![]() ![]() He connected people and commodities across territories by extracting news of high-demand ceremonial items from strangers. Prior to being taken captive, enslaved and baptized by the Spaniards, Perico had traversed the Mississippian chiefdoms of the southeast, suppling wealthy clients with goods like oyster-shell jewelry and copper disks. The boy was a nimble navigator, a skilled linguist and monger of gossip. In 1540, Perico, a Native American guide in the involuntary service of Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto’s invading army, met his limit. And in so doing, I stumbled upon the twisted route Americans followed to reach a moment when blue dots pulsating on miniature screens tell them where to go. By meeting distressed individuals teetering on the edges of the worlds they knew, I learned how people constructed their worlds and how these constructions changed over time. Over five centuries, North Americans traveled from relational space, where people navigated by their relationships to one another, to individual space, where people understood their position on Earth by the coordinates provided by mass media, transportation grids and commercial networks. ![]() ![]() I call this extreme version of getting lost “nature shock,” the title of my new book, and eight years ago, I set out to find the terribly lost in American history. However, every so often, people get utterly lost, so lost that they scramble their brains along with their bearings. A hiker backtracks to find a missed trail marker, or a driver rolls down a window to ask a pedestrian for directions to a certain street or landmark. Usually, these bouts of disorientation end happily enough. ![]()
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