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Brent Richards Weisman. Unconquered People: Florida's Seminole and Miccosukee Indians. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1999. 170 pp. Illustrations, maps. Cloth, $39.95.
Brent Richards Weisman is assistant professor of anthropology at the University of South Florida in Tampa. His previous major book-length work, Like Beads on A String: A Culture History of the Seminole Indians in North Peninsular Florida, provided a focused account of Seminole culture as it had evolved to the time of the Second Seminole War. It was fully documented, it incorporated a good deal of original archaeological research data, and thus it was well received by the academic community. In the volume under review Weisman presents a much broader analysis of Seminole and Miccosukee cultural history in Florida that, although published by a university press, is avowedly intended for a general readership. Thus he condenses some three centuries of Seminole history into 135 pages of meaningful text.
The work opens by tracing Seminole culture origins back to the ancestral Creek cultural patterns as they existed in Georgia and Alabama. The Creek Nation was a loose confederation of independent towns encompassing many languages but sharing a common set of social and religious beliefs. As a result of strife within the...