The Columbia Guide to American Indians of the Southeast

By Theda Perdue and Michael D. Green

-- Choice

• Language: English
• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Release date: Jun 19, 2012
• ISBN: 9780231506021

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The Columbia Guide to

American Indians of the Southeast

The Columbia Guides to American Indian History and Culture

The Columbia Guide to

American Indians of the Southeast

Theda Perdue

and

Michael D. Green

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS     NEW YORK

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS

Publishers Since 1893

New York    Chichester, West Sussex

cup.columbia.edu

Copyright © 2001 Columbia University Press

All rights reserved

E-ISBN 978-0-231-50602-1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Perdue, Theda, 1949–

The Columbia guide to American Indians of the Southeast / Theda Perdue and Michael D. Green.

    p. cm.—(The Columbia guides to American Indian history and culture)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0–231–11570–9 (alk. paper)—0–231–11571–7 (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. Indians of North America—Southern States—History. 2. Indians of North America—Southern States—Social life and customs. I. Green, Michael D., 1941–. II. Title. III. Series.

E78.S65 P45 2001

975’.00497—dc21

2001035338

A Columbia University Press E-book.

CUP would be pleased to hear about your reading experience with this e-book at [e-mail].

Credits

All maps have been prepared by Christopher L. Brest.

Figures 1, 3: Georgia Department of Natural Resources, Historic Preservation Division.

2: Courtesy of the Research Laboratories of Archaeology, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

4: Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site.

5, 6, 7, 8, 9: From Jacques Le Moyne de Morgues, Brevis narratio eorum quae in Florida Americae provincia Gallis acciderunt, secunda in illam nauigatione, duce Renato de Laudoniere classis praefecto: anno MDLXIII (Francoforti ad Moenum: Týpis Ioanis Wecheli, sumtibus vero Theodori de brý, venales reperiutur in officina Sigismundi Feirabedii, 1591). Copy in the North Carolina Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 16, 20: Copyright © The British Museum.

15: Courtesy of the Research Laboratories of Archaeology, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

17: National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution. Neg. no. 1129-b-1.

18: Greenville County Museum of Art, Greenville, S.C. Gift of the Museum Association, Inc.

19: New Orleans Museum of Art. Gift of William E. Groves.

21, 22: From Thomas L. M’Kenney and James Hall, History of the Indian Tribes of North America, 2 vols. (Philadelphia: F. W. Greenough, 1838–44). Copy in the Rare Book Collection, The University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

23, 24: Smithsonian American Art Museum. Gift of Mrs. Joseph Harrison Jr.

25: The Georgia Cherokee descendants of Rachel Martin Davis (photo courtesy of the Atlanta History Center).

26: Mississippi Department of Archives and History.

27, 28, 30, 31: The Archives Division, Oklahoma Historical Society.

29: Harper’s Weekly, 30 March 1872. From a copy in the Rare Books Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

32: National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution. Neg. no. 1044-A.

33: National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution. Neg. no. 44,353A.

34: Courtesy of Wilma Mankiller.

35: Photo by Danny Bell.

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Maps

Part I. History and Culture

Chapter 1.  Writing About Native Southerners

Archaeology

Documentary Evidence

Ethnographic Research

Oral Traditions

Interpreting Native American History and Culture

Ethnohistory

Chapter 2.  Native Southerners

Origins

Paleo-Indians

Archaic

Woodland

Mississippian

Chapter 3.  The European Invasion

The Conquistadores

Depopulation

A New World in the Southeast

Chapter 4.  Native Peoples and Colonial Empires

Spain

England

France

Imperial Wars

Chapter 5.  Civilization and Removal

Conquered Nations

Civilization

The Creek War and the Crisis in Indian Affairs

Tribal Sovereignty and Political Centralization

Removal

Chapter 6.  Native Southerners in the West

Settling in the West

Civil War and Reconstruction

Economic Development

Politics and Government

Territorialization and Allotment

Twentieth Century

Chapter 7.  Those Who Remained

Remnants

Nations Not Removed

Race

Recognition

Part II. People, Places, and Events, A to Z

Part III. Chronology

Part IV. Resources

1.  Indian Tribes

2.  Bibliographies and Finding Aids

3.  Published Primary Sources

4.  Oral Traditions

5.  Archaeological Studies

6.  General Works

7.  Alabama-Coushattas, Caddoes, and Chitimachas

8.  Apalachees, Timucuas, and Calusas

9.  Catawbas

10.  Cherokees

11.  Chickasaws

12.  Choctaws

13.  Creeks

14.  Lumbees

15.  Powhatans

16.  Seminoles and Miccosukees

17.  Selected Fiction

18.  Films

19.  Museums and Sites

20.  Internet Resources

Index

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank those who helped bring this project to completion. Three history graduate students at the University of North Carolina, Joe Anoatubby, Karl Davis, and Rose Stremlau provided research assistance, and their names appear on the sections on which they worked. David Baird, Harry Kersey, and Vincas Steponaitis critiqued chapters in manuscript, Patricia Wickman made suggestions relating to the Florida Seminoles, and John Finger read the entire narrative. A number of tribes and state Indian agencies provided useful information. Danny Bell performed numerous tasks associated with getting a manuscript ready for the process of publication. Summer grants from the Institute for Research in the Social Sciences and the Center for the Study of the American South underwrote research. Although all projects such as this one are collaborative in a number of ways, the authors accept responsibility for any errors.

Introduction

The Native peoples of the Southeastern United States have regionally unique cultures and histories. By the time of European contact, the cultivation of corn, squash, and beans enabled them to establish chiefdoms with a hierarchical social structure, complex ritual life, and monumental architecture in the form of temple mounds. The European invasion dramatically altered this culture through disease, economic dependency, and the erosion of political autonomy. When the Europeans who claimed the South as their own found that wealth lay in the soil, Native people became obstacles to the exploitation of the land. By the mid-nineteenth century the large Indian tribes had been forced west of the Mississippi where they faced new challenges, and the remnant groups that remained in the South struggled to sustain themselves and their ethnic identity. Despite intense pressure, they succeeded. In Oklahoma and the Southeast Native peoples adapted ancient cultural traditions to new circumstances, demonstrating remarkable creativity and persistence. Instead of disappearing, Native Southerners are increasing in number, and, across the region, their influence is being felt. This book tells their story. To make it as useful and accessible to readers as possible, we have divided it into four parts, which are connected conceptually to each other but may be used independently.

In part 1 we present a broad overview of the cultures and histories of Southeastern Indian people. We begin chapter 1, "Writing About Native Southerners, with a discussion of some of the approaches that scholars have used to try to make sense of the Native American past. In subsequent chapters we draw on work from many disciplines to describe the experiences of Native people. The chapters are both chronological and thematic, and they try to construct a narrative based on common experiences and, at the same time, to convey a sense of the enormous diversity in Native America.

In chapter 2, Native Southerners, we examine the period before European contact. We rely heavily on the oral traditions of Native people and on archaeological evidence. A distinct culture began to emerge among Native people in the Southeast about 8000 B.C. They learned how to exploit the region’s rich environment and developed a way of life based on seasonal migrations. By 3000 B.C. agriculture had emerged, and over the next four millennia farming permitted the development of complex cultural traditions. In particular, the Mississippian tradition, which reached its height in the centuries just before the arrival of Europeans, relied on intensive agriculture to support its hierarchical chiefdoms, elaborate ceremonial cycle, and construction of enormous temple mounds.

When Europeans arrived in the Southeast in the sixteenth century, they encountered mostly Mississippian peoples. Chapter 3, The European Invasion, deals with early European exploration and its impact on Southeastern Indians. Hernando de Soto commanded the most extensive expedition through the Southeast in the sixteenth century, and the chronicles of his expedition paint a dramatic picture of Mississippian life. De Soto and other invaders, however, disrupted that way of life by destabilizing polities and introducing diseases to which Native people had no immunity. Epidemic disease had a particularly profound effect on the Native Southeast, and by the seventeenth century, when the French and English began to expand into the region, Mississippian chiefdoms had largely disappeared.

Chapter 4, Native Peoples and European Empires, explores the ways in which Spain, France, and England attempted to incorporate Native people into their empires and the response of Native peoples to this attempt. Spain colonized Florida to provide protection to treasure fleets from Mexico, but the Spaniards also undertook the conversion of Native people. A chain of missions across North Florida disrupted Native societies as priests demanded that mission residents not only follow a new religion but also adopt new patterns of work, new family relationships, and new lines of authority. But the missions also provided some protection in an increasingly unstable world. In the early eighteenth century British colonists and their Indian allies destroyed the missions, and the surviving priests and converts relocated to St. Augustine. For over half a century following this invasion, the British primarily engaged the French in the contest for the continent. Native people in the Southeast generally tried to remain neutral, but the French, in particular, offered Indians powerful inducements in the form of gifts to ally with them. Native people took French presents, but they used these tokens to engage in play-off diplomacy with Britain and Spain. Ultimately, Britain won the contest among European powers, ending this successful strategy. When Britain subsequently lost the American Revolution, Native people found themselves confronted with an incessant demand for their lands and little concept of how to deal with the avarice.

Following the American Revolution, the United States was in no position to force land from Native people, and so it adopted the British practice of acquiring lands through treaties. This practice recognized the sovereignty of Native people, that is, their right to make decisions for themselves. Chapter 5, ‘Civilization’ and Removal, focuses on the development of a federal Indian policy that encouraged Native people to agree to land cessions. Central to the effort was the inculcation of the values of civilization, particularly the concept of private property and the advantages of personal wealth. Ultimately, the five large Indian nations in the Southeast, the Cherokees, Chickasaws, Choctaws, Creeks, and Seminoles, did cede their land and move west of the Mississippi to Indian territory in a forced migration euphemistically called removal.

Chapter 6, Native Southerners in the West, examines the history of the Southern Indians who went west and established new homes, governments, schools, and ways of life in what is today the state of Oklahoma. Drawn into the American Civil War on the side of the Confederacy, the Five Tribes signed Reconstruction treaties that eroded their sovereignty and opened their lands to railroads and economic development. Political and economic pressure led to the allotment of tribal land to individuals in the 1890s, the formal dissolution of tribal governments, and the admission of Oklahoma to the Union in 1907 as a state in which Indians are a minority.

Chapter 7, Those Who Remained, looks at the Native people who did not go west in the 1830s. As the cotton kingdom expanded and racial slavery became more entrenched during this period, the South increasingly regarded itself as a society composed of free whites and enslaved blacks. All free people of color, the category into which Indians fell, were anomalous, but Indians, who lived in their own communities, maintained distinct traditions, and had no history of bondage, were particularly so. After the Civil War, the dichotomy shifted to white/black, with Native people often categorized as black, or, in the parlance of the time, colored. The history of Indians who remained in the South is largely that of their struggle to retain their ethnic identity and the rights—civil, land, and treaty rights—inherent in that ethnicity. Some tribes have managed to do so through federal recognition and the retention of reservations while others have achieved state recognition and/or social acceptance as Indians.

Part 2 of this book, People, Places, and Events, A to Z provides an alphabetical listing, which is cross-referenced in bold type, to some of the individuals who have played important roles in the history of Native Southerners. The listing also includes places that have important cultural and/or historic meaning, the major treaties that Southern Indians have negotiated, and the federal Indian policies and chief legislative acts that have affected the lives of Southern Indians.

Part 3 is a chronology of the major events in the history of Native Southerners. The timeline also includes events, such as wars or federal legislation, that had an impact on all Native people. Most entries also appear in parts 1 and 2, and we encourage readers to think about these events in the broader context that can be found in part 1.

Part 4 lists a number of resources to which readers can turn to learn more about Southern Indians. We have included the addresses of state Indian commissions or offices as well as those of state and federally recognized tribes. Other tribes that have had contact with the Bureau of Indian Affairs but have no formal recognition from either the states or the BIA have simply been listed. We urge readers embarking on serious research projects to consult the section on bibliographies and finding aids. Our own bibliography is by no means comprehensive, but we have compiled these titles for those who want to go beyond the resources we have included here. We have not listed manuscript holdings in this bibliography, largely because they are numerous, scattered, specific to particular projects, and of limited value to most readers of this volume, but we have listed many published primary sources. Most of these are widely available in public libraries or through interlibrary loan, and they will provide endless term paper topics and sufficient documentation for many scholarly projects. Although ethnohistorians use oral tradition and archaeology, we established distinct categories for these because their methodologies and disciplinary conventions distinguish these books from those in most of the subsequent categories. In the section on general works, which includes works that deal with more than one tribe, and in the sections on particular tribes, we have drawn books from a number of disciplines, but especially from history and anthropology. Virtually all are based on documentary evidence, develop a narrative line, and forego technical language or jargon. For Selected Fiction we chose works by Southeastern Indian authors or by non-Indians who write about Southeastern Indians. We realize that this only scratches the surface, but literature is not the focus of this book. The same could be said for the remaining categories—we provide an introduction to film, museums, and internet resources rather than a comprehensive listing. Internet resources present a unique challenge since they change often as sites are updated or abandoned and new sites come online. Nevertheless, we offer a place for readers to begin, and we wish them well as they explore their own avenues of interest.

Readers, after all, are the reason books are written, and we hope that this volume will be interesting to readers who know little about the Indians of the Southeast as well as useful to those who are specialists. At its core Native American history is tribal history because each people has its own cultural traditions and historical experiences. This work makes no effort to alter that essential character, but it does seek to weave the disparate threads of tribal histories into a common cloth. In the process, we hope to give readers a view of Native people not only as members of sovereign tribes but also as Southerners and as Americans.

Part I

History and Culture

The Native peoples of the Southeast share common cultural features and a rich history. Long before the arrival of Europeans, they began to cultivate corn, beans, squash, and other crops. Agriculture enabled their societies to live in relatively permanent villages, develop a social/political/religious hierarchy, construct an elaborate ceremonial complex, and support a large population. The European invasion disrupted this way of life, but Native Southerners displayed remarkable adaptability. They drew on their precontact cultural traditions to sustain their villages, beliefs, and social systems, but they also entered into commercial and diplomatic relations with Europeans that produced substantial change. Native people became entangled in a world economy and European imperial schemes, both of which compromised their sovereignty. By the end of the eighteenth century they had become incorporated into the territorial boundary claimed by the United States, a rapidly expanding nation that saw its aboriginal population as an impediment rather than a constituent part. Some Native people became a marginalized third race in an increasingly biracial region; others managed to retain sovereignty, but most lost their tribal domains. A majority were removed west of the Mississippi to what is today eastern Oklahoma where they reestablished their nations, only to lose them once again at the end of the nineteenth century. The twentieth-century resurgence of Native people in Oklahoma and in the Southeast is a testament to the enduring power of culture, the strength of ethnic identity, and the ironic twists of history.

The geographic boundaries of the Native Southeast tend to be rather fluid. Anthropologists delineate a Southeastern Culture Area, but, as Charles Hudson has noted, Any boundaries drawn are inevitably somewhat arbitrary because all of the aboriginal people east of the Rocky Mountains and north of the Gulf of Mexico to the boreal forest of Canada shared many cultural features. Nevertheless, Hudson maintained that a rather distinctive set of physiographic, biotic, and climatic features … underlay the distinctiveness of the Southeastern way of life.¹ In particular, the Southeast gets more than forty inches of rainfall in general each year and has a growing season of more than 180 days. That is, the Southeast can support agricultural societies, and farming forms the basis of this particular culture area (see agriculture).

Historians do not quibble with this anthropological definition of the Southeast, but they focus on the ways in which a distinctive Anglo-American culture in the South shaped the lives of the region’s Native people. In the process, they broaden the definition of Southeastern Indians. Plantation agriculture made the lands of Southeastern Indians particularly desirable, and racial slavery made the oppression of all nonwhites acceptable. Therefore, historians consider the Native people who lived in the slave states of the antebellum period to be Southeastern. They include in this definition peoples to the north and west of the culture area boundary, such as those in Virginia, who in the twentieth century struggled to maintain their identity and rights as Indians against efforts of segregationists to reclassify them as Negro. Historical events such as removal also have expanded the boundaries of the Native Southeast to include eastern Oklahoma. In this case the line simply followed peoples whom both anthropologists and historians consider to be Southeastern (see removal).

In writing about the Native peoples of the Southeast, scholars of all disciplines encounter a number of interpretative problems. The archaeological, ethnographic, and historical record is never as complete as scholars would like, and, consequently, no discipline or combination of disciplines can ever reveal all we would like to know about Native people. Because the evidence uncovered is fragmentary, scholars must try to make sense of it. In the process, they have developed ways to use that evidence to construct comprehensible narratives of Native life. Not all scholars emphasize the same evidence or interpret that evidence in identical ways. Consequently, they construct different narratives. The sections below focus on some of the problems scholars encounter with evidence and the ways in which they have used that evidence to interpret Native culture and history.

Archaeology

The evidence for the ancient past of Native peoples comes from archaeology. Archaeologists are particularly interested in the physical characteristics of human beings and in their material culture. Skeletal remains have helped scholars chart the migrations of peoples, their nutrition and diseases, and even some cultural practices. Physical evidence, for example, reveals the cranial deformation of infants on cradle boards; other evidence points to the existence of scalping in North America before the arrival of Europeans. Archaeology can identify sites of dwellings through soil discoloration caused by postholes and hearths, and it can plot change over time by sequencing pottery and projectile points. Similarities and differences in construction techniques and decorative motifs can delineate friends and enemies, and disparities in grave goods can reveal hierarchies. Burial practices can also hint at religious beliefs. Nevertheless, archaeology is limited in what it can tell us about Native people. Excavations do not reveal the languages people spoke, the laws they followed, the intricacies of their religions, the relations between men and women, the structures of families, and many other things that we would like to know (see Archaic tradition; Mississippian tradition; Paleo-Indian tradition; Woodland tradition).

As early as the eighteenth century Europeans had developed an interest in the physical remains of ancient civilizations in North America. Thomas Jefferson, among others, acquired Indian artifacts. The systematic excavation of Native sites in the Southeast, however, stems from the late nineteenth century. Archaeological discoveries of the city of Troy and Egyptian tombs sparked interest in ancient America, and a debate raged over who built the earthworks that dotted the eastern third of the United States. Some people insisted that the mounds must have been constructed by a superior race of moundbuilders whom the Indians extirpated, while others maintained that the ancestors of Native Americans had, in fact, built them. Partisans of competing schools of thought rushed to excavate many mounds, in the process destroying them for future generations.

Some mounds yielded extensive caches of artifacts, many of which were exquisitely wrought, and the finds attracted the attention of collectors. The disposable income of the American upper class had never been greater, and the wealthy often competed with each other in establishing collections of Native artifacts. Furthermore, the middle class had more leisure time, and museums emerged to provide entertainment and enlightenment for those not rich enough to amass their own collections. For example, the Valentine Museum in Richmond scoured the South in search of items to line its shelves, and a company in eastern Oklahoma commercially mined the spectacular Spiro Mound for artifacts (see art; Southeastern Ceremonial Complex). By the time archaeology had become an academic discipline with established procedures, much of the South’s distant past had been looted.

Modern archaeologists do not excavate a site merely for its artifacts. Archaeologists seek to reveal a society through its physical remains. Consequently, they are interested in cornfields and dwellings as well as temples and mounds and in utilitarian stone hoes and knives as well as shell gorgets and ceremonial celts. Using these artifacts to reconstruct Native society is possible only when a site is relatively undisturbed. Professional archaeologists map and measure carefully so that they know the context in which an artifact is discovered. Unsystematic digging disrupts the sequence of artifacts—the oldest items in an undisturbed site are deepest—and the identification of the purpose of each area of the site. If the oldest artifacts in a site have been interspersed with the most recent ones, an archaeologist might assume that two peoples lived together at the site rather than sequentially, and a mixture of domestic and ceremonial items in the same area might well prevent accurate identification of the artifacts or the place.

The early exploitation of Native sites and artifacts as well as the cultural resurgence of Native people in the twentieth century has led to a debate between Native Americans and archaeologists over the propriety of excavations. Most sensitive are physical remains, which Native people complain have been ripped from the earth, analyzed, stored, and sometimes even exhibited. While many Native people distinguish between the desecration of graves by amateur pot hunters and professional excavations, others demand the suspension of all archaeological research. Devon A. Mihesuah, a Choctaw historian, has questioned what actually can be learned from skeletons: In dialogues with social scientists, Indians plead for convincing evidence that having the remains of their ancestors scrutinized, then stored for decades in basements and vaults of universities and museums, in addition to being separated from the grave goods with which they were buried, contributes to the well-being of Indian people.² In response to the demands of Native people, in 1990 Congress passed the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, which provides for the return of human remains and funerary objects to the tribe with which affiliation can be proved. Many archaeologists support this act and work with Native people to meet its provisions. Archaeologists also have become sensitive to the concerns of Native people and often seek their input before initiating projects.

Documentary Evidence

While the evidence that archaeology yields, whether in skeletal remains or artifacts, was created by Native people, the documentary record is more likely to have been produced by non-Natives. Native Southerners used pictographs and other symbols to communicate, but they did not have written languages until long after Europeans arrived (see Algonkian languages; Caddoan languages; Iroquoian languages; Muskogean languages; Siouan languages). Therefore, Europeans generated the early documentary record of Native peoples. Official records, such as legislative journals, diplomatic correspondence, trade regulations, and minutes of treaty conferences, provide much of the written evidence for Native peoples after the arrival of Europeans. Perhaps more useful, however, are the works of natural historians, who described Native people with the same care they gave flora and fauna, and travelers, who often made astute observations about the Native people they encountered and conscientiously recorded their interactions with them.

Whether official or private, all these sources share certain problems. First, their authors saw Native people through their own cultural lens and often misinterpreted what they saw. When Native people at treaty conferences referred to the English king or the president of the United States as their father, Anglo-Americans believed that it signaled Indian subservience since fathers dominated patriarchal European households. Native people in the Southeast, however, were matrilineal, and the term father connoted respect, not power (see kinship). Furthermore, exchanging gifts held a central place in Native diplomacy as a demonstration of respect and good will. When Native people demanded gifts from Europeans at treaty conferences, however, official records interpreted their behavior as the result of greed or impoverishment and the gifts as bribes.

Europeans also tended to draw analogies between Native customs and their own practices and beliefs. They created Native royalties in societies where none existed and misunderstood the nature of political hierarchy in societies where it did exist. The Suns, whom French colonists in Louisiana described as a Natchez upper class much like their own aristocracy, were elites, but the similarity of eighteenth-century France to this Mississippian society stopped there (see government). European powers created Medal Chiefs, to whom they awarded silver emblems of authority and from whom they expected the exercise of power in their interest. When Europeans found differences between their own societies and those of Native people, they usually disparaged Native practices or simply ignored them. Some observers dismissed the Cherokees, whose chiefs had no coercive power, as living in a state of anarchy and made no effort to understand the councils by which the Cherokees really governed themselves. When Europeans discovered that Southeastern Indians had no structures reserved solely for religious rituals and no deities they could clearly identify, they assumed that they had no religion at all (see religion).

Finally, Europeans were not privy to much of Native life. Native people closed certain ceremonies and council deliberations to Europeans. Native hunters and warriors were usually loath to have Europeans accompany them, because non-Natives did not know the rules or rituals that ensured success and a wrong move could jeopardize the entire venture (see hunting). Those who documented Native life before the nineteenth century were virtually all men, and they had no access to most aspects of women’s lives. Therefore, we know little about Native women, the organization of domestic life, practices regarding menstruation and childbirth, or the ceremonies specific to women, including those associated with growing corn.

By the time Native people began to generate their own written records in the nineteenth century, their cultures had changed dramatically (see Sequoyah). Or, at least, that is what most authors of these documents wanted readers to believe. Engaged in a struggle to retain their lands in the Southeast, Native people used written language to press their case. Most Native people, however, did not immediately internalize literacy. That is, people did not necessarily find it satisfying to create personal records, such as journals and private letters, just because they had the skill to do so. Therefore, the written Native record was that of a mission-educated, highly acculturated elite. There are some exceptions—Cherokee religious leaders recorded sacred formulas in the Cherokee language—but the documentary records of Native people, like those of other Americans, disproportionately represent the elite.

Ethnographic Research

Ethnography is the study of culture. Ethnographers pursue their research through participant observation in which they live with the people whom they are studying, learn their language, participate in their activities, and record their experiences. Ethnographers then explore the structure of the society by analyzing their findings topically. Their categories of analysis include belief system, social organization, subsistence, and political organization (see agriculture; fishing; gathering; government; hunting; kinship; religion). The emphasis of ethnography is on living peoples, and the view of society that emerges from ethnographic research tends to be frozen in time. There is little sense of the ways in which the culture has changed. Nevertheless, ethnography can have important implications for the study of a people’s past. Cultures change very slowly, and scholars often use ethnographic research to trace particular practices and beliefs back in time, a process that anthropologist William Fenton has called upstreaming.³ This approach must be used with care because cultures, however slowly, do change, and there is no way to standardize the rate and extent of change.

Systematic ethnographic research among Southeastern Indians began in the late nineteenth century at the very time that all Native Americans seemed to be vanishing. The Native population in the United States reached its nadir in 1890, and philanthropists and policy makers focused their attentions on assimilating surviving Indians into the dominant culture. Museums, universities, and organizations such as the Bureau of American Ethnology rushed to record basic information about Native cultures before Indians and their ways of life disappeared. Ethnography flourished until World War II and formed the basis of cultural anthropology.

The people who conducted the fieldwork were overwhelmingly non-Indian, and the quality of their research varied dramatically. Understandably suspicious of researchers, many Indians were less than forthright about their beliefs and practices, and some took delight in spinning yarns for gullible ethnographers. Other Indians, however, shared ethnographers’ concerns for the loss of their cultural traditions and gladly shared information about their people with researchers. Swimmer, an important religious leader among the Cherokees, for example, turned over to ethnographer James Mooney the sacred formulas that he had carefully recorded in the Sequoyah syllabary, and George Washington Grayson, a Creek, revealed to John Swanton the intricacies of Creek social organization.

Oral Traditions

Ethnographers often collected the oral traditions of Native people, but the acceptance of these traditions by other scholars has come slowly. Academics trained in a written literary tradition grounded in empiricism have had great difficulty with orally transmitted Indian myths in which animals speak and human beings possess extraordinary powers. Native historical narratives do not clearly locate events in the past, follow a linear chronology, or empirically link cause and effect. Using oral traditions for purposes for which they were never intended raises ethical as well as intellectual problems. While debates continue on how literally scholars should accept these traditions, most historians and archaeologists as well as cultural anthropologists regard oral tradition as an essential tool in understanding how Native peoples organized their thoughts and interpreted their lives. Ethnographers tapped deeply into creation myths and explanations of how the world came to be the way it is (see religion). In the 1930s employees of the Works Progress Administration added to these records by interviewing thousands of elderly Indians, particularly in Oklahoma, about their lives. More recent projects have added to this oral record of Native Southerners. Questions, however, still remain. How accurate are the memories of the people interviewed? To what extent have external influences, such as Christianity, shaped modern renditions of myths? How do we deal with oral traditions that contradict in fundamental ways the documentary and archaeological record?

Interpreting Native American History and Culture

Scholars use the research methods outlined above to uncover information about Native American history and culture, but then they must make sense of what they have found. The sheer volume of information compels them to be selective and to focus on specific aspects of Native life. Since not all information is of equal value to a particular subject, scholars must choose what to incorporate and what to leave out. Just as the data is subjective because it reflects the biases of the people who created it, the interests and concerns of the scholar shape the interpretation of the evidence. That does not mean that scholars intentionally distort data to make