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The Only Land They Knew: American Indians in the Old South
In this unsurpassed history of the Native peoples of the southern United States, J. Leitch Wright Jr. describes Native lives, customs, and encounters with Europeans and Africans from late prehistory through the nineteenth century.
372 pages, Paperback
Published January 1, 1999
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November 14, 2019
In THE ONLY LAND THEY KNEW, J. Leitch Wright describes Indians as a vital and pervasive presence in the American southeast. Their story, as he tells it, is largely a tragedy. After the first Spanish entradas in the sixteenth century, epidemic disease and war killed tens of thousands of Native Americans and extinguished dozens of coastal chiefdomships. White and Indian raiders sold many of the survivors into slavery, making Indians the principal slave population in the lower South into the early eighteenth century. Others made the difficult choice to become refugees in Spanish missions, tributaries to British colonies, or dependents of European fur traders.
Native Americans both endured and adapted to these disastrous turns of fortune. They adopted European tools, livestock, and imported crops, while contributing their pottery, baskets, housing styles, and medicinal teas to British colonists' material culture. They worked for whites as laborers, fieldhands, carpenters, and sailors. They intermarried with African slaves, and exchanged story-telling and musical traditions with both black and white colonists. (Wright argues that the Uncle Remus tales, for example, had a Native American origin). At the same time, Indians retained their ceremonies and clan structure, and in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries created a pan-Indian resistance movement that, given another few decades to mature, might have stopped the juggernaut of American expansion.
Wright's book belongs to the Romantic school of American Indian historiography, as the author often substitutes pathos or anecdote for analytical rigor. However, Wright tells his tale with grace, clarity, and insight. His observations about Indian slavery and about the persistence of southeastern Indian culture into the twentieth century, observations made in 1981, were well ahead of their time. Only 74,000 Native Americans may have called the South home when this book was published, but they and their ancestors, Wright concludes, left a permanent impression on the region.
Native Americans both endured and adapted to these disastrous turns of fortune. They adopted European tools, livestock, and imported crops, while contributing their pottery, baskets, housing styles, and medicinal teas to British colonists' material culture. They worked for whites as laborers, fieldhands, carpenters, and sailors. They intermarried with African slaves, and exchanged story-telling and musical traditions with both black and white colonists. (Wright argues that the Uncle Remus tales, for example, had a Native American origin). At the same time, Indians retained their ceremonies and clan structure, and in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries created a pan-Indian resistance movement that, given another few decades to mature, might have stopped the juggernaut of American expansion.
Wright's book belongs to the Romantic school of American Indian historiography, as the author often substitutes pathos or anecdote for analytical rigor. However, Wright tells his tale with grace, clarity, and insight. His observations about Indian slavery and about the persistence of southeastern Indian culture into the twentieth century, observations made in 1981, were well ahead of their time. Only 74,000 Native Americans may have called the South home when this book was published, but they and their ancestors, Wright concludes, left a permanent impression on the region.
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