Writing around a common set of topics, Paredes and his colleagues survey American Indian communities still surviving in the southeastern United States some 450 years after first contact with Europeans. Despite concerted government efforts in the 19th and 20th centuries to remove them, dozens of communities that can be described as "American Indian" survive - from Virginia to Florida, from the Atlantic seaboard to the Louisiana bayous. Although many have been studied ethnographically over the past century, this volume is the first comprehensive, scholarly work providing co-ordinated descriptions of these southeastern Indian communities as they near the close of the 20th century. North American Indians, although much changed, are not a "vanishing race" but are thriving - indeed, whether culturally conservative or almost wholly acculturated, it is in their very modernization that the Indian communities of the South most dramatically manifest their durable capacity for distinctive persistence. Contibutors include - Helen C. Rountree, Sharlotte Neely, Patricia Barker Lerch, Wesley DuRant Tauchiray, Alice Bee Kasakoff, Gene Joseph Crediford, Harry A. Kersey, Jr., J. Anthony Paredes, John H. Peterson, Jr., Hiram F. Gregory and George Roth.