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

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СКАЧАТЬ analyses of their history do not explain why this multilingual and multiethnic alliance worked.¹⁵ It was through long-standing ties of trade and alliance that Creeks forged a collective identity without sacrificing local diversity. In addition to helping us appreciate the foundations of Creeks’ local and national identities, a focus on exchange also reveals the foundations of Creeks’ regional influence. Creeks’ willingness to negotiate with all three colonial powers developed in part out of earlier efforts like Zamumo’s to court multiple allies and multiple protectors.

      Creeks’ influence over—and close connection to—the colonial powers highlights a third benefit of a focus on gifts and trade. If John Stuart was right, then Zamumo’s and de Soto’s gifts were the first small knots in this “great tie” that made each a player in the other’s history and bound towns and empires in a colonial Southeast. Europeans, for instance, encouraged Indians to modify their practices of diplomatic gift giving in the service of European notions of profit and debt. As the historian Alan Gallay has shown, the English of Carolina were especially effective in this endeavor between 1690 and 1715, when they promoted a brutal trade in Indian slaves that financed their expansion in the region. In fact, the success of the slave trade highlights a simple but crucial fact: Europeans’ imperial expansion brought new worlds of violence into the lives of their Indian trading partners and victims.¹⁶ And Creeks’ and others’ willingness to maintain relations with Europeans enabled the Spaniards to retain an underfunded military outpost for two centuries, the French to experiment with a plantation economy, and the British to construct a lucrative and brutal plantation economy on the backs of Africans. Native partnerships, in other words, helped Europeans maintain and in some instances finance the region’s connection to a world of commercial and political power situated across the ocean.

      But trade was a mutual relationship. Even as they helped finance imperial expansion, Indians also shaped the course of its development in the Southeast. This last point deserves particular emphasis because histories of Indians have generally fallen silently in the larger forest of colonial and imperial history. This silence should strike us as problematic because empires depended on negotiation with their constituent members, even if this negotiation sometimes occurred under the threat of imperial violence.¹⁷ In some cases like the lands around the Great Lakes, neither Indians nor Europeans could compel the other to conform to their practices, so they developed what Richard White calls a “middle ground,” a new set of norms that blended elements of the participants’ cultures. Although cultural blending and adaptation were crucial to changing patterns of southeastern exchange, no middle ground formed in the Southeast because the participants were often transient or unstable. Few norms lasted more than two generations. Better instead to think of empires in the Southeast as akin to Evan Haefeli and Kevin Sweeney’s “diaphanous spiderwebs connecting individual places and people.”¹⁸ Zamumo’s Gifts explains how Europeans and Indians spun webs of exchange in the Southeast. As Indians helped construct the webs of empire, they induced Spaniards to abandon dreams of military conquest, the French to become negotiators and gift givers, and the British to build and then reform a colony dependent on trade. These developments resulted in a colonial Southeast defined by colonial ports and their military or plantation societies, but even these communities were partly constructed in reaction to the trade networks that lay largely in the hands of Indians. Indians did not seek colonization, but as they wove the violence of European expansion around older strands of local ambition, they helped fashion the fabric of empires.¹⁹

      This history of the exchange relations that shaped the early colonial Southeast depends primarily on documents from the three rival colonies. Spaniards were the first to struggle with colonizing the region, and the writings of political and religious officials have a surprising amount to tell about the lands that lay beyond their effective control. English traders wrote little about their extensive activities in the interior, but they and the men who governed them still said much about the larger geopolitical orientation of many groups. Although the French were later arrivals and had a less obvious impact on the history of the region east of their post of Mobile, Alabama, their colonial officials were some of the keenest observers and practitioners of southeastern diplomacy. My history of the region before 1680 draws heavily from numerous new syntheses of archaeological work, which themselves have benefited from increasingly fine-grained chronological analysis. I have read these documentary and archaeological sources in tandem with selections from Creeks’ own written and oral histories, including those I learned from interviews and conversations with Muscogees (Creeks) in July 1997.²⁰ The stories Creeks tell are themselves legacies of this larger history of exchange. Giving and taking supported towns before and during the trials of colonization, and many stories make clear that Europeans were fundamental to a process of incorporating innovations into past practices of exchange.

      Zamumo’s Gifts examines this process incrementally. Before we can understand the new exchanges that de Soto and Zamumo initiated, we must first trace the rise of Mississippian towns and their networks of regional exchange. During roughly four centuries before 1540, Mississippian peoples defined the town as the center of political and cosmic life, and exchange with other communities reinforced this local autonomy. De Soto’s chroniclers were among the first to record this fact, and when Spaniards sought to conquer the Southeast in the late sixteenth century and the early seventeenth, they confronted peoples who had the military capacity to defend their autonomy and demand the exchange relationships that would protect it. Although Spaniards founded St. Augustine in 1565, it was only decades later, after they accommodated these Mississippian expectations, that they secured their new outpost and its neighboring missions. Natives and Spaniards also connected Mississippian networks to a wider Atlantic world. These groups further modified their exchange relations after about 1620, when they incorporated more commercial activities within exchanges that were initially devoted to gifts and diplomacy. By 1650, these varied and sometimes competing layers of Mississippian foundations, Spanish adaptations, and Spanish-Indian innovations had broad political consequences for the region.

      These consequences appeared most dramatically after 1660, when new communities of Native and English slave raiders entered the region. As communities to the north of the Spanish missions fled these violent incursions, they drew upon and strengthened the networks of exchange that Spaniards and Indians had been developing over the previous century. By the beginning of the eighteenth century, some of these new refugees had reconfigured these ties into powerful new alliances. These alliances forced English traders from the new settlement of Charles Town and French traders from the still newer colony of Louisiana to recognize the diplomatic imperatives of exchange, even when it came at the expense of their profits. When English traders insisted on defining exchange in terms of credit, debt, and, most disturbingly, the enslavement of debtors, many of the colony’s former partners decided to use war to reform the entire system. The Yamasee War of 1715–18 devastated the region. As a number of Native combatants revived older patterns of gift exchange, they also strengthened their alliance to better protect their local autonomy. Carolinians called these reorganized allies “Creeks.” During the 1720s, as Creeks and their Native and colonial neighbors negotiated the norms of postwar exchange, Creeks became increasingly effective at harnessing the multilateral relations that shaped the colonial Southeast. Their success so vexed Carolinian ambitions that the colonists reorganized themselves, too, making their colony and themselves more British. In the long term, Creeks’ use of exchange to support their own power, then, also made possible the survival and eventual success of the colonial peoples who most threatened the towns. This fact is more than ironic. The exchanges that lie at the heart of Zamumo’s Gifts highlight how the history of neither Indians nor Europeans can be understood without the other.

       Chapter 1

      The Spirit of a Feather: The Politics of Mississippian Exchange

       The Cussitas were always Bloody minded But the Pallachucola [Apalachicola] People made them Black Drink as a Token of Friendship And told them their Hearts were white And they must have White Hearts and lay down their Bodies in Token That they Should be White. . . . [The Cussitas] strove for the Tomahawk but СКАЧАТЬ