Colonial southeastern Indian history.

DESPITE GARY B. NASH'S 1974 INSISTENCE THAT DISCUSSIONS OF EARLY America include "red, white, and black," for the next fifteen years early American history and the history of American Indians during the colonial period remained, for the most part, separate literatures. (1) A generation ago the historical literature on Indians also followed fairly stark regional differentiations based on both cultural/linguistic groups and colonial jurisdictions. Not only were Spanish Florida and French Louisiana historiographically separate from the southern English colonies, but the Chesapeake and the Lowcountry were as well, with each of those coastal regions separated from its backcountry. Such divisions reflected the fact that some colonial boundaries roughly followed political and cultural parameters of the Indian nations among whom the Europeans colonized. (2) French, Spanish, and English source materials lie in different countries' archives, written in different languages. English colonial sources are further dispersed into state and local archives. Despite the ready availability of Spanish accounts (in both Spanish and English) of sixteenth-century entradas--as well as of sources for late-sixteenth- and early-seventeenth-century contact between English colonists and Algonquian Indians at Roanoke and in the Chesapeake--for much of the interior South and the Lowcountry, the period between the Spanish entradas of the sixteenth century and the return of European explorers and traders in the late seventeenth century constituted a "lost century" for historians. Clearly enormous changes took place during that century, but the nature of those changes remained obscure. The lack of European written sources to describe the interior of the continent during those hundred years left traditional historians at a loss to explain how the interior Southeast at the start of the eighteenth century seemed completely transformed from the one described by sixteenth-century Spanish explorers. English writers from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries trying to understand the shifting Indian demographic and political maps often found themselves baffled, which did nothing to help twentieth-century historians reading them. (3)

During the 1970s and the beginning of the 1980s, early American Indian history (much of it focused on the Chesapeake and New England) emphasized the violence of Europeans in their encounter with Indians. Francis Jennings demanded in 1975 that we understand the colonial period as a story of conquest. (4) In 1983 Richard White argued in The Roots of Dependency that Euro-Indian relations in various parts of North America had in common the "attempt ... by whites to bring Indian resources, land, and labor into the market." (5) Although White scrutinized Choctaw motives and agency, his argument, as his title suggests, stresses Indians' ultimate dependency on economic forces they did not control. Much of the work on southeastern Indians since then has continued grappling with the questions he raised.

The separation of early American history from the history of American Indians (and early Americanists' inattention not only to American Indian historiography but also to Indians in their own source material) provoked calls during the late 1980s from James Axtell and James H. Merrell for colonial historians to recognize the central place of American Indians in the history of English colonies. (6) J. Frederick Fausz's work on the "merging and emerging worlds" of European colonists and Indians in the Chesapeake illustrates the integration of Indian and colonial politics. His 1988 article published in a volume aimed at colonial (rather than Indian) historians reinforces the point made by Axtell and Merrell. (7) Thereafter, armed with new techniques and questions, many historians in the last two decades have taken up the challenge to integrate American Indian and colonial American history and have done so more fully in the Southeast than elsewhere.

At the same time, greater scholarly attention to Indians' perspectives on regional geopolitics and Atlantic economies complicated characterizations of Indians as victims of forces beyond their control. Both efforts expanded the domain of early Americanists beyond the borders of individual English colonies or of English colonial America into "continental" history, forcing historians trained in the history of the English colonies on the East Coast to look past the reaches of English control to a world that included Europeans, Indians, and Africans living outside English colonial borders. (8) This crossing of colonial boundaries has required entry into sources from French, Spanish, and English perspectives, permitting scholars to triangulate a better historical fix on Indians who left no written sources.

One striking accomplishment of the 1970s was the realization that Indian populations had declined precipitously (perhaps by as much as 95 percent) during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in the wake of contact with Europeans, Africans, and the pathogens they brought with them to the Americas. (9) While historians still struggle to learn the specifics of these declines (percentages, speed of transmission, source of pathogens, exact diseases), they generally agree that population decline triggered a series of changes--demographic, cultural, political, diplomatic--that transformed eastern North America between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. (10) Some of the most innovative recent scholarship has come from historians and anthropologists piecing together southeastern Indians' responses to those demographic changes and to the concurrent appearance of new opportunities and challenges presented by the Atlantic economy. This research has done much to answer questions about what happened in the interior Southeast during the long seventeenth century.

To advance their pursuit, historians, anthropologists, and archaeologists have become increasingly conversant in one another's disciplines, have interrogated traditional sources more carefully (part of which has meant simply heeding the Indians' voices always present in archival sources), and have more often worked in a combination of English, French, and Spanish sources. They have also made particularly imaginative use of Indian and European maps. (11) Because of scholars' new methodological sophistication, harnessed to understand the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in the colonial Southeast, we have learned of extraordinary levels of mobility and cultural and political innovation among southeastern Indians. Two collections--Powhatan's Mantle in 1989 and The Forgotten Centuries in 1994--announced the accomplishments and the promise of ongoing work in the field. (12)

Rapid geopolitical, economic, and cultural change in the Southeast may have preceded the first Spanish entradas into the region, but dramatic transformations certainly followed the arrival of Europeans and Africans with new goods, markets, and diseases. Indian history in the early Southeast thus has been tied increasingly to Atlantic history, often as a history of European/Indian relations. But the reverse holds: historians of English, French, and Spanish colonists in southeastern North America increasingly incorporate Indian history into the history of European colonization in the region. The historical literatures of Indians, Europeans, and Africans in the colonial Southeast have thus become increasingly intertwined, as did the worlds of Indian, European, and African actors in the colonial Southeast.

Scholarship on quickly changing circumstances and rapid realignments has added nuance to earlier conquest/victim stories and opened three related avenues of inquiry about Indians in the colonial Southeast: (1) How did individuals and polities negotiate different kinds of power in this rapidly changing world? (2) Given such swift change, can we find analytical language to describe political units and character of interactions with both precision and some broad applicability? and (3) How central a role did the Indian slave trade play in redefining the region?

The most exciting development of the 1980s involved the advent of studies exploring--in detailed fashion--the political, diplomatic, and cultural genesis of new Indian nations between the mid-seventeenth and mid-eighteenth centuries. These works focused on the ability of those who survived disease epidemics to form new societies and political units, sometimes bridging significant cultural differences and historical enmities in the process. Scholars had long recognized many eighteenth-century polities as new creations but did not understand the processes or motivations behind them. J. Leitch Wright Jr. pioneered this work with his 1986 Creeks and Seminoles: The Destruction and Regeneration of the Muscogulge People, which argues that persistent ethnic and linguistic differences among Creek peoples did as much as economic and diplomatic concerns to foster factionalism during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Wright's book also marked the inauguration of the University of Nebraska Press's Indians of the Southeast series, edited by Michael D. Green and Theda Perdue, announcing scholars' sense of the field's enormous potential. (13)

James H. Merrell's work on the Catawbas introduced most early Americanists to the possibilities of retracing the formation of new Indian nations in the colonial American Southeast. His 1989 The Indians' New World shows the coalescence of refugees--varied linguistically, culturally, and politically--from the Virginia and Carolina Coastal Plain and Piedmont into the Catawba Nation. (14) His work thus also questions the nature of the division separating the Chesapeake from the Carolinas, showing the movement of people from both regions to form the Catawbas. Merrell's work points out the enormity of change and the creativity of Indians' responses to their changing world, prompting historians to ask similar questions of other regions. Patricia Galloway's 1995 Choctaw Genesis analyzes archaeological, cartographic, linguistic, and archival material from French, Spanish, British, and Choctaw sources to argue that southeastern chiefdoms began to decline prior to the arrival of the Spanish entradas, and she argues, as had Merrell and Wright, for multiethnic origins of new southeastern Indian nations. Her methodological discussions provide scholars with a road map for interdisciplinary work on the region. (15)

Now in the midst of an enormous shift toward understanding the specifics of these changes, we have begun to accumulate enough information to see patterns among the changes that had previously confounded scholars. For example, many of the hierarchical, centralized polities that sixteenth-century Spaniards had witnessed disappeared or evolved into much more egalitarian entities with diffused power structures in the centuries following Spanish exploration. That change permitted a range of responses that seem to have facilitated adaptations to European imperial goals and Atlantic economies. Such flexibility allowed new nations such as the Creeks and Choctaws to acquire substantial diplomatic power in the region. John E. Worth argues that the Florida missions preserved the more hierarchical pre-contact power systems, which ultimately made the mission Indians less flexible in their response to change and less able to maintain their identities in the face of European presence. Worth's comparison of culturally similar southeastern Indians' reactions to Spanish missions on the one hand and more gradual integration into the Atlantic world through English traders on the other offers precisely the kind of comparison now becoming feasible and points to possibilities of understanding processes more fully if we look across borders that have compartmentalized scholarship. (16)

Worth's suggestion that we consider questions of trajectory offers the promise of similarly clarifying comparisons. (17) For example, in both the Chesapeake and Carolina during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, English and Scottish traders connected Indians to markets for food, deerskins, and slaves and to sources of guns, ammunition, cloth, and alcohol. Differences between the Indian polities and English economies of the two regions have been used to account for the different outcomes of such trade. It may prove more revealing, however, if we consider that this trade, while almost coterminous, occurred in the two regions at different points in European, Indian, and African demographic trends, Indian geopolitical reorganizations, development of colonial political stability, and establishment of colonial agriculture. Moreover, the trade itself (as well as Indian migrations) connected the two regions. Comparing more precisely where on the trajectory of such changes trade began, for example, may offer much greater insight into the nature of the differences between Chesapeake and Lowcountry Indian history.

Historians' attention to Indian resilience and creativity initiated a debate--begun in the 1980s and undertaken more extensively in the 1990s--over the nature of power in European-Indian relations, within Indian societies, and, to a lesser degree, within European colonies. In much of the Southeast (as well as the rest of North America), Indians held significant diplomatic and economic power through much of the eighteenth century. Richard White's The Roots of Dependency shows that many complicated variables shaped these relations. He recognizes that their eighteenth-century ability to play French and English traders against one another allowed Choctaws to exercise diplomatic power in the region, while at the same time it entailed serious risks for Choctaws ultimately dependent on an Atlantic economy. Those risks could become mortal if Indians found themselves with only one link to markets and sources of ammunition. While Merrell's 1989 The Indians' New World clearly conveys the magnitude of destruction southeastern Indians faced, the book's ultimate message portrays Indian resilience born of cultural and political creativity. Likewise, Daniel H. Usher Jr.'s 1992 Indians, Settlers, and Slaves in a Frontier Exchange Economy argues that a "frontier exchange economy" defined by trade (first in foodstuffs and then in deerskins) rather than colonists' agricultural projects, combined with a weak French imperial presence, created a situation through 1760 that privileged flexibility and precluded monopolization of power in the region before 1783. (18) Usner's book also succeeded in attracting the attention of colonial Americanists to French Louisiana.

In contrast to the emphasis on survival, Kathryn E. Holland Braund's 1993 Deerskins and Duffels explores Anglo-Creek trade (deerskins and slaves for guns, alcohol, and textiles) between 1685 and 1815. It shows the pressures such trade placed on gender relations within Creek societies and the disastrous consequences Creeks faced when declining deer populations forced them to sell their land to acquire the European goods they had grown dependent upon. (19) Most work, however, continues to emphasize significant Indian creativity and diplomatic power. (20) This insistence on resilience has led Claudio Saunt to argue that the pendulum has swung too far--that we now risk neglecting the advantages that Europeans possessed--most notably, connections to European goods, immigrants, and markets. (21)

Historians find these questions complicated because the historical actors themselves often struggled to understand who exercised what kind of power and who held what kind of influence in given situations. Moreover, those elements changed quickly and varied enormously from place to place. But at the heart of questions about power negotiations lies the intersection of Indian worlds with the Atlantic economy. What did it mean that Indians chose--often as individuals rather than as polities--to engage with European empires? How should scholars understand those choices, choices that might improve individuals' economic or political standing within their own societies? In some cases, as with the Creeks, these choices temporarily increased the political, diplomatic, economic, and military power of specific Indian nations but ultimately created dependencies on European goods and markets that the Indians could not control.

The interest in how Indians and Europeans in colonial settings negotiated economic and diplomatic relations influenced by Atlantic markets--and how these relations coincided with ethnogenesis among Indians--in part ignited the explosion of work on South Carolina and the Creeks. Charleston served as a conduit for Atlantic goods and markets, and the Creeks embodied the most interesting changes that southeastern Indians underwent during the colonial period--ethnogenesis, diplomatic success, and internal structural changes. Their stories also offered opportunities for scholars working in multilingual sources to uncover new perspectives. (22)

That interest in understanding power relations drives a reconceptualization of diplomatic history and a rethinking of regional borders. Taking Indians seriously as diplomatic players in the Southeast also requires attention to Indian connections and travel and Indian authority over the geography of travel. This trend reflects a cross-pollination of history, archaeology, and anthropology particularly salient in work on the Chesapeake, as reflected in the contents and title of the 1993 collection Powhatan Foreign Relations, edited by Helen C. Rountree. (23) Greater scholarly attention to Indian geopolitics has resulted in attention to the direct raids by the Iroquois into the Southeast and their indirect impact on the region via beaver and mourning wars (responses to their own integration into the Atlantic economy), which spurred migrations of some of their victims to the Southeast. Eric E. Bowne, for example, argues that the Westos, notorious as slave traders in seventeenth-century Virginia and eighteenth-century Carolina, migrated from Lake Erie in response to Iroquois incursions in the middle of the seventeenth century. (24) Given such migrations, and trade paths spanning eastern North America, regional distinctions become problematic whatever the criteria for making them. (25)

This concern over understanding the precise nature of Euro-Indian relations in the Southeast also has led scholars to grope for analytical language to discuss geopolitics in the region. The variety of political forms, their rapid change, and the filter of European sources often makes it unclear whether "clan," "nation," "chiefdom," "confederacy," or "tribe" best describes a given Indian polity. (26) Scholars have labored to find language to describe the zones of interaction linking and separating various European, Indian, and African players in the Southeast. "Borders" and "boundaries" imply the separation of spaces that retained distinctive identities. "Borderlands," "backcountry," and "frontiers" suggest greater interaction, though scholars disagree about whether the terms imply fluidity, permeability, or even cooperation on the one hand, or contest and conquest on the other. Part of this disagreement derives from their dispute over both the degree of violence or cooperation that characterized these zones and the trajectory of change (with regard to violence) that followed European penetration. Scholars frustrated with the limited nature of the vocabulary available have created new terms: "frontier zone," "middle ground," "shatter zone," "frontier complex," and "colonial complex." (27)

Unlike western historians, many historians of the colonial Southeast accept the term frontier. This acceptance may in part indicate the continuing influence of Verner W. Crane's pathbreaking The Southern Frontier, first published in 1928. (28) While he indisputably adopted a European perspective, because of his attention to Europeans entering the Southeast from three directions, Crane's "frontier" necessarily embodies a more complicated concept than does Frederick Jackson Turner's advancing line of white settlement. Crane's usage indicates ongoing contest rather than advance and retreat. (29) Even Claudio Saunt's recent objection to the term derives from a newer definition that emphasizes frontiers as regions in flux, a characterization he believes denies the power advantages that Europeans possessed because of Atlantic sources of goods and immigrants. (30) But recognizing that boundaries are porous, fluid, and contested does not require configuring them as harmonious or showing the playing field as equal.

During the last two decades, historians of the colonial Southeast have transformed our dim awareness that an Indian slave trade existed into the stark knowledge that that trade played a crucial role in defining southeastern North America for all of its residents from the middle of the seventeenth century to the middle of the eighteenth century. Theda Perdue's 1979 Slavery and the Evolution of Cherokee Society (while focusing on nineteenth-century Cherokee enslavement of Africans) points out the need to understand Indian participation in the colonial slave trade within a context of Indian practices of captivity, although she also emphasizes the impact of the Atlantic economy, calling slavery "a chapter in the broader story of the expansion of Western Europe and the impact of capitalistic values and institutions on human societies." (31) Alan Gallay's 2002 The Indian Slave Trade: The Rise of the English Empire in the American South, 1670-1717 moves the focus back in time to the colonial period and argues that the slave trade had been more important in the Southeast than historians had recognized. While attentive to the participation of Indians in the slave trade and its impact on them, he emphasizes, as his subtitle indicates, the role of slavery in English imperial expansion. His work (and his estimates that the trade enslaved between thirty thousand and fifty thousand Indians between 1670 and 1717) encouraged scholars to explore this trade from the perspective of Indian traders and victims and to determine how this trade affected the reformulation of Indian polities and the transformation of social, political, and economic relations within Indian societies. Much of this work remains unpublished, but searches in the American Historical Association's Dissertations in Progress database, conferences programs, and fellowship award lists make clear that we can anticipate the publication of a flurry of work on Indians involved in the slave trade, on the relationship between the Indian slave trade and Indians' relationship to enslaved Africans, and on the effects of this trade on Indian identities (racial and otherwise). (32)

Because of its complexity--involving multiple rapidly changing Indian polities, three European empires, and the increasing presence of Africans of different ethnicities--southeastern Indian history looms as a fruitful space for the exploration of questions--about power negotiations, about early modern integration of non-Western, Atlantic, and global economies, about the changing definitions of race and identity, and about the formations and definitions of polities--whose relevance extends beyond the region. (33)

(1) Gary B. Nash, Red, White, and Black: The People of Early America (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1974). There were notable exceptions, including Karen Ordahl Kupperman, Settling with the Indians: The Meeting of Indian and English Cultures in America, 1580-1640 (Totawa, N.J., 1980); Bernard W. Sheehan, Savagism and Civility: Indians and Englishmen in Colonial Virginia (New York, 1980); and the essays in James Axtell, The European and the Indian: Essays in the Ethnohistory of Colonial North America (New York, 1981). For their suggestions on this essay, I would like to thank Cynthia Bouton, Sylvia Hoffert, Harold Livesay, and Rebecca Hartkopf Schloss.

(2) Anthropologist Charles M. Hudson helped to define the Southeast as the region inhabited by Muscogean speakers. The Southeastern Indians (Knoxville, 1976). See also John R. Swanton, The Indians of the Southeastern United States (Washington, D.C., 1946). For a more recent assessment of the identification of a cultural region, see Patricia Galloway, ed., The Southeastern Ceremonial Complex: Artifacts and Analysis (Lincoln, Neb., 1989).

(3) Steven J. Oatis, A Colonial Complex: South Carolina's Frontiers in the Era of the Yamasee War, 1680-1730 (Lincoln, Neb., 2004), 10.

(4) Francis Jennings, The Invasion of America: Indians, Colonialism, and the Cant of Conquest (Chapel Hill, 1975).

(5) Richard White, The Roots of Dependency: Subsistence, Environment, and Social Change among the Choctaws, Pawnees, and Navajos (Lincoln, Neb., 1983), xv.

(6) James Axtell, "Colonial America without the Indians: Counterfactual Reflections," Journal of American History, 73 (March 1987), 981-96; James H. Merrell, "Some Thoughts on Colonial Historians and American Indians," William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 46 (January 1989), 94-119.

(7) J. Frederick Fausz, "Merging and Emerging Worlds: Anglo-Indian Interest Groups and the Development of the Seventeenth-Century Chesapeake," in Lois Green Cam Philip D. Morgan, and Jean B. Russo, eds., Colonial Chesapeake Society (Chapel Hill, 1988), 47-98.

(8) Paul Mapp, "Continental Conceptions," History Compass, 1 (2003), http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/full/10.1111/1478-0542.007.

(9) Alfred W. Crosby, "Virgin Soil Epidemics as a Factor in the Aboriginal Depopulation in America," William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd set., 33 (April 1976), 289-99; Henry F. Dobyns, Their Number Become Thinned: Native American Population Dynamics in Eastern North America (Knoxville, 1983), 287 (for percentage).

(10) Peter H. Wood's meticulous synthesis of population data, which set out how many people lived where over the course of the eighteenth century, found that rates of population decline among southeastern Indians slowed and reversed over the period, although they were outpaced by the rapid influx of Europeans and Africans. Wood, "The Changing Population of the Colonial South: An Overview by Race and Region, 1685 1790," in Wood, Gregory A. Waselkov, and M. Thomas Harley, eds., Powhatan's Mantle: Indians in the Colonial Southeast (Lincoln, Neb., 1989), 35-103. For a recent argument that foreign disease epidemics had a smaller effect than most historians claim, see Paul Kelton, "The Great Southeastern Smallpox Epidemic, 1696-1700: The Region's First Major Epidemic?" in Robbie Ethridge and Charles Hudson, eds., The Transformation of the Southeastern Indians, 1540-1760 (Jackson, Miss., 2002), 21-37.

(11) See Marvin T. Smith, "Aboriginal Population Movements in the Early Historic Period Interior Southeast," in Wood, Waselkov, and Hatley, eds., Powhatan's Mantle, 21-34; Helen Hornbeck Tanner, "The Land and Water Communication Systems of the Southeastern Indians," ibid., 6-20; and Gregory A. Waselkov, "Indian Maps of the Colonial Southeast," ibid., 292-343.

(12) Charles Hudson and Carmen Chaves Tesser, eds., The Forgotten Centuries: Indians and Europeans in the American South, 1521-1704 (Athens, Ga., 1994). For the most up-to-date bibliographies of the extraordinary outpouring of high-quality scholarship, see the revised edition of Gregory A. Waselkov, Peter H. Wood, and Tom Harley, eds., Powhatan's Mantle: Indians in the Colonial Southeast (1989; revised ed., Lincoln, Neb., 2006), 7-12; and the "Resources" section (which includes a compilation of primary as well as recent and older secondary sources) of Theda Perdue and Michael D. Green, The Columbia Guide to American Indians of the Southeast (New York, 2001), 241-305.

(13) J. Leitch Wright Jr., Creeks and Seminoles: The Destruction and Regeneration of the Muscogulge People (Lincoln, Neb., 1986).

(14) James H. Merrell, The Indians' New World: Catawbas and Their Neighbors from European Contact through the Era of Removal (Chapel Hill, 1989).

(15) Patricia Galloway, Choctaw Genesis, 1500-1700 (Lincoln, Neb., 1995).

(16) John E. Worth, "Spanish Missions and the Persistence of Chiefly Power," in Ethridge and Hudson, eds., Transformation of the Southeastern (Indians, 39-64.

(17) Worth, "Spanish Missions," 43.

(18) Daniel H. Usher Jr., Indians, Settlers, and Slaves in a Frontier Exchange Economy: The Lower Mississippi Valley before 1783 (Chapel Hill, 1992). Richard White's Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815 (New York, 1991) also contributed to this trend.

(19) Kathryn E. Holland Braund, Deerskins and Duffels: The Creek Indian Trade with Anglo-America, 1685-1815 (Lincoln, Neb., 1993).

(20) For two recent examples, see Joshua Piker, Okfuskee: A Creek Indian Town in Colonial America (Cambridge, Mass., 2004), and Kathleen DuVal, The Native Ground: Indians and Colonists in the Heart of the Continent (Philadelphia, 2006).

(21) Saunt, "'Our Indians': European Empires and the History of the Native American South," in Jorge Canizares-Esguerra and Erik R. Seeman, eds., The Atlantic in Global History, 1500-2000 (Upper Saddle River, N.J., 2007), 61-75.

(22) Steven C. Hahn, The Invention of the Creek Nation, 1670-1763 (Lincoln, Neb., 2004); Oatis, Colonial Complex; Piker, Okfuskee; Alan Gallay, The Indian Slave Trade: The Rise of the English Empire in the American South, 1670-1717 (New Haven, 2002); Claudio Saunt, A New Order of Things: Property, Power, and the Transformation of the Creek Indians, 1733-1816 (Cambridge, Eng., 1999); Braund, Deerskins and Duffels; Tom Hatley, The Dividing Paths: Cherokees and South Carolinians through the Era of Revolution (New York, 1995). Work on these themes continues past the Revolution into the 1840s. For example, the bulk of Saunt's work lies beyond the Revolution. See also Robbie Ethridge, Creek Country: The Creek Indians and Their World (Chapel Hill, 2003), and Joel W. Martin, Sacred Revolt: The Muskogees' Struggle for a New World (Boston, 1991). Ethnogenesis refers to the process whereby a particular set of historical circumstances induces previously disparate peoples to redefine their ethnic and political identities, creating a new ethnic identity.

(23) Helen C. Rountree, ed., Powhatan Foreign Relations, 150-1722 (Charlottesville, 1993). See also Marvin T. Smith, "Aboriginal Population Movements in the Postcontact Southeast," in Ethridge and Hudson, eds., Transformation of the Southeastern Indians, 3-20; and Rountree, "Trouble Coming Southward: Emanations through and from Virginia, 1607-1675," ibid., 65-78.

(24) Eric E. Bowne, The Westo Indians: Slave Traders of the Early Colonial South (Tuscaloosa, 2005).

(25) Tanner, "Land and Water Communication Systems of the Southeastern Indians"; Helen C. Rountree, "The Powhatans and Other Woodland Indians as Travelers," in Rountree, ed., Powhatan Foreign Relations, 21-52.

(26) See, for example, discussions over the nature of Powhatan political organization in Rountree, "Introduction," in Rountree, ed., Powhatan Foreign Relations, 1-3; and Margaret Holmes Williamson, Powhatan Lords of Life and Death: Command and Consent in Seventeenth-Century Virginia (Lincoln, Neb., 2003).

(27) For "shatter zone" see Ethridge, Creek Country, 24, 263. For "frontier complex" and "colonial complex" see Oatis, Colonial Complex, 3-8.

(28) Verner W. Crane, The Southern Frontier, 1670 1732 (Durham, N.C., 1928). Its multiple reissues (in 1929 and 1956 by the University of Michigan Press, in 1981 by W. W. Norton with an introduction by Peter H. Wood, and in 2004 by the University of Alabama Press with an introduction by Steven C. Hahn) and scholars' frequent citation of it attest to its continuing influence.

(29) Oatis, Colonial Complex, 3-4.

(30) Saunt, "'Our Indians,'" 61-62: Jeremy Adelman and Stephen Aron, "From Borderlands to Borders: Empires, Nation-States, and the Peoples in between in North American History," American Historical Review, 104 (June 1999), 813-41; Evan Haefeli, "A Note on the Use of North American Borderlands," ibid., 104 (October 1999), 1222-25.

(31) Perdue, Slavery and the Evolution of Cherokee Society, 1540-1866 (Knoxville, 1979), xiv.

(32) Gallay, Indian Slave Trade. For published work (most of it post-Revolution), see Daniel F. Littlefield Jr., Africans and Creeks from the Colonial Period to the Civil War (Westport, Conn., 1979); Gary Zellar, African Creeks: Estelvste and the Creek Nation (Norman, Okla., 2007); Theda Perdue, "Mixed Blood" Indians: Racial Construction in the Early South (Athens, Ga., 2003); and Tiya Miles and Sharon P. Holland, eds., Crossing Waters, Crossing Worlds: The African Diaspora in Indian Country (Durham, N.C., 2006). A recent example is Christina Snyder, "Conquered Enemies, Adopted Kin, and Owned People: The Creek Indians and Their Captives," Journal of Southern History, 73 (May 2007), 255-88.

(33) Scholars in southeastern Indian history have made significant progress toward understanding the relationships between French and British worlds (and Spanish Louisiana) but have done less well at understanding the relationship between Spanish Florida and the rest of the region, despite recognition of the importance of that relationship and despite much good recent work in Spanish Florida. See, for example, John H. Hann, Indians of Central and South Florida, 1513-1763 (Gainesville, 2003); Paul E. Hoffman, Florida's Frontiers (Bloomington, 2002); and Amy Turner Bushnell, Situado and Sabana: Spain's Support System for the Presidio and Mission Provinces of Florida (Athens, Ga., 1994).

MS. HATFIELD is an associate professor of history at Texas A&M University.