History Is Lunch: Robbie Ethridge, “The Indian Slave Trade & Transformation of Native North America”

In her book From Chicaza to Chickasaw: The European Invasion and the Transformation of the Mississippian World, 1540-1715, Ethridge examines the period from first contact through the collapse of the pre-contact world and the restructuring of chiefdoms into coalescent Native societies in a colonial world.

“The commercial Indian slave trade that early Europeans brought to Native North America in the seventeenth century was a force of disruption to Native communities,” said Ethridge. “That slave trade, along with other historical forces, created large regions of instability that generated militarized Indian slavers and resulted in the migrations, extinctions, and coalescences of Native peoples across the Americas—and the transformation of that world.”

Robbie Ethridge is professor of anthropology at the University of Mississippi. She earned her BS, MA, and PhD in anthropology from the University of Georgia. In addition to From Chicaza to Chickasaw, Ethridge is the author of Creek Country: The Creek Indians and Their World, 1796-1816. She is co-author with Robert Miller of the forthcoming University of Oklahoma Press book A Promise Kept: The Muscogee (Creek) Nation and the End of the Trail of Tears. Ethridge is the editor of four anthologies and has written numerous articles and book chapters on the history and ethnography of Native peoples of the American South.

History Is Lunch is sponsored by the John and Lucy Shackelford Charitable Fund of the Community Foundation for Mississippi. The weekly lecture series of the Mississippi Department of Archives and History explores different aspects of the state’s past. The hour-long programs are held in the Craig H. Neilsen Auditorium of the Museum of Mississippi History and Mississippi Civil Rights Museum building at 222 North Street in Jackson. Signed copies of the book will be for sale.