This article aims to contribute to the current understanding of how contact with and incorporation into the modern world-system may affect the trajectory of change among indigenous people. In order to understand deeply the process of incorporation and the current structural transformation, the author examines the following: (1) the nature of social organization among the various peoples known collectively as Mississippians; (2) the processes involved in the supplanting of their political, cultural, and economic structures during the sixteenth-century conquest; (3) the changes that occurred within the precolonial Mississippian cultures following their initial contact with European agents in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries; and (4) the impact of such changes on the Mississippian people's subsequent integration into the world-system. (Contains 128 notes.)