The Lost Letter of Mary Ann Battis: A Troubling Case of Gender and Race in Creek Country

Abstract

Tiya Miles NAIS 1:1 SPRING 2014 88 Notes from the Field TIYA MILES The Lost Letter of Mary Ann Battis A Troubling Case of Gender and Race in Creek Country IN THE LATE 1990s, I was casting about for a dissertation topic in the subject area of nineteenth-century African American and Native American women’s history when I noticed a pattern of black women’s assertive activities in Muskogee Creek communities of present-day Georgia, Alabama, and Oklahoma. A few of the women who caught my eye moved out of slavery by marrying into Creek families. A couple of the women became hoteliers in Indian Territory at a time when neither Native nor white women were doing the same. And one of these women of African descent, a young adolescent, was distinguished as an extraordinary pupil at the first mission school in the Creek nation. I considered writing a dissertation about the composite experience of these African American women in the context of Creek society. However, upon realizing that the source material was extremely sparse, I set aside this topic and instead located my work within Cherokee society, where I concentrated on the experiences of enslaved blacks and Afro-Cherokee tribal members. Nevertheless, there was one person I had uncovered among the population of black women living in Creek communities who never left my imagination. This was Mary Ann Battis, a teenaged girl of Creek, black, and white ancestry, whose residency at the Alabama-based Asbury Mission School in the 1820s became a point of controversy for Battis, her family members, Protestant missionaries, and a U.S. Indian Agent. According to the Methodist administrators and teachers at the school, Battis chose to remain in the Southeast with them while her own mother, uncle, and siblings emigrated west with other Creeks during the Indian removal period. It took the intervention of Thomas McKenney, head of Indian affairs in the War Department, to settle the conflict. When I first encountered this story as a graduate student, it struck me as unusual that an Indigenous young woman would refuse the requests of her mother and uncle (who in Creek matrilineal kinship terms would have been like a father) to relocate with them in favor of staying behind with white mis- NAIS 1:1 SPRING 2014 The Lost Letter of Mary Ann Battis 89 sionaries. I pursued the matter and found that two historians had offered varying interpretations of Battis’s choice. Adele Logan Alexander, author of Ambiguous Lives, a lyrical history on free women of color in Georgia, had concluded that “Battis was raised a Christian and apparently felt a strong kinship with the settlers’ community because she remained at the Moravian [sic] mission near Milledgeville and chose not to go West when others in her tribe were forced out of Georgia.” In Alexander’s interpretation, Battis’s was an act of loyalty to “the missionaries who had raised her” and to “her own religious devotion.”1 Daniel F. Littlefield, a prolific chronicler of African American and Five Tribe Indian relations, argued in his book Africans and Creeks that Battis was a pawn in the political maneuverings between Indian Agent David Brearley, who was charged with overseeing Creek removal, and the missionary couple who had already lost students to this policy.2 While I admired the work of ­ Alexander and Littlefield, I was not fully satisfied with the explanations about Battis’s life that they had teased from the (admittedly) stingy historical record. Alexander had assumed an acculturative identity as the main push factor for Battis, while Littlefield had attributed the conflict to the white actors and allowed Battis’s own viewpoint to drop out of his analysis. I wondered at the time what might be uncovered about the intersectional dynamics of race, gender, and religion in Creek communities if Battis’s motivation were examined more closely. It would take more than a decade, though, for me to attempt such an examination. I have found through a renewal of my research on Mary Ann Battis that her story was even more unusual than I had perceived all those years ago—unusual enough for a key document in the case, Battis’s...