Searching for the Bright Path

Blending an engaging narrative style with broader theoretical considerations, James Carson offers the most complete history of the Mississippi Choctaws to date.

He traces the story of the Choctaws from their origins in the Mississippian cultures of late prehistory through their varied encounters with the French, Spanish, English, Africans, and Americans, concluding with their forced removal to Indian Territory in the early nineteenth century.

Carson shows how the Choctaws struggled to adapt to life in a New World altered radically by contact while retaining their sense of identity and place.

Despite changes in subsistence practices and material culture, the Choctaws made every effort to retain certain core cultural beliefs and sensibilities, a strategy they conceived of as following 'the straight bright path'.

If Choctaws in 1600 and 1830 could speak to one another, they would be startled by the differences in the crops they grew, the clothes they wore, and the ways they made a living.

If they talked about their kin, families, and religion, however, they would still recognize one another as Choctaw.

This work also makes a significant theoretical contribution to ethnohistory. Carson confronts common problems in the historical analysis of Native peoples: how to allow for and capture concurrent transformations and stability in a given culture; how to emphasize individual agency and consciousness; and how to connect the Native peoples described in the accounts of explorers and early settlers with the late prehistoric Native societies known only through the archaeological record.

James Taylor Carson is an assistant professor of history at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario.

His articles have appeared in contributed volumes and in "Agricultural History", "Ethnohistory", and "Journal of Mississippi History".