Summer Reading: A Blog

Lauren MacDonald

Tag: james axtell

  • At A Punishing Cost

    Currently reading: James Axtell, The Indians’ New South: Cultural Change in the Colonial Southeast (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1997)

    Axtell briefly argues that the exceptional nature of sixteenth-century Mississippian societies was the reason the Spanish conquistadors never meaningfully conquered the region — and while I don’t buy Axtell’s specific argument, I did find it refreshing to encounter a take on La Florida that emphasizes Indigenous power over Spanish incompetence.

    Similarly, I was both perplexed and delighted by his throwaway portrayal of the early Spanish Caribbean:

    “…the Caribbean chiefdoms, situated in tropical, often mountainous terrain and led by astute and powerful caciques, foiled Spanish grabs for power and gold longer and more effectively than would the more populous Aztecs and Incas, at a punishing cost in Spanish blood and treasure.” [5]

    Hmmm! He cites Samuel M. Wilson’s Hispaniola for this claim; this is not an argument that Wilson makes in Hispaniola. (I just pulled down my copy of the book to double-check.) And I can think of half a dozen ways to refute this claim. But! I’m so used to seeing the early Spanish Caribbean being portrayed apologetically as insignificant, unimportant, and a frail prelude to a more important history. (Caribbeanists write this way because they have been traumatized by the jeers and scorn of the Mexicanists and Andeanists, who are always beating up the Caribbeanists for their lunch money.) It’s unexpected to encounter any description of the early Spanish Caribbean as a triumphant success.

  • Momentary and Misleading Stillness

    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]

  • A Mess of Cottage

    Currently reading: James Axtell, The Indians’ New South: Cultural Change in the Colonial Southeast (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1997)

    I last read this slim book (which was composed from a lecture series that Axtell delivered at Louisiana State University in April 1996) maybe ten years ago. Re-reading it now, I could not remember if my favorite groaner Axtell line appeared herein or in another Axtell book.

    I was delighted to reach page 40 and see:

    Although [Powhatan] was interested in trading corn for a few English goods, especially prestige items such as shiny copper and blue glass beads and useful metal tools and weapons, he would not sell his birthright for any price. Off and on for the colony’s first six years, he waged diplomatic and real warfare against the intruders. When he died in 1618, five years after Pocahontas’s marriage brought an uneasy peace, his brother Opechancanough succeeded him and kept a suspicious eye on the acquisitive English, who built him an English-style house with a lock to buy his acquiescence in their expansion. But he, too, could not be bought, certainly not for a mess of cottage.