Survival of the Southeastern Indian Tribes

“All people have blind spots in their memory of the past, but the Southeastern Indians are the virtual amnesia in our historical consciousness.”

- Charles Hudson, The Southeastern Indians.

I found the book, The Southeastern Indians, to be by far the best book on the history of tribes in this region, covering history from ancient to present. The tribes of this region had no written history, so he has thoroughly documented his research with numerous maps and photos. Hudson pulls together artifacts and weaves them together to paint a picture of day-to-day life.

Hudson begins by emphasizing the importance of the culture, and contrasts it with the gap in our knowledge:

“The native people of the American South – the Southeastern Indians – possessed the richest culture of any of the native people north of Mexico. It was the richest by almost any measure. At the time Europeans first came to the New World, the Southeastern Indians lived on the fruits of an economy which combined farming with hunting and gathering; they organized themselves into relatively complex political units; they built large towns and monumental ceremonial centers; and they possessed a rich symbolism and an expressive art style. But hardly any of this has left an impression on our historical memory. The average American has some notion of the Powhatan Indians of Virginia and the role they played in our early colonial history; he has a clear but stereotyped concept of the Indians who lived on the Great Plains; he may know something about the Navajo and Pueblo Indians of the Southwest; but he knows little or nothing about the Southeastern Indians.”

e coHe continues:

“The Indians of the Southeast have been inadequately portrayed both by historians and anthropologists. The reasons for failure are many. One general problem has been that the Indian cultures were so different from European cultures that it has been difficult for European intellectuals to translate the life experience of Indians into terms a layman can readily understand; this problem still exists today, but it was even more acute when Europeans colonization first began. But perhaps the foremost for our ignorance about the Southeastern Indians is simply that many of them were killed, their societies disrupted, and their cultures greatly changed before the day when educated people thought the Indian cultures were worth studying.”

Stay tuned. We will continue this theme in our writings in the weeks ahead.