Zamumo's Gifts. Joseph M. Hall, Jr.

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СКАЧАТЬ them with canes. Again the Cussitas departed, leaving the Coweta warriors to purify themselves inside the mound. When Cherokees came to attack what they thought was an undefended town, they saw, much to their astonishment and dismay, that Coweta warriors “poured up from the bowels of the earth.” After routing the Cherokees, the Cowetas joined the Cussitas in a series of military victories that led them to the Atlantic Ocean. Seeing the sun rise out of the sea the following morning, they understood that the water kept the sun bright and pure. Once they had conquered neighboring peoples, the Cowetas challenged the Cussitas to the ball game to avenge their earlier caning. This contest established the distinction between the red war towns led by Coweta and the white peace towns led by Cussita.⁴⁹

      The stories that Hawkins and Gregory recorded reveal additional details about Creek culture. In the ball game, towns competed only against others that were “of the opposite fire,” that is to say, red or white towns never competed against towns of the same color. Hawkins’s synopsis explains the sources of this division between red towns responsible for war and white towns that took a leadership role in making peace.⁵⁰ The arrival and brief stay at the ocean shore that Hawkins described becomes more meaningful and poignant in Gregory’s version. The convergence at the horizon of the Middle World where people resided with the Above World of air and order and with the Under World of water and chaos must have been a powerful sight for the migrants and for those like Ispahihta and Gregory who recounted their experience.⁵¹ Most important, as with Bartram’s account, the mounds in both stories serve as the sites of rebirth. Atop one mound, migrating peoples learned the sacred ways that would be the foundation of their common culture. Emerging from another mound, as if “from the bowels of the earth,” Cowetas and Cussitas repeated their initial emergence in the west. In each case, the mounds made new people.

      The people were new, but many of their basic institutions were not. Towns no longer had mounds, but by emerging from them, later Creeks acknowledged their Mississippian antecedents. Exchange also gave these towns life and strength. In the story told by Tussekiahmico and summarized by Hawkins, towns received the sacred knowledge necessary to balance the power of the cosmos; in Chekilli’s account, Cussita received a feather to secure bonds of peace. Finally, the stories themselves were products of exchange. Whatever the variations among towns, the congruences also speak to centuries of people sharing information among talwas and across generations.

      Consequently, stories that apparently deny these connections, these acts of sharing, raise interesting questions. Even with mounds figuring as prominently as they did as a rallying point in Bartram’s relation and Gregory’s mention that Cussitas actually built a mound as part of their migration eastward, many Creeks did not consider their ancestors responsible for them. At the end of the 1700s, Creeks claimed no knowledge of the builders of the earthworks. By 1900, some Creeks stridently asserted that neither they nor any Indian people would consent to building the mounds. As Gregory himself wrote to a Cherokee friend interested in Creek history, “None of them would entertain for one moment digging and carrying wet clay by thousands of tons by hand and building firm clay mounds a hundred feet high 400 feet long by sixty feet wide . . . No Sir! No North American Indian tribe done these things.” The mounds, Gregory continued, were the product of an inferior, non-Indian people, the Mound-builders, whom the Creeks drove from the Southeast and out of North America shortly after their arrival in the Southeast.⁵² Gregory made explicit what the oral histories imply: the Creeks had no ancestors other than those talwa or clan members who emerged from the earth.⁵³

      Creeks recall their origin stories to remind themselves who they are, but even in the many stories they have shared with non-Creeks, they are asserting their sense of themselves in relation to outsiders, usually their colonizers. Statements like Gregory’s suggest how Europeans’ involvement in southeastern exchange networks included ideas as well as objects. They also highlight the importance of the historical contexts of these stories from the last three centuries. Most briefly, Chekilli presented Georgia’s leaders with his history lesson to assert his preeminence among the Creeks and also his power in relation to the new Georgia colony. Sixty years later, Tussekiahmico sought to remind Hawkins that Creeks already possessed a civilization and did not need to subscribe to the American version that Hawkins championed. When Ispahihta spoke with Gregory (and, by extension, the anthropologist John Swanton), the Creeks faced the joint political crises of allotment and Oklahoma statehood; the former threatened their land base and the latter their political independence. To assert a Creek power rooted in warfare and migration to the distant Atlantic Ocean (and to tell this to an anthropologist working for the U.S. government) offered a symbolic challenge to a nation that seemed intent on destroying them. Nearly a century later, the stories I heard during a brief visit to Oklahoma came from people who were proud of their history but who were also insistent that their history of emerging clans and migrating towns could not be entirely understood from documents in the archives or books in the library. By way of example from my own experience, when I asked Keeper Johnson about the Creeks’ origins, he confidently explained his own theory, what he called a “Keeperism,” that included Creek descent from the Aztecs who had fled Hernán Cortez’s conquest of Mexico. His story was unique, but his attitude was not.⁵⁴

      In these stories spanning nearly three centuries lies an intellectual history of Creeks charting their future in recollections of their past. The assistance or at least the understanding of outsiders can help, but Creeks always derive their power from their traditions. As the Creek literary scholar Craig Womack contends, by presenting their own history through stories that can only be understood through Creek symbols and cosmology, Creeks “are setting themselves apart as a nation of people with distinct worldviews that deserve to be taken seriously. This is an important exercise of sovereignty.”⁵⁵ In other words, the talwa is not just a fundamental unit of Creek identity and history, a unit important to the mound-builders as much as the mound-born; it is also the basic unit of interaction with and resistance to the last half millennium of European colonization. The Creeks rarely succeeded entirely on their terms, but when they tell stories about towns born from Mississippian mounds, they affirm centuries of exchange—of things and ideas—that created and supported their towns. This is perhaps the Mississippian period’s greatest legacy, and the Creeks were among those Indians with the good fortune to keep the memory and themselves alive.

      But their fortune has not always seemed so good. When the federal government forced Creeks to sell the Ocmulgee Fields in 1828, land-hungry Georgians made every effort to erase signs of the former inhabitants, who had long revered the nearby mounds. Reporting on the sale of the lands, the newspaper of the new town of Macon proclaimed, “We may expect shortly to see the springing up in these romantic retreats, handsome country seats, gardens, orchards, etc. etc. The shadows of superstition which overhung these scenes on the first settlement of the country, concealing beneath their dark mantle the spectral forms of another age, are in a manner dispersed. The goblins and spectres that were supposed to haunt the place some years back are all fled. Of late, we do not hear of unearthly phantoms, nor of unearthly voices.”⁵⁶ In asserting the rights of the new occupants, it was not enough for the reporter to banish ancestral ghosts that Creeks had seen there for decades.⁵⁷ Unless any doubt remained about the Creeks’ title to Georgia’s lands, the reporter went on to assert that their historic roots had never been very deep to begin with. No race of “modern Indians” could have constructed earthworks reaching nearly fifty feet in height because “they exhibit in general too much labor.”⁵⁸ In a short article celebrating the growth of the new town, the article affirmed the silence Adair had pondered over a half century earlier, effacing the memory of the Creeks and the work of their ancestors.

      But Macon’s ghosts apparently did not abandon the region. One hundred fifty kilometers northwest, Lynne and Mark Wisner bought a house near Grovetown on the banks of Euchee Creek some time in 1985, happy for the bucolic setting and even for the twenty-foot-high Indian mound located behind their house. Shortly after moving into their home, however, they were disturbed to learn that the unexcavated mound was haunted. Strange lights, drumbeats, and phantom figures dancing in the woods frequently disturbed the Wisners’ sleep. “Imagine getting up in the middle of the night, looking out СКАЧАТЬ