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Light on the Path: The Anthropology and History of the Southeastern Indians. Edited by Thomas J. Pluckhahn and Robbie Ethridge. (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, c. 2006. Pp. xii, 283. Paper, $34.95, ISBN 978-0-8173-5287-5; cloth, $60.00, ISBN 978-0-8173-1500-9.)
The publication of this essay collection demonstrates that the study of southeastern Indians has reached new levels of sophistication and importance to our understanding of the South as a whole. Along with the several books that appear each year on some aspect of southeastern Indian history, this collection challenges scholars to expand their conception of southern history to include more than the black and white postcolonial South that colors most of the historical literature. It is now clear not only that the South was occupied by people who experienced cultural change for thousands of years before Europeans and Africans arrived but also that Indian people shaped key aspects of southern history at least through the era of Indian removal in the 1830s and have continued to make their presence felt since then. Every general topic of importance to historians of the South-race, slavery, gender, culture, economics, politics, international relations, even the Civil War-had (or has) an Indian component, with Indians sometimes being the determinative force in shaping southern trends...