Introduction: Indigenizing the Eighteenth-Century American South

Abstract:This essay introduces the cluster, "Indigenizing the Eighteenth-Century American South," and shows how its contributions embody the ways in which Native American history and its study continue to reshape our understandings of the American South and the eighteenth century more broadly. The most predominant thread connecting the essays is that of gender, specifically how gender roles and contrasting ideas of femininity and masculinity informed and determined the interactions between Native Peoples and Euro-Americans within the eighteenth century South. Another theme running through the cluster is the longue durée, connecting the deep history of the American South and its peoples to the gendered colonialism that continues to shape the lives of Native American communities today. Altogether, these essays push the envelope of scholars' understandings of the American South and the eighteenth century by privileging and recentering Native epistemologies and practices at the heart of their work and reminding scholars of the explanatory power that Indigenous peoples, their histories, and their stories can provide for seeing into the eighteenth-century past.