4 Political Ecology and the Event: Calusa Social Action in Early Colonial Entanglements

Abstract

There are many examples of colonial entanglements resulting in shifts in religions, practices, subsistence, and political structures, largely linked to inequalities between the colonized and the colonizers. However, there are also examples in which practices, particularly among Native American societies, persisted in the context of social situations that intertwined peoples with diverse histories. At the time of Spanish arrival, the Calusa of southwestern Florida were a large‐scale, hierarchical society with supra‐community integration and were able to maintain high degrees of autonomy. Our focus here is to explicate the early colonial world of the Calusa. Specifically, we want to understand why early European interactions take such a dramatically different course in southwestern Florida than in other areas of Spanish colonization. To do so we use political ecology and recent scholarship on eventful archaeology to consider Calusa and Spanish social and political action. Our work focuses on interactions between the Spanish and the Calusa during the early and mid‐sixteenth century (ca. 1513 to 1569 CE). We argue that because the Calusa were fisher‐gatherer‐hunters, lacked maize agriculture, and had their capital on the defensible island of Mound Key, Spanish‐Calusa interactions and events transpired in a fundamentally different context compared to other Spanish outposts and colonies. With this example, we show how various events, knowledge, and traditions of the Calusa of southern Florida all worked to create a vastly different colonial entanglement that resulted in the Spanish abandonment of the area for some time.

Enduring Traditions and the (Im)materiality of Early Colonial Encounters in the Southeastern United States

“…In this sense, we must “embrace anomalous data” and cases that challenge long-standing typological frameworks and narratives (Nassaney 2018:55). Fortunately, contemporary studies of Indigenous-colonizer dynamics across the southeastern United States—and North America more broadly—are now emphasizing both historical contingency at a local scale and histories that are writ large across regions (e.g., Beck 2013; Beck et al 2016, 2017; Boudreaux et al 2020; Cobb 2019; Ethridge and Shuck-Hall 2009; Hofman and Keehnen 2019; Legg et al 2019; Manning and Hart 2019; Thompson et al 2018; Thompson, Marquardt et al 2019; Walder and Yann 2018).…”

A new view of the native revolts in Spanish Florida and the West Indies in the 16th century

“…Мы работали при поддержке библиотек University of Florida, University of South Florida, University of Sant Leo in Florida. В исследовании использовались книги и работы Ганнона [1], Миланича [2], Ворса [3], публикации Пека [4; 5], Вуда [6], Грей [7], Томпсона [8] и Фрэнсиса [9]. Важными источником для исследования стала книга «Pedro Menéndez de Avilés and the Conquest of Florida.…”