To Be Uninvited Guests is Georgia College Ina Dillard Russell Library Special Collections and Archives Rare Book Room's inaugural exhibit. The physical exhibit can be viewed in the Special Collections Rare Book Room (M-F 9am - 4pm). The companion digital exhibit can be viewed here. The exhibit wascurated by Evan Leavitt, Ina Dillard Russell Library, in consultation and collaboration with the Muscogee Nation Department of Historical and Cultural Preservation.
Special thanks to RaeLynn Butler, Turner Hunt, and Gano Perez.
To Be Uninvited Guests shares the destructive history inflicted upon Georgia's original inhabitants by the European invasion of the North American continent. In a short 100 years from the founding of the colony of Georgia, the Muscogee (Creek) people, whose descendants had called this land home for thousands of years, along with their neighbors, the Cherokee, had been ethnically cleansed from the landscape. Their cultural legacy is still evidenced on our surrounding environment if you know where to look.
We acknowledge the Mvskoke (Muscogee (Creek)) people and their ancestors, who have called this land home for thousands of years. We honor Indigeneity realities by recognizing that they are not historic peoples, but vibrant entities that exist today with a presence in Oklahoma, displaying strength and resilience in the face of their systemic oppression. Their history is living in the surrounding landscape and is still visible today if we know where to look.
Our city, campus, and community reside on the sovereign land of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation, a confederation of many Tribal Towns, who inhabited, worked, nurtured, and produced knowledge on this land during the early years of contact with settlers-colonizers. The Muscogee (Creek) suffered extensively from the arrival of Europeans, first and throughout all early interactions was the European greed for more land.
Georgia College is allowed to occupy this land due to the Treaty of New York (1790), which ceded Creek lands up to the east bank of the Oconee River, and the Treaty of Fort Wilkinson (1802), which ceded land from the Oconee River westward to Commissioner's Creek, seizing control of the remaining area that would eventually become Baldwin County, Georgia.
We recognize the officially sanctioned, sustained, and intentional oppression, land dispossession, and forced removals of the Muscogee and Cherokee peoples from Georgia and the Southeast by the state and federal governments of the United States. We also recognize the Enslaved people (primarily Indigenous and of African descent) who suffered from forced labor on the land and within structures that now encompass the Georgia College campus.
We ask for you to consider our institutions’ relationships to past and current mistreatment or apathy in regards to Native American lives and culture, and for awareness that this land is still key to the cultural identity of the Muscogee people. We seek to honor the Muscogee (Creek) Nation and other Indigenous caretakers of this land by humbly seeking knowledge of their histories and committing ourselves to respectful stewardship of this land.
"Acknowledgment is a simple, powerful way of showing respect and a step toward correcting the stories and practices that erase Indigenous people’s history and culture and toward inviting and honoring the truth."
~ From the U.S. Department of Arts and Culture Honor Native Land: A Guide and Call to Acknowledgment
Creating a land acknowledgement requires several considerations that should be investigated before beginning the process:
Chinnubbie and the Owl by
Though he died at the age of thirty-four, the Muscogee (Creek) poet, journalist, and humorist Alexander Posey (1873–1908) was one of the most prolific and influential American Indian writers of his time. This volume of nine stories, five orations, and nine works of oral tradition is the first to collect these entertaining and important works of Muscogee literature. Many of Posey’s stories reflect trickster themes; his orations demonstrate both his rhetorical prowess and his political stance as a “Progressive” Muscogee; and his works of oral tradition reveal his deep cultural roots. Most of these pieces, which first appeared between 1892 and 1907 in Indian Territory newspapers and magazines, have since become rarities, many of the original pieces surviving only as single clippings in a few archives. nbsp; While Muscogee oral tradition greatly influenced Posey’s prose, his work was also infused with the Euro-American influences that formed much of his literary education. As this collection demonstrates, Posey used his knowledge of Euro-American literature and history to help write works that championed his own people at a time of profound oppression at the hands of the United States government. Posey’s vivid literary style merges rich regional humor with Muscogee oral tradition in a way that makes him a unique figure in American Indian literature and politics. Chinnubbie and the Owl brings these works of great literary, cultural, and historical value to a new generation of readers.
A Grammar of Creek (Muskogee) by
Creek (or Muskogee) is a Muskogean language spoken by several thousand members of the Muscogee (Creek) and Seminole nations of Oklahoma and by several hundred members of the Seminole Tribe of Florida. This volume is the first modern grammar of Creek, compiled by a leading authority on the languages of the southern United States. Intended for scholars, students, and Creek instructors, this reference grammar describes all the major morphological and syntactic patterns in the language. Special attention is given to pitch accent and tone, active agreement, locative prefixes, tense, aspect, and switch reference. The description covers several hundred years of documentation and draws heavily on materials written by Creek speakers. It is likely to be the definitive source on the language for years to come.
Rivers of Sand by
2017 James F. Sulzby Book Award from the Alabama Historical Association At its height the Creek Nation comprised a collection of multiethnic towns and villages with a domain stretching across large parts of Alabama, Georgia, and Florida. By the 1830s, however, the Creeks had lost almost all this territory through treaties and by the unchecked intrusion of white settlers who illegally expropriated Native soil. With the Jackson administration unwilling to aid the Creeks, while at the same time demanding their emigration to Indian territory, the Creek people suffered from dispossession, starvation, and indebtedness. Between the 1825 Treaty of Indian Springs and the arrival of detachment six in the West in late 1837, nearly twenty-three thousand Creek Indians were moved--voluntarily or involuntarily--to Indian territory. Rivers of Sand fills a substantial gap in scholarship by capturing the full breadth and depth of the Creeks' collective tragedy during the marches westward, on the Creek home front, and during the first years of resettlement. Unlike the Cherokee Trail of Tears, which was conducted largely at the end of a bayonet, most Creeks were relocated through a combination of coercion and negotiation. Hopelessly outnumbered military personnel were forced to make concessions in order to gain the compliance of the headmen and their people. Christopher D. Haveman's meticulous study uses previously unexamined documents to weave narratives of resistance and survival, making Rivers of Sand an essential addition to the ethnohistory of American Indian removal.
Engines of Diplomacy by
As a fledgling republic, the United States implemented a series of trading outposts to engage indigenous peoples and to expand American interests west of the Appalachian Mountains. Under the authority of the executive branch, this Indian factory system was designed to strengthen economic ties between Indian nations and the United States, while eliminating competition from unscrupulous fur traders. In this detailed history of the Indian factory system, David Andrew Nichols demonstrates how Native Americans and U.S. government authorities sought to exert their power in the trading posts by using them as sites for commerce, political maneuvering, and diplomatic action. Using the factory system as a lens through which to study the material, political, and economic lives of Indian peoples, Nichols also sheds new light on the complexities of trade and diplomacy between whites and Native Americans. Though the system ultimately disintegrated following the War of 1812 and the Panic of 1819, Nichols shows that these factories nonetheless served as important centers of economic and political authority for an expanding inland empire.
The Commissioners of Indian Affairs by
Although federal Indian policies are largely determined by Congress and the executive branch, it is the commissioner and assistant secretary of Indian Affairs who must implement them. Over the past two centuries, the overarching goals of federal Indian policy have been the social and political integration and assimilation of Native Americans and the extinguishment of aboriginal title to Indian lands. These goals have been woven into policies of emigration, assimilation, acculturation, termination, reservations, and consumerism, shifting under the influence of a changing national moral compass. Indian Affairs commissioners have and continue to hold an enormous power to dictate how these policies affect the fate of Indians and their lands, a power that David H. DeJong shows has been used and misused in different ways through the years. By examining the work of the Indian affairs commissioners and their assistant secretaries, DeJong gives new insight into how federal Indian policy has evolved and been shaped by the social, political, and cultural winds of the day.
The Federal Road Through Georgia, the Creek Nation, and Alabama, 1806-1836 by
The Federal Road was a major influence in settlement of the Mississippi Territory during the period between the Louisiana Purchase and removal of the Creek Indians Histories of early Alabama covering this period are replete with references to isolated incidents along the Federal Road but heretofore no documented history drawn from original sources has been published. Authors Southerland and Brown have explored many scattered and often obscure sources in order to produce this fascinating, informative account of the impact of the Federal Road on the timing, shape, and settlement of the lower South. What started as a postal horsepath through a malaria-infested wilderness occupied by Indians was widened into a military road for use during the War of 1812 and became a primary thoroughfare for pioneers. The accessibility to Indian land provided by the road was a principal cause of the Creek Indian War of 1813-1814; moreover, it expedited the exodus of the Creek Indians and permitted English-speaking settlers to enter western Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi. This history of the Federal Road, describing its birth of necessity to fulfill an essential need, its short and useful service life, and its demise, opens a new window onto our past and reveals a historical period that, although now almost faded into oblivion, still affects our daily lives. This illumination of the life of the Federal Road will help present-day inhabitants appreciate how we came to be where we are today.
Creek Paths and Federal Roads by
In Creek Paths and Federal Roads, Angela Pulley Hudson offers a new understanding of the development of the American South by examining travel within and between southeastern Indian nations and the southern states, from the founding of the United States until the forced removal of southeastern Indians in the 1830s. During the early national period, Hudson explains, settlers and slaves made their way along Indian trading paths and federal post roads, deep into the heart of the Creek Indians' world. Hudson focuses particularly on the creation and mapping of boundaries between Creek Indian lands and the states that grew up around them; the development of roads, canals, and other internal improvements within these territories; and the ways that Indians, settlers, and slaves understood, contested, and collaborated on these boundaries and transit networks. While she chronicles the experiences of these travelers--Native, newcomer, free, and enslaved--who encountered one another on the roads of Creek country, Hudson also places indigenous perspectives squarely at the center of southern history, shedding new light on the contingent emergence of the American South.
Of One Mind and of One Government by
In Of One Mind and Of One Government Kevin Kokomoor examines the formation of Creek politics and nationalism from the 1770s through the Red Stick War, when the aftermath of the American Revolution and the beginnings of American expansionism precipitated a crisis in Creek country. The state of Georgia insisted that the Creeks sign three treaties to cede tribal lands. The Creeks objected vigorously, igniting a series of border conflicts that escalated throughout the late eighteenth century and hardened partisan lines between pro-American, pro-Spanish, and pro-British Creeks and their leaders. Creek politics shifted several times through historical contingencies, self-interests, changing leadership, and debate about how to best preserve sovereignty, a process that generated national sentiment within the nascent and imperfect Creek Nation. Based on original archival research and a revisionist interpretation, Kokomoor explores how the state of Georgia's increasingly belligerent and often fraudulent land acquisitions forced the Creeks into framing a centralized government, appointing heads of state, and assuming the political and administrative functions of a nation-state. Prior interpretations have viewed the Creeks as a loose confederation of towns, but the formation of the Creek Nation brought predictability, stability, and reduced military violence in its domain during the era.
The Second Creek War by
Historians have traditionally viewed the “Creek War of 1836” as a minor police action centered on rounding up the Creek Indians for removal to Indian Territory. Using extensive archival research, John T. Ellisor demonstrates that, in fact, the Second Creek War was neither brief nor small. Indeed, armed conflict continued long after “peace” was declared and the majority of Creeks had been sent west. nbsp; Ellisor’s study also broadly illuminates southern society just prior to the Indian removals, a time when many blacks, whites, and Natives lived in close proximity in the Old Southwest. In the Creek country, also called New Alabama, these ethnic groups began to develop a pluralistic society. When the 1830s cotton boom placed a premium on Creek land, however, dispossession of the Natives became an economic priority. Dispossessed and impoverished, some Creeks rose in armed revolt both to resist removal west and to drive the oppressors from their ancient homeland. Yet the resulting Second Creek War, which raged over three states, was fueled not only by Native determination but also by economic competition and was intensified not least by the massive government-sponsored land grab that constituted Indian removal. Because these circumstances also created fissures throughout southern society, both whites and blacks found it in their best interests to help the Creek insurgents. This first book-length examination of the Second Creek War shows how interethnic collusion and conflict characterized southern society during the 1830s.
George Galphin's Intimate Empire by
A revealing saga detailing the economic, familial, and social bonds forged by Indian trader George Galphin in the early American South A native of Ireland, George Galphin arrived in South Carolina in 1737 and quickly emerged as one of the most proficient deerskin traders in the South. This was due in large part to his marriage to Metawney, a Creek Indian woman from the town of Coweta, who incorporated Galphin into her family and clan, allowing him to establish one of the most profitable merchant companies in North America. As part of his trade operations, Galphin cemented connections with Indigenous and European peoples across the South, while simultaneously securing links to merchants and traders in the British Empire, continental Europe, and beyond. In George Galphin's Intimate Empire: The Creek Indians, Family, and Colonialism in Early America, Bryan C. Rindfleisch presents a complex narrative about eighteenth-century cross-cultural relationships. Reconstructing the multilayered bonds forged by Galphin and challenging scholarly understandings of life in the Native South, the American South more broadly, and the Atlantic World, Rindfleisch looks simultaneously at familial, cultural, political, geographical, and commercial ties--examining how eighteenth-century people organized their world, both mentally and physically. He demonstrates how Galphin's importance emerged through the people with whom he bonded. At their most intimate, Galphin's multilayered relationships revolved around the Creek, Anglo-French, and African children who comprised his North American family, as well as family and friends on the other side of the Atlantic. Through extensive research in primary sources, Rindfleisch reconstructs an expansive imperial world that stretches across the American South and reaches into London and includes Indians, Europeans, and Africans who were intimately interconnected and mutually dependent. As a whole, George Galphin's Intimate Empire provides critical insights into the intensely personal dimensions and cross-cultural contours of the eighteenth-century South and how empire-building and colonialism were, by their very nature, intimate and familial affairs.
Bending Their Way Onward by
2018 Choice Outstanding Academic Title 2019 Dwight L. Smith (ABC-CLIO) Award from the Western History Association Between 1827 and 1837 approximately twenty-three thousand Creek Indians were transported across the Mississippi River, exiting their homeland under extreme duress and complex pressures. During the physically and emotionally exhausting journey, hundreds of Creeks died, dozens were born, and almost no one escaped without emotional scars caused by leaving the land of their ancestors. Bending Their Way Onward is an extensive collection of letters and journals describing the travels of the Creeks as they moved from Alabama to present-day Oklahoma. This volume includes documents related to the "voluntary" emigrations that took place beginning in 1827 as well as the official conductor journals and other materials documenting the forced removals of 1836 and the coerced relocations of 1836 and 1837. This volume also provides a comprehensive list of muster rolls from the voluntary emigrations that show the names of Creek families and the number of slaves who moved west. The rolls include many prominent Indian countrymen (such as white men married to Creek women) and Creeks of mixed parentage. Additional biographical data for these Creek families is included whenever possible. Bending Their Way Onward is the most exhaustive collection to date of previously unpublished documents related to this pivotal historical event.
Lost Creeks by
Lost Creeks collects for the first time all the journals and shorter autobiographical works of noted Muscogee (Creek) writer, humorist, and political activist Alexander Posey (1873–1908). In his brief but productive life Posey became an influential political spokesperson, man of letters, and advocate for better conditions in Indian Territory. Posey’s journals reveal much about his turbulent but noteworthy political career, his personal aspirations and challenges, and the creative process behind not only his poetry and short stories but also his famed Fus Fixico letters. nbsp; Drawing on extensive archival research, Matthew Wynn Sivils produces a carefully annotated edition of the journals and also provides abundant contextual information. This volume enriches and personalizes the legacy of this remarkable Native writer and provides new insight into the beginnings of twentieth-century Native intellectual, political, and literary movements and traditions.
Untangling a Red, White, and Black Heritage by
Examining the legacy of racial mixing in Indian Territory through the land and lives of two families, one of Cherokee Freedman descent and one of Muscogee Creek heritage, Darnella Davis's memoir writes a new chapter in the history of racial mixing on the frontier. It is the only book-length account of the intersections between the three races in Indian Territory and Oklahoma written from the perspective of a tribal person and a freedman. The histories of these families, along with the starkly different federal policies that molded their destinies, offer a powerful corrective to the historical narrative. From the Allotment Period to the present, their claims of racial identity and land in Oklahoma reveal inequalities that still fester more than one hundred years later. Davis offers a provocative opportunity to unpack our current racial discourse and ask ourselves, "Who are 'we' really?"
Muscogee Daughter by
How American is Miss America? For Susan Supernaw, a Muscogee (Creek) and Munsee Native American, the question wasn't just academic. Throughout a childhood clouded by poverty, alcoholism, abuse, and a physical disability, Supernaw sought escape in school and dance and the Native American Church. She became a presidential scholar, won a scholarship to college, and was crowned Miss Oklahoma in 1971. Supernaw might not have won the Miss America pageant that year, but she did call attention to the Native peoples living largely invisible lives throughout their own American land. And she did at long last earn her Native American name. Chronicling a quest to escape poverty and find meaning, Supernaw's story is revealing, humorous, and deeply moving. Muscogee Daughter is the story of finding a Native American identity among the distractions and difficulties of American life and of discerning an identity among competing notions of what it is to be a woman, a Native American, and a citizen of the world.
Unconventional Politics by
Throughout the nineteenth century, Native and non-Native women writers protested U.S. government actions that threatened indigenous people's existence. The conventional genres they sometimes adopted--the sensationalistic captivity narrative, sentimental Indian lament poetry, didactic assimilation fiction, and the mass-circulated commercial magazine--typically had been used to reinforce the oppressive policies of removal, war, and allotment. But in Unconventional Politics Janet Dean explores how four authors, Sarah Wakefield, Lydia Huntley Sigourney, the Muscogee/Creek S. Alice Callahan, and the Cherokee Ora V. Eddleman, converted these frameworks to serve a politics of dissent. Intervening in current debates in feminist and Native American literary criticism, Dean shows how these women advocated for Native Americans by both politicizing conventional literature and employing literary skill to respond to national policy. Dean argues that in protesting U.S. Indian policy through popular genres, Wakefield, Sigourney, Callahan, and Eddleman also critiqued cultural protocols and stretched the contours of accepted modes of feminine discourse. Their acts of improvisation and reinvention tell a new story about the development of American women's writing and political expression.
