Reading: Alejandra Dubcovsky, Talking Back: Native Women and the Making of the Early South (Yale University Press, 2023)
This book’s first chapter performs a nifty trick: speculating on the human experience implied by an archival fragment as a shortcut to establishing the who-what-why-when historical context needed for the reader’s comprehension of the rest of the book. I guess I’ve seen this move made before in the history genre, but this is the first time I can remember thinking, All this source-less speculation is good and useful, and I like it. The first chapter imagines the life of an Indigenous Chacato woman who exists only in the Spanish sources as a nameless corpse. In so doing, the chapter makes it much easier to follow the complicated Indigenous politics of Chacato autonomy, Yamasee slave-raiding, and Apalachee diplomacy in late-seventeenth-century northwest Florida.
Though most slave raids managed to take twenty to thirty individuals, if the majority of those captured were women, Indian slavery had the potential of eliminating the autonomy and reproductive capability of these matrilocal communities in which women not only determined succession lines but also kept their communities populated and fed, had a say in where their husbands lived and worked, and made their towns’ well-being and future viable. …Chacato relocation prioritized the safety of their remaining “young women” and the future of their entire communities. Without young women, Chacatos could not survive, and so they moved. [36]