Creek Country: The Creek Indians and Their World.
Carson, James Taylor
Creek Country: The Creek Indians and Their World, by Robbie
Ethridge. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003. xiii,
369 pp. $59.95 cloth. $22.50 paper.
Totkv Mocvse/New Fire: Creek Folktales by Earnest Gouge, edited and
translated by Jack B. Martin, Margaret McKane Mauldin, and Juanita
McGirt. Foreword by Craig Womack. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press,
2004. xiii, 132 pp. $49.95 cloth, $29.95 paper.
BETWEEN 1796 AND 1816 BENJAMIN HAWKINS SERVED AS THE UNITED
STATES' agent to the Creek Nation that, at the time, was located in
present-day western Georgia and eastern Alabama. For scholars of the
native history of the South, Hawkins stands out as one of the most
thoughtful, sensitive, and admirable figures in an otherwise dark
history of frontier expansion and human dispossession. That being said,
we must remember Hawkins was a man of his age, whose Enlightenment
notions of the perfectibility of the human character and of the
superiority of Anglo-American civilization meant that no matter how much
he sympathized with his Creek charges, he nonetheless saw them as
uneducated, uncivilized, and altogether backwards. Over the course of
his career, however, he softened his views, and as surely as he
instructed them in cotton cultivation, spinning and weaving, and
scientific agriculture, so too did he argue for their interests against
federal and state officials who craved their land. In addition to his
stalwart defense of Creek rights and claims to their land, Hawkins left
behind an enormous treasure of documents that recorded all sorts of
aspects of Creek life: this work has made possible in large measure the
outstanding outpouring of Creek scholarship over the last two decades.
In Creek Country." The Creek Indians and Their World, Ole Miss
anthropologist Robbie Ethridge has taken Hawkins's descriptions of
the Creeks' landscape and environment and reconstructed, with
supplemental information from a wider variety of primary sources, how
the Creeks created the land that they had inhabited for so many
centuries. In Ethridge's words, the book is "a snapshot in
time" of "a distant lost world" (1). If the physical
space of Creek country has been lost, however, many of the values that
Creeks read in the land and the beliefs that they had about the making
of the land did not vanish in the tide of settlers that washed over
Creek country at the close of the War of 1812. After the United States government expelled them to present-day Oklahoma, the vast store of
knowledge that Creeks had of their land remained an important component
of their daily lives and has survived to the present day in the form of
stories told by elders like Earnest Gouge, published recently as Totkv
Mocvse/New Fire. Together the two books bring to life the environment
and the ethic that has sustained Creeks throughout the loss of their
land, the Trail of Tears, and the federal government's various
attempts to bring about their end as a people.
Ethridge's reconstruction of Creek country begins with a
wonderful series of maps that situate the towns and villages of the
Upper Creeks on the Tallapoosa, Coosa, and upper Alabama Rivers, as well
as those of the Lower Creeks along the watersheds of the lower Flint and
Chattahoochee Rivers, in the mix of hardwood forests, gardens, corn
fields, and other features that composed their landscape. By correlating
information from Hawkins's notes with recent archaeological data,
she has been able to provide the most complete and accurate picture of
the old nation to date. The maps, however, support Ethridge's
broader project, which is to recreate the land as the Creeks lived in
it. A number of differences from today's landscape are interesting.
Creek country, for example, afforded much more protection to native
soils: erosion was not a problem, owing to their careful cultivation
practices and preservation of forests. Streams that today run muddy with
the run-off of commercial agriculture and suburban development were once
startling to visitors for their sparkling clarity and healthful properties. Massive canebrakes once followed the banks of the meandering
streams and rivers to provide shelter and forage for bears and other
animals and hiding places for people in peril. Overgrazing by
Creeks' and settlers' hogs and cattle, along with the
settlers' deliberate clearing efforts, removed from the land what
had once been one of its signal features. And, of course, land that was
once held in common trust for the use of their nation is now divided,
bought, and sold as regularly as the seasons change.
Throughout her exploration of the flora and fauna of Creek country
and of the different ways that Creeks made use of their land, Ethridge
is always careful to explain that they did not inhabit a wilderness.
Today we often imagine first people living in pristine forests, but such
assumptions dangerously obscure their real relationships with the land.
The great oak, hickory, and walnut trees that took the breath of
settlers and bespoke to their minds the natural fertility of the soil
were, in fact, cultivated by Creeks to ensure dependable and bountiful
supplies of acorns and nuts for their own sustenance as well as their
hogs'. The grassy fields that settlers found convenient spots to
plant their own crops were segments in the system of field rotations
that Creeks used to regenerate the fertility of the soil. The lack of
undergrowth reflected the efficacy of Creek burning practices that
curtailed the numbers of pesky bugs, provided browse for deer and
horses, and opened space for blackberry brambles.
As carefully as Ethridge documents the Creeks' struggles for
control of the land, one is left to wonder exactly what this land meant
to them. How did their lives map onto the land? Here Hawkins's and
others' documents are silent. Flash forward to the early twentieth
century, however, and the stories that Earnest Gouge penned for
anthropologist John Swanton, translated into English for the first time
in the book New Fire, give a number of hints as to what later
generations of Creeks thought of their land. Gouge was an activist who
sought to defend Creek claims to nationhood in Oklahoma. Though he died
in 1955, his stories explain that the land was as alive as the people.
Hunters, for example, had to be alert for any number of tricks that
shape-shifting cannibals might pull. Rabbit shifted shapes too, and used
his disguises to fool other animals into doing his bidding. He was not
always successful though, and his failure to straighten out the rivers
left them more crooked than before. If Gouge's stories explain why
Creeks considered rivers to be Rabbit's paths, they also tap into
deep stores of memory. When Gouge recounted "I was going about
hunting, someone once said, it was said" (106), he layered the
telling of stories in reference to their passage through the ages. At
once he bridged the gap between the early 1800s and the early 1900s and
reminded his audience of their deeply held beliefs, about the land and
the people, that have outlived any number of challenges and changes.
Creek Country and New Fire could not be more different as books.
The former is an important and engaging scholarly monograph while the
latter is an important collection of tales augmented by a CD version
recorded in the Muskogee language. But together the two work to open our
eyes to a past landscape of the South. Creek scholarship has taken off
over the last few years and these two books are a welcome addition to
that burgeoning body of work.
JAMES TAYLOR CARSON
Queen's University
