A few notes about Indian dress, culture, and way of life among the Five Civilized Tribes, before relocation!
Then a great article on how the Indians became who they are today . . .
The Five Civilized Tribes consisted of (1), the Creek Confederacy (who inhabited Georgia, primarily South of Atlanta, and Alabama; this confederacy was started by the Oconee -- who lived in the Creek township of Cold Springs about thirty-five miles south of Athens, in present-day Green County, GA [what about Bold Springs? where Joseph Rodgers/Rogers was supposedly buried, close to or just north of the Creek-Cherokee line; the latter passed through Watkinsville, GA; see: Bold Springs, Barrow County map], and who it seems, later, moved south towards the Ofekenokee Swamp; see list of towns: farther South in the swamp [early Indian towns listed on the list here] -- in response to encroachment by Europeans and Cherokees); (2), the Cherokee (who inhabited Georgia North of Atlanta, the Carolinas, and Tennessee); (3), the Choctaw and (4), the Chickasaw (who inhabited primarily Mississippi and Louisiana); and (5), the Seminole (originally called the Oconee -- the same name as that of the Oconee Indians above who became a main tribe of the Creeks -- were composed of renegade Creeks from Georgia not happy with land deals with the United States, and of other tribes as well including maybe some Yamasee remnants -- this is an interesting story as the Creek move south coincides with the end of the Yamasee War together with the trader wars, which left the Yamasee and their allies of course defeated [perhaps the Yamasee alliance was the Southern equivalent of the alliance led by Tehcumseh that followed the French and Indian War] -- , and of members of Florida tribes who had survived earlier disease; a number of African slaves ran away and joined the Seminoles as well; the Seminoles inhabited Florida and one group of Seminoles has yet to surrender any land there -- though two other groups of Seminoles did make a few deals). (To see Native Americans in Georgia today and also Georgis census data, see Tiger Block Maps.)
In the early days of the Creeks, the Creeks voluntarily sought White education. The men also sought marriage with White women -- perhaps in hope this would save the tribes from disease. Both the Creeks and Seminoles preferred to wear business suits, but stuck to Indian moccassins for shoes, and the various elegant combs that were traditional to these Indians. The Civilized Tribes' own religion was "holistic," with
| no separation between the sacred and the secular, es existed among Europeans. Respect for authority, the importance of kin identity, and the centrality of animals and the environment in the spiritual worldview all carried over from the Mississippi [moundbuilding] era [into the early post-European era -- and perhaps even into Christianity] (source: A. Gallay [2002], The Indian Slave Trade [New Haven, CT]: 29). |
Like a number of other Creek leaders in the late eighteenth century, [one 'leader' who interests Formwalt] Kinnard had a Scottish merchant father and a Creek mother. Scotch and English traders operating out of Charles Town (later Charleston, SC) often lived for awhile in Creek country while arranging for the exchange of deerskins for British manufactured goods, especially guns, ammunition, and alcohol. Some of these traders took Creek wives and produced offspring who often took advantage of their dual heritage. Since Creek society was matrilineal with property descending through the female line, the son for a Creek woman had status in American Indian society. In colonial British society, which was patrilineal, the son achieved his status through his father. |
The Story of the White Potato Clan (http://www.ilhawaii.net/~stony/lore117.html) is a Creek legend that tells of mixed bloods on a quest for a home for their children in "The place of soft ground and black waters . . . a place filled with biting insects, snakes, thorns, mud, spiders, the hungry logs, and strange spirits", anthologized in the Stonee's Web Lodge collection of native lore.
Some Creek and Cherokee leaders ceded the land in which Bethlehem and Oconee, Georgia (now pretty much part of Athens) are located to the United States in The Treaty of Augusta a treaty helped along in part by Samuel Elbert -- in 1783 (In November, 1783, two minor chiefs (Tallassee and Cusseta) ceded Creek land to the South and West of the Tugaloo and Apalachee Rivers, apparently with Elbert acting as a facilitator). This land helped to provide allotments for U.S. soldiers who had fought in the Revolution, and also provided the land that is now home to the University of Georgia in Athens.
Some of the Indians left for Oklahoma, but many remained on the land; the forced removal of the Indians did not really get off the ground until the 1830's after the last of the Creek land in Georgia was ceded; even at this point, Creek mixed-bloods remained in the Swamps and some moved to the Everglades. Some lands in the East were reserved for the Cherokees, however, in part thanks to the Cherokee's legal efforts, and the Eastern Cherokee nation remains today.
To view the history of Cherokee lands, go to sections 4 and 5 of http://www.ngeorgia.com/history/cherokeehistory4.html and http://www.ngeorgia.com/history/cherokeehistory5.html, both in About North Georgia's "North Georgia History"!.
To view the changing boundaries of the United States, go to Evolution of U.S. County Boundaries, 1650-1983 (http://www.edstephan.org/Animation/us.html), an animation created by Ed Stephan of Western Washington University, and part of a University of Georgia map collection.
Some members of the Creek and other Southeast tribes not happy with the White encroachment on Indian lands, or with the treaties being made, moved to Florida and joined Indians already living there. Migration increased toward 1813. Runaway slaves of African descent had also been hiding in Florida, and the Seminoles, as the collection of Indians in Florida came to be known, lived side by side with the slaves. Initially at peace with their White neighbors, the Whites' desire for land and the problems of runaway slaves helped fuel the Seminole Wars. When we visited the Everglades as children, we met the Indians living in the chickee huts who may have been members of the Independent Seminole Tribe. Besides thatched roofs, the huts we viewed had shades woven of dried palm strands that hung from logs at the top of the huts and could be raised or lowered, providing privacy and shade, perhaps a wind break too. I do not know to what extent these shades could keep out the bugs or rain-but do know that some of the traditional Algonquin settlers of the plains wove baskets so tight that they held water. To learn more about the Seminoles, you may want to visit two outside sites, Caufield's (1998) description of the struggle of the Independent Seminoles of Florida, in Whole Earth (http://www.findarticles.com/cf_dls/m0GER/n94/21260287/p1/article.jhtml?term=) or The Seminole Tribe's History of Removal from Florida (http://www.seminoletribe.com/history/indian_removal.shtml).
The Seminole leader Osceola's story itself is typical of the way Indian-white relations went. Raised by a Creek mother and a Scottish father, Osceola went by a European name and came to know White ways. As an adult he sided with the Indians, joined the Seminoles, and denied having White blood. Pressure from White settlers seeking the land in Florida led Jackson to direct the war in Florida that led to Osceola's capture. Osceola was separated from his people, which left him heart-broken, but was kept in Officer's quarters by the army rather than in a traditional prison. He went about Charleston some, and viewed at least one play. The U.S. military fired a salute to him when he ultimately died -- in part of his broken heart -- but then his attending physician removed his head from his corpse, and took it as a trophy to avenge the death of a relative. While some of the fighters in the many White-Indian wars conducted themselves with honor, others unfortunately showed with none at all.
The forced adoption of White ways described in the stories of relocation is a bit different than the earlier mixing of ways practiced in the Southeast by Indians and their White neighbors.
Learn More About The Early Southern Indians!
A name in my tree that was a common Indian name is Rogers or Rodgers (Cherokee; also Creek; also of course Irish); Whitehead may also be an Indian name (an early Whitehead who married eventually an English woman had first apparently a son Arthur by another women and many of the Whiteheads of North Carolina, Virginia, and possibly Maryland are descendants of this Arthur Whitehead); one John Glosson/Glossin was enrolled in the Cherokee tribe, but I am not sure if he was a relative of my ancestor Anne Glosson; I have heard that some Glissons were of the Lumbee tribe, a mixed-blood North Carolina tribe; a James Glasson living in Orange County, North Carolina where some of my Glassons/Glossens/Glawsons are from is identified as 'Colored' ('Colored' may mean mixed blood and not a full-blood African) by one of the Orange County Whitted (a temporary spelling change from Whitehead for one group of Arthur Whitehead's descendants) family in one record; my ancestor Joseph Glawson's father may have been named James Glawson and he may have lived in Orange County at about the time that the 'Colored' James Glawson lived there. The name "Rae" (also in my tree) also appears on one tribe's roll, though I've lost the reference; in addition, in 1813-14, a "Michael Elbert" or "Elhert" or "Elkhert" in Georgia sued for land compensation as a member of a Creek tribe -- and I am checking to see if he is related in any way to Samuel Elbert who was rescued from imprisonment during the Revolution by Indians he apparently had some friendship with as a young man; the mixed-blood Creek MacGillivray's father Lachlan MacGillivray had himself had some friendship with the Raes of Georgia whose daughter Elizabeth Elbert eventually married. I am searching these ancestors further.
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How the Indians got to today:
Lesson No. 1: Shed your Indian ancestry
by Tim Vanderpool
Special to The Christian Science Monitor
Date: 04/02/2002
(A Reprint from a Christian Science Monitor article shared with me by my dad.)
Click here to read this story online: http://www.csmonitor.com/2002/0402/p14s01-lecs.html.
(PHOENIX)Whether toddlers or teens, they were taken from home and shipped thousands of miles to dreary barracks. Their hair was cut, they were given new names, and each was assigned a number.
The United States government began this brutal attempt at social engineering in 1879. Breaking rebellious Indians by indoctrinating their children in Anglo ways was considered a cost-effective alternative to war. But the personal cost to native Americans was incalculable.
"Remembering Our Indian School Days: The Boarding School Experience," an exhibit at the Heard Museum in Phoenix, examines this dark chapter of American history.
Exhibits and books about native American boarding schools give the public "some clue about where we've been, and that we're now really making a massive attempt to participate in American academic life," says Elizabeth Cook-Lynn of South Dakota's Crow-Creek Reservation, author of "Anti-Indianism in Modern America."
The Heard, nationally renowned for its indigenous art and artifact collections, considers this to be the most comprehensive exhibition ever offered about the boarding schools. Nearly half a million people have viewed it since the opening a year and half ago, and the museum expects to keep the display up for several more years.
Walking through the exhibition, it is easy to understand why Heard archivist LaRee Bates says the forced education program was "absolutely devastating" for the children and their families. "They were literally kidnapped, loaded on wagons or trains, and all of them thought at any moment they were going to die. When the children arrived at the schools, it was the first time they'd been away from home." Many former boarding-school students, she says, including her own aunts and a grandmother, found their memories too painful to discuss.
'Rehabilitated' with clothes, haircuts
Before depicting their ordeal, the exhibition starts with the sounds of innocence, the laughter of children at play. Soothing voices welcome visitors in Comanche, Navajo, Hopi, and Delaware languages, and we see the landscapes of native homelands photographed in their pristine beauty.
Then the journey of separation begins. A huge, daunting photograph of a railroad locomotive travels along one wall. Juxtaposed against it are the frightened faces of Chiricahua Apache children, newly arrived at the Carlisle Indian School in Carlisle, Pa. Their hair is long, and they wear traditional, sometimes ragged clothing.
Another photo shows youngsters after their first few days of school. Their hair is neatly trimmed, and they wear stiff Anglo clothes - uniforms for the boys, neck-high dresses for the girls. Their faces have also changed; fear appears to have been replaced by sad resignation.
These "before and after" photographs were propaganda tools, Ms. Bates says. They highlighted the program's effectiveness at "rehabilitating" Indians. One tiny girl, probably just 4 or 5 years old, holds a sign that reads "Haskell Babies," referring to the Haskell Institute, a Kansas boarding school.
In other images, we see sinewy members of "Fort Totten's Baseball team" who played "the fastest game in the state," North Dakota. Some young boys huddled around a TV set, presumably sometime in the 1950s or '60s, appear almost preppy with their knit shirts and short hair.
The photos are accompanied by a steady stream of taped oral histories. "When they first took us in school, they gave us government lace-up shoes," one woman says. "Then they gave us a number. My number was always 23."
"When you first started school," says another female voice, "they looked at you, guessed how old you were, set your birth-date and gave you an age. Then they assigned you a Christian name. Mine turned out to be ... Fred."
Richard Pratt's oppressive plan
Hundreds of Indian boarding schools dotted the United States from the 1880s through the 1960s. The program was spearheaded by a zealous Army officer named Richard H. Pratt, who embraced the idea after working with Apache prisoners in St. Augustine, Fla. Pratt believed that removing Indian children from their culture and subjecting them to strict discipline and hard work would force their assimilation into mainstream society.
Congress agreed, and in 1897 it gave Pratt roughly 18 students and the drafty barracks at a deserted Army college in Carlisle. Cynical politics - and simple math - played into Pratt's plan. The government hoped to save millions of dollars, "because it cost anywhere from six to ten thousand [dollars] for the Army to kill an Indian," Bates says. "But if Indian children were put in schools and forced to change into 'Americans,' it would only cost a couple of hundred dollars per child."
Pratt's famous dictum was straightforward: "Kill the Indian and save the man." School officials prohibited children from speaking native languages, and punished transgressors. "Every school had a disciplinary jail cell," Bates says. Some even offered bounties for returned children.
Contagious diseases often swept through the schools, and exposure to the elements took the lives of many runaways. Photographs show vast cemeteries of plain white headstones inscribed with children's names. Equally haunting is "Going Home," a painting by native American artist Judith Lowry. In somber tones of black, blue, and purple, Ms.Lowry depicts her great aunt, who escaped from California's Greenville Indian School in 1916 only to freeze to death in the nearby woods. The tiny girl is ringed in a halo of white. Her face is peaceful as an owl swoops down to carry her away.
For decades, there was little criticism of this abusive program from a nation steeped in dime novels about 'the savage Indian.' Instead, magazines such as Harper's Weekly praised the schools. In a glowing article dated April 26, 1890, Harper's glorifies the Haskell Institute with pictures of young men in contrasting settings: "Indian boys at home" shows them in traditional buckskin clothing, whereas "a finished pupil" looks like a young clerk with a high collar.
Vocational training was also central to the boarding- school mission. Indian teens worked at various tasks - girls setting tables and cooking meals, boys repairing shoes or pushing wheel barrows.
Pratt's misguided vision was never fully realized, as most children eventually returned to their families and old ways of life. By the 1960s, tribes wrested control of the schools away from the federal government "and began to make them their own," Bates says. Today, only four boarding schools remain, and attendance is voluntary.
For many former students, the experience remains bittersweet. The influence of Pratt's harsh philosophy had faded by the time Michael Kabotie, a Hopi, entered the Haskell Institute in 1959 at age 15. "In many ways it was an exciting adventure," says Mr. Kabotie, now a successful artist. "But on the other side of it, I come from a very traditional culture, and many of our religious activities happen during the winter months. And those are the things I missed."
Alcohol was a common escape at Haskell, Kabotie says. "There was a sense of detachment there. A lot of us just got lost." His own alcohol problem worsened when he entered the University of Arizona, where he felt intimidated by the academic demands. "They didn't train us for critical thinking at Haskell," he says.
He eventually beat the bottle, but other scars remain. "I think the boarding schools denied me parenting skills," he says, "because I was taken away from my own role models."
Ms. Cook-Lynn, a visiting professor of Indian studies at Arizona State University, says Kabotie's is a common tale. "I think that tribal people all over the United States are working to recover from this dreadful colonial, racist experience," she says.
That's the legacy of the "genocidal federal policy," she adds. "Many people don't use that word, but if you look at the schools and what they represent, it is not an exaggeration."
Teaching a new generation
The show's impact is perhaps most powerfully felt by native American visitors themselves. Among them is Giovanna Teller and her daughter Audrianna. Ms. Teller, a Navajo whose own mother attended Oregon's Chimawa Indian School in the 1950s, says, "I can't imagine leaving my daughter. It's unfathomable to me. They shaved [my mother's] hair, burned her clothes and possessions - including a carpet bag that she carried on her saddle - and bathed them, all in one step."
Robin Tsosie, a Navajo who went to Arizona's Leupo Indian School from kindergarten through second grade, describes his experience there as "scary." "I stayed with my brother," he says. "They were very strict. We had to always have our hair braided and wear dresses. Now it's a lot different for those who do attend Indian School [by choice]. They have a lot more freedom."
Viewing the exhibition moves Mr. Tsosie to tears. "It was heartbreaking," he says. "It brings back bad memories. It's sad that we were forced to change our identities when all we wanted to do was be ourselves. We now have to teach our kids where we came from."
But for many museum-goers, the exhibit is the closest they'll come to knowing what the boarding school experience was like.
"It was a sad era when they tried to put American/European values on their culture," says Dorothy Allenson of Cape Coral, Fla. "I hope it was just ignorance and not something else."
Countless native Americans are still grappling with their boarding-school ordeals. But they no longer suffer quietly.
"Our main point with this exhibit is allowing silent voices to really come out," Bates says. "This is a part of everyone's history, and most people have no idea that it happened."
(c) Copyright 2002 The Christian Science Monitor. All rights reserved.
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The Oconee of Georgia, who lived along the Oconee River, were one of the many tribes of the region who traded with the Europeans, in particular with the settlers of the Carolina colonies. The Indians traded animal skins, various implements, and sometimes slaves, in exchange for guns and European implements, according to J. E. Worth's Georgia Before Oglethorpe, according to Worth's Georgia's American Indian Heritage, and also according to Gallay, author of The Indian Slave Trade. The Indians both sought this trade, but at times tried to prevent White encroachment.
Here is a Creek leader's reference to this trade in a letter!
The few Whites who settled the Oconee (and later, Creek, after the tribes confederated) Indian township, Oconee, in the eighteenth century included the traders.
The author of The Indian Slave Trade writes that:
| the American Indians like much of the rest of the world were familiar with slavery. However, slavery was conducted on a small scale among the Indians as the Indians did not have large plantations, and, as captives knew the area and could easily slip back to their own tribes, it was easier to either kill them, or else adopt them into the tribe with all ceremonies and courteseys. The Indian slave's major advantage against the African slave was that the Indian slave knew the continent, through travel, or through stories, and, when the season was right, could usually slip away and return home. For this reason, some of the Indians were brought as far as New England to work as slaves, and some others were shipped to the Caribbean and exchanged with African slaves. Unlike the Old World peoples, the Indians were not accustomed to farming large plantations, however, and Europeans were not always as happy with the Indians' work habits. |
All three groups -- Indians, Blacks, and Whites sometimes owned slaves themselves.