Description: A bold reconceptualization of how settler expansion and narratives of victimhood, honor, and revenge drove the conquest and erasure of the Native South and fed the emergence of a distinct white southern identity
Review Quotes: "The author details how violent encounters with Indians--and consistently one-sided white interpretations of these events--helped fuel Southern white identity and facilitate Indian Removal. Further, Nooe 'connects the dots' of white Southern attitudes about race, citizenship, and land rights. Why are some Americans so attached to Confederate iconography? Nooe demonstrates that the emotional/psychological connection began long before 1865. Aggression and Sufferings skillfully weaves all of these themes together."
--Robert M. Owens, author of "Indian Wars" and the Struggle for Eastern North America, 1763-1842
--Christina Snyder, Penn State University "Evan Nooe has written a powerful book. In focusing on how people gave meaning to violence, and used violence as a language in the Native South, Nooe gives us something new. He presents us with the clearest understanding yet of how Indigenous bodies (both real and imagined) figured in making a white and Southern identity. In fact, Nooe's careful reading of public commemorations, written memories, and a range of archival sources enables him to reveal how whiteness was constructed in the South through the brutalization of Indigenous bodies."
--Gregory D. Smithers author of Reclaiming Two-Spirits: Sexuality, Spiritual Renewal, and Sovereignty in Native America; Native Southerners: Indigenous History from Origins to Removal; and Indigenous Histories of the American South during the Long Nineteenth Century