Currently reading: James Axtell, The Indians’ New South: Cultural Change in the Colonial Southeast (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1997)
It is interesting reading this book nearly thirty years after its publication. Lots of little things in it are “wrong,” because later scholarship has clarified and revised, and it belongs to a very distinct genre of ’90s cultural history. (Among other highlights, the book features a breezy assertion that Native peoples just loved the novelty of European pigs.) But! It still makes a solid case for its larger arguments: Native people were central to the colonial history of southeastern North America, and those people creatively and strategically adapted to changing environments and societies.
But we should also remember that the more focused snapshots of native culture we begin to get at first contact with literate and artistic Europeans freeze the fluidity of cultural time in momentary and misleading stillness, which we must not regard as a necessarily representative or encompassing picture of the larger and longer history of Indian America. [2]