The Native South: New Histories and Enduring Legacies
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The Native South: New Histories and Enduring Legacies
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Overview
Theda Perdue and Michael Green, pioneers in the modern historiography of the Native South who developed it into a major field of scholarly inquiry today, speak in interviews with the editors about how that field evolved in the late twentieth century after the foundational work of James Mooney, John Swanton, Angie Debo, and Charles Hudson.
For scholars, graduate students, and undergraduates in this field of American history, this collection offers original essays by Mikaëla Adams, James Taylor Carson, Tim Alan Garrison, Izumi Ishii, Malinda Maynor Lowery, Rowena McClinton, David A. Nichols, Greg O’Brien, Meg Devlin O’Sullivan, Julie L. Reed, Christina Snyder, and Rose Stremlau.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781496201423 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Nebraska |
| Publication date: | 07/01/2017 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 318 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
The Native South
New Histories and Enduring Legacies
By Tim Alan Garrison, Greg O'Brien
UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS
Copyright © 2017 Board of Regents of the University of NebraskaAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8032-9690-9
CHAPTER 1
An Interview with Theda Perdue and Michael D. Green
Greg O'Brien
On July 11, 2012, Greg O'Brien conducted the following interview with Theda Perdue and Michael D. Green at their home in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.
Greg O'Brien (GO): First of all, tell us a little about your personal backgrounds, where you're from, where you grew up, what your parents did, and how you got interested in history as a profession.
Michael Green (MG): I was born and raised in Iowa. My dad was a Methodist minister. I've been interested in history since I can remember. When I was a kid in junior high and high school, I was a voracious reader and what I read was historical stuff. It was never a question what I was going to major in when I went to college. I went to Cornell College in Mount Vernon, Iowa, where I was a history and political science major because history and political science were joined together in the same department. When I went to graduate school to the University of Iowa I was a history major. I've always been, I've always had, the soul of a historian.
Theda Perdue (TP): I'm from McRae, Georgia, a town of 2,500 where my father was a farm equipment dealer. My mother had been a beautician during the late 1930s and through World War II, but by the time I was born she was a stay-at-home mom. I'm the only child, and my parents were middle-aged when I was born. I think I probably became a historian in part because my mother was an avid reader. She read constantly, and even in her late 80s, she could read a book a day. I remember going with her to the library where there was a series of biographies of famous women arranged alphabetically by their first name. I started with Abigail Adams, then Amelia Earhart, and I ended, I think, with Sarah Bernhardt the actress. So, I guess that hooked me. I began college at Emory University, then I transferred to Mercer University. By that time I wanted to be a lawyer. I entered law school early after my junior year in college, and I lasted one semester. I quit law school because I thought that the study of law was one of the most boring things I'd ever done in my life. It consisted largely of abstracting cases, but equally important, I was struck by what one of my professors said, which was that "there is no justice in the law." What he meant was that your client could be innocent and still not win, but it bothered me terribly, because this, after all, was 1971, at the height of the antiwar movement, and issues of social justice were still very much in the fore. I was appalled by the idea that you couldn't really be assured of justice in the American legal system. So I quit, I thought about what I wanted to do next, and I decided to go to graduate school in history. I ended up at the University of Georgia and became a historian.
GO: Okay. Mike, did you ever consider any other career other than being an academic historian?
MG: I briefly toyed with the idea of the State Department diplomatic corps, but when I graduated from college, I was faced with a real crisis, I guess. I graduated from college in 1963. I was married. I had a son who was two years old. I had not taken any education courses so I could not qualify to teach high school. I was a historian, and I had absolutely no idea what I was going to do, but I realized that I had to make up my mind immediately and graduate school was the only thing I could think of to do. That's how I ended up going to graduate school, and I discovered very quickly that I had blundered into the right decision. I was very happy as a graduate student, and I was very happy being a historian. So the question about whether or not I was going to become our ambassador to the Soviet Union slipped through my mind fairly quickly.
GO: Okay. Theda, other than possibly being a lawyer, did you ever consider any other careers by the time you were an undergraduate?
TP: No, I don't think so. I resisted education courses in the same way that I resisted typing courses in high school. (I still type with two fingers.) I don't know whether it was a kind of budding feminism or it was simply a reaction to my mother's situation. My mother was an extraordinarily bright woman who really never found an outlet for her intellect. I didn't want to get pigeonholed into a stereotypically female job as a schoolteacher or a secretary, so I shunned anything that smacked of that.
I never really thought about being a historian, it just sort of happened. I got a job, although, in the fall of 1974, there were not many jobs out there. I had not finished my dissertation or even taken qualifying exams when a job came open at Western Carolina University for a position in Cherokee history. Few people did Indian history in those days, and apparently I was one of two people in the country who applied. I managed to get the job. I was hired on December 30, and I started teaching the first half of world history on January 2. That was a humbling experience. But I took qualifying exams that spring, and by the next spring, I had a dissertation ready to defend. So, my career was something that just kind of happened. But once I got an academic position, I was absolutely certain that that's what I should do.
GO: Mike, I've heard you talk a lot before about academic legacies and your intellectual forebears, so I was wondering if you could spend a little time talking about that. Who have been your intellectual influences, either in your career or just in the way you approach history?
MG: Well, I suppose that the person most responsible for my becoming a student of American Indian history was Allan Bogue, who was my first professor at the University of Iowa. I went to Iowa with the intent of being a western historian. I took a seminar my first semester as a master's student with Bogue, and the first day, we went around the table talking about our projects for the seminar. I had no idea what a seminar was. I had no idea what my project was. I had no idea about anything. I wandered into graduate school as ignorant, as ill informed, as innocent of reality as anybody I could possibly imagine. And so when it came to me, I said that I wanted to do research on mountain men and the fur trade. Bogue gave me a sour look and didn't say anything. At the end of the hour as I was walking out the door, he said, "Come to my office." So I went to his office. He announced, "You can't do any work on the fur trade, there's nothing to be said about the fur trade" — this was 1963 — "there's nothing new to be said about the fur trade, that's a waste a time, what other ideas do you have?" And I looked at him and said, "Er, uh, none." He got out a little 3x5 card-box and told me to start flipping through the cards, which had topics on them.
Bogue was a Canadian, and he'd been in the tank corps in the British Army during World War II. His tank had gotten blown up. The blast screwed up his back and he couldn't sit down, so his office was arranged for someone to stand up. The row of file cabinets had a sheet of plywood across the top, and he did all of his work — his writing, his typing, and everything — standing up, working off the top of his file cabinet. So I stood there next to him flipping through the card-box, and he said, "Hey, I know what you can do. I just got this collection of microfilm from the Oklahoma Historical Society. Go read that letter book and see what you can make out of it."
It was the letter books of an Indian agent for the Sac and Fox Indians named John Beach. I ended up writing this first seminar paper on John Beach and the administration of Indian policy among the Sac and Fox in the 1840s. That was the beginning of my focus on Native American history. So, I guess Allan Bogue was significant in heading me in that direction. I learned how to be a historian from Malcolm (Mac) Rohrbough, but basically I was a self-taught Indian historian. I learned how to be an ethnohistorian as a fellow at the Newberry Library in Chicago in the mid-1970s where director Francis (Fritz) Jennings and my colleagues inspired me, but I learned by floundering around, trying to figure things out and make as few mistakes as possible. I just really can't think of anybody that I would point to as being decisive in the development of my career as an Indian historian until Theda. I have learned so much from her, but that was of course after I had already gotten a start.
GO: Right. Okay. Theda, who do you see as intellectual forebears for you?
TP: The Charlies — Charles (Charlie) Crowe and Charles (Charlie) Hudson. I developed an interest in race when I was in high school. I will never forget shocking my high school history teacher by doing a book review on Martin Luther King's Letter from a Birmingham Jail. I was fascinated by the civil rights movement in part because it challenged the world I knew. I graduated in an all-white class in 1967. I think that I saw the injustice there, but my response was more intellectual than political or emotional. I was absolutely fascinated by how we became such a divided society and how we were going to change such an ingrained system.
When I went to Mercer, I enrolled in a course in African American history taught by a history professor from Fort Valley State College, a historically black institution. It was a life-changing experience. Everyone in the room except me was black. For the first time in my life, I was a racial minority and I was studying a history that was completely different from the histories I always had been taught. This was before African American history began to change the way that we teach American history or think about southern history. I found the experience to be disorienting on the one hand and thrilling on the other. All of a sudden I began to understand history not simply as the memorization of fact but as the understanding of human beings as actors and society as the creation of their decisions.
When I went to graduate school, I sought out the African American historian of the department, Charlie Crowe, who was white. (There were no black faculty members at the University of Georgia in the history department when I went there.) Charlie Crowe never saw a radical cause that he didn't like. Charlie had been fired from his first job at Old Dominion University because he got arrested for protesting the closing of the schools in Prince Edward County, Virginia. Charlie was a man who believed that resistance to injustice took precedence over everything else, and that included his academic job, which provided the income for his wife and his two small children. Charlie was a man driven — some would say a man possessed. I found his engagement with the present, one shaped by a profound understanding of the past, to be really exciting.
Charlie didn't know anything about Indians, but he knew who did, so he sent me to the other Charlie, Charles Hudson in the anthropology department. Charlie Hudson was a very different personality. Charlie thought that if you're going to write about the Indian past you have to put Indians at the center of it and you have to try to reconstruct their worldview. Charlie Hudson taught me how to do that. Charlie Crowe taught me how to write. Charlie never published very much, but what he did publish was beautifully written. The reason that I line edit my graduate students' work to this day is because that's what Charlie Crowe did for me. In the process of turning my rather awkward prose into something that was readable, he taught me the rules, and he convinced me that writing is mastering a skill set even more than it is innate talent. Many of the things that I have told my graduate students about good writing are the things that Charlie Crowe told me.
MG: Well, as you can see, her training is much more avant-garde than mine, which was very traditional, very old-fashioned.
GO: Let's talk a little bit more specifically about your own work. Mike, you first. How did you become interested in Creek Indian history and/or the removal era for southeastern Indians?
MG: After I got my master's degree on the removal of the Sacs and Foxes from Iowa Territory, I went to West Texas State University in Canyon in the Texas Panhandle for two years as an instructor. I taught five sections a semester of American survey for $54.50 a year. This was 1965–1967. By the time I got back to Iowa to do my PhD work, I really didn't have much of a notion of what I was going to do for a PhD. I didn't think that I wanted to continue with what I had started with Allan Bogue and the Sacs and Foxes. By this time, Mac's first book had come out and it was an administrative history of the General Land Office, and Mac thought of himself as an administrative historian. I got the bright idea that I would do a similar kind of study of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Now I was going to be an administrative historian, study the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and do a dissertation that sort of replicated Malcolm's work on the General Land Office. I started doing research, and I just sort of floundered around. I started reading microfilm with no guidance, no direction, no focus. I was just reading and taking notes. I spent a year doing that. I hadn't gotten very far and I got a little bit scared. I said to Mac, "You know, I don't really know how on earth I'm going to be able to fulfill our plan doing research for the next ten or fifteen years, because there's just so much stuff." He replied, "Well what have you got? Is there any way that you could proceed with something that you've got?" I said: "As a matter of fact, there is this hellacious controversy in Georgia in the 1820s between the state of Georgia and the federal government over the question of who's got authority over the administration of affairs with the Creeks. It's really interesting. I've done a lot of work. I think I know where I can find other stuff." And Mac said, "Well try that."
So that's what I did. I fell into the Creeks, I fell into Georgia in the 1820s, and I fell into the removal era. My career has been a succession of incredibly lucky accidents with essentially no plan, no preparation, no guidance. I don't know how on earth I ever made it to first base, but that's how it got started. I left Iowa in 1970 and went back to Canyon. I had taken a leave of absence with the idea that I was never going back, but by 1970 the jobs were all gone and they had to take me back. I taught at West Texas for another four years. I completed my dissertation and defended it in the spring of 1973. It took me three years to write it, and it was a very lackluster, ho-hum, uninteresting administrative history of this quite exciting controversy.
I was just about to finish it in the spring of 1973 when I went to Tahlequah, Oklahoma, to the first meeting of an Indian history, culture, and literature symposium sponsored by Northeastern Oklahoma University in Tahlequah. Francis Paul Prucha, Angie Debo, and two or three other major figures were on the program. That's when I met Angie — and talking about people who influenced me — Angie turned out to be a very good friend. I spent a fair bit of time with her, and we had marvelous conversations. I told her about my dissertation and my desire to turn it into a book. I asked her if she would read it, and she agreed to. She was pushing eighty by that time, long retired, and living in this little house in Marshall, Oklahoma. I didn't send it to her for a year or two, and by the time she got it, she had forgotten me, her promise, and our conversation — she told me later that she had no idea what was going on. But I had sent her a cover letter asking her to read it, and so she did. She had some good advice about what to do, but, she really wasn't, at that time, much of an ethnohistorian either, and so she didn't see where the real flaws in it lay. Fortunately, she thought what she saw was good, and she thought that what she saw in me was promise.
Then I got fired from West Texas State and became a gypsy for a year or two. I realized that there were no jobs, and the only way I was going to avoid becoming a car salesman or some such thing was to get a fellowship. About the only fellowship around was at the Center for the Study of the American Indian at the Newberry Library in Chicago. And I wrote an application and I asked Angie to write for me. D'Arcy McNickle was the director then, and my application said that I wanted to turn my dissertation inside out. This was a dissertation about the Creek Indians, but there were no Creeks in it. What I needed to do was to learn how to understand Creek culture and Creek society and put the Creeks in the center of the book. D'Arcy, I was told later, said, "That's not possible, he can't, there's no way he can do something like that." And somebody said, "Well, Angie Debo has written a letter for him." They read the letter, and D'Arcy conceded, "Angie says if anybody can do this, he can." So that's how I got the fellowship. And that's how, totally by accident, I became a student of Creek history and American Indian history.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Native South by Tim Alan Garrison, Greg O'Brien. Copyright © 2017 Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS.
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgments Introduction Greg O’Brien 1. An Interview with Theda Perdue and Michael D. Green Greg O’Brien 2. The Enterprise of War: The Military Economy of the Chickasaw Indians, 1715–1815 David A. Nichols 3. Quieting the Ghosts: How the Choctaws and Chickasaws Stopped Fighting Greg O’Brien 4. Cherokee and Christian Expressions of Spirituality through First Parents: Eve and Selu Rowena McClinton 5. Andrew Jackson’s Indian Son: Native Captives and American Empire Christina Snyder 6. Inevitability and the Southern Opposition to Indian Removal Tim Alan Garrison 7. An Absolute and Unconditional Pardon: Nineteenth-Century Cherokee Indigenous Justice Julie L. Reed 8. Race, Kinship, and Belonging among the Florida Seminoles Mikaëla M. Adams 9. Witnessing the West: Barbara Longknife and the California Gold Rush Rose Stremlau 10. Cherokee Women and the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union Izumi Ishii 11. Kinship and Capitalism in the Choctaw and Chickasaw Nations Malinda Maynor Lowery 12. “Engaged in the Struggle for Liberation as They See It”: Indigenous Southern Women and International Women’s Year Meg Devlin O’Sullivan 13. Cherokee Ghostings and the Haunted South James Taylor Carson Contributors Index