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

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СКАЧАТЬ or copper with the powerful designs that leaders and followers both needed for social stability. In the midst of these crises—some grave, some merely troubling—chiefs recognized the opportunities that accompanied the people of St. Augustine. Some found answers in the new religion of the Spaniards; many saw the advantages of their gifts. Possessing a spiritual power rooted in their foreign origins and the military strength and religious zeal of their purveyors, these objects offered potential solutions for the challenges that beset southeastern elites after 1550. By 1630, Spanish beads were arriving in towns as far west as Alabama and as far north as Tennessee.⁵²

      Roughly one century after Ponce’s entradas, Spaniards finally secured a stable colony, one that influenced its neighbors and altered the lives of those who never heard a mission bell. Their success, such as it was, was born of hard lessons. What began with invasions of entrepreneurial conquistadors became next a military venture and then an evangelical one. Each phase certainly involved elements of the others—missionaries accompanied Luna, Menéndez de Avilés sought personal profit, and Franciscans depended on soldiers to prevent or suppress neophyte revolts. Nonetheless, the shifts were crucial to Spanish success, and they occurred because Indians forced Spaniards to rethink their efforts. However disruptive the floods that swallowed some towns, plenty of chiefs and their townspeople had the power to enforce the norms of Mississippian intertown diplomacy. Only after 1587, when royal and religious officials regularly offered gifts to potential Native allies, effectively purchasing a friendship they could not compel, did the missions expand with any predictability. Feathers and lace accomplished much more than fire and steel. Southeastern peoples had reshaped an outpost of empire to resemble a paramount chiefdom. For the Spanish, the expansion of empire required the gifts of empire.

      For many Indians, though, the gifts of empire also entailed the acceptance of empire. As the Guales knew in 1597, the missionaries who followed these gifts had more than just religious power. They also had strong ideas about how that religious power should shape Native societies. Franciscan insistence on settled communities reduced Native mobility and their access to food sources that lay outside their maize fields and the immediate environs of their missions. Chiefs might have preserved much of their authority thanks to the support of Spanish officials, but they increasingly exercised their authority in the interests of royal and religious officials, whether it was to collect tribute, enforce church attendance, or organize the labor drafts that took their towns-people to the fields of St. Augustine.⁵³ Along with the situado, the repartimiento labor of Indians was the only resource available for Florida elites to exploit for their personal benefit. As the archaeologist Jerald Milanich has noted and mission Indians must have increasingly realized, “Missions were colonization.”⁵⁴ True as this was, this form of colonization was nonetheless conditioned by the demands of gift exchanges that built and maintained it. Floridians were gradually colonizing the Southeast, but they were doing so within some of the constraints of Mississippian norms. This fact would become especially apparent during the middle decades of the seventeenth century.

      Profound changes were also underway in the interior: Indians were adjusting to and helping to create a new Spanish ecumene far inland from the colony’s coastal foothold. Spaniards were offering items that corresponded well with the indigenous objects of copper, shell, and deerskin that traditionally marked Native leaders’ ceremonial and political power. Indians of the Southeast came to recognize these new and rare objects not just as simple analogs of older symbols but also as creations from people who possessed impressive (if not overwhelming) military power and deep religious fervor. Political, economic, and perhaps epidemiological upheavals of the late 1500s and early 1600s led some Native American elites to seek these symbols of stability and strength with additional urgency. By offering gifts instead of presenting arms, Spaniards repeatedly acknowledged the failure of imperial imposition in their quest for regional influence. Accepting these items into their political and religious practices, Indians began building their eventually unbreakable ties to peoples far beyond their Atlantic shores. Subsequent observers from the eighteenth century through the twenty-first would note the transformative consequences of European goods, but most associated them with the English and French commerce that grew after 1690. Though certainly more profound after 1690, these transformations had modest but still portentious roots in the decades immediately preceding and following 1600.⁵⁵ From those roots grew a new set of relations that reworked the practices of gift exchange to fit a developing Atlantic world bound by trade and war.

       Chapter 3

      Seeking the Atlantic: The Growth of Trade

       Way back before the Indians had any religion they were playing ball close to the ocean. They saw a ship coming on the water and ran off. The ship had come across the ocean and they discovered the Indians already here. When the Indians were all gone they brought a barrel of whisky with dippers all around it and put it at the ball pole then went back to the ship. When the Indians returned and found the barrel they all were afraid of it but one venturing closer decided to taste it. Then he drank more and the rest started to drink it. They didn’t know how it would affect them so they drank too much. Some were wobbling around and others were on the ground when the strangers came back. The ones who could, ran off again but the white people captured one Indian and took him to the ship. They taught him to talk their language and brought him back to talk to the other Indians. Through him they said that they would like to be in their country and take care of them. They made an agreement—they put a cowhide in water to soak so it would be soft and would stretch. Then it was cut into a long strip. All the ground that could be encircled by this strip was to belong to the white people—about a mile square. Later they told the Indians to go way back and one of the whites would shoot a gun. As far as the Indians could hear the gun—the whites would take the ground. They kept taking more and more ground until the Indians were in Alabama. Then they had to get up and walk clear to this country [that is, Oklahoma] as they didn’t have any wagons.—Mose Wiley, 1937 ¹

      In the first years of the twentieth century, long after Altamahas weighed the potential advantages of gifts and long after the Spanish missions promoted by those gifts had crumbled, the people called Creeks lived in a land called Oklahoma. Although their homes in Georgia and Alabama and later Oklahoma had never been close to the ocean, the Atlantic still played a prominent role in many stories. In those accounts, Creeks evoked the sounds of its pounding surf and the sight of the mists that rose from its waves, but more than these things, they remembered its power. The ocean had appeared in stories at least a century earlier, but it was in the time of phonographs and motorcars that some of the more subtle versions were written down. The Creek historian James Gregory recalled the Atlantic as a place of sacred power when he described the Cussitas’ and Cowetas’ migration to the white anthropologist John Swanton at the dawn of the twentieth century; from its waters the pure sun rose each day, and at its horizon upper, middle, and lower worlds met. Three decades later, though, when an interviewer hired by the Works Progress Administration asked Mose Wiley for stories of his past, he recounted how the ocean brought trouble rather than power to his ancestors. The newcomers initially promised friendship, but over the course of years, white demands for land pushed the Indians steadily westward, eventually to Oklahoma. Told amid the poverty of the Great Depression and in the aftermath of Creeks’ economic and political dispossession, both of these stories said much about Creek lessons from the past and hopes for the future. Memories of ancient migrations and spiritual power must have reassured Creeks of their great heritage, but so, too, must references to the Atlantic have been laden with grim portents of twentieth-century troubles. Whether Gregory’s or Wiley’s ancestors from the seventeenth century spoke of the ocean in either set of terms is impossible to say, but they did become acutely aware that new sources of power lay in the hands of people who crossed its eastern horizons and debarked on its western shores.

      Of course, leaders like Zamumo had recognized this fact decades earlier. Spaniards and their gifts provided new resources for old Mississippian networks, and by 1612, well-traveled leaders visiting St. Augustine testified to the outpost’s regional status. But even as La Florida’s capital gained a reputation СКАЧАТЬ