| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.2

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Joshua Piker. Okfuskee: A Creek Indian Town in Colonial America. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 2004. Pp. xi, 270. $45.00.
Joshua Piker's book takes us inside the Creek Confederacy at the level of one of the most important political and social affiliations for an eighteenth-century Creek Indian: the township. This is its genius. By concentrating on a single community, Piker forefronts Creek politics and Creek international diplomatic institutions, as well as the concerns and politics that would have been on eighteenth-century Okfuskee minds as they learned to manage their relationships with Europeans, especially the British. Piker's wonderful insight in doing a community study undoubtedly also made him privy to the "peculiar connections" (p. 1) that existed between two seemingly disparate colonial towns, Okfuskee and Charleston. Although Piker does not fully explore the place of Okfuskee in the Creek Confederacy, he gives us a vivid picture of how Okfuskee politicians understood and manipulated their position in the larger colonial world by forging a town-to-town relationship with Charleston.	1
Piker obviously did much archival sleuthing. Pulling together enough information on a single Creek town is no easy task. The documentary record is quite fragmentary since the Creeks left few written records and since Indians oftentimes went unnamed in the European documents. Kudos to Piker for not flinching from his community focus in the face of such evidentiary problems and kudos to him for finding every scrap of reference to Okfuskee and Okfuskee leaders in the colonial documents. The result is a fine-grained history and analysis of Okfuskee international politics during the eighteenth century, replete with notable historical actors (Indian and British), historical episodes that reflect larger issues, and events particular to Okfuskee that made up the history of the town.	. . .

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