Creeks and Southerners

Biculturalism on the Early American FrontierBy Andrew K. Frank

University of Nebraska Press

Copyright © 2005 University of Nebraska Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8032-2016-4

Contents

Acknowledgments…………………………………………………………………ixSeries Editors’ Introduction……………………………………………………..xiiiINTRODUCTION The Problem of Identity in the Early American Southeast…………………1CHAPTER 1 The Invitation Within………………………………………………….11CHAPTER 2 “This Asylum of Liberty”……………………………………………….26CHAPTER 3 Kin and Strangers……………………………………………………..46CHAPTER 4 Parenting and Practice…………………………………………………61CHAPTER 5 In Two Worlds…………………………………………………………77CHAPTER 6 Tustunnuggee Hutkee and the Limits of Dual Identities……………………..96CHAPTER 7 The Insistence of Race…………………………………………………114EPILOGUERace, Clan, and Creek……………………………………………………………129Abbreviations…………………………………………………………………..133Notes………………………………………………………………………….135Selected Bibliography……………………………………………………………171Index………………………………………………………………………….187

Introduction

The Problem of Identity in the Early American Southeast

In 1783 a belief in the connection between race, culture, and identity nearly resulted in hostilities between Spanish Floridians and Creek Indians. The problem began in early February, when an English-born and English-speaking man named Andrew Brissert entered the Gulf Coast town of Pensacola hoping to sell two African American slaves. Soon after he and his Creek wife arrived, the trader purchased some coffee, sugar, and hardtack and found a place to spend the night. That evening Brissert’s host offered the guests some rum before the married couple fell asleep. The following morning, soon after Brissert awoke, Spanish officials arrested him. His crime was not that of slave trading-for selling African Americans was a legal and common occurrence in the Spanish colony and port town. Nor was he arrested for his drunkenness or for purchasing rum. Brissert’s offense was that in being “dressed and painted as an Indian,” he broke an ordinance that prohibited men from wearing disguises in the city. The local magistrates arrested him on their “Suspicion of his being a Spy.”

Brissert’s wife and Indian family did not passively watch events transpire. The well-known Creek diplomat and trader Alexander McGillivray voiced his disapproval of the capture of his faithful assistant and tried to get the Spanish officials to explain their actions. Brissert’s wife and several members of her clan similarly objected to the arrest, claiming that this was a case of mistaken identity. These initial protests hardly impressed the Spanish officials, who chose to ignore “the supplications and threats of his Tallapoosa Creek wife” and to ship Brissert off to receive punishment in New Orleans “with other English prisoners.” This stranger, they claimed, was not a Creek man and definitely not an Indian; he was an English slave trader and spy who cleverly used Indian paints and clothes to conceal his true English identity. After all, when stripped of the elaborate paints and his Native costume, Brissert looked, acted, and sounded like an Englishman.

While Brissert sailed to New Orleans, where he would have been detained until a suitable punishment could be determined, the threats from Fus-hatchee villagers and Wind clan Creeks became more explicit. They vowed to cut off trade relations and hinted that their warriors might take immediate retribution if the Spaniards did not promptly return Brissert to his home. The seizure of their trusted neighbor, they claimed, was tantamount to a declaration of war. Commandant of Pensacola Arturo O’Neill took these new threats seriously and shared them with Luis de Unzaga, his superior. After some deliberation O’Neill and Unzaga concluded that they had no choice but to return Brissert to his village. If the Creeks claimed that Brissert was one of their own, the Spaniards were in no position to disagree. Race, culture, and language, they reluctantly conceded, had deceived them.

Men like Brissert, his Creek children, his Creek wife, and her family form the core of this study. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries hundreds of European American men entered Creek villages, married and cohabitated with Native women, and fathered an unknown number of Creek children. These European American men often embraced the customs and behaviors of their hosts, at least enough to live relatively inconspicuously, and adhered to the expectations of their new families and communities. In these instances they became known as “Indian countrymen.” At the same time, these newcomers to Indian life, at least in the eyes of many European American colonists, did not always blend into their communities. In villages located in what is now Florida, Georgia, and Alabama, many of the early American newcomers recognized their newly obtained Creek obligations even as they held what appeared to be European American economic and social practices. They held and sold African slaves and participated in the annual Green Corn Ceremony. They herded cattle and fenced their lands, while they partook of the ritual black drink and painted their skin. They held positions in European trading firms, even as they catered to the interests of their wives’ clans. They spoke English, Spanish, or French while also interpreting it into Muskogee, Alabama, and Hitchiti. Their behavior and appearances defied simple identification. In short, Brissert was not the only resident of the early American South who, at least on occasion, looked, acted, and sounded like both a Creek Indian and a European American colonist.

Brissert’s two or three Creek children, much like the offspring of other Indian countrymen and Native mothers, further blurred the distinctions between European American and Creek. In Native villages, where the overwhelming majority of these children lived, the children of Indian countrymen were considered Creeks because they obtained their matrilineal clan and village identities from their mothers, who in nearly all instances were Creek. When these children left their matrilocal homes and traveled into European American society or when European Americans entered their villages, however, their paternal identities and physical appearances often created confusion. Sometimes even more so than their Indian countrymen fathers, these Creeks had ambiguous appearances, participated in all elements of Creek life, and yet still seemed to be Englishmen, Scotsmen, or Spaniards in disguise. As much as they pierced their ears and noses, shaved their hair according to Native custom, and plucked their beards, they could not and often did not want to cut their ties to European American society. Many spoke English or Spanish, held positions in the region’s deerskin trading firms, owned property in colonial society, and had European American wives. In short, Indian countrymen and their Creek children made the disparity between race, culture, and identity rather common in the early American South.

In the two centuries since the Spanish officials arrested Brissert for disguising himself as an Indian, most scholars have continued to rely on race, culture, and language to categorize their subjects. Traditional anthropological fields are devoted to tracing and categorizing people according to their physical, cultural, and linguistic traits, and historians frequently impose similar methods of defining peoples of the past. At times this methodology seems to work, as these often overlapping traits have historically defined the boundaries of many communities. Such a schema, though, cannot be used to understand the multiracial, multiethnic, and nonracial societies of the past. Nor can it effectively deal with instances in which cultures met and overlapped. In these instances the trilogy of race, culture, and language has led scholars to see boundaries and fixed cultures where fluidity reigned.

Even though scholars have long recognized the ethnic diversity within Creek and other Indian communities, the rigid logic of race continues to shape most interpretations of Indian countrymen and their Native children. These individuals exist in the background, if not the core, of every recent book on the southern backcountry and southeastern Indians. These works refer to many of the children of intermarriages, their European American fathers, and their centrality to the region’s economy, social structure, culture, and political affairs. Their omnipresence, not surprisingly, has not led to a consensus about their place in Indian society. Instead scholars have split into two opposing interpretive camps.

One group of ethnohistorians points to the problems inherent to racial and cultural hybridity and recognizes that the children of intermarriages were often seen as European American intruders. These scholars emphasize the “disruptive role” that they played in Native communities, declare them to be “double-agent[s]” who helped American “divide and conquer” ambitions, and cleverly demonstrate how they were “cultural breakers” rather than cultural brokers. Perhaps James Merrell’s assessment of Andrew Montour, a child of an Indian-European American intermarriage, best epitomizes this approach. “Trying to be both” Indian and European American, Merrell concluded, “Montour ended up being neither…. There was no place in between, there were no words to describe the sort of person he was.”

Other scholars declare that in matrilineal communities the children of Native women were necessarily Natives. These historians contend that the children of intermarriages should be understood entirely within the Indian contexts in which they lived. Theda Perdue, for example, persuasively explains that the children of Native women in southeastern matrilineal societies must be treated as fully Native. Their clan identities and village ties can lead to no other conclusion. Terms such as mixed-blood and half-breed, which imply racial categories and partial Indianness, betray the ways in which Native peoples determined kinship and identity in the eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century southeast. Children of mixed parentage took the identity of their mothers. James Taylor Carson similarly counters the idea that the children of intermarriages lived on the fringes of Native communities, even when they seemed to be fully immersed in European American commerce. Belonging, in a southeastern Native society, did not have a racial component or a singular cultural perspective. Even when these children embraced the most “cosmopolitan” attitudes, they did not defy Native custom or become marginal figures. Instead, they came to represent a legitimate, although not the only, Native outlook.

Creeks and Southerners integrates the strengths of these previous studies and illuminates a new way to understand the children of intermarriages, especially those who served as cultural brokers on the early American frontier. Rather than treating identity as an either-or situation, this book explores how individuals simultaneously obtained and maintained their central roles in both Creek and European American societies. It demonstrates how intermarried individuals and their families bridged the gap between southern and Creek societies with their kinship networks, cultural practices, political power, and economic functions. As long as the interaction between Creeks and European Americans served the needs of both communities, these families found seemingly limitless opportunities on the southern frontier. The result of such interaction is an inclusive understanding of race and identity on the early American frontier.

The experiences of European American husbands and their Creek children were rooted in a historical context, but the rules of kinship that controlled their entrance into Creek society remained remarkably consistent throughout the pre-removal era. As a result Creeks and Southerners does do not have a strictly chronological structure. Instead the volume contains chronological bookends, with chapter 1 investigating the importance of contact and the creation of the Creek Confederacy in the early eighteenth century and chapter 7 considering the connections between race and forced removal in the early nineteenth century. In between, chapters 2 through 6 explore themes and stages in the lives of Indian countrymen and their Creek children. The book begins by examining the factors that led European Americans to enter Creek society and the ways in which Creeks incorporated them. It then assesses how Creeks used mutable traits to determine identity and thus allow non-Creek outsiders to become kin and neighbors. Next Creeks and Southerners details how the children of Creek-European American intermarriages obtained bicultural skills in the eighteenth century. Then the book explains how these skills and dual identities frequently allowed the children of intermarriage to serve as cultural brokers and to live in two worlds simultaneously. Finally, chapter 6 studies the life of Tustunnuggee Hutkee to detail the limits of biculturalism and dual identities.

Creeks and Southerners avoids the mistakes made by the Spanish magistrates in 1783, men who initially viewed the Creeks as a racially defined community and treated the Creeks as a fluid, multiethnic confederacy. A pan-Indian identity would slowly emerge in the nineteenth century, and race would eventually become an important factor of Native identity in the twentieth century, but this was not the case during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Throughout the pre-removal era Creeks used a matrilineal system of clans to determine membership in their community, and they occasionally adopted various ethnic outsiders and embraced them as kin. They did not believe themselves to be, nor did they behave as if they were, a part of a biologically connected group called Indians. Brissert, despite the pigment of his skin, the color of his hair, and the place of his birth, lived completely immersed in Creek society. He had Creek children, a Creek wife, and a series of obligations to her clan and the Fus-hatchee village. He, like other immigrants in the Creek villages, learned to look, act, and sound like his neighbors. He painted and tattooed his skin, wore appropriate clothing, accepted the matrilineal kinship structures, and otherwise lived according to Creek custom. Brissert made these changes in his behavior and appearance, even as he participated in the domestic slave trade and worked for the region’s largest deerskin trading firm, the Panton, Leslie, and Forbes Company. In this way he could look and act the part of both a Creek and a European American.

Had Creeks defined themselves in racial and nonmatrilineal terms, Indian countrymen and their Creek children would not have played significant roles in Native communities. That they did testifies to the fact that eighteenth-century Creeks neither understood nor used the language of blood quantum or hybridity. In addition, it demonstrates that they did not turn a blind eye to European American appearances, behavior, or paternity. These biological or racial attributes simply did not determine Creek identities. Similarly, Creeks did not possess a singular or essentialist understanding of Creek culture. Instead they recognized that their boundaries existed in flux, with new peoples and technologies constantly entering their community. Nothing prevented Creeks from speaking English, herding cattle, owning slaves, having blond hair, or marrying non-Creeks. The boundaries between insiders and outsiders, and between kin and strangers, were not as clear-cut as the Spanish officials who detained Brissert desired and often demanded.

Erasing the racial language and logic from the history of Creek society is not an easy task. In part, interaction with European Americans prevents us from totally removing the concept of race and the importance of paternity from early American Indian history. As the behavior of the Spanish magistrates in 1783 demonstrated, many European Americans behaved as if race and identity were logically connected. Throughout the eighteenth century many European Americans, whether Spanish or English, shared a belief that immutable differences separated humankind into several races. This understanding of human difference, though, was not as clear as even the Brissert case indicates. Diplomatic concerns and the danger of the Spanish losing the Creek trade to the United States certainly contributed to the arrest and then the release of Brissert. O’Neill, who initially supported the arrest, did not consistently believe that race and identity were inevitably connected. Prior to 1783 he voiced his fears that Spanish settlers and soldiers might embrace an Indian lifestyle and family. O’Neill’s experience dealing with Brissert, who was an adopted member of Creek society, must have buttressed his anxieties that Europeans could become Indians. A half year after Brissert’s arrest, O’Neill urged fellow magistrates to “keep the friendship of … Englishmen [who] are married and have Indian children, since in what other fashion can you be assured of the trade and friendship of the Indians.” In short, while Creeks did not use race to divide the world into static categories, European Americans such as O’Neill presupposed biological divisions between peoples but accepted the reality that a racial barrier did not permanently prevent European Americans from becoming Indians.

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