It is poorly understood that the southern tribes worked hard to integrate their world with the new European world impacting them. Yet it was not to be. This explains well the underlying dynamics involved. Quite simply the planters using slaves had to shut off escape and the tribes were close and would obviously welcome a strong back as well. They were farming after all.
Land hunger was there but for the white poor. The planters needed a secure source of compliant slaves. By then the surviving Indians were none of that. The two cultures could not coexist.
Thus we have the odious trail of tears which was reminiscent of the Armenian genocide in terms of method..
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The dehumanization of Native Americans . . . getting to the roots
In this famous painting of Indian Agent Benjamin
Hawkins, all of the Creek Indians are shown either bowing in submission
to him or shorter than him. In fact, Creek men were substantially
taller than most Europeans. The Creek woman is portrayed in the then
scandalous act of bearing her breasts to nurse a baby . . . thus
proofing her sub-civilized status. Amazingly, this is one of the least
obnoxious portrayals of Southeastern Indians from the Federal Period.
It is one thing to identify the intentional fabrication of history.
The People of One Fire over the past 10 years has certainly identified a
supertanker load of that sort of malarkey. However, it is another
thing to understand why people, who were at least superficially
educated, created false understandings of the past. There has to be
some deeply buried societal value, or even, neurosis, at work.
Before we go any further, look at the background of the
painting. This is only known artistic description of an early 19th
century Creek village. You can see an undersized, cone-shaped chokopa
(chukofa in Oklahoma) and an outdoor cooking shed. In the background
is the mikko’s house with a double portico. On the other side of the
river is Macon, Georgia.
The disinterest of Federal Period white Americans in the lifestyles,
architecture and communities of their Muskogean neighbors was just one
aspect of a comprehensive effort to relegate them to sub-human status.
One can see a stark change in attitude from the period six decades
before when enlightened British leaders such as General James Edward
Oglethorpe guided their government’s enlightened self-interest policies
toward Native Americans.
Whereas Oglethorpe literally described the Creeks as “highly
intelligent people descended from a great civilization,” the emerging
Southern Planter aristocracy characterized them as children, incapable
of making correct decisions for themselves. Look at this newspaper
cartoon from the 1820s.
While many middle-class Southerners were often part Native American
themselves or at least viewed their Native American neighbors as
neighbors, the planter aristocracy sought to put Native Americans in
the same box as African Americans, i.e. childlike sub-humans, in order
to justify the theft of their land and civil rights.
As soon as the Creeks and Seminoles stood their ground and acted like
adults in response to the continued treachery of government leaders,
the planter class demonized them and passed that attitude on to the
Crackers, who did the dirty work for the planters. Hostile Injuns were
lumped into the same sub-human category as slaves.
If you think that the Andrew Jackson cartoon, portraying Native
Americans as diminutive children, was the product of the racist America
of almost 200 years ago, think again. When the Franciscan Order and
Atlanta Roman Catholic Archdiocese first announced their proposal to
have five Franciscan friars, who were killed at their missions on the
coast of Georgia in the late 16th century, declared saints, the press
release was accompanied by a cartoon-like drawing. The scene portrayed
a couple of short, almost naked Indians supplicating before a towering
Franciscan friar. The caption said, “Father so-in-so teaching the
ignorant pagan Indians on the Georgia coast.”
That was going too far. I sent a letter to the archdiocese that was
accompanied by a painting by Jacque LeMoyne, which showed the coastal
natives towering over the French, who were themselves taller than the
Spanish. I included a passage from the De Soto Chronicles, where some
SE Georgia Indians told de Soto that they did not worship idols, but one
invisible God. The same section of the chronicles described the
Georgia Indians as being a foot taller than the Spanish and wearing
bright colored clothing.
The church officials had their feathers ruffled, but eventually the
obnoxious cartoon disappeared from the internet. And yet . . . what
was the first public statement by a University of Georgia archaeology
professor when the Track Rock Terrace Complex was announced? “Now go away children and play somewhere else.”
Okay, but why specifically was Muscogean history changed?
That’s a good question. Why would Georgians change the name of
Mount Noccasee, an Anglicized Creek word meaning “bear” to Mount Yonah,
the Cherokee word for “bear” . . . 15 years after they had dispatched
the Cherokees at bayonet point on the Trail of Tears? Why would both
Tennesseans and Alabamans continue to erase of the memory of the
Chickasaw, who occupied much of their states? Why would the Uchee be
erased by all the states? Why would to this day, archaeologists,
white-or-wannabe dominated organizations and white, female state
bureaucrats be obsessed with relabeling Uchee, Chickasaw and Creek
heritage sites as being Cherokee?
In studying the literature of the early 1800s, I have found several
causes for the two century long effort to belittle and erase the memory
of Muskogeans and Uchee. Today’s generation of archaeologists and civic
organization leaders probably don’t realize the true causes, but like
all forms of racial prejudice. these attitudes embed their psyches like
microscopic amoeba from tepid water.
- The aristocrats of South Carolina and Georgia never forgave the Creeks and Seminoles for giving sanctuary to runaway African slaves. This was the real cause of the three Seminole Wars and the obsession by the United States government of removing the Seminoles from watery lands that no one else wanted.
- Throughout the Antebellum Period, Southern Crackers were kept in perpetual poverty by the disproportionate wealth held by the Planter Class and the unfair competition of slave labor. Prior to the Trail of Tears, they looked around for someone to hate and therefore make themselves feel better about their harsh lives . . . There were the Choctaws, Chickasaws, Creeks and Seminoles. What really rubbed salt into the neurotic wounds of Georgia Crackers was seeing the Creeks in Georgia and Florida becoming affluent by selling livestock and produce to the planters and townspeople. Many Crackers were notoriously inept farmers.
It was the Antebellum intelligentsia of the South, who created
“Cherokee is better” thing. The reason was just the opposite of the
myth continued today in history textbooks that the Cherokees were “more
civilized.” You will be surprised at the real history.
The Cherokees lost well over half their population to smallpox
plagues in the mid-1700s and lost every major war they fought between
1738 and 1794. William Bartram stated that at the 1773 Treaty
Conference in Augusta, the Creeks openly mocked and laughed at the
Cherokee delegates, because they were so impoverished and still
humiliated by their catastrophic defeats by the Coweta Creeks in 1754
and British-Colonial forces in 1761.
The Chickamauga War had ended with a massacre of Cherokees at the
Battle of Etowah Cliffs. In 1794, decades of plagues and military
defeats had left the Cherokees demoralized and impoverished. Four
decades of seeing their villages repeatedly burned by first the Coweta
Creeks and then the white soldiers had left them with little memory of
their original cultural heritage. They were a broken people. They
were exactly what the Planter Class wanted all Indians to be. They were
brown-skinned people, who would now jump when Massa told them to jump.
Throughout the early 1800s, I found snide comments in the newspapers
and literature about the Chickasaw, Uchee, Creeks and Seminoles being
“arrogant” or “uppity.” At least until 1836, the Creeks and Seminoles
were also feared. They were labeled “cruel, barbaric savages” because
they shot back when shot at. A victorious Andy Jackson even
acknowledged that “It takes 40 of my white soldiers to whip one Creek
warrior.”
You would think that these prejudices would have ended soon after
most of the Southeastern Indians were thoroughly broken and forced to
march to the Indian Territory in the 1830s. That is not the case.
I found a passage written by Georgia historian in the 1880s that
tells it all. Most of the passages related to American Indians in his History of Georgia,
dwelt on the Cherokees . . . who were only in the state in any
significant number between 1794 and 1838. He did not mention the Uchee
and Chickasaw at all. Of the Creeks, he stated, “They were
a stubborn, ignorant people, who refused to acknowledge their
inferiority to the White race. It was a blessing for Georgia to be rid
of them.”
And how about today?
Civil Rights laws and the incessant efforts of the media to make us
“politically correct” have changed the superficial appearance of the
cultural landscape, but demons still dwell within. One can go to jail
for demeaning the religion of a terrorist just before he sets off a
bomb. Nevertheless, we still see a propensity among Americans, to put
down others, in order to make one’s self seem more important. Whether it
be text message bullying by teenagers or the the legion of nasty
rantings that follow news articles, it is all the same thing.
How about the simultaneous loathing and fear that characterized
attitudes toward Creeks and Seminoles in the early 1800s? Surely that
has disappeared?
Back in the spring of 2010, I had gotten tired of playing Rambo at
night. Graham County, NC neo-nazi’s (or whatever) were repeatedly
attacking my campsite after midnight. I drove over the Snowbird
Mountains to a peaceful tourist campground in Nantahala Gorge (Swain
County). After pitching my tent, I went to a country grocery to pick
up some food supplies. The lady checking me out asked, “If you don’t
mind sir. You look like an Indian, but not like a Cherokee. What are
you?”
I answered, “I’m part Creek . . . from Georgia.”
She grimaced, looked a little fearful and uttered, “Oh . . . you’re the mean ones!”
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I wonder if she and her sons lived in Graham County? Hm-m-m.
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