Choctaw Genesis: 1500-1700.

GARRISON, TIM ALAN

Choctaw Genesis: 1500-1700, by Patricia Galloway. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995. xv, 411 pp. Index. $65.00 cloth.

Early European maps of the southeast, if viewed in the chronological order of their drafting, seem to suggest that the Choctaws emerged out of nowhere in the last half of the seventeenth century. Historians of the tribe, facing a paucity of evidence, have generally treated the origins of the Choctaws as an impenetrable mystery. In Choctaw Genesis, however, Patricia Galloway pulls a persuasive story of the tribe's beginnings out of the evidentiary vortex of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Her strategy, she declares early on, "is to uncover the deep narrativity of social process by confronting the broken sequence of the material record with the brief flashes of vision embedded in the ramblings of braggart soldiers and earnest friars" (p. 26). In sum, Galloway is quite successful in unearthing part of the untold story of the Choctaw tribal birth.

Galloway addresses the most perplexing question in the study of Southeastern Indians--the assumed but troublesome link between the Mississippian cultures and the major tribes of the postcontact period. Past studies, like those by Charles Hudson, have maintained that the Southeast was dominated by a handful of powerful chiefdoms on the advent of European colonization. The modern Muskogean tribes, he argues, were recombinations of these chiefdoms that splintered in the late precontact and early colonial period. However, it is extremely difficult to explain the process that produced the structural declension from the hierarchical stratification of the chiefdom to the social egalitarianism of the tribes that Europeans encountered in the eighteenth century. Galloway answers the conundrum by challenging some of the undergirding planks of that conventional wisdom. For instance, she makes a persuasive argument that the Southeast that De Soto explored was a land of sociopolitical diversity. Most Southeastern Indians during the Spaniard's time were not affiliated with a large chiefdom, she argues, but with smaller, segmented groups or small chiefdoms.

The Choctaws, she concludes, were a conglomeration of diverse native ethnic groups that moved into what is now east-central Mississippi in the seventeenth century. This area was bereft of established settlements during the protohistorical period and had been shared as winter hunting ground by a number of peoples. Small groups of "prairie people," the remnants of a small chiefdom, settled along the head waters of the Pearl River and became what would later be identified as the "Western Division" of the Choctaws. Peoples formerly associated with the great Moundville chiefdom and refugees of the smaller Bottle Creek chiefdom in the upper Mobile delta settled west of the Tombigbee River. Another group from the Mobile delta migrated into the Chickasawhay River valley at the beginning of the seventeenth century to escape the slave raids of the English and their Alabama allies. Finally, some Natchezan peoples abandoned the large Pearl Mounds chiefdom and moved into the upper Leaf and western Pascagoula valleys in the middle of the seventeenth century. Galloway applies Henry Dobyns's theorem of the "proper size" for settlement and suggests that these groups were following a sociological urge to reestablish a society of the appropriate size necessary to reproduce and function in the ways they had in the past. For necessity, these societies abandoned their villages and their intricate political and social hierarchies, moved into the vacant region, and continued their basic subsistence methods and patterns of behavioral regulation. These diverse groups, formerly separated by considerable distance, realized that they shared a historical trading relationship, related languages (except the Natchezans), and common means of acquiring food and shelter. Over time, Galloway concludes, these commonalities were cemented into tribal self-conception by intergroup marriages and diplomatic arrangements. Ultimately, what resulted was a powerful tribe that could fend off challenges from Native enemies and the European colonies. Upon entering the historical period, the Choctaws "became encapsulated in European notions of nationhood and ethnicity and were increasingly affected by their own perception of themselves under that name" (p. 360).

Galloway's painstaking study draws from a wide array of material and documentary evidence. For example, from European maps of the Southeast she concludes that the eastern division of the Choctaws migrated in from east of the Tombigbee River. From the variety of pottery shards, she identifies the diverse groups that melded together in the Choctaw homeland. From archeological reports, she concludes that the Choctaws adopted complicated mortuary practices that had in the past been reserved for an elite class of one of the contributing disintegrated chiefdoms. The linguistic evidence, she suggests, shows that the Choctaws encouraged unanimity and particularism by adopting a tribal public language while preserving local dialects. She also perhaps solves the puzzle of an oral tradition that suggests both migration into, and emergence from the ground of, the homeland. The coming together of groups with different cosmologies, Galloway argues, explains this contradiction in the origin stories.

Galloway proffers Choctaw Genesis as a beginning point and hopes that her hypothesis will be tested by further documentary interpretation and archeological excavation. The strength of the work, however, is not just the end of Galloway's conclusions, but her means of coming to them. The book could well serve as a primer on ethnohistorical methodology. Students of European exploration, in particular, will appreciate Galloway's lessons in textual and cartographic analysis. However, though Galloway's facile appraisal of the interdisciplinary evidence and scholarship is remarkable, only specialists in archeology, anthropological theory, and linguistics will be capable of evaluating elements of her analysis. Those she criticizes, Hudson in particular, should do us all a service and respond to her challenges in kind. The debate between Hudson and Galloway, should they choose to continue it, will be a boon to our understanding of the origins of the Southeastern tribes.

TIM ALAN GARRISON Portland State University