Creek Indians Research Articles

“Our Lands Are Our Life and Breath”: Coweta, Cusseta, and the Struggle for Creek Territory and Sovereignty During the American Revolution

Given the relatively sparse historical literature on the Creek Indians immediately before and during the American Revolutionary War, this essay is an effort to remedy such scarcity of scholarly attentions. It examines the competing political and economic interests of two Creek towns, Coweta and Cusseta, and their headmen prior to and during the Revolution. Due to the unprecedented economic and political dislocation engendered by the Revolution among indigenous communities, these two towns' leaders found themselves on opposite sides of the conflict. For the headmen and warriors of Coweta, their agitations for the protection of Creek lands and authority over their territories contrasted sharply with the interests of Coweta's sister town, Cusseta, whose headmen exhibited more pressing concern for the Euro-American trade along the “eastern path,” a diplomatic and economic path/relationship that sustained Creek livelihoods throughout the early to late eighteenth century. As a consequence, these two Creek towns and their populaces, who had historically enjoyed a unity of interests, witnessed the breakdown of their historical consensus as Coweta sided with the British in hopes of guaranteeing the integrity of their lands and territorial authority while Cusseta leaders joined the American war effort to ensure the continued viability of the eastern path. Coweta seems to evince the beginnings of a larger, maybe even national, Creek interest in lands and boundaries that Alexander McGillivray and later Creek leaders would espouse in efforts to create a Creek “Confederacy” to stem the tide of American expansion. Conversely, the Cussetas pursued a continued town-centric concern for trade and diplomacy rooted in the historical and political past that trumpeted town interests before any sense of a national interest.

Yuchi Indian histories before the removal era

Yuchi Indian Histories Before Removal Era. Edited by Jason Baird Jackson. (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2012. Pp. xxxiv, 246. $30.00, ISBN 978-0-8032-4041-4.) In Yuchi Indian Histories Before Removal Era, Jason Baird Jackson has brought together an impressive collection of essays to fill historiographical void on Yuchi history. Rather than depicting Yuchis as subset of Creek Indians as past historians and anthropologists have done, Jackson and other authors in this book argue that Yuchi cultural distinctiveness and political autonomy, both in past and in present, warrant recognition of Yuchis as separate people. This interdisciplinary collection, born out of 2004 panel on Yuchi history at American Society for Ethnohistory, presents theories on Yuchi history and culture from ethnologists, linguists, archaeologists, anthropologists, and historians. Seemingly spinning gold from straw, authors use close reading, careful analysis, and comparative perspectives to draw compelling evidence from sparse historical and archaeological record that Yuchis in eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were culturally distinct from their neighbors, resistant of political domination by other groups, and diplomatically connected within Southeast. Jackson argues that this investigation into the almost completely unexamined case of Yuchi people provides productive vantage point on ... broader questions of diversity in culture and political interactions in colonial Southeast, especially among native peoples (p. xv). Organized chronologically, chapters in this collection span from time in linguistic past around 4,000 B.C.E. to efforts to remove Yuchi Indians from Florida along with Seminoles during Second Seminole War (1835-1842). Building on each other's work, these scholars present synthesis of currently available on Yuchi Indians by teasing out brief references in historical documents and linking them to archaeological record to provide basis for further inquiry. By bringing together these ideas, this collection is intended to inspire what might become robust Yuchi national historiography, including monographs on Yuchi history and culture (p. xvi). As an interdisciplinary study, this book fuses together several approaches to Yuchis. While authors refer to one another and show awareness of how their ideas intersect, many of chapters retain disciplinary specificity and jargon that might not be easily accessible to readers who are not specialists in that field. Other essays make concerted effort to define terms for lay audiences. Mary S. Linn describes Yuchi as a language isolate seemingly unconnected to all other languages in Southeast and beyond (p. 1). Describing current state of efforts to detennine Yuchi's genetic relationships with other languages, Linn argues that innovative research might eventually reveal Yuchi's linguistic and deep historical roots (p. 24). Anthropologist John E. Worth notes how first historical reference to Yuchis in Juan Pardo's 1567 expedition through Southeast, when paired with later eighteenth-century sources, opens up possibilities for understanding Yuchi town locations and political standing among their neighbors before eighteenth century. …

Creek Paths and Federal Roads: Indians, Settlers, and Slaves and the Making of the American South (review)

Creek Paths and Federal Roads: Indians, Settlers, and Slaves and the Making of the American South. By Angela Pulley Hudson. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010. Pp. 252. Cloth, $65.00.)Reviewed by J. M. OpalThis book is a reminder of how a simple change in focus can illuminate a given place and time. Over the past ten years, the Gulf Coast region during the decades around 1800 has attracted new attention, especially by historians of slavery. The making of the deep south or cotton kingdom by enslaved black workers and their white masters now claims center stage in larger narratives of western expansion. Hudson's book offers a fresh glimpse of that vast and complex region by focusing on the ways its native inhabitants, especially the Creek Indians, moved through it. In other words, the book makes mobility and territoriality - the ways native peoples and their neighbors traveled through the country and understood their rights to do so - the central topics of inquiry. Who could move through Indian country, and according to what treaties, customs, or agreements? What did new roads and paths through that territory mean to young braves, opportunist chiefs, and American speculators, soldiers, and settlers? In addressing these questions, Hudson offers a compelling narrative of the Creek Nation from the 1 770s to the 1830s as well as a provocative interpretation of U.S. expansionism and regional politics during the early national age.Hudson's early chapters explore Creek understandings of the landscape and of the pathways leading through it. By the time of the American Revolution, an intricate network of paths connected the forty Upper Creek towns and twenty Lower Creek towns. Travel through the forests and along the rivers was essential to both the semi-nomadic, mixed economy of the Creeks and to their cultural and spiritual understandings of the land itself. While attempting to forge a more cohesive nation out of their largely noncoercive society (63), Creek headmen tolerated American travelers along their paths, if only because they were increasingly reliant upon credit, gifts, and supplies. Single white men were seen as innocent passersby. During the last two decades of the eighteenth century, however, Creeks encountered more and more family groups traveling along their roads, in some cases with slaves and in many cases in wagons that physically expanded the paths themselves. Such persons were obviously coming to settle, not to trade. Their appearance worsened or created divisions within the Creek population, with some arguing for a negotiated coexistence and others for a more radical break with white ideas, goods, and demands. This latter group noted that no treaty made with the Anglo Americans had yet restrained them from swarming into Creek hunting grounds and that any crime committed by a single Creek - a stolen horse or slave, for example - became the collective responsibility of the entire Nation, while American authorities shrugged off thefts or murders by white settlers as the regrettable actions of a few bad men.Among the many benefits of Hudson's approach is the view it offers of the new American state, which managed to infuriate borderlands elites for alleged partiality to Indians and to take a very active role in building roads through Creek country. Especially after 1805, when both the Creek and Cherokee leadership officially agreed to let American citizens freely pass through their nations, U.S. soldiers chopped down the trees and laid down the stones to connect the Tennessee settlements with the Carolinas and New Orleans. …

One Hundred Sixty-One Knots, Two Plates, and One Emperor: Creek Information Networks in the Era of the Yamasee War

Indian information networks crisscrossed the colonial Southeast. Operating outside European control and hidden from European eyes, these networks' existence and importance have been assumed but never fully explicated. This article explores some of these inter- and intra-Indian connections. Rooted in the Lower Creek town of Coweta and analyzing sources from the vantage point of Indian country, it shows some of the different ways in which Creek Indians remained informed of and connected to developments in the colonial Southeast. Exploring the networks forged by one particular Indian chief—Brims, Mico of Coweta—helps evince the breadth and extent of information channels among native people. The information networks linked, modified, and influenced by Brims show more than the movement of news; they offer insight into the power structures that shaped the colonial Southeast.

Response to Presidential Address

Response to Presidential Address

Colonial Georgia and the Creeks: Anglo-Indian diplomacy on the southern frontier, 1733-1763

Juricek understands the changing southern frontier in the mid-eighteenth century, and this seasoned historian has used his thorough knowledge of original texts and secondary sources to create a reliable narrative of lasting value. His readable book highlights the balance-of-power diplomacy of Brim and later Creeks, putting early Georgia relations with this powerful Indian nation into the wider context of Native American rivalries, European imperial competition, and the expanding world of Atlantic affairs.-- Peter H. Wood, Duke University. This detailed account of interactions between the English and the Creek Indians in colonial Georgia, from the founding until 1763, describes how colonists and the Creeks negotiated with each other, especially over land issues. John Juricek's deep research reveals the clashes between the groups, their efforts to manipulate one another, and how they reached a series of unstable compromises. European and North American Indian nations had different understandings of national territory. In Georgia, this led to a bitter conflict that lasted more than a decade and threatened to destroy the colony. Unlike previous accounts of James Oglethorpe's diplomacy, Juricek reveals how his serious blunders led directly to colonial Georgia's greatest crisis. In the end, an ingenious and complicated compromise arranged by Governor Henry Ellis resolved the situation, mainly in favor of the English. After spending more than twenty years gathering and editing documentary information on the treaties, Juricek is uniquely qualified to explain the legal and practical issues involved in the acquisition of territory by the British Crown and Georgia settlers at the expense of the Creek Indians. By focusing on the land issues that structured the treaties, he tells a cross-cultural story of deal-making and deal-breaking, both public and private

Sampling of Data Derived from Historical Documents in Anthropological Research

In response to Joshua Piker's (this issue) comment on our article (Foster and Cohen 2007), we point out that our article was a description of a test of a hypothesis. Piker's (this issue) criticism of our paper is grounded in the differences between historians and anthropological archaeologists. The historic literature that Piker (this issue) cited does not inform about whether or not Creek Indians hunted where we performed the sediment cores. It merely points out that Creek hunters may have hunted with greater frequency elsewhere. But that is irrelevant to our study, which tested whether the eighteenth-century deerskin trade increased the frequency of forest fires in a particular region. Archaeologists will benefit from using historical documents but archaeologists still have to be clear about the potential biases of those interdisciplinary data sources.

The color of land: race, nation, and the politics of landownership in Oklahoma, 1832-1929

This title presents the changing definitions of what it means to be Native American, African American, or white. The Color of the Land brings together the histories of Oklahoma's Creek Indians, African Americans, and whites into one story that explores the way races and nations were made and remade in conflicts over who would own land, who would farm it, and who would rule it. This story disrupts expected narratives of the American past, revealing how identities - race, nation, and class - took new forms in struggles over the creation of different systems of property. Conflicts were unleashed by a series of sweeping changes: the forced 'removal' of the Creeks from their homeland to Oklahoma in the 1830s, the transformation of the Creeks' enslaved black population into landed black Creek citizens after the Civil War, the imposition of statehood and private landownership at the turn of the twentieth century, and the entrenchment of a sharecropping economy and white supremacy in the following decades. In struggles over land, wealth, and power, Oklahomans actively defined and redefined what it meant to be Native American, African American, or white. By telling this story, David Chang contributes to the history of racial construction and nationalism as well as to southern, western, and Native American history.

Communications

Communications Rafe Blaufarb and Timothy M. Roberts To the Editor, In his review (JER, vol. 28, Fall 2008, 511–17) of my book, Bonapartists in the Borderlands (Tuscaloosa, AL, 2006), Dr. Timothy M. Roberts claims that I argue that the U.S. government supported the establishment of a small French settlement (the Vine and Olive colony) in the Alabama territory as “a front for covert military operations against the Spanish Empire” (514). He criticizes this view as both “unpersuasive” and “not plausible” (Roberts, 514). I agree that such an explanation is unconvincing. But it is not the one I advance in my book. What I actually argue is that, to the extent the colony served a military purpose at all, that purpose was defensive and dissuasive—“to act as a barrier against cross-border raids” mounted by Seminoles, escaped slaves, and others from the territory of Spanish Florida (Blaufarb, 53). But an even more important American aim in backing the colony was “to put additional pressure on Spain to resume negotiations for the sale of Florida” by demonstrating that “the prevailing demographic trends [in the Gulf Coast region] made it inevitable that the United States would eventually absorb Florida” (Blaufarb, 56). I elaborate at some length upon President Madison’s original idea “that Spanish Florida could be obtained through the weight of demography alone” and also upon his efforts to bring the bellicose General Andrew Jackson around to his point of view (Blaufarb, 56). None of this suggests that the U.S. government contemplated using the Vine and Olive colony for military action against Spanish Florida. Rather, I explicitly argue that the U.S. proceeded cautiously in this part of the world out of fear that too aggressive a policy toward Spain would provoke British military intervention—“renewed conflict with Great Britain was the last thing the United States needed” (Blaufarb, 71) Dr. Roberts also takes me to task for supposedly ignoring the fact that, after 1815, the U.S. government sought to “distance the country officially from assistance to Latin American independence and in particular to filibustering” (Roberts, 514). Roberts seems to have overlooked what I wrote on this matter. “Before 1815 first Jefferson and then Madison had come close to proffering recognition and even [End Page 187] sponsored filibustering expeditions against Spanish provinces. . . . But after the return of peace to Europe and the United States after 1815, a note of hesitation began to color American policy. President Madison signaled this shift with a proclamation delivered on 1 September 1815 prohibiting ‘illegal expeditions’ against the Spanish domains . . . Despite the difficulties experienced by the government in enforcing American neutrality, even within its own ranks, the fact that violations were increasingly exposed and sometimes prosecuted underlines the growing determination of the administration to proceed cautiously after 1815” (Blaufarb, 70–71). Dr. Roberts is right to question the notion that the Vine and Olive colony was founded as a filibustering base. But he is in error when he attributes such an interpretation to my book. Rafe Blaufarb To the Editor, I stand by my view that in his book, Bonapartists in the Borderlands, Rafe Blaufarb overemphasizes the purpose of the Society for the Cultivation of the Vine and Olive to solve Americans’ inability to intimidate Spain into conceding Florida. He writes, “By early 1817 the [U.S.-Spanish] negotiations had clearly reached a deadlock. . . . [I]n this ‘thickening atmosphere’ of diplomatic stalemate over Florida, Congress approved the Vine and Olive grant. . . . [T]he French settlement on the Tombigbee was intended to put additional pressure on Spain to resume negotiations for the sale of Florida. . . . [Andrew] Jackson approved wholeheartedly of these views” (56, 57). There was little sense in the Madison or Monroe administrations, however, that failure to achieve Spanish concessions represented a deadlock or stalemate soluble by taking land obtained from the Creek Indians out of the market for purchase by American citizens and giving it to French and Haitian Creole refugees. General Jackson supported the policy of President-elect Monroe of white settlement of this land, but merely reiterated his position at the time of the conclusion of the Treaty of Fort Jackson in 1814, that American security would be enhanced...

Black, White, and Indian: Race and the Unmaking of an American Family

Deceit, compromise, and betrayal were the painful costs of becoming American for many families. For people of Indian, African, and European descent living in the newly formed United States, the most personal and emotional choices-to honor a friendship or pursue an intimate relationship-were often necessarily guided by the harsh economic realities imposed by the country's racial hierarchy. Few families in American history embody this struggle to survive the pervasive onslaught of racism more than the Graysons. Like many other residents of the eighteenth-century Native American South, where Black-Indian relations bore little social stigma, Katy Grayson and her brother William-both Creek Indians-had children with partners of African descent. As the plantation economy began to spread across their native land soon after the birth of the American republic, however, Katy abandoned her black partner and children to marry a Scottish-Creek man. She herself became a slaveholder, embracing slavery as a public display of her elevated place in America's racial hierarchy. William, by contrast, refused to leave his black wife and their several children and even legally emancipated them. Traveling separate paths, the Graysons survived the invasion of the Creek Nation by U.S. troops in 1813 and again in 1836 and endured the Trail of Tears, only to confront each other on the battlefield during the Civil War. Afterwards, they refused to recognize each other's existence. In 1907, when Creek Indians became U.S. citizens, Oklahoma gave force of law to the family schism by defining some Graysons as white, others as black. Tracking a full five generations of the Grayson family and basing his account in part on unprecedented access to the forty-four volume diary of G. W. Grayson, the one-time principal chief of the Creek Nation, Claudio Saunt tells not only of America's past, but of its present, shedding light on one of the most contentious issues in Indian politics, the role of blood in the construction of identity. Overwhelmed by the racial hierarchy in the United States and compelled to adopt the very ideology that oppressed them, the Graysons denied their kin, enslaved their relatives, married their masters, and went to war against each other. Claudio Saunt gives us not only a remarkable saga in its own right but one that illustrates the centrality of race in the American experience.

Archaeology of the Lower Muskogee Creek Indians, 1715-1836

Archaeology of the Lower Muskogee Creek Indians, 1715-1836

Black, White, and Indian: Race and the Unmaking of an American Family. By Claudio Saunt. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. xii, 300 pp. Paper, $19.95, ISBN 978-0-19-531310-9.)

Writing family history, Claudio Saunt ruminates after attending a 2000 conference at Dartmouth College on black Indians, reveals that “African and Indian relationships are as fraught with tensions as those between Africans and Europeans” (p. 7). His subsequent research, more like walking barefoot through a field of cacti to characterize it bluntly, is a prickly foray into southwestern mixed racial history, chronicling five generations of the Grayson family. Saunt is well suited to this study. His earlier work, A New Order of Things: Property, Power, and the Transformation of the Creek Indians, 1733–1816 (1999), won the 2000 Charles S. Sydnor Award for the best book in southern history and the Wheeler-Voegelin Award for the best book in ethnohistory. Saunt's recent study, Black, White, and Indian, recieved the William P. Clements Prize for the best nonfiction book on southwestern America. The fractured Grayson family saga begins with Creek Indians tracing their ancestry to a Scottish trader and slave owner, Robert Grierson, who took a Creek wife, Sinnugee, and lived in the Creek nation. Their family of eight included daughter Katy and son William, both of whom had children by African American partners in the early nineteenth century, but Katy abandoned her mate and married a prosperous Creek named Tulwa Tustanagee. Her new family owned slaves and prospered. William, on the other hand, had seven children by an African American woman, worked for a decade to earn their freedom, and then moved his newly emancipated family to the Western Creek nation. Katy's family and their slaves removed to Indian Territory two years later, but the two branches of the family maintained strict separation. Reinforcing the division was an increasingly mixed Creek and white elite that realized that its “survival depended on carefully negotiating the racial hierarchy that formed U.S. policies and shaped American communities” (p. 215). Non-African Creeks positioned themselves over part-African Creeks under the plantation system and after Andrew Jackson's removal policies in the 1830s, as well as during the Civil War, Reconstruction, and allotment in the 1890s.

African Creeks: Estelveste and the Creek Nation (review)

2??8Book Reviews105 largely missing. Stanley Hordes's essay on New Mexico's crypto-Jewish population of course dedicates considerable attention to this area, but most other references to die region are only in passing, and the introductory essay represents a missed opportunity to reflect on this gap. The book's misleading map of New Spain contributes to this oversight, showing as it does the modern U.S. border with Mexico—and in the Soudi, the modern borders with Guatemala and Belize —as the boundaries of New Spain. Like these nations, New Mexico and Texas appear shaded so as to suggest their complete separation from New Spain; Florida and California are entirely absent. Still, this volume does a better job than many on New Spain in this respect as it devotes two sections to the frontier and includes perspectives from Baja California, Coahuila, and elsewhere. The strengths of diis fine volume, including its engaging scholarship, colorful stories, and topical breadth easily outweigh any minor shortcomings. Religion in New Spain represents a strong contribution to the field, with essays that are accessible , interesting, and wonderfully free ofjargon. Texas Woman's UniversityMartina Will de Chaparro African Creeks: Estelveste and the Creek Nation. By Gary Zellar. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2007. Pp. 368. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, index. ISBN g78o8o6i38i52. $34.g5, cloth.) In the past decade, scholarship on southeastern Indians has increasingly focused on the question of race and identity: When and why did Natives embrace or adopt Euro-American racial categories in their own ordering of society? In African Creeks, Gary Zellar focuses his attention on the post-removal reordering of the Creek Nation and makes two compelling claims. First, Zellar claims that for longer than previously acknowledged African Creeks successfully integrated themselves into the Creek Nation, a nation that repeatedly rejected efforts to connect race, identity, and citizenship. Second, rather than universalize his conclusions to account for all southeastern Indians, Zellar prudently explains diat this history of sustained toleration is exceptional to the Creeks. A single answer for the entire southeast, he claims, does not exist. Zellar begins his narrative with a brief discussion of Mississippian norms and pre-removal history, but the bulk of the volume explores the issue of citizenship in post-removal Creek society. For most of Zellar's assessment, Creek Indians emerge as a "tolerant" people who allowed Africans to live among them. Throughout the nineteenth century, Zellar claims that Estelveste (black people) were botii segregated from and integrated into Creek society. They forged "a separate African Creek identity within the confines of Creek Indian culture" (p. 32). With separate but integrated identities, African Creeks formed freed people 's towns almost immediately after they obtained their freedom. As much as these towns were independent, Zellar emphasizes that they were "firmly grounded in the Creek cultural milieu" (p. 114). On several occasions, Zellar reminds us that Creek behavior was abnormal ?o6Southwestern Historical QuarterlyJuly for its southern and southeastern Indian neighbors. Toleration may have existed among the Creeks, but this was not the case elsewhere. During Reconstruction, for example, U.S. senators were repeatedly frustrated by the actions of Creek Indians and African Creeks when they tried to treat African Creeks as freed people . At about the same time, violent confrontations repeatedly took place between African Creeks and Cherokee Indians, neighbors who "during the postwar period did not exhibit the fluidity and flexibility found in die Creek county" (P- 124). Zellar's study focuses primarily on the political and the public, as it follows the history of race and citizenship through the maze of late-nineteenth- and early -twentieth-century Indian history. Only through federal interference through the Dawes Act and die allotment of lands did this era of tolerance end. At the turn of the twentieth century African Creeks had "full political, legal, and economic rights as citizens of the Creek Nation." Yet, within a decade, "the foundation of those rights—Creek citizenship and the right to hold and improve any part of the Creek domain—was kicked out from underneath them in the guise of reform and progress" (p. 257). Jim Crow would thereafter structure Creek society . African Creeks emphasizes the formalist interpretations ofsources and...

Death and Dying in New Mexico (review)

?o6Southwestern Historical QuarterlyJuly for its southern and southeastern Indian neighbors. Toleration may have existed among the Creeks, but this was not the case elsewhere. During Reconstruction, for example, U.S. senators were repeatedly frustrated by the actions of Creek Indians and African Creeks when they tried to treat African Creeks as freed people . At about the same time, violent confrontations repeatedly took place between African Creeks and Cherokee Indians, neighbors who "during the postwar period did not exhibit the fluidity and flexibility found in die Creek county" (P- 124). Zellar's study focuses primarily on the political and the public, as it follows the history of race and citizenship through the maze of late-nineteenth- and early -twentieth-century Indian history. Only through federal interference through the Dawes Act and die allotment of lands did this era of tolerance end. At the turn of the twentieth century African Creeks had "full political, legal, and economic rights as citizens of the Creek Nation." Yet, within a decade, "the foundation of those rights—Creek citizenship and the right to hold and improve any part of the Creek domain—was kicked out from underneath them in the guise of reform and progress" (p. 257). Jim Crow would thereafter structure Creek society . African Creeks emphasizes the formalist interpretations ofsources and largely determines issues of identity through the legal issue of citizenship. Personal relationships and attitudes are largely overshadowed by political discussions, voting records, U.S. commission hearings, and public controversies. These discussions overwhelm the all-too-brief discussions of how African Creeks embraced or contributed elements of Creek culture or how they were actually integrated into the community. In this regard, Zellar's work differs from the studies by Claudio Saunt, Tiya Miles, Circe Sturm, and others who explore the intricacies of southeastern families with ethnohistorical evidence. Rather than attribute the CreekAfrican relationship to the widespread ethnic diversity within Creek society or to familial or clan ties, Zellar perhaps simplistically attributes it to Creek tolerance. Despite its shortcomings, African Creeks is a remarkably lucid, well-researched , and documented study that deserves the attention of southeastern Indian historians, as well as scholars of race, emancipation, and Reconstruction. Although it is certainly not the last word on the topic of Indians, race, and identity , it should help shape the future conversation. Florida Slate UniversityAndrew K. Frank Death and Dying in New Mexico. By Martina Will de Chaparro. (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2007. Pp. 286. Illustrations, figures, notes, bibliography , index. ISBN 9780826341631. $29.95, cloth.) Having suffered the untimely death of a loved one in early adulthood, Martina Will approaches her topic with a respectfulness that transcends this careful, lucidly presented academic study, the first to probe the subject in New Mexico. Her eye is on human beings as she relates telling anecdotes that put flesh (at 2??8Book Reviews107 least temporarily) on the numbers. Probing their emotions and practices surrounding deatfi, she illuminates people's lives, demonstrating time and again how in colonial New Mexico death possessed a meaning beyond the immediate loss it represented. On occasion, for example, dying New Mexicans reached out in their wills to free or bind the living, listing as property captive Indians (and their children) who had grown up serving their families, preferring because of antislavery legislation the more benign term criado (one who has been raised) to esclavo. At the heart of diis study are analyses based on the author's examination of 469 wills (overall, a very small percentage of Hispanic and Pueblo Indian New Mexicans made wills) and of thousands of burial entries in sacramental registers. These are informed by literature on death and dying from Spain, Mexico, and North America. Core chapters consider "The Good Death," "Releasing Worldly and Spiritual Concerns," "Rituals to Aid the Soul," "Treating the Physical Remains ," and "Exiling the Dead." Will writes with precision and wit as when referring to outsiders who imposed their alien funeral industry during the second half of the nineteenth century. Their names must have fallen clumsily off the tongues of Spanish speakers: Spiegelman, Deibyshire, Klattenhoff (p. 175). And, following David Weber, she provides in the notes Spanish transcriptions of every passage she has translated. Spanish...

Archaeology of the Lower Muskogee Creek Indians, 1715-1836 , and: Archaeology of the Moundville Chiefdom (review)

J U L Y 2 0 0 8 229 blossomed into full public view in the 1960s and continue to fuel a religious movement of Alabama Baptists looking toward the future. CHARLES A. ISRAEL Auburn University Archaeology of the Lower Muskogee Creek Indians, 1715–1836. By H. Thomas Foster II, with contributions by Mary Theresa BonhageFreund and Lisa O’Steen. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2007. xxii, 292 pp. $55.00 (cloth). ISBN 978-0-8173-1239-8. $32.95 (paper). ISBN 978-0-8173-5365-0. Archaeology of the Moundville Chiefdom. Edited by Vernon James Knight Jr. and Vincas P. Steponaitis. New edition. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2007. xxiii, 203 pp. $29.95. ISBN 978-0-8173-5421-3. These two recent publications by the University of Alabama Press bookend about eight hundred years of Southeastern Indian prehistory and history in present-day Alabama and Georgia. Archaeology of the Moundville Chiefdom is the paperback new edition of a collection of essays that were first presented in a 1993 symposium and subsequently published in 1998 by the Smithsonian Institution Press. At the time of their first publication, the essays constituted a new synthesis of Moundville archaeology which upended previous syntheses through the development of a new, finer chronology for the site. The model worked out in these essays still stands as the basic model for understanding Moundville. Editors Knight and Steponaitis offer the new model of Moundville in a well-presented chapter appropriately titled “A New History of Moundville.” They reconstruct the rise and fall of Moundville from its modest beginnings to its rise as a preeminent regional center by 1300, through its transition to a largely vacant ceremonial center and necropolis, to its occupation as a minor chiefdom in the sixteenth century prior to and during early European contact. The chapters that follow present the archaeological evidence that fills out some of the details of this reconstruction. Thirteen years after their first T H E A L A B A M A R E V I E W 230 presentations, it is clear that these essays not only charted new lines of archaeological inquiry about Moundville, but they gave this new research a solid framework upon which to build. In chapter two, for example, Steponaitis’s demographic analysis was integral to the development of the new history and it still provides the baseline sequence for the site. Knight, in chapter three, presents the reader with a “sociogram” of Moundville wherein he analyzes the layout of the mounds around the central plaza in terms of social organization. Knight’s social and symbolic analysis of Moundville’s monumental spaces has been and continues to be replicated by many researchers excavating other mound sites. In chapter four, Margaret Scarry examines the ordinary people of Moundville through an analysis of domestic spaces. Her emphasis on the nonelite is repeated by many archaeologists today who strive to understand the full suite of Mississippian citizenry. In chapters five and six, first Mary Lucas Powell and then Margaret Schoeninger and Mark Schurr examine the bioarchaeological data to assess how each transition in Moundville’s history had health and diet repercussions for both the elite and non-elite. Among other things, their studies conclusively showed that a heavy maize diet did not necessarily have ill effects on health, and the isotope analysis they used, considered cutting edge in 1993, is now standard procedure. In chapter seven, Paul Welch offers what at the time was a first look at other sites within the chiefdom over which the Moundville rulers held authority. Welch’s chapter inspired and continues to inspire many researchers to examine the outlying sites that comprise Mississippian chiefdoms. In chapter eight, Lauren Michals’s examination of the prestige goods found at the Oliver site first drew attention to the necessity for understanding the formation of Moundville—a research question being vigorously studied today. Obviously, this remarkable little book of eight essays not only revamped our understanding of Moundville, but, even more importantly, also challenged and continues to challenge archaeologists to look at Indian life during prehistoric times through a diachronic, historical lens. At the other end of our eight hundred–year history is H. Thomas...

Reviews

Reviews

A Probable Early 19th Century Coushatta Village Site on Big Cypress Bayou in Northeastern Texas

In February 2002, avocational archaeologists from northeastern Texas and northwestern Louisiana conducted archaeological investigations in an area along Big Cypress Bayou in Marion County, Texas, to search for and identify a pre-1841 Coushatta Indian village depicted on a 1943 General Land Office map. That map showed a "Coushatti" village with at least seven to eight structures (a common way at the time to indicate an Indian village, but not necessarily an accurate characterization of the number of structures once present at the site) near the confluence of Black Cypress Bayou and Big Cypress Bayou. This article describes the results of these archaeological investigations.. Other Alabama (Alibamu) and Coushatta (Koasati) villages have been documented in recent years through archaeological and historical investigations in the Caddo Lake and Red River areas of northeastern Texas and northwestern Louisiana. These villages were first established around 1803 or 1804 by these members of the Creek Indian confederacy who had moved or resettled as a group from the Alabama River area of east-central Alabama. The Alabama and Coushatta chose to resettle in traditional Caddo lands rather than "associate with the British and American traders and settlers who moved into Creek Territory after the French and Indian War, which ended in 1763, and the American Revolution".

Archaeology of the Lower Muskogee Creek Indians, 1715-1836

The Muskogee Indians who lived along the lower Chattahoochee and Flint River watersheds had, and continue to have, a profound influence on the development of the southeastern United States, especially during the historic period (circa 1540-1836). Our knowledge of that culture is limited to what we can learn from their descendants and from archaeological and historical sources. Combining historical documents and archaeological research on all known Lower Muskogee Creek sites, Thomas Foster has accurately pinpointed town locations discussed in the literature and reported in contemporary Creek oral histories. In so doing, this volume synthesizes the archaeological diversity and variation within the Lower Creek Indians between 1715 and 1836. The book is a study of archaeological methods because it analyzes the temporal and geographic variation within a single archaeological phase and the biases of that archaeological data. Foster's research segregates the variation between Lower Creek Indian towns through a regional and direct historic approach. Consequently, he is able to discern the unique differences between individual Creek Indian towns. Foster argues that the study of Creek Indian history should be at the level of towns instead of archaeological phases and that there is significant continuity between the culture of the Historic Period Indians and the Prehistoric and Protohistoric peoples.

Light on the Path: The Anthropology and History of the Southeastern Indians (review)

Light on the Path: Anthropology and History of the Southeastern Indians. Edited by Thomas J. Pluckhahn and Robbie Ethridge. (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2006. Pp. 283. Cloth, $60.00; Paper, $34.95.)Reviewed by Laurence M. HauptmanCharles Hudson of the University of Georgia has revolutionized our understanding of the American Indians of the Southeast. After the publication of his Southeastern Indians (1976), a groundbreaking ethnography, the eminent anthropologist transformed himself into the leading ethnohistorian of the region. Largely influenced by the Annales historians, he ambitiously delved into the study of the documents of early European explorers of the Southeast. In numerous writings that culminated in Knights of Spain, Warriors of the Sun: Hernando de Soto and the South's Ancient Chiefdoms (1999), he significantly revised the findings of John Swanton and other earlier scholars.Thomas J. Pluckhahn, an archaeologist at the University of Oklahoma and author of Kolomoki: Settlement, Ceremony and Status in the Deep South A.D. 350-750 (2003) and Robbie Ethridge, McMullan Professor of Southern Studies and an anthropologist at the University of Mississippi who previously authored Creek Country: Creek Indians and Their World (2003), have coedited ten essays delivered at a conference at the University of Georgia in honor of Hudson. Seven of the essays are by anthropologists, mostly archaeologists. Although there is much valuable information presented, the coeditors have not provided connecting links to the essays. articles jump in chronology and subject matter. Introductions to each of the essays would have made for a cohesive volume.In a fascinating analysis, The Cussita Migration Legend, Steven Hahn, a historian at St. Olaf College and the author of Invention of the Creek Nation, 1670-1763 (2004), explains the origins of the legend, first recorded at Savannah in 1735, that helped make the town of Coweta central in the Creek world. By positioning Coweta as the place of emergence, Chigelly, a Coweta with political ambitions, raised the town's importance in Creek history. To Hahn, in his careful study of mythmaking, Coweta was not an ancient town, but may have been an upstart migrant community.Theda Perdue, a historian at the University of North Carolina and author of Cherokee Women: Gender and Cultural Change, 1700-1835 (1998), discusses intermarriage. While the larger non-Indian world often viewed intermarriage as an impediment to the overall assimilationist goal of civilization, individual white men frequently saw the advantages of marrying into Indian communities because Indian women had considerable power when it came to land use and assured hospitality, friendship, and better trade opportunities. process bound these men economically, politically, and socially to these Indian communities, and, as Perdue points out, their allegiance shifted away from the Euro-American world. Although what Perdue writes is not new and conforms to other scholarly analyses focusing on French Canada, England, and the Plains, hers is a nicely presented case study.William Jurgelski's New Light on the Tsali Affair is based on the recent discovery of a document written by Nanih, Tsali's wife. Tsali is the culture hero of Cherokee resistance to the military's round up of the Indians before their forced removal west. Much of Tsali's life and actions are shrouded in mystery, which is not cleared up by the article. Jurgelewski, an anthropologist at the University of Georgia, suggests that the legend should not be dismissed so quickly by scholars.Two essays by archaeologists deserve special praise. Steven Kowalewski's Coalescent Societies focuses on the combining and recombining of southeastern societies after population collapse resulting from European contact. Kowalewski, a University of Georgia anthropologist and coauthor of Ancient Oaxaca (1999), shows some of what occurred: Chiefdoms became confederacies, the nature of myths changed, and the Green Corn Ceremony arose. …

A Conquering Spirit: Fort Mims and the Redstick War of 1813-1814 (review)

T H E A L A B A M A R E V I E W 304 A Conquering Spirit: Fort Mims and the Redstick War of 1813–1814. By Gregory A. Waselkov. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2006. ix, 414 pp. $39.95. ISBN 978-0-8173-1491-0. On Monday, August 30, 1813, a force of seven hundred Redstick Creeks attacked the fortified plantation home of Samuel Mims in the Tensaw District of the Mississippi Territory (now Baldwin County), killing five hundred men, women, and children. For Alabamians this event resonates as a turning point in the state’s early history. Gregory Waselkov’s exhaustively researched and eloquently written account of the Fort Mims massacre explains not only what happened but also why it occurred, and how it has since shaped American collective memory. “Remember Fort Mims” became the rallying cry of southerners during the War of 1812 and, as Waselkov insists, the event provided justification for the expulsion of the Native Americans from their territory to lands in the west. The events that climaxed in the 1813 attack at Fort Mims, as Waselkov illustrates, were more complicated than Indian reaction to white expansion . For more than a century the Creeks had adapted, preserving their independence by constantly reshaping their culture in the face of European encroachment. When the United States assumed control of the region in the 1780s, Creeks suddenly found that they had to adopt and refashion cultural elements to suit their needs while preserving their core beliefs, language, and customs. The rapid changes brought poverty and indebtedness to many Creeks and further accentuated differences between the Métis (those with Indian-white ancestry) and full-blooded Creeks. In 1811, Shawnee leader Tecumseh traveled south through the Creek country, encouraging a new pan-Indian religious, political, and military confederation. Tecumseh’s efforts revealed a social cleavage amongst the Creeks that erupted into a civil war between the conservative Redstick faction—called such because of their painted red clubs— and the faction that supported Creek assimilation into white culture. The Creek civil war between the two factions evolved into the Redstick War (Creek War) between the Creeks and the United States, which began with the attack on Fort Mims. The massacre of men, women, and children at Fort Mims generated American sympathy for a war against the Upper Creeks, the division of the Creek Confederacy situated along the Tallapoosa-CoosaAlabama river system. The states of Georgia and Tennessee, along with the Mississippi Territory, mobilized their militias for operations against the Redsticks, who in turn secured support from the Spanish in Florida and from British agents on the Gulf of Mexico. Andrew Jackson led the O C T O B E R 2 0 0 7 305 Tennessee militia south into Creek country, and, on March 27, 1814, defeated the Redsticks at Tohopeka (a fortified refugee town located along a horseshoe-shaped bend of the Tallapoosa River). The resulting American massacre of the Creek Indians at Horseshoe Bend seemed to balance the Creek massacre of Americans at Fort Mims. During the following weeks American troops swept through Creek country, destroying food supplies, detaining refugees, and tracking the Redsticks. By early August 1814, with their food supply exhausted and nowhere to hide, the Creeks signed the Treaty of Fort Jackson, relinquishing some twenty -three million acres of land in the Mississippi Territory (present-day Alabama) and Georgia to the United States. Many of the Creeks who evaded capture fled to Spanish Florida, where they joined the Seminoles and continued their struggle against American incursions. Fort Mims, Fort Dearborn (at the site of present-day Chicago), River Raisin (in southeastern Michigan), Hampton (in Virginia), Bladensburg (in Maryland), and Washington, D.C., all experienced defeats during the War of 1812. Yet those defeats are trumped by the victories at Lakes Erie and Champlain, at Baltimore, Horseshoe Bend, and New Orleans. Understandably, selective American memory highlights the victories and minimized the defeats. Thus Jackson’s victory on the plains of Chalmette overshadows the sacking of the capital city of Washington. But, as Waselkov emphasizes, the conventional Fort Mims narrative represents the attack as a sinister massacre of innocent Americans...