Summer Reading: A Blog

Lauren MacDonald

Tag: seventeenth century

  • 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]

  • 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.