Book Review: Chiefdoms, Collapse, and Coalescence in the Early American South; Tears of Repentance: Christian Indian Identity and Community in Colonial Southern New England

Faced with land pressures, depopulation, debt, cultural impositions, and a myriad of other challenges, Native Americans searched for ways to safeguard their families and communities. In Chiefdoms, Collapse, and Coalescence in the Early American South, Beck addresses a major historical development in the region that has captured the attention of archaeologists, anthropologists, and historians: the shift from a precolonial Mississippian world of chiefdoms to powerful Indian nations and confederacies by the eighteenth century. A professor of sociology at the University of Saint Joseph in Connecticut, and the author of several books on religious melancholy, Rubin brings a firm grasp of sociological and religious theory to the field of Native American history in Tears of Repentance: Christian Indian Identity and Community in Colonial Southern New England. Though Rubin\u27s use of sociological theory to explain Native engagement with religion is innovative, Edward E. Andrews\u27s Native Apostles: Black and Indian Missionaries in the British Atlantic World (2013) and Linford D. Fisher\u27s The Indian Great Awakening: Religion and the Shaping of Native Cultures in Early America (2012) provide greater depth in understanding the role of indigenous missionaries as cultural brokers and the selective engagement that Native communities had with Christianity in general