The authors of these essays are an interdisciplinary team of anthropologists and historians who have combined the research methods of both fields to present a comprehensive study of their subject. Published in 1979, the book takes an ethnohistorical approach and touches on the history, anthropology, and sociology of the South as well as on Native American studies. While much has been written on the archaeology, ethnography, and early history of southern Indians before 1840, most scholarly attention has shifted to Oklahoma and western Indians after that date. In studies of the New South or of Indian adaptation after the passage of the frontier, southeastern native peoples are rarely mentioned. This collection fills that void by providing an overview history of the culture and ethnic relations of the various Indian groups that managed to escape the 1830s removal and retain their ethnic identity to the present.

The two-hundred-year-old myth of the “vanishing” American Indian still holds some credence in the American Southeast, the region from which tens of thousands of Indians were relocated after passage of the Indian Removal Act in 1830. Yet, as the editors of this volume amply demonstrate, a significant Indian population remained behind after those massive relocations. The first anthology to focus on the literary work of Native Americans who trace their ancestry to “people who stayed” in southeastern states after 1830, this volume represents every state and every genre, including short stories, excerpts from novels, poetry, essays, plays, and even Web postings. Although most works are contemporary, the collection covers the entire post-Removal era. Some of the contributors are well known, while others have only recently emerged as important literary voices. All of the writers in The People Who Stayed affirm their Indian ancestry, though many live outside the Southeast today. As this anthology demonstrates, indigenous Southeastern writing engages the local and the global, the traditional and the modern. While many speak to the prospects and perils of acculturation, all the writers bear witness to the ways, oblique or straightforward, that they and their families continue to honor their Indian identities despite the legacy of removal. In an introduction to the volume and in headnotes on each contributor, the editors provide historical context and literary insight on the diversity of writing and lived experiences found in these pages. All readers, from students to scholars, will gain newfound understanding of the literature — and the human experience — of Native people of the American Southeast.

In Yuchi Indian Histories Before the Removal Era, folklorist and anthropologist Jason Baird Jackson and nine scholars of Yuchi (Euchee) Indian culture and history offer a revisionist and in-depth portrait of Yuchi community and society. This first interdisciplinary history of the Yuchi people corrects the historical record, which often submerges the Yuchi within the Creek Confederacy instead of acknowledging the Yuchi as a separate tribe. By looking at the oral, historical, ethnographic, linguistic, and archaeological record, contributors illuminate Yuchi political circumstances and cultural identity. Focusing on the pre-Removal era, the volume shows that from the entrada of Hernando de Soto into the American South in 1541 to the Yuchis’ internal migrations throughout the hinterlands of the South and their entanglement with the Creeks to the maintenance of community and identity today, the Yuchis have persisted as a distinct people. This volume provides a voice to an indigenous nation that previous generations of scholars have misidentified or erroneously assumed to be a simple constituent of the Creek Nation. In doing so, it offers a fuller picture of Yuchi social realities since the arrival of Europeans and other non-natives in their Southern homelands.

The Forgotten Centuries draws together seventeen essays in which historians, archaeologists, and anthropologists attempt for the first time to account for approximately two centuries that are virtually missing from the history of a large portion of the American South. Using the chronicles of the Spanish soldiers and adventurers, the contributors survey the emergence and character of the chiefdoms of the Southeast. In addition, they offer new scholarly interpretations of the expeditions of Lucas Vasquez de Ayllon from 1521 to 1526, Panfilo de Narvaez in 1528, and most particularly Hernando de Soto in 1539-43, as well as several expeditions conducted between 1597 and 1628. The essays in this volume address three other connected topics. Describing some of the major chiefdoms--Apalachee, the "Oconee" Province, Cofitachequi, and Coosa--the essays undertake to lay bare the social principles by which they operated. They also explore the major forces of structural change that were to transform the chiefdoms: disease and depopulation, the Spanish mission system, and the English deerskin and slave trades. And finally, they examine how these forces shaped the history of several subsequent southeastern Indian societies, including the Apalachees, Powhatans, Creeks, and Choctaws. These societies, the so-called native societies of the Old South, were, in fact, new ones formed in the crucible fired by the economic expansion of the early modern world.

In countless ways, the Yuchi (Euchee) people are unique among their fellow Oklahomans and Native peoples of North America. Inheritors of a language unrelated to any other, the Yuchi preserve a strong cultural identity. In part because they have not yet won federal recognition as a tribe, the Yuchi are largely unknown among their non-Native neighbors and often misunderstood in scholarship. Jason Baird Jackson’s Yuchi Folklore, the result of twenty years of collaboration with Yuchi people and one of just a handful of works considering their experience, brings Yuchi cultural expression to light. Yuchi Folklore examines expressive genres and customs that have long been of special interest to Yuchi people themselves. Beginning with an overview of Yuchi history and ethnography, the book explores four categories of cultural expression: verbal or spoken art, material culture, cultural performance, and worldview. In describing oratory, food, architecture, and dance, Jackson visits and revisits the themes of cultural persistence and social interaction, initially between Yuchi and other peoples east of the Mississippi and now in northeastern Oklahoma. The Yuchi exist in a complex, shifting relationship with the federally recognized Muscogee (Creek) Nation, with which they were removed to Indian Territory in the 1830s. Jackson shows how Yuchi cultural forms, values, customs, and practices constantly combine as Yuchi people adapt to new circumstances and everyday life. To be Yuchi today is, for example, to successfully negotiate a world where commercial rap and country music coexist with Native-language hymns and doctoring songs. While centered on Yuchi community life, this volume of essays also illustrates the discipline of folklore studies and offers perspectives for advancing a broader understanding of Woodlands peoples across the breadth of the American South and East.

The Removal of the Five Tribes from what is now the Southeastern part of the United States to the area that would become the state of Oklahoma is a topic widely researched and studied. In this annotated bibliography, Herman A. Peterson has gathered together studies in history, ethnohistory, ethnography, anthropology, sociology, rhetoric, and archaeology that pertain to the Removal. The focus of this bibliography is on published, peer-reviewed, scholarly secondary source material and published primary source documents that are easily available. The period under closest scrutiny extends from the passage of the Indian Removal Act in 1830 to the end of the Third Seminole War in 1842. However, works directly relevant to the events leading up to the Removal, as well as those concerned with the direct aftermath of Removal in Indian Territory, are also included. This bibliography is divided into six sections, one for each of the tribes, as well as a general section for works that encompass more than one tribe or address Indian Removal as a policy. Each section is further divided by topic, and within each section the works are listed chronologically, showing the development of the literature on that topic over time. The Trail of Tears: An Annotated Bibliography of Southeastern Indian Removal is a valuable resource for anyone researching this subject.