The First Southerners: Creeks and Cherokees in Early Georgia [Lecture]

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good morning can you all hear me okay there in the back okay well those of you who have had classes with me know that i can't walk and stand still at the same time so first of all i want to i want to thank the society for the the invitation i'm humbled by the turnout today i see current students and former students and i see friends from the faculty friends from the community uh friends from the highly competitive carrollton georgia 5k running scene um so i'm delighted i'm humbled by this turnout um so here we go uh for those of you who are here for extra credit write this down um if you're if your professors have asked you what you learned about uh during this talk today this is what you learned about i've made it easy for you so here you go um my talk today is about the first southerners um and i have to thank john for that title which is much better than the terrible academic title i gave him is much catchier so thank you for that um my talk today is is is is sort of to to hopefully give you guys an overview um of creek and cherokee culture in georgia these are groups many of us are familiar with as two of the five civilized tribes that may be the extent of our knowledge of creek and cherokee culture that's really probably all we learned about in high school so i hope to give you guys some more information today um but these are the three things that i hope you all take away in all syria in all seriousness um first of all uh creek and cherokee um who we probably know best uh sort of as they appeared in the 18th and 19th century in georgia those of you who have some familiar familiarity with with creek and cherokee culture that's probably what your mental template is you're probably thinking about what creek and cherokee looked like uh in the in the 18th and 19th century um hopefully we'll expand that a bit today but creek and cherokee share uh social and cultural and social institutions that go back several thousand years uh they go back until at least one thousand a.d um but however they used very different strategies um to adapt to the biological political economic and social changes of the colonial period so after the arrival of this of the spanish in the 1500s and then after the arrival of the french and english colonists all native american groups in in north america had to adapt had to adjust to this new landscape of extreme social and biological change people were with epidemic diseases they became a part of a new global economy these were incredible demographic economic biological social changes creek and cherokee adapted different strategies to adapt to these changes and that helps explain some of the similarities and differences in their culture in the 18th and 19th centuries and then finally you know perhaps the most important thing creek and cherokee are still here i hang out with them i received a text from a cherokee guy this morning giving me a hard time about my talk today um so i want you to sort of i hope this talk will also help dispel um any romantic ideas you might have about vanishing indians um creek and cherokee and other southeastern indians are very much alive and well today um i'd like i'd like to embarrass my students how many of my archaeology field school students are here will you guys raise your hands okay they're hanging out in the back um but my my archeology field school students have had have had the chance to work very closely with with members of the cherokee tribal historic preservation office they can certainly vouch for the fact that these folks have not vanished so that's our big our three take home messages today my talk today draws from several sources i put this up here in part to direct you guys to some reading those of you who'd like to learn more about greek and cherokee culture but i'm really drawing on my graduate training at the university of georgia where we sort of we draw heavily on charles hudson's seminal ethnographic work with southeastern indians um i'd also point you to rob robbie etheridge a great author on creek studies um theta perdue who's done excellent work on on on cherokee gender um and then barbara duncan and brett riggs have done fantastic work with with creek i'm sorry with cherokee archaeology and ethno history my work my talk today will also be drawing on uh original archaeological research that i've done i'll be talking about some of my own work and work that my students have done um and then also for for me about 10 years of experience now uh living and working in cherokee north carolina closely with the eastern family so this is a talk that draws from academic sources some original field research and also just my own really sort of cultural anthropology experiences living and working in cherokee um uh in my talk today i'll give you guys just a little bit of history about me a little bit of an introduction um i'll give a brief overview of uh cherokee creek geography culture and history so we're all on the same page and then i'll talk about archaeology um i'll talk about uh creek and cherokee origins you know when did those identities creek and and cherokee when did they develop how did they develop uh when did native americans first arrive in the americas to begin with right so some sort of deep we'll talk about the deep origins of creek and cherokee culture we'll talk about some of these shared cultural cultural traditions again while while creek and cherokee speak different languages um had very different strategies to adapt to the the social and economic changes of the colonial period um they share the these very deep uh cultural uh political economic traditions that they go way back in the southeast um uh and then i'll sort of end by just kind of reminding you that creek and cherokee are here today i'm going to point you to some creek and cherokee websites that are pretty cool so there you go um so how did i how did i grow up to become an archaeologist right dangerous stuff um when uh when i was an undergraduate at wake forest university um i couldn't get a spanish class my first semester and i took an anthropology class instead and like many of you i didn't know what anthropology was but i walked into my anthropology class and our professor was an ornery texan uh who wore western shirts and dirty jeans and boots every day when he came to class and and that was just i was like man this is it this is it this is what this is what i want to do i want to have a job where i get to be a social scientist but i get to work outside and i get to wear jeans to work my students don't recognize me today i don't normally look like this right but i did fall of my freshman year i was i was set on a dark dark path toward archaeology when i graduated in 2003 um i i began what i call my forest gump years where i just fell uh uh i just very fortunately fell into really really good archaeological projects i just landed on one really interesting archaeological project after another i worked as a contract archaeologist for a cultural resource management company that primarily worked in western north carolina and i had the very good fortune to work on projects collaborative collaboratively with the eastern band of cherokee indians so almost all of my archaeological experience professionally and academically has has been to work cooperatively uh with a native american group and that's really informed my archaeological career this is an article from american archaeology magazine in 2009 covering a huge archaeological research project in cherokee i was part of a team that excavated what became the footprint for the cherokee k-12 school complex it was a 40-acre excavation largest excavation in the history of north carolina we found over a hundred well-preserved woodland and cherokee structures um fascinating site but we also worked very closely with the with the tribe um this is a picture of uh the principal chief of the the eastern band of cherokee indians michelle hicks with tasha benishek our our project supervisor anthropologists and an archaeologist and and native americans have not always gotten along so well and there's a lot of good reasons for that frankly um but this is a and continues to be just a real touchstone a fantastic example of what good collaborative archaeology can look like so i was fortunate to be sort of raised in in in that that sort of collaborative tradition um uh and and i've been enough there i've been around enough there now that they may be the poster boy um for for cherokee archaeology um i i've developed a great relationship with eastern band um and this last summer i had the good fortune to take my students up there these are some shots of our our west georgia students working at our archaeology field school in cherokee north carolina they're working side by side with enrolled members of the eastern band like my friend beau carroll here who is our our field supervisor in addition to learning archaeological field methods such as excavation survey with a laser transit we also had the opportunity to to speak with and learn from cherokee elders like jerry wolf jerry wolf is a cherokee beloved man that's sort of the the the most revered status a male cherokee can attain in cherokee culture he's also a world war ii vet he was a d-day um really really interesting guy but but jerry actually lived up the hill from the site we were working on um and he would just come by and talk to us sometimes um and so this was a really remarkable experience for for me and my students but this is this is the kind of work i do now um another shot from our field school uh again um sort of showing this this collaboration our our site was open to the cherokee community um here we have cherokee visitors being led by um uh one of our archaeological volunteers this is damon allen damon's a member of the eastern band he's actually a high school student but he does he does archaeology every summer and he would lead site tours for us and stuff and here are our uh our our dirty field school students you know they're really doing archaeology so um that's sort of just sort of how i got here and what i'm doing today um so to really do to really get into the talk now i want to begin by giving sort of an overview of creek and cherokee uh history and geography and culture for some of you uh who have an interest in this stuff it may be review um for a lot of you this may be the first you've ever heard of this so if you're here for extra credit write this stuff down too there you go okay um when many of you think about about creek and cherokee culture in georgia you may think about some of the perhaps famous individuals creek and cherokee individuals from the 18th and 19th century um how many of you are familiar with willman william mcintosh right there you go okay right very good so william mcintosh was a um a a creek indian chief who in 1825 was part of a small group that signed a treaty with the u.s illegally um uh without the authorization of the rest of the the the crete confederacy um giving away lots of land he was very much murdered he was murdered many times murdered um for doing that and i'll explain why here in in a minute um barry musgrove was a a vital was um also creek a vital player in the founding of savannah um was an important diplomat in uh native american and colonial relationships in savannah john ross of course was the chief of the the cherokee nation during removal uh during 1838 and tried uh tried uh using diplomatic and legal recourses to to keep the cherokee in their native homeland um the cherokee actually had a constitution uh that the u.s supreme court acknowledged and that the state of georgia refused to acknowledge and that andrew jackson openly uh openly defied uh by sending them to removal so thanks andrew jackson okay um and we have here also again images you may have as the cherokee cabin photographed in 1888 um showing cherokee as they begin to take on certain elements of european and american culture log style cabins and western dress but still practicing native land use practices they're growing corn beans and squash in an inter-cropping pattern right by their household they're still pounding pounding maze in the old-fashioned way there you go some more sort of famous individuals you might be aware of nancy ward very famous cherokee beloved woman a beloved woman is an honorary title among the cherokee she was born in shota in tennessee among the over hill cherokee her travels took took her to to georgia where she fought at the at the battle of taliwa against greek picked up her brother's rifle when he was shot uh wasted a couple of creeks um and uh you know rose to prominence as a cherokee war woman uh stickamafuchi famous creek leader and then this great image that i've seen plastered all over west georgia i mean the region like i saw this in sandy springs the other day with our kids um this is a picture of three cherokee chiefs who in 1762 actually traveled to uh to london traveled to england um as the british and the and the cherokee were making allegiances so perhaps you guys are familiar with some of these famous individuals um this is a map from the smithsonian's handbook of north american indians that shows sort of the territorial extent of the crete confederacy and the cherokee the cherokee territory in the 18th century you have to take maps like this with a grain of salt during the colonial period territorial boundaries controlled by native american groups were changing quite a bit but in general this gives us a pretty good idea of where the creek and cherokee were living in the 18th century um and you may notice right off the back right off the bat that the creek confederacy is very large right i mean it's a large huge territory extent much of most of alabama um quite a bit of of west georgia as i'll explain in some more detail the crete confederacy is a really large multi-ethnic multi-uh lingual group of people the creek confederacy is essentially made up of native americans who had survived wars with the british in the early 1700s who came together roughly around columbus georgia and formed a confederacy formed a sort of coalescent society of refugees they created this new culture they created this this new political organization um in the uh in the 18th century so it's it's the 18th century when when the creek as we know them are sort of born um the cherokee in the 18th century still controlled uh much of their ancestral territory in western north carolina northern georgia northern south carolina east tennessee for the cherokee there's there's more cultural continuity um they actually were able to to maintain territory that they had controlled for for thousands of years um that that's that cherokee identity in a sense is a little bit older than than the creek identity um but they're both representing these sort of um groups that are adapting and surviving in the face of the colonial encounter i have to make i have to put more text up for the creek because it's more complicated i don't remember the stuff as well so you have to forgive my on my text here um but again we can we've got this map here showing the two major um uh uh divisions of the creek in their their their the territories they controlled um in the 18th century there were two groups of creek the upper creek and and the lower creek the upper creek were centered on the tallapoosa river in alabama uh the lower creek were censored sort of around columbus georgia on the chattahoochee river an anthropologist and archaeologists have again referred to the creek as a coalescent society uh the the best way the simplest way to think about creek identity is that this is a huge group made up of people who who share a lot of common cultural traditions of southeastern indians who came together as sort of refugees and formed a confederacy as a way to sort of create a political and military and economic unit that could compete with other groups like the cherokee and also compete and deal with groups like the the british and the french that make sense to you guys so you have all these refugees of war kind of coming together forming a new society based on older cultural and social institutions why do we call them creek it actually obviously creek is in english is an english word and it was the word that english colonists living in south carolina used for the native americans who are living near macon georgia how many of you have been to okmulgee on the making plateau site right okay so that was also a trading post um much of the crete confederacy takes up residence there in macon georgia in the late 18th century um uh and yes late 18th century um and it's there they get that name creek indians that sticks um the creek again we have the upper the upper creeks along the coosa tallapoos and alabama rivers the lower creeks on the chattahoochee river they uh they all spoke muskogen languages but they all spoke different but mutually intelligible muskogan languages so the cousin creek are speaking in slightly different language than uh the tallapoosa creek who are speaking in slightly different language than your your coweta creek a very complex kind of cultural uh configuration here the cherokee on the other hand have sort of uh deeper roots at least sort of spatially have more people who are sort of stayed in the same place with the same amount of time in the 18th century we have good documentation good historical and archaeological documentation that the cherokee lived in five groups of of towns uh in the southern appalachian mountain region uh down here in in south carolina and into georgia a little bit um right on the savannah river we have the lower towns moving into north carolina along the valley river we have the valley towns um the middle towns if you've ever driven up 441 along little tennessee river from say dillard georgia up into franklin north carolina you have driven through the middle towns i mean you are right there you are in the middle towns um the out towns today uh represent um uh settlements along the tuckasege and it kinda lefty rivers um uh cherokee north carolina is located right here near danuni uh the mount of gdua is where the cherokee emerged from in in their oral tradition so these out towns are very very central to the cherokee and then in the 18th century cherokee actually moved over and took over four former settlements here on the other side of the of the the mountain in what became called the the overheal towns these are all well documented in the 18th century around 1760 1775 the british and the emerging american military wages a series of really really brutal campaigns against the cherokee the cherokee towns are completely burned twice most of them are burned around the 1760s and again right around 1776. the cherokee in response move out of their ancestral territory and down into georgia so this cherokee nation uh around nuachota and this cherokee settlement in northwest georgia is later and relatively short-lived phenomena they're not actually here around new echota for all that long so say around 1775 1780 uh cherokee start moving down south to to avoid that uh to sort of recover from those british attacks um some folks go to east tennessee with their kin but quite a few folks moved down here and and new new echota um the cherokee nation is a is a coherent nation from 1819 until 1838 when we have the uh the removal act and the removal of the indians so again that presence there in georgia around new york uh very important but actually a relatively short-lived phenomenon historically and archaeologically speaking so that's the creek in the cherokee in the 17th and 18th century in the 19th century that's how most of us think about creek and cherokee but where do they come from in the first place and i'm going to go way back here i'm going to go back about 15 000 years to when native americans first come to to north america and i'm going to borrow this great one-liner from a wearing speaker we had we had visitors 2000 in 2012 dr ted gable at texas a m university um and he reminds us that the uh the north north america um so our continent um was was populated around 15 000 years ago from siberia not iberia so um there there uh there are some folks who argue that that you know native americans may have have come over from um uh uh europe from the atlantic coast and there's a solution hypothesis that says that clovis points look like european points and there's really no good evidence for that it's a bunch of huey there you go what we know from all the genetic all the genetic and all the archaeological data uh point clearly to north america being populated by a group of basically siberian immigrants who are chasing big game on foot and probably also on sea coming over by boat um they come into the americas we now have good genetic evidence showing that most native americans are part of this this first migration probably around 15 15 000 years ago we can see that in the in the haplogroup markers there's also another genetic wave of later groups that come in and populate alaska it looks like so we know that 15 000 years ago give or take this is where native americans come from they they bring with them and create a clovis technology a remarkably effective big game hunting technology this is the end of the ice age these guys are hunting mammoth and mastodon hard way to make a living but they're doing it they're doing it well um the clovis horizon and my colleagues my colleagues in the anthropology department dr smallwood and dr jennings are experts in clovis if you want to have them for another one of these talks it should be really i'll make a plug for ashley and tom um they can tag team it it'll be fun there we go but they brought this big game technology and very quickly native americans filled up our continent at the end of the ice age as the big game die off people begin to adapt their hunting technology um to to smaller game white-tailed deer replaces mammoth and mastodon as your primary protein source people are hunting smaller game and we begin to see changes in projectile point technology as people are moving away from from clovis spears uh to to to throwing and thrusting spears they're a little bit smaller people begin to take advantage of local raw material and archaeologists can use these changing projectile point styles to uh to understand changes in subsistence and behavior but they also change over time in a predictable way so we can use them to date archaeology sites so how many of you have ever found arrowheads when you're out like walking fields and collecting stuff right so those are valuable to us as archaeologists as ways to understand subsistence and also understand uh when places were being populated and here in around carrollton um by 8 000 years ago we've got a really healthy population of hunter-gatherers by 3 000 4 000 years ago we basically have almost sedentary hunter-gatherers who are setting up shop if you find these little sort of small triangular projectile points in your backyard those are called moro mountain points and they're extremely common because people were just all over the place here three thousand four thousand years ago technologies continue to change we see the invention of container and cooking technology here in the southeast during the late archaic period about 4 000 years ago people make soapstone bowls for indirect heating and we get the invention of pottery around 2500 bc here here in georgia pottery is first made with fiber temper and and the first ceramic type we identify in the southeast is actually from georgia stallings island georgia stallings island pottery so claim to fame for us here in georgia we've got the first pottery by 500 bc um populations are expanding people are becoming more and more sedentary they're beginning to do some sort of beginning beginning agriculture horticulture and we see native american groups across across the uh the eastern woodlands getting involved in long distance trade and exchange these are not isolated little populations just living in their little hamlets these are people who are exchanging information and exchanging goods over huge huge distances the hopewell phenomenon is this regional trade network centered around ohio that expands down into into parts of georgia and much the southeast here in georgia people were making really beautiful pottery and trading it up into ohio in exchange for for different kinds of stone sources so native americans here were never never isolated um they didn't have the internet but they were connected right i mean they had social networks and social networks there weren't things like twitter social networks were things like you were trading micah for for pottery and and getting involved in these really regional uh regional interesting regional exchange networks um but the real the real roots the places where archaeologists can can really begin to see um uh these these first glimmers of what would become creek and cherokee culture happened during what archaeologists call the mississippian period and the mississippian period across the southeast so i'm talking here about everything uh east of the mississippi and and south of say you know virginia or so um is this period of time that dates from about 1000 a.d until about 1600 about contact with the spanish when native american populations in in the southeast begin living in centralized villages they begin building platform mounds as central places to mark their to mark their territories and also to serve as platforms for the house of of elite chiefs begin living living on top of houses and it's during this time in the southeast when we actually see the rise of quite a bit of social inequality uh a lot of political centralization um and a lot of hierarchy there are haves and have-nots it's not as bad as the one percent and there aren't like in there aren't like you know there's no warren buffett or anything like that but we are beginning to see that you know uh political centralization um uh one person in in charge of other people uh people that have power over over life and death and economic inequality emerging during this time period and a set of rituals and beliefs that become widely shared across the southeast um and that form the the sort of basis if you will of a lot of really important creek and cherokee cultural uh practices and to illustrate what the mississippian period looks like i'm going to use a convenient example about one one hour north of us which is the the etowah mound site how many of you have been to etowah oh excellent very good do they make you go in fifth grade do you like to they they should if they don't right okay so we'll take a look here at at the site of etowah um ottawa is occupied for actually longer than this but it reaches its peak around 1200 or 1350 a.d between 1200 and 1350 a.d edible was the center of a large polity the center of a large chieftain there would have been a chief at etowah who was in control of a territory roughly one day's walk in diameter so as far as you could walk in in about you know four hours or so uh you know moving in a good clip that was uh that was the extent of of of the the chieftain at ottawa um that's a pretty big distance geographically um there are three large mounds at edward if you've been uh mound a b and c a large plaza area this is a highly organized architectural plan um full of sort of symbolism much of which was aimed at sort of uh um asserting the status of the chief nice overhead view there if you haven't been to the site there's actually a really big fish weir at etowah um people would trap fish there that help feed the population um also lots of great farmland where they would have farmed their corn and nearby forests for hunting hunting whitetail deer archaeologists have reconstructed the the growth of etowah it begins as a relatively modest mound site with some public buildings out in the plaza area um and grows into a fortified site with a large a large ditch surrounding the site uh for defensive fortification um formal plaza mounds for the chief to live on i mean really really impressive um very sort of hierarchical site here artist reconstruction of edo and it would have been a booming a booming metropolis of sorts and some pictures of daily life there crowded bustling place kids and dogs running around etowah is famous for for two marble statues these are actually carved out of marble um local georgia marble and that were that were carved and painted um representing uh a male and female figures um these were found sort of buried haphazardly in a mound it's thought that that the last chief of ettawa may have come to a violent end the site may have actually been attacked and the temple mound may have been sacked by by another um another chieftain that's a possibility there's lots of warfare in the mississippi period but we can get a sense of what these folks look like and these are thought to carry some cosmological meaning as well okay many famous artifacts from from etowah include um this this cold hammered copper plate um of what what archaeologists call an eagle dancer or a falcon warrior um cold hammering copper is no joke that's not easy this is really skilled craftsmanship we're looking at um and and these copper plates from etowah also carry with them um important images sort of explaining and showing symbolism for uh for the native americans who live there um much of the iconography on this on this plate falls under a set of related icons that we call the southeastern ceremonial complex things like a forked eye motif around the eye this guy is carrying a mace he's got a headdress he's holding a severed head there showing his status and power as a warrior so we have a lot of information about about these religious and cosmological and social ideas from the mississippian period they carry over into creek and cherokee culture and during the 16th century so when the spanish arrive you know we have these great accounts from spanish explorers like like desoto and juan pardo and what they're encountering as they move through the southeast as they move through georgia are these very politically centralized chiefdoms what this map shows is mound sites with the the dots here mound sites the shaded in circles of the territories they controlled in the 16th century when desoto was coming through desoto encountered and recorded um the chieftains of akuti and kaffetachiki and also kusa for good measure i put the cherokee up here as well he actually does an end around around cherokee territory and doesn't run into these guys but he hears about the chalaki he hears about the cherokee here in the in the 16th century um this is the landscape that desoto encounters um very different kind of social organization and political organization than we're going to see with the creek and cherokee i mean these are very powerful very centralized hierarchical uh political entities i mean the the the paramount chieftain of coosa um which was actually centered uh in in floyd county georgia i mean covers a huge territory i mean all the folks that lived here would have declared allegiance to cusa they would have considered that their their chieftain their polity very centralized political organization in the 1500s and up until about 1700s we then enter with what some archaeologists have labels rather pessimistically the forgotten centuries this is a period of time we don't have historical records um the spanish leave uh it's a while before the english come back in and sort of set up shop again and so we have this period of a little over 100 years we don't know much about how native american culture is changing in the southeast it's one of the things that we're most interested in as archaeologists because we know what it looks like when desoto is here in 1540 we have these very hierarchical politically organized socially unequal chiefdoms and then we know what things look like in the 18th century we know what the creek and cherokee look like they're actually more egalitarian people have more uh political autonomy there are some different social and cultural institutions um uh much of my research like pretty much every other southeastern archaeology who works in the contact period is focused on is trying to figure out how societies are changing during during these years this is a crucial time period so for those of you who are interested in this uh you know students who who want to go on to graduate school i mean this is still a really active area of research many of us are trying to figure out you know what's going on during this time and we can use archaeology to do that we don't have historic records but people are still leaving behind material records of their their past behaviors and we can try and understand this this really important period of time as native american communities adapt to and respond to epidemic diseases and warfares they they build on older social and cultural institutions but they're creating new societies they're creating new social formations um by the time the british arrive and begin writing things down again in the 1700s so to bring us back to the 18th century we've got our map here we've got the you know creek confederacy um again this is the the 18th century landscape large sprawling uh creek confederacy um and the smaller sort of more centralized cherokee territory what are some shared cultural traditions traditions well in the 18th 19th century there are some really interesting similarities between the creek and cherokee that point to their common cultural origins in the mississippian period what we see instead of chiefdoms and instead of these really centralized polities are groups of towns people declared allegiance to to groups of towns so if you were a cherokee in the 18th century and somebody asked you where you were from you would say i'm from bird town or i'm from kuala town or i'm from teleco or i'm from qantasy you would associate with your town above that you would associate with your group of towns i'm from kwanasi in the valley towns i'm from the quasi in the in the middle towns and so for cherokee and for creek alike their real political and allegiance was to their town group the europeans couldn't stand that first of all there's no there's no chief you know like when the aliens arrive and say take me to your leader there is no leader right leadership is by council uh by head men who don't have much authority so things are things are not like they used to be there's no one creek king there's no one cherokee king this crazy scot alexander arrives in cherokee country in the 1700s and tries to create a cherokee emperor he like names a cherokee emperor and nobody takes them seriously because it's stupid they don't they don't do it that way right okay so you have you know a lot of political autonomy people are loyal to their town to their group of towns when cherokee and creek are dealing with the english and french they're concerned about their town how will trade with the french affect my town not the whole cherokee nation not the whole creek nation and that makes political negotiation really interesting and very difficult um there's a matrilineal kinship system and a clan system this is a very old social institution for the for the creek and cherokee um you reckoned dissent along your mother's line it didn't mean you didn't know who your dad was and you didn't like him i'm sure you liked him very much but but but in terms of your kinship you reckon you're just sending your kinship through your mother's line when a young couple was married um a man would go and live with his wife's family um there's some suggestion this may have actually been a really good kind of way to integrate society because men are jerks and they're always starting trouble they're always starting fights in warfare so when you take the jerks and you put them all in their wives family's houses it keeps them under control a little bit and it and it keeps them from going to war with other towns in the same town unit because they don't want to start a scuffle with their brother right so there's actually it's a useful thing there and there's a clan system people would identify with different clans that helped integrate these different towns there's rules of marriage that help integrate these towns strong a strong division of gender roles that are tied to a kind of cold season and warm season tradition men primarily hunted and went to war those were male activities that you did mostly in the winter time women primarily farmed those are more sort of warm season activities this this was a really important component of gender identity for creek and cherokee what you did was a really important part of your gender the american government never got this and they were really trying to shove euro-american styles of farming on the creek and cherokee where you make the man a yeoman farmer right you make the man the head of household and he's a farmer and the men are saying that's women's work what in the world you know you want me to farm corn you know and women are saying hey you're taking away my subsistence base what's wrong with you you know so so of course that was disastrous but there you go um blood revenge and a style of warfare called cutting off warfare um in traditional creek and cherokee culture and we think this goes back to the mississippian period um if a member of your your clan or your town was killed um you had the right and the obligation to go kill um a member of the offending clan or their town and then it was done then it was over there was not this kind of european total warfare the idea for for creek and cherokee the idea of like burning down a village or totally obliterating in other people was just insane you didn't do that if somebody had a beef with you you went and you you killed them and then it was done it was over and and every year there was there there was an annual ceremony called the green the green corn ceremony where all outstanding debts were forgiven and resolved and it really limited violence in these societies warfare was was conducted in the in the cutting off manner kind of ambush warfare small parties going out for war it was an important part of male identity it was an important part of status achievement it was only to achieve status as a male um but it was not this kind of total warfare and so creek and cherokee were just when they encountered europeans who burned down villages and killed women and kids they said what in the world is this this this is not right right okay um and then in terms of cosmology and belief system there there is a notion that things need to be in balance the the maintaining balance is important uh that the world is is made up of three parts and upper world where there are supernatural beings uh this world where we live uh in the lower world you enter the lower world by the way um uh through water or whirlpools or caves and tunnels and so that's where the scary things live uh is down there um uh and and creek and cherokee sort of shared that tradition um we look in the 18th and 19th century the creek and cherokee are adapting different strategies to to try and create coherent societies in the face of colonialism the creek this big multi-ethnic uh multilingual community keep in mind you're bringing in people who speak different languages who have some different cultural traditions develop a lot of new kinds of social institutions so we can look for example at architecture this is a mississippian period mound and plaza complex it's the one in etowah you've got a large mound a large open plaza area domestic habitation surrounding it the creek creates something different called the square ground it's this sort of rectangular plaza um within a small set of of square buildings in a circular building it evokes the mound and plaza complex a little bit but it's kind of a new thing um the cherokee maintain a more traditional kind of look they have a townhouse that is really i think a representation of that mound it's still elevated a little bit and then a big plaza area and then you're surrounded by habitation sites or habitation residences dwellings so creek are sort of inventing some new ideas about architecture and about society uh whereas cherokee who've been able to maintain their land base for longer are kind of drawing on these deeper memories uh this kind of deeper sense of cultural identity to integrate their communities a few other kind of point-by-point comparisons we can make and i think i've hit most of these but again just to reiterate um the as they're trying to to survive and and thrive in the face of the colonial encounter in the 18th century um the creek have this big consent confederacy a multilingual multi-ethnic group um the cherokee are still in their groups of towns where you have a lot of cultural continuity where you probably have some of the same people who have survived the epidemics of the 1600s 1700s and are still maintaining their their ancestral territory the creek really try to to go to war um to defend their territory they try to go to war with the british and the americans and how many of you are familiar with the red six war so history majors in the house yeah there you go okay so the creek are really divided uh as to whether to try and negotiate with the british and american governments or go to war um there there is sort of an outbreak of the civil war among the creek the red sticks are the ones who want to go to war the white sticks are the ones who don't um and the creek really take the fight to the new colonial governments and and unfortunately are are not successful the cherokees see this happening and they say okay we think we're not going to try the violence route we think this is not working so the cherokee really try and use diplomacy to maintain their ancestral lands the cherokee very in a very adaptive way take on a lot of elements of european government they create a constitution they develop a legislative branch and executive branch they draft a constitution down here in georgia up in north carolina the eastern band who are i think the most politically savvy group of people i've ever met in my entire life the eastern band decided to become north carolina citizens to stay in the state of north carolina and they very carefully negotiate with the state of north carolina to maintain their lands they are not on the same page as these guys down in georgia they are not on the same page they are negotiating very carefully in their own backyard to try and keep their ancestral lands and they are ultimately successful in doing that which is which is just remarkable um the treaty of indian springs in 1826 which which macintosh signed um uh uh sort of paves the way for creek removal and the treaty of new echota um uh which the sort of infamous treaty party signs without cherokee consent in 1835 paves the way for the removal of of the cherokee um what we see again just to recap here though is this kind of selective adoption of european culture and political organization uh the cherokee especially are very savvy they sort of take on some elements of european governmental organization while maintaining a lot of their own cultural identity there's always this balance between warfare and diplomacy um uh and and the creek sort of try first to go with warfare and ultimately don't don't do quite as well as the cherokee along with diplomacy and we have this sort of broader theme also of on the one hand developing new social institutions um uh to integrate newcomers to develop a new society versus falling back on on sort of social memory and cultural continuity to maintain a sense of identity um in the face of these dramatic changes um but i want to close you know i want to close with with this important fact which is that renew removal was not the end of creek and cherokee culture so in 1838 creek and cherokee and other southeastern indians are removed from the southeast on the trail of tears and that's often where in our history books the story kind of ends that's where we stop talking about these cultures but of course they persist on the creek and the cherokee and other southeastern indians form new governments in oklahoma in indian territory which are successful and continue to persist today the eastern band of chiari stay in their homeland in north carolina and are still there today this is a shot from the conference of the leaders of the united southeastern tribes in washington dc so here are creek and cherokee and choctaw and chickasaw and seminole representatives there in our nation's capital advocating on behalf of their their people um cherokee today um uh really have this the this uh deep appreciation for their their culture and their heritage um but they're also very much modern people living in the modern world um here's chief hicks looking very dapper in a suit um along with the uh the warriors of anika dua this is a traditional cherokee dance group that reenacts cherokee dances keeping these cultural traditions alive and you should check out the muskogee creek nation website it's pretty slick you can learn about muskogee creek tradition and heritage um uh current events scholarships for chair for uh for for creek students likewise the eastern cherokee uh have their own website as well um they have helped you know head start programs for their kids healthy choices programs going on so these are very living vibrant communities you can get to cherokee in about three and a half hours go check it out there's a great museum it's a good place to visit go eat at paul's diner get the trout that's really good okay um and again in closing for those of you who are interested in learning more about these topics um i would start with with charles hudson and then his students charles hudson robbie ether cedar perdue barbara duncan and brett riggs all excellent ethno historians who can provide you with excellent good information about about southeastern native americans and if you want a really really uh stirring read i tell folks who want to learn about southeastern if you can only read one book if you can only read one book read knights of spain warriors of the sun by charles hudson it's a reconstruction of the desoto expedition using archaeology and ethno history to try and just paint this portrait of what the southeast looked like between 1500 and and 1800 absolutely fantastic read so check that out that's all i've got i did want to show you my students one more time because i'm very proud of them there they are um thank you so much for the invitation and i think i i saved a little bit of time for questions i'll take questions if you do ask a question remember a question ends in a question mark maybe it really shortens the sink we don't have much time uh and also we ask them can i speak briefly about the cherokee indian mystery trees no i cannot because i do not know enough about them to speak to them but but thank you yeah go ahead okay okay good question so i've got a gentleman up front who's got family that moved into lagrange around around 1834 or so um lagrange 1834 that's the time when the creek would have been getting ready for removal some would have already been removed and so you would have been in a situation where there are probably going to be some abandoned creek uh farmsteads and homesteads and probably that's the kind of landscape your feeling might have moved into i'll point out too that's another really important thing is that in the 1830s all of the modifications and improvements that cherokee and creek had made this land it was still there it was not some kind of bearing wilderness or landscape cherokee had been farming they built schools and homes and churches so at the creek and so people are actually moving into a landscape this had a lot of modification but that's probably what it looked like more or less good question yeah yes ma'am please sure i i've got a general question about um a soapstone quarry here in carrollton there's actually several there are several but you'll sometimes find in in in some of the areas around carrollton um soapstone quarries where native americans would have gone to mine soapstone and they would have been doing that for i mean really thousands of years that's a practice that would have gone back five thousand six thousand years they're using soapstone to make bowls um to make stones for heating water in pots tempering ceramics that's a thousand thousand thousands of years old practice um and there are definitely some some well-used soapstone quarries around here they well they would have been ancestors of creeks they'd been creek ancestors yeah patrick excellent question what's the state of creek and cherokee language there are there are more fluent speakers in of muskogee in oklahoma and there are more fluent speakers of of cherokee in oklahoma than there are in the east so those groups that were removed actually maintain the english the language pretty well pretty well and don't quote me on the creek figure i think there are at least hundreds if not a few thousand uh muskogee speakers in in oklahoma there are there are a couple of thousand affluent cherokee speakers in north carolina there are currently only about 200 fluent cherokee speakers but they're they're starting some new programs there's an immersion preschool where the kids go at like age two and just speak cherokee and they're beginning to collaborate with the western cherokee to get full-time teachers in who can who can really help that program great question patrick yes sir on the weekends down there what year would that have been sir what year would that have been roughly okay so i've got a report here that in the in the 1820s you would have native americans actually coming up into carrollton to use the square um how would they have traveled what would that be just they would just buy something yeah i mean folks i mean folks at that point probably doing it on horseback that could have been coming on foot also by canoe potentially i got a question if i'm interested in the trail marker trees um yeah you can come see me after the talk yes so there's um there was there was a mound located fairly close to carrollton on snake creek um this is near like uh was near it's near banning mills actually um that mound was completely excavated unfortunately it's been completely destroyed by early excavations and farming however that would be a great place to do research um there aren't currently any plans but that would be a great place for students from westward to go to go out and do work potentially so great question yes sir those are mostly sir those are west georgia um i i've got a general question about obesity and health uh there is there is a problem with um obesity in in a lot of native american communities um and in in general is it's the same problem in a lot of uh low-income communities where there's a lot of easy access to high calorie foods and less access to good quality foods but the cherokee are really actively working on health programs uh to to fight diabetes and obesity in their communities there's a lot of good work going on with that including work that takes traditional cherokee ideas about medicine and health and incorporates that into into fighting obesity and diabetes so good good question anything else yes sir the question is is chief mcintosh actually buried in the great macintosh reserve and i don't know i i would hope so but i don't know i i can take one more and then i gotta go teach my class um so i'll take i'll take one more question yeah uh okay so if you guys are interested i've got a report from from stanley here um that uh the western cherokee come over once a year and collaborate with the chieftains museum up in rome to do some culture classes so if you're interested in that see stanley okay i hate to do it but i really do have to go um but thank you very much
Info
Channel: Ingram Library - University of West Georgia
Views: 38,484
Rating: 4.4537177 out of 5
Keywords: Southern United States (Region), Georgia (US State), Cherokee (Ethnicity), Muscogee (Ethnicity), Creek
Id: mKZRUJavFF8
Channel Id: undefined
Length: 55min 26sec (3326 seconds)
Published: Wed Apr 15 2015
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