| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.4

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

African Creeks: Estelvste and the Creek Nation. By Gary Zellar. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2007. xx, 343 pp. $34.95, ISBN 978-0-8061-3815-2.)

In African Creeks, Gary Zellar traces the social and political history of people of African descent in the Creek nation, first in the Southeast and then in Indian Territory. The opening epigraph by Ralph Ellison on "the sharing of bloodlines and cultural traditions by groups of widely differing ethnic origins" sets the tone for Zellar's two major arguments (p. xiii). He contends that the Creek nation was a "racial frontier" (p. 45) in which racial "fluidity" and "ambiguity" led to a higher status for people of African descent that persisted until the era of Oklahoma statehood. Although Creeks were slaveholders, Zellar emphasizes that enslaved blacks had physical mobility, rights to property ownership, and the flexibility to manage their own farms, concurring with Kathryn Holland Braund's characterization of the format of Creek slavery as "patron-client" (Deerskins and Duffels: The Creek Indian Trade with Anglo America, 1685–1815, 1993). Zellar posits that this unique formation was enabled by the Creek Confederacy tradition, in which different tribes were incorporated into a cooperative whole.

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