American Indian History and Culture
In 2008, Southern Cultures published our highly acclaimed and popular First Peoples issue. The essays from this issue, as well as our additional essays and features on American Indians in the South, are below, with direct links to full texts and pictures online at Project Muse.
Columbus Meets Pocahontas in the American South
by Theda Perdue
The author uses two legendary figures to explore sex, culture, and power in the conquest of the South.
Southern Cultures, Volume 3, Number 1, Spring 1997
Deerskins and Duffels: The Creek Indian Trade with Anglo-America, 1685-1815
by Katherine E. Holland Braund
reviewed by Peter H. Wood
Southern Cultures, Volume 1, Number 1, Fall 1994
Indians, Settlers, and Slaves in a Frontier Exchange economy: The Lower Mississippi Valley Before 1783
by Daniel H. Usner Jr.
reviewed by Eric Hinderaker
Southern Cultures, Volume 1, Number 2, Winter 1995
Archaeology of Precolumbian Florida
by Jerald T. Milanich
reviewed by H. Trawick Ward
Southern Cultures, Volume 1, Number 3, Spring 1995
The Seminoles of Florida
by James W. Covington
reviewed by Patricia B. Lerch
Southern Cultures, Volume 1, Number 3, Spring 1995
Freedom on the Border: The Seminole Maroons in Florida, the Indian Territory, Coahuila, and Texas
by Kevin Mulroy
reviewed by James E. Crisp
Southern Cultures, Volume 1, Number 4, Summer 1995: Humor
After the Trail of Tears: The Cherokees Struggle for Sovereignty, 1839-1880
by William G. McLoughlin
reviewed by Rowena McClinton Ruff
Southern Cultures, Volume 1, Number 4, Summer 1995: Humor
Inherit the Alamo: Myth and Ritual at an American Shrine
by Holly Beachley Brear
reviewed by James E. Crisp
Southern Cultures, Volume 2, Number 1, Fall 1995
The Cherokee Princess in the Family Tree
by John Shelton Reed
Southern Cultures, Volume 3, Number 1, Spring 1997
The Forgotten Centuries: Indian and Europeans in the American South, 1521-1704
by Charles Hudson and Carmen Chaves Tesser, editors
reviewed by Sarah H. Hill
Southern Cultures, Volume 3, Number 1, Spring 1997
Jerald T. Milanich's
Florida Indians and the Invasions from Europe
reviewed by Amy Turner Bushnell
Southern Cultures, Volume 3, Number 4, Winter 1997
James Axtell's
The Indians' New South: Cultural Change in the Colonial Southeast
reviewed by Tim Alan Garrison
Southern Cultures, Volume 5, Number 1, Spring 1999: Scarlett O'Hara
Hello, America: The Life and Work of Willie French Lowery
by Michael C. Taylor
"When I came back, kids were the ones I was playing for."
Southern Cultures, Volume 16, Number 3, Fall 2010: Music IV
Blues Power in the Tuscarora Homeland: The Music of Pura Fé
by John W. Troutman
"Pura Fé has developed a highly unusual style of weaving a fast-paced and complex, sinewy web of notes to follow and accent her extraordinarily dynamic vocal range. . . a unique and engagingly melodic tour de force."
Southern Cultures, Volume 15, Number 3, Fall 2009: Music III
"The Obituary of Nations": Ethnic Cleansing, Memory, and the Origins of the Old South
by James Taylor Carson
"The wilderness settlers thought they were entering was in fact a landscape created and managed by the First Peoples."
Southern Cultures, Volume 14, Number 4, Winter 2008: First Peoples
Mississippi Choctaws and Racial Politics
by Katherine M. B. Osburn
"In December 1912, Mississippi representative Pat Harrison stood before Congress and delivered an impassioned speech on behalf of the Choctaw Indians living in his district. 'Mr. Chairman,' Harrison announced, 'the Choctaw Indians always stood with the white men of the South.'"
Southern Cultures, Volume 14, Number 4, Winter 2008: First Peoples
"When Carolina Indians Went on the Warpath": The Media, the Klan, and the Lumbees of North Carolina
by Christopher Arris Oakley
"On a frigid Saturday night in January 1958, Grand Dragon James ‘Catfish’ Cole and fifty other members of the Ku Klux Klan gathered for a rally in a cornfield near Hayes Pond just outside of Maxton, a small town located in Robeson County in southeastern North Carolina. But before the rally even began, several hundred Lumbees chased the Klansmen from the frozen cornfield."
Southern Cultures, Volume 14, Number 4, Winter 2008: First Peoples
Remembering Cherokee Removal in Civil Rights–Era Georgia
by Andrew Denson
"Sanctifying a historic site almost always involves an effort to derive some kind of clear moral message from the events that have taken place there. At New Echota in the early 1960s, that interpretive effort focused on the story of Cherokee Removal, and the moral message was atonement."
Southern Cultures, Volume 14, Number 4, Winter 2008: First Peoples
Glimpses of a Nearby Nation: The Making of Catawba Pottery with Georgia Harris and Edith Harris Brown (Photo Essay)
by Lorene B. Harris, with photographs by Thomas J. Blume and with an introduction by Brett H. Riggs
"Like their ancestors for thousands of years, Catawba potters of the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries have continued to adapt their material traditions to ever-changing modern contexts. In the process, they create remarkably contemporary works of visual and tactile art."
Southern Cultures, Volume 14, Number 4, Winter 2008: First Peoples
The Indian Sports Mascot Meets Noble Savage and Noble Savage Confronts Indian Mascot
two poems by LeAnne Howe
"But here we are. You with a bow and arrow. Me in a headdress."
Southern Cultures, Volume 14, Number 4, Winter 2008: First Peoples
Mother Corn and the Dixie Pig: Native Food in the Native South
by Rayna Green
"They all know, out there in Indian Country, that the loss of traditional diet and the cultural skills needed to maintain it has killed more Indians than Andy Jackson."
Southern Cultures, Volume 14, Number 4, Winter 2008: First Peoples
"Tiger Tiger": Miccosukee Rock 'n' Roll
by Patsy West
with Lee Tiger’s "The Life of the Tiger Brothers"
"During this time we played with Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin, Procol Harum, Cream, and Jefferson Airplane, and we even backed Bo Diddley and Chuck Berry."
Southern Cultures, Volume 14, Number 4, Winter 2008: First Peoples
When Heritage Is Hip
by Larry J. Griffin
"Not all 'cool' identities are equally cool. If the socially constructed identity of American Indian is cool, for most people it is cooler to have Indian ancestry than to be Indian."
Southern Cultures, Volume 14, Number 4, Winter 2008: First Peoples
Helen C. Rountree
Pocahontas, Powhatan, Opechancanough: Three Indian Lives Changed by Jamestown (review)
reviewed by Michael D. Green
"Rountree debunks the myth of Pocahontas saving Smith’s life as he was about to have his head beat in."
Southern Cultures, Volume 12, Number 2, Summer 2006: Tobacco
What is Progress?: Desegregating an Indian School in Robeson County, North Carolina
as told to Melinda Maynor by James Arthur Jones
"But I could walk in the classrooms, and I could name ninety percent of those kids' parents, because I taught a lot of their parents. If a problem surfaced, I said, 'Do you want me to talk to your mother and daddy about you?'"
Southern Cultures, Volume 10, Number 2, Summer 2004
Hamlet Rides among the Seminoles
by Robin O. Warren
"When William Forbes and his company of actors steamed out of Savannah in May 1840, they were about to enter the Second Seminole War. Befre they had been in Florida for more than a full day, the actors were ambushed by real-life Indians, lost two of their number, and had their props and costumes sacked."
Southern Cultures, Volume 7, Number 4, Winter 2001