of histories from the entire colonial period in the land now called Mississippi. Christian Pinnen and Charles Weeks reveal stories spanning over three hundred years and featuring a diverse array of individuals and peoples from America, Europe, and Africa. The authors focus on the encounters among these peoples, good and bad, and the lasting impacts on the region. The eighteenth century receives much-deserved attention from Pinnen and Weeks as they focus on the trials and tribulations of Mississippi as a colony, especially along the Gulf Coast and in the Natchez country. The authors tell the story of a land borrowed from its original inhabitants and never returned. They make clear how a remarkable diversity characterized the state throughout its early history. Early encounters and initial contacts involved primarily Native Americans and Spaniards in the first half of the sixteenth century following the expeditions of Columbus and others to the large region of the Gulf of Mexico. More sustained interaction began with the arrival of the French to the region and the establishment of a French post on Biloxi Bay at the end of the seventeenth century. Such exchanges continued through the eighteenth century with the British, and then again the Spanish until the creation of the territory of Mississippi in 1798 and then two states, Mississippi in 1817 and Alabama in 1819. Though readers may know the bare bones of this history, the dates, and names, this is the first book to reveal the complexity of the story in full, to dig deep into a varied and complicated tale.

During the two centuries following European contact, the world of late prehistoric Mississippian chiefdoms collapsed and Native communities there fragmented, migrated, coalesced, and reorganized into new and often quite different societies. The editors of this volume, Robbie Ethridge and Sheri M. Shuck-Hall, argue that such a period and region of instability and regrouping constituted a ?shatter zone.? ø In this anthology, archaeologists, ethnohistorians, and anthropologists analyze the shatter zone created in the colonial Southøby examining the interactions of American Indians and European colonists. The forces that destabilized the region included especially the frenzied commercial traffic in Indian slaves conducted by both Europeans and Indians, which decimated several southern Native communities; the inherently fluid political and social organization oføprecontact Mississippian chiefdoms; and the widespread epidemics that spread across the South. Using examples from a range of Indian communities?Muskogee, Catawba, Iroquois, Alabama, Coushatta, Shawnee, Choctaw, Westo, and Natchez?the contributors assess the shatter zone region as a whole, and the varied ways in which Native peoples wrestled with an increasingly unstable world and worked to reestablish order.

In the past two decades, new research and thinking have dramatically reshaped our understanding of Choctaw history before removal. Greg O’Brien brings together in a single volume ten groundbreaking essays that reveal where Choctaw history has been and where it is going. Distinguished scholars James Taylor Carson, Patricia Galloway, and Clara Sue Kidwell join editor Greg O’Brien to present today’s most important research, while Choctaw writer and filmmaker LeAnne Howe offers a vital counterpoint to conventional scholarly views. In a chronological survey of topics spanning the precontact era to the 1830s, essayists take stock of the great achievements in recent Choctaw ethnohistory. Galloway explains the Choctaw civil war as an interethnic conflict. Carson reassesses the role of Chief Greenwood LeFlore. Kidwell explores the interaction of Choctaws and Christian missionaries. A new essay by O’Brien explores the role of Choctaws during the American Revolution as they decided whom to support and why. The previously unpublished proceedings of the 1786 Hopewell treaty reveal what that agreement meant to the Choctaws. Taken together, these and other essays show how ethnohistorical approaches and the “new Indian history” have influenced modern Choctaw scholarship. No other recent collection focuses exclusively on the Choctaws, making Pre-removal Choctaw History an indispensable resource for scholars and students of American Indian history, ethnohistory, and anthropology.