Native South

In The Native South, Tim Alan Garrison and Greg O’Brien assemble contributions from leading ethnohistorians of the American South in a state-of-the-field volume on southern Native American history from the sixteenth to the twenty-first century. Spanning such subjects as Seminole–African American kinship systems, Cherokee notions of guilt and innocence in evolving tribal jurisprudence, Indian captives and American empire, and second-wave feminist activism among Cherokee women in the 1970s, The Native South offers a dynamic examination of ethnohistorical methodology and evolving research in southern Native American history.   Theda Perdue and Michael Green, pioneers who developed the modern historiography of the Native South into a major field of scholarly inquiry, 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.  

"[The Native South] reveals how the history of the Native South and Native southerners is a dynamic form of historical inquiry, a testimony to the skill of the contributors and an enduring testimony to the pathbreaking scholarship of Michael Green and Theda Perdue."—G. D. Smithers, Choice, "The Native South offers a collection of essays in honor of Theda Perdue and the late Michael Green by a panel of their former students, all established or up-and-coming scholars of Native history in their own right. The essays are a fine tribute to their mentors."—Michelle LeMaster, Ethnohistory, "Whether we train future historians, or future teachers, nurses, or pilots, any professor's greatest legacy is her or his students. In The Native South the editors Tim Alan Garrison and Greg O'Brien have assembled the students of Theda Perdue and the late Mike Green to prove this point forcefully and beautifully."—Matthew Jennings, Journal of American History, "Fieldworkers among the Cherokee, Choctaw, and other local groups will find this material useful . . . and ethnographers elsewhere will be encouraged to seek out the discoveries of ethnohistorians to enrich their own work."—Anthropology Review Database, "A welcome and long overdue sampling of one of the fastest growing subfields in American Indian history today."—Bradley Shreve, Tribal College Journal

Tim Alan Garrison is a professor and chair of the Department of History at Portland State University. He is the editor of “Our Cause Will Ultimately Triumph”: Profiles in American Indian Sovereignty. Greg O’Brien is an associate professor and chair of the Department of History at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. He is the editor of Pre-Removal Choctaw History: Exploring New Paths and the executive editor of the journal Native South.