Christina Snyder

Scholars and the public generally categorize moundbuilding as “prehistoric” and frequently fail to understand the connection between mounds and modern Indigenous nations. This article troubles the notion of “prehistory” by demonstrating that Indigenous peoples have maintained an unbroken tradition of moundbuilding for thousands of years; they continue to use and build mounds today. Focusing particularly on Indigenous people of the South from 1000 CE to the present, this article examines platform mounds, a particularly iconic form of monumental architecture. Platform mounds are elevated earthen pyramids that feature flat summits used for community buildings, temples, chiefly residences, and ceremony. Though long-lived, platform mounds are not static. Rather, Native peoples have adapted the art, design, and use of platform mounds over the course of millenia to help them overcome challenges ranging from climate change to colonialism.

The history of American slavery began long before the first Africans arrived at Jamestown in 1619. Evidence from archaeology and oral tradition indicates that for hundreds, perhaps thousands, of years prior, Native Americans had developed their own forms of bondage. This fact should not be surprising, for most societies throughout history have practiced slavery. In her cross-cultural and historical research on comparative captivity, Catherine Cameron found that bondspeople composed 10 percent to 70 percent of the population of most societies, lending credence to Seymour Drescher’s assertion that “freedom, not slavery, was the peculiar institution.” If slavery is ubiquitous, however, it is also highly variable. Indigenous American slavery, rooted in warfare and diplomacy, was flexible, often offering its victims escape through adoption or intermarriage, and it was divorced from racial ideology, deeming all foreigners—men, women, and children, of whatever color or nation—potential slaves. Thus, Europeans did not introduce slavery to North America. Rather, colonialism brought distinct and evolving notions of bondage into contact with one another. At times, these slaveries clashed, but they also reinforced and influenced one another. Colonists, who had a voracious demand for labor and export commodities, exploited indigenous networks of captive exchange, producing a massive global commerce in Indian slaves. This began with the second voyage of Christopher Columbus in 1495 and extended in some parts of the Americas through the twentieth century. During this period, between 2 and 4 million Indians were enslaved. Elsewhere in the Americas, Indigenous people adapted Euro-American forms of bondage. In the Southeast, an elite class of Indians began to hold African Americans in transgenerational slavery and, by 1800, developed plantations that rivaled those of their white neighbors. The story of Native Americans and slavery is complicated: millions were victims, some were masters, and the nature of slavery changed over time and varied from one place to another. A significant and long overlooked aspect of American history, Indian slavery shaped colonialism, exacerbated Native population losses, figured prominently in warfare and politics, and influenced Native and colonial ideas about race and identity.

The Older South Christina Snyder (bio) Robin Beck. Chiefdoms, Collapse, and Coalescence in the Early American South. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013. xvii + 302 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, and index. $110.00. Paul Kelton. Cherokee Medicine, Colonial Germs: An Indigenous Nation's Fight against Smallpox, 1518–1824. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2015. xiv + 281 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, and index. $29.95. Gregory D. Smithers. The Cherokee Diaspora: An Indigenous History of Migration, Resettlement, and Identity. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press. 368pp. Illustrations, tables, glossary, notes, bibliography, and index. $40.00. Charles Hudson spent much of his career considering the impact of colonialism on Native peoples of the South. When inscribing my copy of his 2002 edited volume, The Transformation of the Southeastern Indians, 1540–1760, he asked, "how can we adduce evidence for truly fundamental differences on either side of this divide, with archaeology on one side of it and history on the other?" Since that time, many scholars from a wide range of fields have enhanced our collective knowledge about the Native South: archaeologists have accumulated data about Mississippian societies; multilingual scholars have discovered little-known material in French and Spanish archives; trans-disciplinary work has challenged old assumptions about disease; and historians have revealed an Indian slave trade that devastated and transformed the region. Yet Hudson's 2002 charge still challenges us to bridge the divide between archaeology and history, between "pre" and "post." Beck, Kelton, and Smithers all answer Hudson's call, offering new perspectives on colonialism, agency, and periodization. Beck seeks to understand coalescence broadly, but takes the understudied Catawbas as a case study. Like Charles Hudson, Beck argues that "societies" and "cultures" are slippery concepts and therefore asserts that polities "should be our units of analysis in writing the social histories of the Native South" (p. 10). Archaeologists have long understood that the precolonial South was dominated by dozens of chiefdoms, with hierarchically ranked multi-village [End Page 365] polities. Beck investigates how and why these chiefdoms collapsed, giving way to the Native nations of the eighteenth-century South. The fundamental reason for this transformation, Beck argues, is that Native political economies shifted from focusing on maize tribute to commodity exchange in the form of guns, slaves, and peltry. Like many contemporary archaeologists, Beck's work is explicitly historical, emphasizing agency, context, and contingency. This represents a departure from older scholarship, which often used evolutionary or neo-evolutionary schemas to categorize peoples. Highlighting the correlation between economics and sociopolitical organization, Elman Service (Primitive Social Organization, 1962) developed a popular model that placed societies across space and time into one of four categories: band, tribe, chiefdom, or state. In recent decades, Service's theory has come under heavy fire. One of the most passionate critics, Timothy Pauketat, argued in Chiefdoms and Other Archaeological Delusions (2007) that these evolutionary categories were nothing more than counterproductive conceptual clutter that created "obstacles to understanding what really happened in the ancient world" (pp. 3–4). Pauketat and like-minded archaeologists have tried to abandon Service's typology, though, as Beck points out, the language of cultural evolution, so integral to archaeological research since the days of Lewis Henry Morgan, cast a very long shadow. Beck himself argues for preserving the term chiefdom, not as an "exemplar of a general evolutionary type," but rather as a tool for comparison and analysis (p. 13). "Categories," Beck argues, remain useful to scholars in "creating order and recognizing stability of form," although "we need not deny the fuzziness of edges or the inevitability of change" (p. 26). Beck eschews the term "prehistory" and instead uses sources and methods from both archaeology and history in favor of a more integrated story of the Carolina Piedmont and nearby regions from the fourteenth to eighteenth centuries. The region was, of course, dynamic before the arrival of Europeans. Beck highlights chiefly cycling, the frequent and sometimes dramatic fluctuations of power among chiefdoms that led to the abandonment of the Savannah River Valley around 1450. Using archaeological evidence, Beck demonstrates that many Savannah peoples resettled in nearby river valleys—the Oconee, Wateree, Yadkin, and Catawba. Within a few generations, another dramatic series of...

Surveying the history of Native Americans of the South from ancient times through the early twenty-first century, this chapter draws on oral tradition, material culture, climatology, and historical documents. Like all Native North Americans, Southern Indians have a dynamic past. They repeatedly adapted their societies to meet challenges arising from climate change 10,000 years ago, population growth during the Mississippian era, population collapse due to the introduction of new diseases following contact, warfare, and slaving in the colonial era, Indian removal, and ongoing US racial discrimination and imperialism. While pointing out diversity within the region, as well as the ties that linked Southern Indians to other people and places over time, this chapter also marks the cultural characteristics that make Native peoples of the South a distinctive group, namely their traditions of matrilineal kinship, dense populations, their long history of agriculture, and distinctive art forms and architecture.

Reviewed by: Anetso, the Cherokee Ball Game At the Center of Ceremony and Identity Christina Snyder (bio) Anetso, the Cherokee Ball Game At the Center of Ceremony and Identity By Michael J. Zogry; University of North Carolina Press 328 pp. Cloth $49.95 Since ancient times, all across eastern North America, Native people have played stickball. Although rules and form vary somewhat from one Indian nation to another, all use web-ended sticks and score points by shooting a small leather-bound ball at a goal. In the Northeast, stickball was the forerunner to lacrosse, but in the Southeast, players used two sticks and shot at slender poles or objects atop poles. Perhaps originally intended to train warriors for battle, stickball often translates as "little war" or "little brother to war" in Native languages. Some communities had a women's version or played co-ed games as well. In this book, Michael Zogry focuses on anetso, the version of the game played by the Eastern Band of Cherokees. The Eastern Band, who now number over 13,000, managed to avoid Removal and remain in western North Carolina. As Zogry explains, anetso has always been much more than a game: for hundreds of years, anetso has been at the center of religious rituals and even Cherokee identity itself, persisting in much the same way despite the meddling of missionaries, Indian agents, and other outsiders. The prominence of anetso in Cherokee oral tradition is suggestive of the game's significance and antiquity. Kana'ti (The Lucky Hunter) and Selu (Corn) had two boys who were challenged to "play ball"—a euphemism for war—by the Wolf people. The boys, who became known as the Thunderers, used spiritual power to defeat the wolves. Cherokees have long maintained the connection between the Thunderers and anetso, often adorning sticks with relevant imagery and asking the brothers for assistance in matches. Today, the oral tradition that Eastern Band members most often associate with anetso is that of the ball game between the birds and animals. Despite their diminutive size, the birds, using smarts, cunning, and teamwork, managed to beat the animals. Both oral traditions, as Zogry explains, reveal the trials that individuals must overcome in order to foster community, a signal Cherokee value. [End Page 116] Zogry, a religious studies scholar, spent two years living among the Eastern Band and visited many times thereafter. What he learned about anetso challenged his view of religion. Since the publication of Claude Lévi-Strauss's influential The Savage Mind in 1966, academics, for the most part, have considered the categories of "ritual" and "game" to be "distinct if not mutually exclusive" (4). But anetso defies this neat dichotomy. Zogry places stickball at the center of a ceremonial complex—"a group or cycle of individual ritual activities performed in a standard sequence as parts of a single ritual event" (2). These activities include conjuring, going to water, divination, ritual scratching, medicine-taking, dancing, and restrictions on sexual activity and diet. Beginning in the 1790s, missionaries and federal Indian agents did their part to discourage the game, though their lamentations focused mostly on violent play, scantily clad players, and the drinking and gambling in which spectators engaged, rather than anetso's attendant rituals. Despite outside pressures, anetso has persisted because, in Zogry's words, Cherokees "are committed to its preservation" (28). Prior to his fieldwork, Zogry supposed (like many other scholars and outsiders) that Cherokee culture, including anetso, was on the decline, but he came away with a far different impression. There may be fewer games now than in 1800 and accompanying ceremonies may be truncated, but Cherokees hold fast to "belief in the principles underlying the complex activities" (148). Moreover, anetso has taken on new cultural meanings. Perhaps especially in the post-Removal period, as Cherokees and other Native peoples have become a minority within their homelands, anetso has become a marker of identity recognizable to insiders and non-Indians alike, connecting Cherokees back to their foundational cultural narratives and to an unbroken chain of ancestors. Zogry is at his best when discussing contemporary anetso among the Cherokees, which he learned about through observation as well as interviews with...

Book Review| January 01 2008 Peace Came in the Form of a Woman: Indians and Spaniards in the Texas Borderlands Peace Came in the Form of a Woman: Indians and Spaniards in the Texas Borderlands, Juliana Barr. Christina Snyder Christina Snyder Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Journal of American Ethnic History (2008) 27 (2): 105–106. https://doi.org/10.2307/40543340 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Christina Snyder; Peace Came in the Form of a Woman: Indians and Spaniards in the Texas Borderlands. Journal of American Ethnic History 1 January 2008; 27 (2): 105–106. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/40543340 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveUniversity of Illinois PressJournal of American Ethnic History Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright 2007 Immigration and Ethnic History Society2007 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

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Two-stage texturization of either single-crystal or polycrystalline wafers improves conversion efficiency of finished solar cells.