Native Southerners

Over the last two decades, scholars of Native America have slowly but steadily magnified indigenous perspectives in their treatment of specific regions. Historians such as Ned Blackhawk and Pekka Hämäläinen, among others, are flipping an emphasis long seen in twentieth-century scholarship on North American Indians. They are moving the focus from how settler colonialists and the nation-states that supported them dictated the worlds that all occupied to a focus on natives themselves and the worlds they created and maintained despite colonialism. Fitting nicely into this needed refocus is Gregory D. Smither's Native Southerners, which centers on native perspectives while asserting a narrative of American history quite different than those found in many textbooks. In fewer than two hundred pages of text, Smithers “aims to provide a chronicle of historical events analyzed through the oral and cultural traditions of Native Southerners and the written archives bequeathed to posterity by European colonists and their Native counterparts” (p. 5). His audience is both scholars and students, but the book's organization and prose are crafted more for the latter. Chapters provide easily digestible coverage of native-origin stories; chiefdoms; colonialism-driven changes to native polities; and the systematic impact of warfare, pan-Indianism, tribal nationalism, and removal. Throughout these sections, Smithers reminds readers that “stories matter” and “appreciating the importance of storytelling—of not only speaking, but listening—is critical to understanding the histories of Native Southerners” (p. 3

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