Summer Reading: A Blog

Lauren MacDonald

Tag: florida

  • Frantic Accounts of Failed Exploits

    Reading: Kimberly C. Borchard, Appalachia as Contested Borderland of the Early Modern Atlantic, 1528-1715 (Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2021).

    This book has told the story of how colonial Appalachia emerged from the Spanish myth of Apalache, which quickly dissociated from the very real Apalachee people of the Florida panhandle in the early sixteenth century and migrated — along with the legions of European explorers who sought its fabled riches — north and east into the sprawling eastern mountains of the contemporary United States. This migration was the product of a protracted rivalry among three European empires, narrated in no less than five languages, as generation after generation of would-be conquistadors and fortune-seekers composed frantic accounts of their failed exploits to herald the imminent discovery of indescribable wealth just around the bend in the next river, just at the summit of the next mountain. [153]

  • Commensurable State Power

    Reading: Alejandra Dubcovsky, Talking Back: Native Women and the Making of the Early South (Yale University Press, 2023)

    On the 1675 Chacato Revolt: The very norms and behaviors Diocsale regarded as foundational to his survival were the ones Franciscans opposed… Historians are often keen to see Native ambitions — especially Native male ambitions — as connected to state power. Native (male) decisions and actions then become commensurable with those of Europeans and fit together in a shared colonial narrative. But Diocsale prioritized his family and his matrilineal ties… [59]

  • Future Viable

    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]