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Kristalyn Shefveland, Alejandra Dubcovsky. Talking Back: Native Women and the Making of the Early South., The American Historical Review, Volume 129, Issue 2, June 2024, Pages 724–725, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhae051
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In Talking Back: Native Women and the Making of the Early South, esteemed scholar of the early Native South Alejandra Dubcovsky draws on a broad range of sources, including official reports, letters, personal papers, surveys, interrogations, court records, contemporary published accounts, and on interviews, oral histories, and stories of Indigenous people. This work relies on archival documentation in Spanish, English as well as Timucua, providing some of the first translations of these Native language works. By analyzing these multi-archival and multilanguage sources alongside Native-made and preserved oral histories and evidence, Dubcovsky creates an intimate space whereby scholars can take closer looks at the lives, experiences, and struggles of Native women in the early South.
At times harkening to the historical amnesia that led anthropologist Charlie Hudson to refer to this era as the “forgotten centuries,” Dubcovsky reminds us that, “Stories of Native women are often buried in colonial documents, but sometimes they are simply right there” (186). Through six well-documented chapters, the author centers narratives of Native women from the Timucua, Apalachee, Chacato, and Guale nations as well as Spanish, Criolla, and African-descended women in the communities of San Augustín and San Luis, the two Spanish-held settlements in north Florida that were at the heart of the Indigenous slave trade and at war with English-allied Natives of the Carolina colony.
