Creek Indian Quotes

You look back on some little decision you made and realize all the things that happened because of it, and you think to yourself "if only I'd known," but, of course, you couldn't have known.

He looked at me. “If I were a creek, I would be where the ground slopes.” “Right.” Sometimes it was good to have an Indian scout.

While chasing birds, he had hitchhiked through some of the most desolate places imaginable. Nicaraguan jungles, Indian slums, Samoa fruit bat colonies. But when asked to name the least likable place he'd seen in the world, he instantly pointed to an affluent California suburb: Walnut Creek, no question.

Colonel Maycomb’s misplaced self-confidence and slender sense of direction brought disaster to all who rode with him in the Creek Indian Wars.

There were many deficits in our swamp education, but Grandpa Sawtooth, to his credit, taught us the names of whole townships that had been forgotten underwater. Black pioneers, Creek Indians, moonshiners, women, 'disappeared' boy soldiers who deserted their army camps. From Grandpa we learned how to peer beneath the sea-glare of the 'official, historical' Florida records we found in books. "Prejudice," as defined by Sawtooth Bigtree, was a kind of prehistoric arithmetic--a "damn, fool math"--in which some people counted and others did not. It meant white names on white headstones in the big cemetery in Cypress Point, and black and brown bodies buried in swamp water. At ten, I couldn't articulate much but I got the message: to be a true historian, you had to mourn amply and well.

if everything that is happening in the world is traceable to our inability to understand what is happening in the world.  If there is such a thing as original sin, it's the human capacity to get everything wrong, right from the beginning and all the way up to now, and that's what the old storytellers have been telling us, including the Creek Indians who told this story along with every other tribe on earth. 

Even when I encountered racism outside Salmon Creek, it usually rolled off me. The worst of it often came from rednecks whipping past in rusted pickups. I looked at them and I looked at me-class leader, track star, straight-A student- and their slurs about dirty Indians and drunk Indians and dumb Indians were laughable. Mom says crap like that comes from people who´ve accomplished so little in lifethat they feel the need to lift themselves above someone, anyone. So they pick skin color or religion or sexual orientation and say, "Well, I might not be much, but at least I´m not a ..." I´d look at those guys, and see the truth of her words.

My shame is as big as the earth…I once thought that I was the only man that persevered to be the friend of the white man, but it is hard for me to believe the white man anymore.” – Black Kettle

Down through the druid wood I saw Wildman join with Cleaver Creek, put on weight, exchange his lean and hungry look for one of more well-fed fanaticism. Then came Chichamoonga, the Indian Influence, whooping along with its banks war-painted with lupine and columbine. Then Dog Creek, then Olson Creek, then Weed Creek. Across a glacier-raked gorge I saw Lynx Falls spring hissing and spitting from her lair of fire-bright vine maple, claw the air with silver talons, then crash screeching into the tangle below. Darling Ida Creek slipped demurely from beneath a covered bridge to add her virginal presence, only to have the family name blackened immediately after by the bawdy rollicking of her brash sister, Jumping Nellie. There followed scores of relatives of various nationalities: White Man Creek, Dutchman Creek, Chinaman Creek, Deadman Creek, and even a Lost Creek, claiming with a vehement roar that, in spite of hundreds of other creeks in Oregon bearing the same name, she was the one and only original...Then Leaper Creek...Hideout Creek...Bossman Creek...I watched them one after another pass beneath their bridges to join in the gorge running alongside the highway, like members of a great clan marshaling into an army, rallying, swelling, marching to battle as the war chant became deeper and richer.

Four wonderful books on early Creek and Cherokee histories are Michael Green’s The Politics of Indian Removal: Creek Government and Society in Crisis; Claudio Saunt’s A New Order of Things: Property, Power, and the Transformation of the Creek Indians, 1733–1816; Theda Purdue’s Slavery and the Evolution of Cherokee Society, 1540–1866; and Angela Pulley Hudson’s Creek Paths and Federal Roads: Indians, Settlers, and Slaves and the Making of the American South.

Beauty Way Today my heart will have harmony; My spirit singing the songs of happiness. My mind will seek balance, one with Mother Earth and the Creator. My eyes will look for good and there I will find it. My mouth will whisper the words of gratitude. Today I will walk the beauty way.

No matter how low, everyone wants somebody to look down upon. Jeremiah didn’t own one acre to his name, and land was what white men throughout the history of this nation had killed and employed deceit to get. Land occupied a space in white pride, and a white man without land was no better than the Black man he had enslaved or the Indian he had stolen from, through murder and connivance and a lack of sympathy. White men had laughed at the anguish of the displaced Creeks: sooner or later, every conqueror laughs at his victim. That’s what makes victory sweet, and more than that, justified.

The Seminoles did not exist as a tribe or nation before the arrival of Europeans and Africans. They were a triracial isolate composed of Creek Indians, remnants of smaller tribes, runaway slaves, and whites who preferred to live in Indian society. The word Seminole is itself a corruption of the Spanish cimarrón (altered to maroons on Jamaica), a word that came to mean runaway slaves.

Still, it had been a triumphal six-week tour. The nervy, smooth-talking governor had dispossessed the natives of 20,000 square miles without firing a shot. In return, the Indians were given nine reservations totaling about 93 square miles and promised $300,000 in hardware over the next two decades and a few vocational services. The U.S. government was subject to no penalties if it welshed on any of its promises.

In the 1830s, the forced removal of Cherokees, Choctaws, Chickasaws, Creeks, and Seminoles from the fertile lands of the southeastern United States, under the direction of President Andrew Jackson, amassed even more land for cotton cultivation and expansion of the wealth of white people. As Native Americans made the involuntary treks to what would become Indian Country or Oklahoma, white Americans dislocated approximately one million African Americans through the domestic slave trade, moving them from the Upper South to the Lower South and westward, destroying families, and severing community ties in order to create plantations and cultivate cotton.

Indian Creek, in its whole length, flows through a magnificent forest. There dwells on its shore a tribe of Indians, a remnant of the Chickasaws or Chickopees, if I remember rightly. They live in simple huts, ten or twelve feet square, constructed of pine poles and covered with bark. They subsist principally on the flesh of the deer, the coon, and opossum, all of which are plenty in these woods. Sometimes they exchange venison for a little corn and whisky with the planters on the bayous. Their usual dress is buckskin breeches and calico hunting shirts of fantastic colors, buttoned from belt to chin. They wear brass rings on their wrists, and in their ears and noses. The dress of the squaws is very similar.

Thomas slammed his fist on the table, sending eating utensils flying. “Shameful! It is downright shameful that so-called men of God would use religion to manipulate people.” --from Prairie Grace when Thomas learns how the Indian agents and others are stealing from Native Americans

raw state militias patrolling the west with seasoned troops better capable of confronting the Indians of the Great Plains. South of the Arkansas, this meant eradicating the Kiowa and the Comanche, who were blocking movement along the Santa Fe Trail into New Mexico. North of the Platte, it meant killing Red Cloud and Sitting Bull. General Ulysses S. Grant, the Army’s commander in chief, had long planned such a moment. The previous November, the day after the Sand Creek massacre, Grant summoned Major General John Pope to his Virginia headquarters to put such plans in motion. Despite his relative youth, the forty-three-year-old Pope was an old-school West Pointer and a topographical engineer-surveyor whose star had risen with several early successes on western fronts in the Civil War. It had dimmed just as rapidly when Lincoln placed him in command of the eastern forces; Pope was thoroughly outfoxed by Stonewall Jackson and James Longstreet at the Second Battle of Bull Run. Pope had been effectively exiled to St. Paul, Minnesota, until Grant recalled him to consolidate under one command a confusing array of bureaucratic Army “departments” and “districts” west of St. Louis. Grant named Pope the commanding general of a new Division of the Missouri,

Scholars have estimated that by 1850, the aboriginal population in North America—besieged by the invaders’ explosive weaponry, wondrous technology, contemptuous cruelty, and irresistible pathogens, as well as the Indians’ own ever-deepening despair—was just one-tenth of what it had been when Columbus first ventured ashore.

The Bureau of Indian Affairs, without Indigenous peoples’ consent, invested Indigenous funds in railroad companies and various municipal and state bonds. For instance, the Cherokee national fund and the Muskogee Creek Orphan Fund were so invested. Indigenous leaders were well aware of these practices but were powerless to stop them.

Land occupied a space in white pride, and a white man without land was no better than the Black man he had enslaved or the Indian he had stolen from, through murder and connivance and a lack of sympathy. White men had laughed at the anguish of the displaced Creeks: sooner or later, every conqueror laughs at his victim. That’s what makes victory sweet, and more than that, justified.

Mason is able to inspect the long Map, fragrant, elegantly cartouch’d with Indians and Instruments, at last. Ev’ry place they ran it, ev’ry House pass’d by, Road cross’d, the Ridge-lines and Creeks, Forests and Glades, Water ev’ry-where, and the Dragon nearly visible. “So,— so. This is the Line as all shall see it after its Copper-Plate ’Morphosis,— and all History remember? This is what ye expect me to sign off on?” “Not the worst I’ve handed in. And had they wish’d to pay for Coloring? Why, tha’d scarcely knaah the Place . . . ?” “This is beauteous Work. Emerson was right, Jeremiah. You were flying, all the time.” Dixon, his face darken’d by the Years of Weather, may be allowing himself to blush in safety. “Could have us’d a spot of Orpiment, all the same. Some Lapis . . . ?

As long as it didn't cost white anything American officials were absolutely determined to see justice done for the black Indian. The United States took nearly a century to grant the millions of freedman in its own borders the same rights as Creek freedmen enjoyed after 1866. On an economic level adoption into the tribe's communal land trust proved far more beneficial to blacks than any program ever devised by the federal government—even in modern times.

A Creek man more than a hundred years old, named Speckled Snake, reacted to Andrew Jackson’s policy of removal: Brothers! I have listened to many talks from our great white father. When he first came over the wide waters, he was but a little man . . . very little. His legs were cramped by sitting long in his big boat, and he begged for a little land to light his fire on. . . . But when the white man had warmed himself before the Indians’ fire and filled himself with their hominy, he became very large. With a step he bestrode the mountains, and his feet covered the plains and the valleys. His hand grasped the eastern and the western sea, and his head rested on the moon. Then he became our Great Father. He loved his red children, and he said, “Get a little further, lest I tread on thee.” Brothers! I have listened to a great many talks from our great father. But they always began and ended in this—“Get a little further; you are too near me.

Traveling with more than a hundred men, from engineers, cartographers, and geologists to astronomers, meteorologists, and botanists, as well as soldiers and guides, Whipple trudged through present-day Oklahoma, Texas, and New Mexico, into what would become Arizona, on a path that vaguely foreshadowed today’s Route 66. The group was guided along the way by Indians — Creeks, Shawnees, and Zunis. But it was the Mohaves who would lead Whipple on the final leg of the journey.2 On

Takes them less than a week to run the Line thro’ somebody’s House. About a mile and a half west of the Twelve-Mile Arc, twenty-four Chains beyond Little Christiana Creek, on Wednesday, April 10th, the Field-Book reports, “At 3 Miles 49 Chains, went through Mr. Price’s House.” “Just took a wild guess,” Mrs. Price quite amiable, “where we’d build it,— not as if my Husband’s a Surveyor or anything. Which side’s to be Pennsylvania, by the way?” A mischievous glint in her eyes that Barnes, Farlow, Moses McClean and others will later all recall. Mr. Price is in Town, in search of Partners for a Land Venture. “Would you Gentlemen mind coming in the House and showing me just where your Line does Run?” Mason and Dixon, already feeling awkward about it, oblige, Dixon up on the Roof with a long Plumb-line, Mason a-squint at the Snout of the Instrument. Mrs. Price meantime fills her Table with plates of sour-cherry fritters, Neat’s-Tongue Pies, a gigantick Indian Pudding, pitchers a-slosh with home-made Cider,— then producing some new-hackl’d Streaks of Hemp, and laying them down in a Right Line according to the Surveyors’ advice,— fixing them here and there with Tacks, across the room, up the stairs, straight down the middle of the Bed, of course, . . . which is about when Mr. Rhys Price happens to return from his Business in town, to find merry Axmen lounging beneath his Sassafras tree, Strange Stock mingling with his own and watering out of his Branch, his house invaded by Surveyors, and his wife giving away the Larder and waving her Tankard about, crying, “Husband, what Province were we married in? Ha! see him gape, for he cannot remember. ’Twas in Pennsylvania, my Tortoise. But never in Maryland. Hey? So from now on, when I am upon this side of the House, I am in Maryland, legally not your wife, and no longer subject to your Authority,— isn’t that right, Gents?” “Ask the Rev,” they reply together,

Jackson himself described how the treaties were obtained: “. . . we addressed ourselves feelingly to the predominant and governing passion of all Indian tribes, i.e., their avarice or fear.” He encouraged white squatters to move into Indian lands, then told the Indians the government could not remove the whites and so they had better cede the lands or be wiped out. He also, Rogin says, “practiced extensive bribery.” These treaties, these land grabs, laid the basis for the cotton kingdom, the slave plantations. Every time a treaty was signed, pushing the Creeks from one area to the next, promising them security there, whites would move into the new area and the Creeks would feel compelled to sign another treaty, giving up more land in return for security elsewhere. Jackson’s work had brought the white settlements to the border of Florida, owned by Spain. Here were the villages of the Seminole Indians, joined by some Red Stick refugees, and encouraged by British agents in their resistance to the Americans. Settlers moved into Indian lands. Indians attacked. Atrocities took place on both sides. When certain villages refused to surrender people accused of murdering whites, Jackson ordered the villages destroyed.

The sun glanced off a long, wicked looking knife in the Comanche's grip. At least Cash wouldn't have long to mourn. The other Indians held similar weapons, but they hung back as their leader knelt next to Sullivan. He muttered something, low and guttural, a single syllable that sounded like an insult, then picked up a lock of Sullivan's hair. The knife descended toward his scalp. "No!" Reese shouted. "Me." The Comanche paused and stared at him with a spark of interest, almost admiration. But that couldn't be since the Indian had no idea what Reese was saying. He continued to try anyway. "Me first." He struggled, wishing he could use his hands to point at himself. "Shut the hell up, Reese," Sullivan said. "What possible difference does it make who they kill first?" "Who knows what might happen. While they're working on me, anyone could show up and save the rest of you." "In that case, me first," Cash drawled. "Me." "No. Yo primero!" "Kid, I'm the only one without a wife and far too many children. No one would miss me." "I would." The words were punctuated by the distinct sound of a rifle being cocked. All eyes turned toward the man who had appeared at the edge of the clearing. Cash's sigh of relief was in direct contrast to the sneer in his voice. "About damn time, Rev. We've been waitin' on you.

Baum then bought the Aberdeen Saturday Pioneer, becoming its editor, writer, and sole proprietor. He wrote most of the editorials, including one calling for the “total extirmination” of the Indians. “Why not annihilation?” he argued. “Their glory has fled, their spirit broken, their manhood effaced; better that they die than live the miserable wretches that they are.”182 That was his response to the death of Sitting Bull and to the 1890 massacre of several hundred men, women, and children at Wounded Knee Creek, which marked the end of the Indian wars that Little Crow had set in motion thirty years earlier. People were still worried about another Minnesota massacre.

LIGHT PALE AS MILK guided the old man’s steps over the field to the creek and then to the mountain, stepping into the black wall of pineshadows and climbing up the lower slopes out into the hardwoods, bearded hickories trailing grapevines, oaks and crooked waterless cottonwoods, a quarter mile from the creek now, past the white chopped butt of a bee tree lately felled, past the little hooked Indian tree and passing silent and catlike up the mountain in the darkness under latticed leaves scudding against the sky in some small wind. Light saw him through the thick summer ivy and over windfalls and limestone. Past the sink where on a high bluff among trilobites and fishbones, shells of ossified crustaceans from an ancient sea, a great stone tusk jutted.

Author’s Note Caroline is a marriage of fact and Laura Ingalls Wilder’s fiction. I have knowingly departed from Wilder’s version of events only where the historical record stands in contradiction to her stories. Most prominently: Census records, as well as the Ingalls family Bible, demonstrate that Caroline Celestia Ingalls was born in Rutland Township, Montgomery County, Kansas on August 3, 1870. (Wilder, not anticipating writing a sequel to Little House in the Big Woods, set her first novel in 1873 and included her little sister. Consequently, when Wilder decided to continue her family’s saga by doubling back to earlier events, Carrie’s birth was omitted from Little House on the Prairie to avoid confusion.) No events corresponding to Wilder’s descriptions of a “war dance” in the chapter of Little House on the Prairie entitled “Indian War-Cry” are known to have occurred in the vicinity of Rutland Township during the Ingalls family’s residence there. Drum Creek, where Osage leaders met with federal Indian agents in the late summer of 1870 and agreed peaceably to sell their Kansas lands and relocate to present-day Oklahoma, was nearly twenty miles from the Ingalls claim. I have therefore adopted western scholar Frances Kay’s conjecture that Wilder’s family was frightened by the mourning songs sung by Osage women as they grieved the loss of their lands and ancestral graves in the days following the agreement. In this instance, like so many others involving the Osages, the Ingalls family’s reactions were entirely a product of their own deep prejudices and misconceptions.

I like rainbows. We came back down to the meadow near the steaming terrace and sat in the river, just where one of the bigger hot streams poured into the cold water of the Ferris Fork. It is illegal – not to say suicidal – to bathe in any of the thermal features of the park. But when those features empty into the river, at what is called a hot pot, swimming and soaking are perfectly acceptable. So we were soaking off our long walk, talking about our favorite waterfalls, and discussing rainbows when it occurred to us that the moon was full. There wasn’t a hint of foul weather. And if you had a clear sky and a waterfall facing in just the right direction… Over the course of a couple of days we hked back down the canyon to the Boundary Creek Trail and followed it to Dunanda Falls, which is only about eight miles from the ranger station at the entrance to the park. Dunanda is a 150-foot-high plunge facing generally south, so that in the afternoons reliable rainbows dance over the rocks at its base. It is the archetype of all western waterfalls. Dunenda is an Indian name; in Shoshone it means “straight down,” which is a pretty good description of the plunge. ... …We had to walk three miles back toward the ranger station and our assigned campsite. We planned to set up our tents, eat, hang our food, and walk back to Dunanda Falls in the dark, using headlamps. We could be there by ten or eleven. At that time the full moon would clear the east ridge of the downriver canyon and would be shining directly on the fall. Walking at night is never a happy proposition, and this particular evening stroll involved five stream crossings, mostly on old logs, and took a lot longer than we’d anticipated. Still, we beat the moon to the fall. Most of us took up residence in one or another of the hot pots. Presently the moon, like a floodlight, rose over the canyon rim. The falling water took on a silver tinge, and the rock wall, which had looked gold under the sun, was now a slick black so the contrast of water and rock was incomparably stark. The pools below the lip of the fall were glowing, as from within, with a pale blue light. And then it started at the base of the fall: just a diagonal line in the spray that ran from the lower east to the upper west side of the wall. “It’s going to happen,” I told Kara, who was sitting beside me in one of the hot pots. Where falling water hit the rock at the base of the fall and exploded upward in vapor, the light was very bright. It concentrated itself in a shining ball. The diagonal line was above and slowly began to bend until, in the fullness of time (ten minutes, maybe), it formed a perfectly symmetrical bow, shining silver blue under the moon. The color was vaguely electrical. Kara said she could see colors in the moonbow, and when I looked very hard, I thought I could make out a faint line of reddish orange above, and some deep violet at the bottom. Both colors were very pale, flickering, like bad florescent light. In any case, it was exhilarating, the experience of a lifetime: an entirely perfect moonbow, silver and iridescent, all shining and spectral there at the base of Dunanda Falls. The hot pot itself was a luxury, and I considered myself a pretty swell fellow, doing all this for the sanity of city dwellers, who need such things more than anyone else. I even thought of naming the moonbow: Cahill’s Luminescence. Something like that. Otherwise, someone else might take credit for it.

In the interval from about February to May 1609, there was considerable material progress in and about Jamestown. Perhaps forty acres were cleared and prepared for planting in Indian corn, the new grain that fast became a staple commodity. A "deep well" was dug in the fort. The church was re-covered and twenty cabins built. A second trial was made at glass manufacture in the furnaces built late in 1608. A blockhouse was built at the isthmus which connected the Island to the mainland for better control of the Indians, and a new fort was erected on a tidal creek across the river from Jamestown.

Well, it didn’t feel very good to have half of our mystery spoiled for us. We found out that Barry and Eagle Eye had made it up between them that Eagle Eye was to put on a wig and do what he had done, just to give us an adventure in that Indian cemetery.

One morning the Pomo lookouts saw a long boat coming up the lake with: ... [a] pole on the bow with [a] red cloth. And several of them came. Every one of the boats had ten to fifteen men ... The next morning the white warriors went across in their long dugouts. The Indians said they would meet them in peace. So when the whites landed, the Indians went to welcome them but the white man was determined to kill them ... One old lady, a Indian told about what she saw while hiding under a bank in under a cover of hanging tuleys [bulrushes]. She said she saw two white men coming with their guns up in the air and on their guns hung a little girl. They brought it to the creek and threw it in the water. And a little later two more men came in the same manner. This time they had a little boy on the end of their guns and also threw it in the water. A little ways from her she said lay a woman shot through the shoulder. She held her little baby in her arms. Two white men came running torge [toward] the woman and baby. They stabbed the woman and the baby and threw both of them over the bank in to the water. She said she heard the woman say, ‘O my baby;’ she said when they gathered the dead, they found all the little ones were killed by being stabbed, and many of the women were also killed [by] stabbing. She said it took them four or five days to gather up the dead: And the dead were all burnt on the east side of the creek... The next morning the soldiers started for Mendocino County ... The Indians wanted to surrender. But the soldiers did not give them time. The soldiers went in the camp and shot them down as if they were dogs. Some of them escaped by going down a little creek leading to the river. And some of them hid in the brush. And those who hid in the brush most of them were killed ... They killed mostly women and children ...

But here’s what you’ve got to understand. When you look at black people, you see ghosts of all the slavery and the rapes and the hangings and the chains. When you look at Jews, you see ghosts of all those bodies piled up in the death camps. And those ghosts keep you trying to do the right thing. “But when you look at us you don’t see the ghosts of the little babies with their heads smashed in by rifle butts at the Big Hole, or the old folks dying by the side of the trail on the way to Oklahoma while their families cried and tried to make them comfortable, or the dead mothers at Wounded Knee or the little kids at Sand Creek who were shot for target practice. You don’t see any ghosts at all. “Instead you see casinos and drunks and junk cars and shacks. “Well, we see those ghosts. And they make our hearts sad and they hurt our little children. And when we try to say something, you tell us, ‘Get over it. This is America. Look at the American dream.’ But as long as you’re calling us Redskins and doing tomahawk chops, we can’t look at the American dream, because those things remind us that we’re not real human beings to you. And when people aren’t humans, you can turn them into slaves or kill six million of them or shoot them down with Hotchkiss guns and throw them into mass graves at Wounded Knee. “No, we’re not looking at the American dream, Nerburn. And why should we? We still haven’t woken up from the American nightmare.

The lion landed in the snow well below the outcrop, at least thirty feet below where he’d been lying on the tree branch. The same as jumping from the roof of a three-story building. I saw him just as he hit, disappearing in an explosion of soft snow. Before I could picture how broken he would be, he erupted from the snow in another leap that covered twenty feet, straight down the side of the hill we’d toiled up. His body began to ball up in mid-air and he crashed down into the snow again, only to reappear a moment later, stretched out and bounding. In a few seconds he was into the bottom of the draw and out of sight.

RED JACKET, SAGOYEWATHA (Seneca) “We like our religion, and do not want another” (May 1811) Red Jacket (c. 1751-1830) addressed Reverend Alexander, from New York City, during a Seneca council at Buffalo Creek. Brother!—We listened to the talk you delivered us from the Council of Black-Coats, in New York. We have fully considered your talk, and the offers you have made us. We now return our answer, which we wish you also to understand. In making up our minds, we have looked back to remember what has been done in our days, and what our fathers have told us was done in old times. Brother!—Great numbers of Black-Coats have been among the Indians. With sweet voices and smiling faces, they offered to teach them the religion of the white people. Our brethren in the East listened to them. They turned from the religion of their fathers, and took up the religion of the white people. What good has it done? Are they more friendly one to another than we are? No, Brother! They are a divided people—we are united. They quarrel about religion—we live in love and friendship. Besides, they drink strong waters. And they have learned how to cheat, and how to practice all the other vices of the white people, without imitating their virtues. Brother!—If you wish us well, keep away; do not disturb us. Brother!—We do not worship the Great Spirit as the white people do, but we believe that the forms of worship are indifferent to the Great Spirit. It is the homage of sincere hearts that pleases him, and we worship him in that manner. According to your religion, we must believe in a Father and Son, or we shall not be happy hereafter. We have always believed in a Father, and we worship him as our old men taught us. Your book says that the Son was sent on Earth by the Father. Did all the people who saw the Son believe him? No! they did not. And if you have read the book, the consequence must be known to you. Brother!—You wish us to change our religion for yours. We like our religion, and do not want another. Our friends here [pointing to Mr. Granger, the Indian Agent, and two other whites] do us great good; they counsel us in trouble; they teach us how to be comfortable at all times. Our friends the Quakers do more. They give us ploughs, and teach us how to use them. They tell us we are accountable beings. But they do not tell us we must change our religion.—we are satisfied with what they do, and with what they say. SOURCE: B.B. Thatcher. Indian Life and Battles. Akron: New Werner Company, 1910. 312—314. Brother!—for these reasons we cannot receive your offers. We have other things to do, and beg you to make your mind easy, without troubling us, lest our heads should be too much loaded, and by and by burst.

The first campsite is at mile 7.0 (6,180), but it is small and does not have a nearby water source. The trail continues climbing, following a series of switchbacks until reaching a bench known as Lenny’s Rest in honor of Eagle Scout Leonard Southwell, at mile 7.9 (6,543). There is an intersection here with Indian Creek Trail #800, a single-track sometimes used as an alternate to Waterton Canyon. The trail then descends, crossing Bear Creek at mile 8.7 (6,177). This is the last reliable water source until the end of Segment 1 at the South Platte River. There are several good campsites in this area. At mile 9.8 (6,689) the CT begins to parallel and then occasionally cross West Bear Creek. There is a good, dry campsite at mile 11.8 (7,309) near leaning rocks. The trail continues climbing to a ridge at mile 12.6 (7,517), the segment’s highest point. From here, the CT descends 4 miles before reaching a gentle, grassy slope on a hillside with possible campsites at mile 16.6 (6,240) offering the convenience of river water a short distance below. Travel another 0.2 mile before reaching Douglas County Rd 97 and the South Platte River Trailhead, the end of Segment 1, at mile 16.8 (6,117). From here, the trail continues over the river on the Gudy Gaskill Bridge, the last water for over 10 miles. Due to private property, there is no camping along the river.

Had Colonel Carrington visited the scene of the Sand Creek Massacre, which occurred only two years before the Fetterman Massacre, he would have seen the same mutilations—committed upon Indians by Colonel Chivington’s soldiers. The Indians who ambushed Fetterman were only imitating their enemies, a practice which in warfare, as in civilian life, is said to be the sincerest form of flattery.

The creek was South Indian Creek. When the settlers moved in, they liked the Indian's names better than they liked the Indians.

We will be stronger for this, But only if it forces us To reach out. Corona Barry Marks “…normally only visible during a solar eclipse” Of course I’m crazy there are no sharks in swimming pools, just like there were none in freshwater lakes and rivers all those years when boys and dogs and a horse or two disappeared and everyone knew it was a haint, not some biological U-Boat stalking Little Bear Creek for 400 million years. Yes, I watch for periscopes, dorsal fins, Indian signs whispering something is down there, beneath the surface tension: angle of reflection, angle of refraction, invisible geometry making you squint and not see, making you not see. Go ahead, tell me I’m crazy with my stock of masks and toilet paper, bottled water and ammo; I know this immigrant air is from Mexico, maybe Wuhan before that, and the things I can’t see are the ones trying to pry my ribs open to let the ghost-you-can’t-see out of its cage. I know things under the air, behind the darkness, within the water are real because so am I and I believe the myth of electricity and the fable of fluoridation, that the sun can be lethal and meds can mend a Stockholm Syndrome childhood. I believe my vote and my opinion count. I believe in germs and viruses, and not going out with a wet head, and the new normal and the old one, too. I believe it is the unseen things that kill us, the small things: a moment’s distraction, the hole a virus shoots through a body. I cannot believe the dead will forgive us for being too slow to believe in what we did not want to see.

understand you got all kinds of family stuff in there from Minnesota Sioux. Anything on Bluebird or Yellow Hand?” “I looked up Bluebird. He’s just about the last of the family. A lot of Bluebirds went East and married into the Mohawks and that bunch. There are still quite a few Yellow Hands out at Crow Creek and Niobrara. Those used to be Minnesota Indians before they got run out. But I know this Yellow Hand you talked

From the moment of their first meeting, Native American and African people share with one another a respect for the life-giving forces of nature, of the earth. African settlers in Florida taught the Creek Nation run-aways, the "Seminoles," methods for rice cultivation. Native peoples taught recently arrived black folks all about the many uses of corn. (The hotwater cornbread we grew up eating came to our black souther diet from the world of the Indian.) Sharing the reverence for the earth, black and red people helped on another remember that, despite the white man's ways, the land belonged to everyone.

Once, for example, on a train going across Canada, I began talking to a man everyone was avoiding because he was weaving and slurring his speech as if drunk. It turned out that he was recovering from a stroke. He had been an engineer on the same line we were riding, and long into the night he revealed to me the history beneath every mile of track: Pile O’Bones Creek, named for the thousands of buffalo skeletons left there by Indian hunters; the legend of Big Jack, a Swedish track-layer who could lift 500-pound steel rails; a conductor named McDonald who kept a rabbit as his traveling companion. As the morning sun began to tint the horizon, he grabbed my hand and looked into my eyes. “Thanks for listening. Most people wouldn’t bother.” He didn’t have to thank me. The pleasure had been all mine.

Of these, the Creek were known to be the most recalcitrant. Jackson proved his mettle by showing he could mow them down and massacre them into submission, earning his subsequent reputation as an “Indian killer.” Today we may wince at the title, but it was considered a compliment among Jackson’s Democratic supporters.

The New England wilderness March 1, 1704 Temperature 10 degrees And then a creek, so fast-flowing that even in this wicked cold it had not frozen. The Indians stood in ice water up to their thighs, handing the small children across, but the adults had to wade. Wet clothing froze to the body. In this wind, at this temperature, that could spell death. Should you fall in and get entirely wet, could you even get back on your feet in the force of that current? Would not your heart stop and your lungs fill? The adults dithered fearfully along the ice-rimmed rocks. Lord, thought Mercy, wishing for solid English shoes instead of Indian slippers, I have to get myself over, I can’t let Daniel fall in; Ruth needs help, she hasn’t thrown anything today because she’s so tired she can hardly put one foot in front of another. Joanna can’t see and Eliza is still only half here. When her turn came, however, the Indians lifted Daniel from her arms and passed him safely to the other side. Mercy took a deep breath, steeling herself to enter the frigid water, but Tannhahorens lifted her as if she weighed nothing and set her ashore, dry and safe. “Thank you, Tannhahorens,” she said. They handed Ruth over as well, but Ruth did not thank them. “How could you?” she said to Mercy as the march went on. “How could you thank that man for anything? He killed your family.

Just wait a month, and this meadow will be carpeted in bluebonnets,” Sarah promised him. “And the next month, gold and red flowers, Indian blanket, Mexican hat, primroses—Nolan, you can’t believe how beautiful it is!” “I can’t believe how beautiful you are, Sarah,” he said, cupping her cheek. “And as I said in church, how kind, how brave…” “Brave? Me? I’m not brave at all,” she protested. “Milly would tell you I’ve been a quiet little mouse all my life. She’s been the brave one, the leader.” “I don’t think she’d say that anymore, Nurse Sarah. In fact, I think you have all the qualities to make an excellent doctor’s wife.” When his words hit her, she gaped at him. “Dr. Nolan Walker! Did you just propose to me, on our very first outing together?” He grinned. “Ayuh,” he said, in a deliberately exaggerated “Downeast” accent. “We men of Maine don’t waste time. Am I going too fast, sweetheart? I promise you’ll get your courtship, never fear, but you and I both know I’ve been courting you every time we met—as much as you’d let me, anyway—ever since Founder’s Day last fall.” She considered his words. “I guess that’s true. All right, as long as you don’t stint on the courtship—we Texas ladies set great store by courting, I’ll have you know—I agree.” “Did you just say yes, Miss Sarah, on our very first outing as a courting couple?” She nodded, blushing a rosy pink that made her even lovelier still. He couldn’t wait any longer, and lowered his lips to hers.

That’s my Sarah,” he said, extending an arm to tickle her nose with a vivid red Indian paintbrush blossom. “Always more concerned for others than herself. It’s one of the things I love about you.” She swatted playfully at the flower, capturing it, and tickling him back.

Do you know the name of these yellow stones, Mr. Pond?” asked Violet. She picked one up and gave it to him. “No, I don’t know much about stones,” he said. “This yellowish rock makes a fine powder. I know that Indians long ago used it for their sand paintings.” “Sand paintings?” asked Benny. “I never heard of sand paintings.” “They are very interesting,” said Mr. Pond. “They are beautiful, too. The Indians took sand of all colors: blue, green, red, yellow, black, brown. They looked for a nice, flat place, and painted it with colored sand. They put the different colors in the right places. They would make a round sun like this.” Mr. Pond quickly made a big yellow sun on the ground, to show Benny how it was done. “Do you think there are any sand paintings in our field now?” Benny asked hopefully. “No,” answered Mr. Pond, smiling. “There haven’t been any Indians here for many years.” “I’d rather have Indians here than whoever is living in that hut,” said Jessie. “I think you’re right,” said Mr. Pond. “But don’t worry about that. We’ll go to Stony Creek tomorrow and tell the sheriff, Mr. Bates, about this.” He glanced at Henry, and the boy understood that Mr. Pond would tell the sheriff about some other things, too.

Things like the Sundogs shaking the foundations of our original beliefs, turning us to the ways of the Indians we search out to do battle with. Although we saw a number of places along the trail where the Comanche raiding parties have crossed from the north here in Texas to Mexico, carrying out their raids south of the border we saw no actual Indians.  For the Comanche, there is no border.  Just the land that they have freely ridden for hundreds of years.  The divide we white men and Mexicans have made between two countries having little importance to the Comanche as they consider the white men and the Mexicans as all hostile men encroaching on their lands. We rode nearly to Fort Leaton near the Juntas before we turned back now having taken the patrol much farther than we had planned.  The Comanche activity, encouraging us to ride on hoping to encounter at least one of the raiding parties, although we saw no more signs of Comanche not meaning that they have not seen us.  Maybe we are too large an enemy for the small raiding parties to approach.  Most Comanche shy away from skirmishes that result in more than a death or two of their Warrior Braves. Since the death of the two men by the hands of Lopez all of my men staying sharp, if in fact Lopez try's to capture another Ranger.  The torture and death of Dan Skaggs shaking my men up considerably.  "If a man like Lopez catches you make sure that you save one bullet in your revolver to shoot yourself before you get captured and have to face such heinous torture as Dan did," Bill Vents said.  Mostly for the benefit of our new Texas Ranger Bear Wallace, who was new to the ways of the Comanche and outlaws like Lopez.  "Make sure you shoot yourself in the eyeball to assure the bullet kills you dead and don't bounce around in your mouth or off your skull.  Eventually leaving you just alive enough to be left to the hands of Lopez to be tormented till death comes." "That is about enough of the horror tales, Bill," I said noting that the men are more nervous than usual with Bills story no matter how unbelievable the tale seemed.  Out here in the wild country, many things seem to be twisted from reality, some often making the impossible seem possible.  Not only because of Bill's stories but also due to a large amount of Indian gossip not far from being as wild as Vents lies.  Especially the Tonkawa as they believe the way to assure that spirits of the men they kill will be captured and rendered harmless, is to eat the men they slaughter

the Cottonwood Creek one, or maybe it was Indian Creek—so that I could park near the broken-down van that had given up one of its occupants that cold night. I parked and got out, walking toward whatever damn creek it was, and looked up at the makeshift poster still stapled to the power pole. The snow was falling steadily, very much like the night Jeanie One Moon had gone missing, almost as if the fates were toying with me, laughing in my face. I reached up and tore the now brittle plastic from the tree, having been fastened there for over a year, and studied the photo of the missing girl with half her face faded away, as if she were lying in a snowdrift somewhere, waiting to be discovered. Carefully folding the notice, I slipped it into the inside pocket of my jacket just as a pair of headlights appeared in the distance from the south, roiling the snow in their wake. I watched, fully expecting it to continue on I-90 up to Billings, but instead it slowed, turned in, and pulled up behind my truck. The big, full-ton turbo diesel dually engine rattled to a stop and the lights shut off. A large man extricated himself from the driver’s seat and lumbered toward me. “How did you know I would be here?” Lyndon Iron Bull stomped through the couple of inches of snow and pulled up the collar on his blanket-lined coat, his glasses steaming with his breath. “This is my land;

Apart from Cherokee freedpeople, Cherokee citizens also spoke out against the present of African Americans from the United States. In 1894, the editor of the Cherokee Advocate incited his fellow tribesmen to resist both Black and white migration, telling them to ‘Be men, and fight off the barnacles that now infest our country in the shape of non-citizens, free Arkansas ni—ers, and traitors.’ Anti-Black sentiment like this encouraged Native peoples to ignore Indian freedpeople’s shared histories with their nations and to inaccurately associate them with Black interlopers from the United States. Indian freedpeople fought this attitude by attempting to differentiate themselves. When Mary Grayson was interviewed in 1937 as part of the Works Progress Administration Slave Narrative project, she illustrated this dichotomy, saying ‘I am what we colored people call a ‘native.’ That means I didn’t come into the Indian country from somewhere in the Old South, after the War, like so many Negroes did, but I was born here in the Old Creek Nation and my master was a Creek Indian. Mary felt that her experiences of enslavement were better than those of Black Americans, arguing that ‘I have had people who were slaves of white folks tell me that they had to work awfully hard and their masters were cruel to them, but all the Negroes I knew who belonged to Creeks always had plenty of clothes and lots to eat and we all lived in good log cabins we built.’ Mary clearly demarcated her history and circumstances from those of African Americans from the United States. Mary’s assertion of her identity as a ‘native’ rather than a newcomer (like other Blacks in the West) is reflective of a key component of the settler colonial process—strategic differentiation.

In reality, the various movements and removals of Indigenous peoples from the Southeast due to white invasion meant that the first western settlers were often Native Americans who migrated to spaces other than their homelands, where they encountered other tribes—longtime enemies, other displaced peoples, and groups who had long called this land home. Native peoples adjusted their oral histories and survivance strategies to incorporate their new surroundings as they had done for millennia, crafting stories that told of successful migrations and learning about the food and herbs of their new homes. As they were forced westward, the Five Tribes’ experience in Indian Territory was different from the other Indigenous migrations occurring around them. The Chickasaw, Choctaw, Cherokee, Creek, and Seminole Nations sought to use the settler colonial process to cast themselves as civilizers of their new home: they used the labor system that Euro-Americans insisted represented sophistication—chattel slavery—to build homes, commercial enterprises, and wealth, and they portrayed themselves as settlers in need of protection from the federal government against the depredations of western Indians, which, the Five Tribes claimed, hindered their own civilizing progress. Moreover, they followed their physical appropriation of Plains Indians’ land with an erasure of their predecessor’s history. They perpetuated the idea that they had found an undeveloped ‘wilderness” when they arrived in Indian Territory and that they had proceeded to tame it. They claimed that they had built institutions and culture in a space where previously neither existed. The Five Tribes’ involvement in the settler colonial process was self-serving: they had already been forced to move once by white Americans, and appealing to their values could only help them—at least, at first. Involvement in the system of Black enslavement was a key component of displaying adherence to Americans’ ideas of social, political, and economic advancement—indeed, owning enslaved people was the primary path to wealth in the nineteenth century. The laws policing Black people’s behavior that appeared in all of the tribes’ legislative codes showed that they were willing to make this system a part of their societies. But with the end of the Civil War, the political party in power—the Republicans—changed the rules: slavery was no longer deemed civilized and must be eliminated by force. For the Five Tribes, the rise and fall of their involvement in the settler colonial process is inextricably connected to the enslavement of people of African descent: it helped to prove their supposed civilization and it helped them construct their new home, but it would eventually be the downfall of their Indian Territory land claims. Recognizing the Five Tribes’ coerced migration to Indian Territory as the first wave among many allows us to see how settler colonialism shaped the culture of Indian Territory even before settlers from the United States arrived. Though the Cherokee ‘Trail of Tears’ has come to symbolize Indian Removal, the Five Tribes were just a handful of dozens of Indigenous tribes who had been forced to move from their eastern homelands due to white displacement. This displacement did not begin or end in the 1830s Since the 1700s, Indian nations such as the Wyandot, Kickapoo, and Shawnee began migrating to other regions to escape white settlement and the violence and resource scarcity that often followed. Though brought on by conditions outside of their control, these migrations were ‘voluntary’ in that they were most often an attempt to flee other Native groups moving into their territory as a result of white invasion or to preempt white coercion, rather than a response to direct Euro-American political or legal pressure to give up their homelands….

The labor of enslaved women and men was crucial to the Five Tribes’ economic and social success in Indian Territory... Preserved through family lines and nourished by increasing dividends, Black chattel slavery had bene an element of life in the Five Tribes for decades by the time of the Civil War.” Pg 23 “The Five Tribes, to varying degrees, adapted the institution of slavery to suit their own needs beginning in the late 1700s and intensifying in the early 1800s. Along with the institution of slavery the Five Tribes also adopted other parts of American ‘civilization,’ such as Euro-American clothing, agriculture, political language, religion….while retaining aspects of their own culture. As in the United States, the majority of people in the Five Tribes did not own slaves. Yet, Indian elites created an economy and culture that highly valued and regulated slavery and the rights of slave owners…In 1860, about thirty years after their removal to Indian Territory from their respective homes in the Southeast, Cherokee Nation members owned 2,511 slaves (15 percent of their total population), Choctaw members owned 2,349 slaves (14 percent of their total population, and Creek members owned 975 slaves, which amounted to 18 percent of their total population, a proportion equivalent to that of white slave owners in Tennessee, a former neighbor of the Chickasaw Nation. Slave labor allowed wealthy Indians to rebuild the infrastructure of their lives even bigger and better than before. John Ross, a Cherokee chief, lived in a log cabin directly after Removal. After a few years, he replaced this dwelling with a yellow mansion, complete with a columned porch.

The Five Tribes not only physically displaced other Indian nations in Indian Territory; they erased the history of southern Plains people and drafted a new history of Indian Territory. For example, in 1955, the Chickasaws built their council house, a sixteen-by-twenty-five-foot log house. Here, the Chickasaws rewrote their constitution and took their first actions as a sovereign legislature, under the first Chickasaw governor, Cyrus Harris. Although the log house was quickly replaced (within the next year or so) by a brick iteration, the log house serves a particular purpose in the pantheon of Chickasaw public history. In 1911, the Wapanucka Press, an Oklahoma-based newspaper, interviewed someone (presumably a representative of the Chickasaw Nation) about the story of the log house’s origins. The paper reported, ‘Slaves of the Chickasaws toiled in the dense oak forests cutting down the finest trees and hewing them into shape…Thick undergrowth was cleared from a knoll…paths were cut from bottom meadows.’ Rough-hewn and surrounded by overgrown foliage, the log house is meant to evoke the idea that the Chickasaws encountered a ‘wilderness’ in early Indian Territory. The reader is meant to believe that, as civilizers, the Chickasaws shaped this wilderness into the modern space that it became. This idea of ‘civilization’ is based on Euro-American colonizer’ ideas of advanced societies. The Cherokee Nation alleges on its website that ‘upon earliest contact with European explorers in the 1500s, Cherokee Nation was identified as one of the most advanced among Native American tribes.’ Although the Cherokees were asserting their longevity as a people and their pride in their culture, here they use a European measurement of their merit. In the nineteenth century, the Five Tribes succeeded at crafting a perception of difference. The western Indians certainly saw them as settlers. The special agent to the Comanches reported that they were angry that tribes such as the Creeks and Choctaws ‘have extended their occupation and improvements to the country heretofore used by themselves as a hunting ground,’ expressing that they saw the Five tribes as unlawful settlers, just like whites, and themselves as the dispossessed indigenous peoples of the region.

The land scrunched like a dry blanket, where the flatness of the prairie gave way to badlands, to canyons cut by seasonal creeks.

Jefferson would civilize the Indians, but not in ‘the ancient ineffectual’ way of religious conversion— The following has been successful. First, to raise cattle whereby to acquire a sense of the value of property… arithmetic to compute that value, thirdly writing, to keep accounts, and here they begin to labour; enclose farms, and the women to weave and spin… fourth to read Aesop’s Fables, which are their first delight along with Robinson Crusoe. Creeks, Cherokees, the latter now instituting a government.

The river loomed large in the mythology of the New World. The Indians called it Mother of All Waters, Big Greasy, Beyond Age, and River of the Falls. White men called it the Flaming Sword, Old High Wide and Handsome, Big Muddy, and Old Man River. In the north, where it wasn’t so impressive, it was known as Miserable Wretched Dirty Water River, No-Account Creek You Can Step Right Over, and a Norse name that we’d rather not translate. The river even had a secret name, that it babbled to itself in a language that no man could understand.

Many of the remains of the Cheyenne men, women, and children slaughtered at the Colorado Sand Creek massacre of 1864 were sent to the Army Medical Museum … Other remains from this massacre, such as scalps and women’s pubic hair, were strung across the stage of the Denver Opera House. —Kathleen S. Fine-Dare, Grave Injustice: The American Indian Repatriation Movement and NAGPRA

At a place known only to them they buried Crazy Horse somewhere near Chankpe Opi Wakpala, the creek called Wounded Knee.

entered this place . . . obliged to continue my rout untill sometime after dark before I found a place sufficiently large to encamp my small party; at length such an one occurred on the lard. side. . . . from the singular appearance of this place I called it the gates of the rocky mountains.” In the morning, as the flotilla paddled its way out of the canyon, the mountains receded and a beautiful intermountain valley presented itself. But about 10:00 a.m., a distressing, worry-making sight appeared in the sky: a column of smoke, coming out of a creek drainage some seven miles west, big enough to have been deliberately set. It had to have been done by Indians, all but certainly Shoshone, and almost surely because a single Indian or a small party had heard the discharge of a rifle and set fire to the grass to warn the rest of the tribe to retreat into the interior of the mountains. That was about as bad as anything that could happen, but there was nothing to do but press on. The following day, the flotilla entered “a beautifull and extensive plain country of about 10 or 12 miles wide which extended upwards further than the eye could reach this valley is bounded by two nearly parallel ranges of high mountains which have their summits partially covered with snow.” • Lewis was within a couple of hours’ march from one of the great gold deposits, at Last Chance Gulch,

The removed Cherokees, Choctaws, Chickasaws, Creeks, and Seminoles had brought with them approximately five thousand black slaves, and the bondage institution persisted in Indian Territory as the planter-slaveholder elite set out to rebuild its exchange-oriented cotton and tobacco economy. This created secure markets for Comanche slavers who now commanded extensive raiding domains in Texas and northern Mexico.

At the Big Hole: Savagery of the Whites: Two small children crossed the creek alone and hid in the brush. Some women and the old medicine man, Kahpots, were there. One woman requested of him, "Why not do something against soldiers' killing? You must have some strong Power?" Kapots replied, "I can do nothing. I have tried, but my Power is not effective. I feel helpless. So, my niece, you better look out for yourself, how you can save your life. Go farther down the creek!" The woman did as directed and was saved. Kahpots, unable to travel farther, had to be left on the trail a few days later, and was killed and scalped by General Howard's Bannacks, and maybe white scouts. . . .when I think of those terrible scenes, wrongs waged against human beings, I say shame! shame! This great Christian government had power to do differently by those truly patriotic people. It is such rememberances [sic] which touch my emotions, and I am led to marvel at the term 'civilization.

In existing writings about federally recognized tribes and their engagement with tribal acknowledgment politics, a palpable theme is clear: presently recognized nations are not acting the ‘Indian way’ when they refuse to acknowledge their less fortunate Indian relatives and share with them. To many writers, federally recognized tribal leaders are so ensconced in the hegemonic colonial order that they are no even aware that they are replicated and reinforcing it inequities. According to this line, because the Five Tribes and related groups like the Mississippi Band of Choctaws and the Eastern Band of Cherokees have embraced nonindigenous notions of ‘being Indian’ and tribal citizenship using federal censuses such as the Dawes Rolls and blood quantum they are not being authentic. Some critics charge that modern tribes like the Choctaw Nation have rejected aboriginal notions and conceptions of Indian social organization and nationhood. This thinking, however, seems to me to once again reinforce stereotypes about Indians as largely unchanging, primordial societies. The fact that the Creek and Cherokee Nations have evolved and adopted European notions of citizenship and nationhood is somehow held against them in tribal acknowledgment debates. We hear echoes of the ‘Noble Savage’ idea once again. In other context when tribes have demanded a assay in controlling their cultural property and identities – by protesting Indian sports mascots or the marketing of cars and clothing with their tribal names, or by arguing that studios should hire real Indians as actors – these actions are applauded. However, when these occur in tribal recognition contexts, the tribes are viewed as greedy or racists. The unspoken theme is that tribes are not actin gin the ‘traditional’ Indian way…With their cultures seen as frozen in time, the more tribes deviate from popular representation, the more they are seen as inauthentic. To the degree that they are seen as assimilated (or colonized and enveloped in the hegemonic order), they are also seen as inauthentic, corrupted, and polluted. The supreme irony is that when recognized tribes demand empirical data to prove tribal authenticity, critics charge that they are not being authentically ingenious by doing so.

Before the Five Civilized Tribes—the Cherokee, Choctaw, Creek, Chickasaw, and Seminole—were forced to leave their homes and tribal lands in the Southeast, many had assimilated in order to save themselves, to keep their land. They cut their hair and wore western clothes and adopted white ways to make whites feel “safer” around “Native” Americans. They owned hundreds of slaves, who walked with them during the Great Removal to Indian Territory in Oklahoma and Alabama. Slaveholding Indians? I never learned about that in school.

Elvis’ form of B matches Chickasaws, Choctaws and Creeks.

Joy Harjo, who’s a Creek Indian poet and a jazz musician, was once asked by a white reporter why she played the saxophone, since it’s not an Indian instrument. And she said: “It is when I play it.” If “I’m in the reservation of my mind” is the question, then “It is when I play it” is the answer. It’s an internal condition, and we spend too much time defining ourselves by the external. There is always this implication that in order to be Indian you must be from the reservation. It’s not true and it’s a notion that limits us—it forces us to define our entire life experiences in terms of how they do or do not relate to the reservation.

History is a delicate matter in a diverse country. Shortly after the fall of the Alamo—likewise in 1836—Mexican troops defeated the Texans at the Battle of Coleto Creek near Goliad, Texas. The Texans surrendered, believing they would be treated as prisoners of war. Instead, the Mexicans marched the 300 or so survivors to Goliad and shot them in what became known as the Goliad Massacre. Mexicans resent the term “massacre.” With the city of Goliad now half Hispanic, they insist on “execution.” Many Anglos, said Benny Martinez of the Goliad chapter of the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), “still hate Mexicans and using ‘massacre’ is a subtle way for them to express it.” Watertown, Massachusetts, had a different disagreement about history. In 2007, the town’s more than 8,000 Armenian-Americans were so angry at the Anti-Defamation League’s refusal to recognize the World War I Turkish massacres of Armenians as genocide that they persuaded the city council to cut ties with the ADL’s “No Place For Hate” program designed to fight discrimination. Other towns with a strong Armenian presence—Newton, Belmont, Somerville, and Arlington—were considering breaking with the ADL. Filmmaker Ken Burns has learned that diversity complicates history. When he made a documentary on the Second World War, Latino groups complained it did not include enough Hispanics—even though none had seen it. Mr. Burns bristled at the idea of changing his film, but Hispanics put enough pressure on the Public Broadcasting Service to force him to. Even prehistory is divisive. In 1996, two men walking along the Columbia River in Washington State discovered a skeleton that was found to be 9,200 years old. “Kennewick Man,” as the bones came to be called, was one of the oldest nearly complete human skeletons ever uncovered in North America and was of great interest to scientists because his features were more Caucasian than American Indian. Local Indians claimed he was an ancestor and insisted on reburying him. It took more than eight years of legal battles before scientists got full access to the remains.

Sometimes there were trips to somebody's cousin's friend's plot of land by the black-water creeks off the highway, trips that killed me with nostalgia even while I lived them, driving aback a pickup, silvery rain pelting bare backs, leaves dancing on the mud trail, branches snapping back onto faces, puddles like lakes forded in the sinking vehicle, bushcook and red rum and drenched cricket, jamoon splattered purple upon the wet soil - the remarkable freedom of a forgotten and irrelevant place on earth.

Creeks called the square ground the tcoko-thlako, or big house, probably because it resembled the layout of a Creek house.53 The square ground was an open plaza surrounded by four “cabins” and with a place for a fire in the middle.54 Archaeologists have identified one of these at Fusihatchee.55 The square ground