|
|
|
REVIEWS
| Okfuskee: A Creek Indian Town in Colonial America. By Joshua Piker (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004. 284 pp. $39.22).
|
| Johua Piker's Okfuskee is a community history that depicts Okfuskee, a Creek town, as part of an inviting, dangerous, and innovative market economy. Okfuskee's location on the major trading path connecting Upper Creek towns to the British colonies in the east subjected it to commercial forces, or what Piker calls, "peculiar connections" from the late eighteenth century. In addition to exploring Okfuskee's history, Piker's related objective is to "trace the points in their histories where Native and Euro-American communities overlapped" (5). This he does masterfully, and his cross-cultural comparisons should aid American History professors in making their lectures more inclusive of Native peoples. Some similarities shared by the Creeks and the colonists included their relative autonomy from centralized governments, their insecurity amid cross-cultural warfare, their mobility and the break up of their close-knit communities due to land and game exhaustion, and their mutual participation in a frontier exchange economy. |
1
|
|
Piker's discussion of the divergence between Native and colonists' economic interests is eloquent and worth quoting in part. Piker describes "a politically based constriction of Native opportunity. Markets were open to Indians only under certain circumstances. They could produce and purchase only a set range of goods, a range whose boundaries were increasingly set not by market forces or Indian culture but by the political requirements of colonial and imperial life." (160). |
. . . |
There are about 578 more words in this article.
Please log in (or, if you are not yet an
authorized user, please go to the
User Setup page) to gain full access rights. Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.
|
