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Reviews of Books
Native American History: Stories and Theories
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Conversations with the High Priest of Coosa. By
CHARLES M. HUDSON
. (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 2003.
Pp. xxii, 222. $34.95 cloth, $17.95 paper).
Clearing a Path: Theorizing the Past in Native
American Studies. Edited by NANCY
SHOEMAKER (New York
and London: Routledge, 2002. Pp. xiv, 215. $80.00 cloth, $21.95
paper.)
Reviewed by Joshua Piker
, University of Oklahoma
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Anyone who pays attention to early Native American history will be familiar with two facts. First, the subfield is beset by an unusually recalcitrant documentary record. Much of what we would like to know went unrecorded, and much of what we do know is suspect. Second, the subfield is beset by an unusually explosive political context. Most mainstream scholars—myself included—are not of native descent, and many descendants of the people we write about question the ethics of academic projects, the efficacy of the discipline's methods, and the veracity of historians' conclusions. Historians focused on colonial-era native history, in other words, are enmeshed in colonialism's legacies—an unsatisfactory evidentiary base and a frequently adversarial relationship with modern Indian peoples. Books that address either problem deserve a wide audience, and the two under review here are no exception. |
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Charles M. Hudson's Conversations
with the High Priest of Coosa represents an innovative response
to the problem of intractable sources. The book is "a fictionalized
ethnography" (p. xi). It is "discipline[d] and inform[ed]" (p. xv)
by an enviable mastery of the Southeast's historical, archaeological,
and ethnographic record, but it "begins where the reach of archaeology
and history ends" (p. xi). Hudson aims "to reconstruct the belief
system, or world view, of a late prehistoric southeastern people"
(p. xi) by using "extant but fragmentary oral materials from the
various Native American peoples of the seventeenth- to twentieth-century
Southeast, [and] employing threads of fiction to stitch these pieces
together into something like a coherent system of belief " (p. xv).
The stories that Hudson tells combine quotation, paraphrase, adaptation,
and invention, with the endnotes explaining both the degree to which
each is present in a given story and the provenance of the non-original
material. A monograph stitching together an intellectual system
from fragments of cultures separated by significant chronological
and geographic distances would be controversial, but fiction permits
experimentation. Essentially, Hudson offers a book-length hypothesis—phrased
in fictional terms yet firmly grounded in the ethnohistorical record—about
a sixteenth-century native worldview. It is an impressive piece
of informed imagination.
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