Talking Back: Native Women and the Making of the Early South by Alejandra Dubcovsky (review)

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• Talking Back: Native Women and the Making of the Early South by Alejandra Dubcovsky
• Heather Miyano Kopelson

Talking Back: Native Women and the Making of the Early South. By Alejandra Dubcovsky. (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2023. Pp. xiv, 263. $38.00, ISBN 978-0-300-26612-2.)

The core argument of this book is that Native women were (and are) at the center of their communities, that they held power in what is now the U.S. South during the key period of 1670–1710 even as the Spanish established a few small settlements, and that they continued to hold power in the region afterward. Alejandra Dubcovsky skillfully weaves relevant philosophies and art from Indigenous intellectuals and artists with her historical analysis to show continuities between the past and present. The first half of the book delves into women and gender in a Native world that remained strong in the face of intensifying slave raiding linked to colonization efforts by the English and the Spanish, while the second half analyzes women during and after Queen Anne’s War, particularly the 1702 English siege of San Agustín.

The book begins with a painstaking reconstruction of the life of a murder victim, unnamed in the colonial Spanish record, who nonetheless held power in her community. Her tribe, the Chacatos, was forced to relocate several times to avoid slave raiders, whose seizures of young women threatened demographic collapse and starvation. Despite this upheaval, the case of this “Yndia Chacata” demonstrates how Native women had political, economic, and spiritual power in the Native world (p. 15). They were not usually chiefs, but a chief’s power depended on his matrilineal claims. All wives dictated where their husbands lived and worked, chiefs or not. This knowledge changes the interpretation of what the Spanish dubbed the Chacato Revolt into an assertion of political and cultural autonomy, in which the Chacatos expelled Franciscan missionaries who had violently tried to enforce patriarchy and new religious practices. Dubcovsky also details the political and social acumen that Native, African, and African-descended women required in order to forge an existence for themselves in colonial society. For example, Isavel de los Ríos, a free Black woman, used her business connections and knowledge of San Agustín to avoid shouldering the blame when two Apalachee men targeted her shop by paying with fake currency. [End Page 403]

The latter half of the book shows how Native women influenced Spanish military policy during the 1702 English siege of San Agustín’s Castillo de San Marcos. These women’s centrality within their communities compelled the Spanish governor to allow women and children to enter the previously male-dominated space so that their husbands and fathers might concentrate on fighting without worrying about their families’ safety. Additionally, the women’s loud cries during the siege served to rally their men to fight while also expressing discontent with the Spanish military response, creating a gendered wall of sound rooted in women’s responsibilities during wartime. After the siege, Spanish and Criolla (Spanish-descended people born in the Americas) women filed petitions for support from the Crown that narrated their continuing losses from the war, deliberately omitting the experiences of Native and Black women. Native accounts told a different story.

Despite delineating connections between this history and the ongoing epidemic of murdered and missing Indigenous women, Talking Back: Native Women and the Making of the Early South ends on a note of resilience. After acknowledging that Native women seem to enter the archive only as victims of violence or in death, Dubcovsky reframes the narrative to articulate Native women’s value to their communities. Their vulnerability to attacks did not mean marginality. Thus, the Apalachee accounts detailing the cruelty and violence exhibited by Doña Juana Caterina, one of the prominent Criolla petitioners, simultaneously depicted a vital Native world whose inhabitants continued to fight for their futures. Dubcovsky reminds readers that “Native women’s survival, resistance, strength, and hope” are as historical as the violence they have endured (p. 184). Scholars should avoid replicating the erasure of these women in the archives by drawing on Indigenous theoretical frameworks and...