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Book Review
| Creek Country: The Creek Indians and Their World. By Robbie Ethridge. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003. xiii + 369 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, index. Cloth $59.95, paper $22.50.
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| Robbie Ethridge concludes her well-written and absorbing study of Creek Country with an account of the closing in the early nineteenth century of this vast homeland to the Creek Indians once covering most of the Alabama territory. More fitting to the place this volume ought to achieve in the literature of North American ethnohistory, however, would have been a chapter on the opening of Creek Country to contemporary scholarship. In this important volume Ethridge adds substantively to a growing body of scholarship demonstrating the complexity, sophistication, and efficacy of Native American cultures during the entire period of European and American contact. But what she does not say about Creek Country opens many doors for further work on the world the Creeks inhabited within the larger history and cultural geography of North America. |
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Ethridge lays out the boundaries of her study at the outset. It covers the years from 1796 to 1816 when Benjamin Hawkins, United States agent to the Creek Indians, wrote extensively and sympathetically about their society, their land, and the living they made from it. Most interesting to readers of Environmental History will be long, descriptive passages on the natural environment. Ethridge is an anthropologist who describes her work as a "historical ethnography" (p. 3), a genre in which accounts of landform, hydrography, weather, flora, and fauna customarily precede the detailed parsing of cultural forms and functions from documentary and archaeological records. Thus much of Ethridge's book is taken up with detailed descriptions of Creek towns gleaned from Hawkins's accounts. These are accompanied by many gracefully drawn maps depicting the extent of various forests by type, swamps, agricultural fields, cane fields, and many other landscape features. Ethridge then peoples this landscape with accounts of the social uses to which Creeks put their town spaces, the political organization of townships and the Creek nation, kinship systems and their capacity to govern ecological relationships, and gender and race in the Creek worldview. Central to this ethnography are descriptions of the Creek economy, which by the end of the eighteenth century depended upon the deerskin trade and later, as market hunting depleted deer populations, upon farming and ranching. Concluding chapters chronicle the end of Creek Country as the Indians knew it with the advance of American settlement under the irresistible force of white land hunger. |
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A "snapshot in time" (p. 3), Ethridge's Creek Country is timeless. How complex, centuries-long patterns of evolution and accommodation produced what appears as a stable, traditional culture lies beyond the compass of her concerns. So is the influence of surrounding cultures. The operation of the deerskin trade, for instance, receives considerable attention but not its introduction or its protean ability to shape or distort cultural systems. Relations between culture and environment also come across as static. As in many ethnographies, descriptions of the natural world parallel reports of cultural practices leaving environmental possibilities or limitations for cultural change unscrutinized. Nor is the closing of Creek Country treated as a dynamic encounter between Native American and European American cultures. Many of the conflicts that led to Creek land cessions, for instance, resulted from the incapacity of American legal concepts and practices to accommodate Creek systems of blood revenge in the resolution of murder cases. Ethridge reviews these differences but fails to treat them as a clash of cultures. |
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What some might regard as the shortcomings of the volume, however, others will praise as developmental opportunities within the intellectual terrain that Ethridge opens. Fascinating questions emerge from this author's work. In what direction, for example, was environmental change leading Creek culture at the critical moment when the new United States took responsibility for managing both people and land? How did the penetration of Atlantic economies affect the Creek environment and its cultural potential? How was the world of Creek Indians as much an accommodation to surrounding cultures as it was an artifact shaped by the daily life of Creek peoples? Or, how can the conflicts destroying Creek Country be viewed through the prism of cultural encounter and change? Whether readers emerge from Creek Country with a static appreciation for its stability, order, and completeness or an enthusiasm for the bright prospects of its further exploration, Ethridge renders the venture well worth the risk in either case by elegant prose and a deeply engaging account of yet another world otherwise lost to history but for the rigor and craft of careful scholarship. |
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Warren R. Hofstra is professor of history at Shenandoah University in Winchester, Virginia. He is the author of The Planting of New Virginia: Settlement and Landscape in the Shenandoah Valley (Johns Hopkins, 2004) and is currently engaged in research on the same region during its great age of grain production and high farming. |
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