Yuchi Indian Histories Before the Removal Era

by Jason Baird Jackson (Editor), Jason Baird Jackson (Introduction)

Overview

In Yuchi Indian Histories Before the Removal Era, folklorist and anthropologist Jason Baird Jackson and nine scholars of Yuchi (Euchee) Indian culture and history offer a revisionist and in-depth portrait of Yuchi community and society. This first interdisciplinary history of the Yuchi people corrects the historical record, which often submerges the Yuchi within the Creek Confederacy instead of acknowledging the Yuchi as a separate tribe.

By looking at the oral, historical, ethnographic, linguistic, and archaeological record, contributors illuminate Yuchi political circumstances and cultural identity. Focusing on the pre-Removal era, the volume shows that from the entrada of Hernando de Soto into the American South in 1541 to the Yuchis' internal migrations throughout the hinterlands of the South and their entanglement with the Creeks to the maintenance of community and identity today, the Yuchis have persisted as a distinct people. This volume provides a voice to an indigenous nation that previous generations of scholars have misidentified or erroneously assumed to be a simple constituent of the Creek Nation. In doing so, it offers a fuller picture of Yuchi social realities since the arrival of Europeans and other non-natives in their Southern homelands.

Jason Baird Jackson is an associate professor of folklore and American Studies at Indiana University. He is the author of Yuchi Ceremonial Life: Performance, Meaning, and Tradition in a Contemporary Native American Community (Nebraska, 2003).

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780803240414
Publisher:	Nebraska Paperback
Publication date:	11/01/2012
Pages:	280
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Jason Baird Jackson is a professor of folklore and director of the Mathers Museum of World Cultures at Indiana University. He is the author of Yuchi Ceremonial Life: Performance, Meaning, and Tradition in a Contemporary Native American Community (Nebraska, 2003).
 

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations ix

List of Maps x

List of Tables xi

Introduction: On Studying Yuchi History Jason Baird Jackson xiii

1 Deep Time and Genetic Relationships: Yuchi Linguistic History Revisited Mary S. Linn 1

2 Enigmatic Origins: On the Yuchi of the Contact Era John E. Worth 33

3 Reconsidering Chestowee: The 1713 Raid in Regional Perspective Brett Riggs 43

4 Yuchi in the Lower Savannah River Valley: Historical Context and Archaeological Confirmation Daniel T. Elliott 73

5 The Yuchi Indians along the Chattahoochee and Flint Rivers (1715-1836): A Synthesis H. Thomas Foster II 101

6 "They Look upon the Yuchis as Their Vassals": An Early History of Yuchi-Creek Political Relations Steven C. Hahn 123

7 Reconsidering Coalescence: Yuchi and Shawnee Survival Strategies in the Colonial Southeast Stephen Warren 155

8 To the Backcountry and Back Again: The Yuchi's Search for Stability in the Eighteenth-Century Southeast Joshua Piker 189

9 A Band of Outsiders: Yuchi Identity among the Nineteenth-Century Florida Seminoles Brent R. Weisman 215

List of Contributors 233

Index 235

Editorial Reviews

"The editor and contributors deserve congratulations for sustaining the nearly invisible Yuchi story line. Hope for future information rests in the questions raised by these and other scholars. This publication makes clear that the possibilities are enormous for ethnohistorians, historians, archaeologists, anthropologists, ethnologists, ethnographers, linguists, ethnobotanists, and geographers."—J.H. O'Donnell III , Choice

Choice - J.H. O'Donnell III

"Future scholars of the Yuchi will undoubtedly begin with the conclusions and frameworks of Yuchi Indian Histories before the Removal Era. The essays in the volume are uniformly accessible and simultaneously insightful yet cautious in their conclusions. Scholars of the early South (native or otherwise) will appreciate their insights."—Andrew K. Frank, Journal of American History

Journal of American History - Andrew K. Frank

"This volume will stimulate a spate of new archaeological and ethnographic fieldwork, archival research, and linguistic analyses of the Yuchi."—Cameron B. Wesson, Plains Anthropologist

Plains Anthropologist - Cameron B. Wesson

"This important new collection further illuminates the intricacies of the political climate of the colonial Southeast and highlights the history of an important, understudied group."—Natalie Inman, Journal of Southern History

Journal of Southern History - Natalie Inman

"Yuchi Indian Histories before the Removal Era will interest historians of the Native Southeast and anyone with a stake in the Yuchi past, present, and future. That group, as this book shows, should include scholars across multiple disciplines."—Jessica R. Cattelino, Journal of Anthropological Research

Journal of Anthropological Research - Jessica R. Cattelino

"A must read for anyone interest in the Native Southeast."Dixie Ray Haggard, Chronicles of Oklahoma

Chronicles of Oklahoma - Dixie Ray Haggard