The Native South: New Histories and Enduring Legacies

302 Pages·2017·2.464 MB·English

by  Tim Alan Garrison, Greg O'Brien

The Native South

The Native
SOUTH
New Histories and Enduring Legacies
Edited by Tim Alan Garrison and Greg O’Brien
university of nebraska press | lincoln & london
© 2017 by the Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska
Some of the examples discussed by Mikaëla M. Adams in chap-
ter 8, “Race, Kinship, and Belonging among the Florida
Seminoles,” were published in her book Who Belongs? Race,
Resources, and Tribal Citizenship in the Native South (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2016).
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data
Names: Garrison, Tim Alan, 1961– editor. | O’Brien, Greg,
1966– editor.
Title: The native south: new histories and enduring legacies /
edited by Tim Alan Garrison and Greg O’Brien.
Description: Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2017. |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: lccn 2016041534
isbn 9780803296909 (cloth: alk. paper)
isbn 9781496204123 (epub)
isbn 9781496201430 (mobi)
isbn 9781496201447 (pdf)
Subjects: lcsh: Indians of North America— Southern States. |
Indians of North America—S outhern States— History.
Classification: lcc e78.s65 n386 2017 | ddc 975.004/97— dc23
lc record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016041534
Set in New Baskerville ITC Pro by John Klopping.
Contents
Acknowledgments | vii
Introduction | ix
greg o’brien
1. An Interview with Theda Perdue and
Michael D. Green | 1
greg o’brien
2. The Enterprise of War: The Military Economy of the
Chickasaw Indians, 1715– 1815 | 33
david a. nichols
3. Quieting the Ghosts: How the Choctaws and Chickasaws
Stopped Fighting | 47
greg o’brien
4. Cherokee and Christian Expressions of Spirituality
through First Parents: Eve and Selu | 70
rowena mcclinton
5. Andrew Jackson’s Indian Son: Native Captives and
American Empire | 84
christina snyder
6. Inevitability and the Southern Opposition to Indian
Removal | 107
tim alan garrison
7. An Absolute and Unconditional Pardon: Nineteenth-
Century Cherokee Indigenous Justice | 126
julie l. reed
8. Race, Kinship, and Belonging among the Florida
Seminoles | 144
mikaëla m. adams
9. Witnessing the West: Barbara Longknife and the
California Gold Rush | 162
rose stremlau
10. Cherokee Women and the Woman’s Christian
Temperance Union | 181
izumi ishii
11. Kinship and Capitalism in the Choctaw and Chickasaw
Nations | 200
malinda maynor lowery
12. “Engaged in the Struggle for Liberation as They See It”:
Indigenous Southern Women and International Women’s
Year | 220
meg devlin o’sullivan
13. Cherokee Ghostings and the Haunted South | 238
james taylor carson
Contributors | 265
Index | 267
Acknowledgments
The editors wish to thank Theda and Mike for supporting the
publication of this volume and for providing years of guidance.
It is an honor to call them mentors and friends. The contribu-
tors to this volume are also friends, and we thank them for pro-
ducing new essays and for exhibiting patience as we gathered the
essays together and made them ready for publication.
Special thanks go to Kendon Levett (ma, unc– Greensboro,
2013) for transcribing the interview with Mike and Theda and
making useful suggestions about that chapter.
Tim Garrison thanks Cindy Garrison for thirty years of love,
Sam Garrison for his growth and his commitment to excellence,
and Talmadge and Jeannine Garrison and Jim and Dorothy Lamb
for their steadfast support.
Greg O’Brien wishes to thank his former and current master’s
and doctoral graduate students at the University of North Caro-
lina at Greensboro for contributing their own insights about the
study of the Native South and early American history while this
collection was under production. In alphabetical order: Hailey
Ayers, Stephanie (Krysiak) Balaconis, Katie Bates, Sam Berton,
Becky Byron, Sarah Cloutier, Matthew Esterline, Rebecca Fecher,
Arlen Hanson, Jacquelyn Jones, Chris Jordan, Ellen Kennedy,
Ellen Kuhn, Chris Kutas, Kendon Levett, James Marsh, Sarah
McCartney, Jamie Mize, Ethan Moore, Kimberly Mozingo, Ste-
ven Peach, Kim Proctor, Melanie Staley, Jason Stroud, Monica
Ward, Samantha Winer, and Ashley Wyatt.
We dedicate the book to the memory of Michael D. Green, who
passed away while this volume was being assembled, and for whom
we will always strive to, in his words, “know shit from apple butter.”

Introduction
greg o’brien
This collection of all original essays serves two main purposes. On
one hand it provides a sampling of the latest work being done
on the history of the Native South and Native peoples from the
South. On the other hand, it honors two scholars who have done
more to shape this field than anyone else: Michael D. Green and
Theda Perdue.1
When Michael Green and Theda Perdue published their first
monographs (Perdue: Slavery and the Evolution of Cherokee Society,
1540– 1866 in 1979 and Green: The Politics of Indian Removal: Creek
Government and Society in Crisis in 1982), few historians focused on
Indian people in the South.2 Throughout most of the twentieth
century anthropologists dominated understandings of Indian
people in and from the South. James Mooney (1861–1 921) lived
for years among the Eastern Cherokees in North Carolina as an
anthropologist working for the Smithsonian Institution’s Bureau
of American Ethnology in Washington dc. He learned the Cher-
okee language and conducted numerous interviews with Cher-
okees that led to important publications such as Sacred Formulas
of the Cherokees (1891), Myths of the Cherokee (1900), and the post-
humous The Swimmer Manuscript: Cherokee Sacred Formulas and
Medicinal Prescriptions (1932). These works remain in print and
have long served as a foundation for the scholarly understand-
ing of Cherokee traditions.3
John Reed Swanton (1873–1 958), who spent most of his career
employed by the Bureau of American Ethnology, still influences
the Native South field with his Boazian- derived structuralist inter-