Zamumo's Gifts. Joseph M. Hall, Jr.
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and the British to construct a lucrative and brutal plantation economy on the backs of Africans. Native partnerships, in other words, helped Europeans maintain and in some instances finance the region’s connection to a world of commercial and political power situated across the ocean.
But trade was a mutual relationship. Even as they helped finance imperial expansion, Indians also shaped the course of its development in the Southeast. This last point deserves particular emphasis because histories of Indians have generally fallen silently in the larger forest of colonial and imperial history. This silence should strike us as problematic because empires depended on negotiation with their constituent members, even if this negotiation sometimes occurred under the threat of imperial violence.17 In some cases like the lands around the Great Lakes, neither Indians nor Europeans could compel the other to conform to their practices, so they developed what Richard White calls a “middle ground,” a new set of norms that blended elements of the participants’ cultures. Although cultural blending and adaptation were crucial to changing patterns of southeastern exchange, no middle ground formed in the Southeast because the participants were often transient or unstable. Few norms lasted more than two generations. Better instead to think of empires in the Southeast as akin to Evan Haefeli and Kevin Sweeney’s “diaphanous spiderwebs connecting individual places and people.”18 Zamumo’s Gifts explains how Europeans and Indians spun webs of exchange in the Southeast. As Indians helped construct the webs of empire, they induced Spaniards to abandon dreams of military conquest, the French to become negotiators and gift givers, and the British to build and then reform a colony dependent on trade. These developments resulted in a colonial Southeast defined by colonial ports and their military or plantation societies, but even these communities were partly constructed in reaction to the trade networks that lay largely in the hands of Indians. Indians did not seek colonization, but as they wove the violence of European expansion around older strands of local ambition, they helped fashion the fabric of empires.19
This history of the exchange relations that shaped the early colonial Southeast depends primarily on documents from the three rival colonies. Spaniards were the first to struggle with colonizing the region, and the writings of political and religious officials have a surprising amount to tell about the lands that lay beyond their effective control. English traders wrote little about their extensive activities in the interior, but they and the men who governed them still said much about the larger geopolitical orientation of many groups. Although the French were later arrivals and had a less obvious impact on the history of the region east of their post of Mobile, Alabama, their colonial officials were some of the keenest observers and practitioners of southeastern diplomacy. My history of the region before 1680 draws heavily from numerous new syntheses of archaeological work, which themselves have benefited from increasingly fine-grained chronological analysis. I have read these documentary and archaeological sources in tandem with selections from Creeks’ own written and oral histories, including those I learned from interviews and conversations with Muscogees (Creeks) in July 1997.20 The stories Creeks tell are themselves legacies of this larger history of exchange. Giving and taking supported towns before and during the trials of colonization, and many stories make clear that Europeans were fundamental to a process of incorporating innovations into past practices of exchange.
Zamumo’s Gifts examines this process incrementally. Before we can understand the new exchanges that de Soto and Zamumo initiated, we must first trace the rise of Mississippian towns and their networks of regional exchange. During roughly four centuries before 1540, Mississippian peoples defined the town as the center of political and cosmic life, and exchange with other communities reinforced this local autonomy. De Soto’s chroniclers were among the first to record this fact, and when Spaniards sought to conquer the Southeast in the late sixteenth century and the early seventeenth, they confronted peoples who had the military capacity to defend their autonomy and demand the exchange relationships that would protect it. Although Spaniards founded St. Augustine in 1565, it was only decades later, after they accommodated these Mississippian expectations, that they secured their new outpost and its neighboring missions. Natives and Spaniards also connected Mississippian networks to a wider Atlantic world. These groups further modified their exchange relations after about 1620, when they incorporated more commercial activities within exchanges that were initially devoted to gifts and diplomacy. By 1650, these varied and sometimes competing layers of Mississippian foundations, Spanish adaptations, and Spanish-Indian innovations had broad political consequences for the region.
These consequences appeared most dramatically after 1660, when new communities of Native and English slave raiders entered the region. As communities to the north of the Spanish missions fled these violent incursions, they drew upon and strengthened the networks of exchange that Spaniards and Indians had been developing over the previous century. By the beginning of the eighteenth century, some of these new refugees had reconfigured these ties into powerful new alliances. These alliances forced English traders from the new settlement of Charles Town and French traders from the still newer colony of Louisiana to recognize the diplomatic imperatives of exchange, even when it came at the expense of their profits. When English traders insisted on defining exchange in terms of credit, debt, and, most disturbingly, the enslavement of debtors, many of the colony’s former partners decided to use war to reform the entire system. The Yamasee War of 1715–18 devastated the region. As a number of Native combatants revived older patterns of gift exchange, they also strengthened their alliance to better protect their local autonomy. Carolinians called these reorganized allies “Creeks.” During the 1720s, as Creeks and their Native and colonial neighbors negotiated the norms of postwar exchange, Creeks became increasingly effective at harnessing the multilateral relations that shaped the colonial Southeast. Their success so vexed Carolinian ambitions that the colonists reorganized themselves, too, making their colony and themselves more British. In the long term, Creeks’ use of exchange to support their own power, then, also made possible the survival and eventual success of the colonial peoples who most threatened the towns. This fact is more than ironic. The exchanges that lie at the heart of Zamumo’s Gifts highlight how the history of neither Indians nor Europeans can be understood without the other.
Chapter 1
The Spirit of a Feather: The Politics of Mississippian Exchange
The Cussitas were always Bloody minded But the Pallachucola [Apalachicola] People made them Black Drink as a Token of Friendship And told them their Hearts were white And they must have White Hearts and lay down their Bodies in Token That they Should be White. . . . [The Cussitas] strove for the Tomahawk but the Apalachicola People by fair persuasion gained it from them And Buried it under their Cabin[.] The Pallachucola People told them their Captain Should all one with their People and gave them White feathers. . . . Ever Since they have lived together And they Shall always live Together and bear it in remembrance.—Chekilli, 1735 1
In 1735, Chekilli, the principal leader of the Creek town of Coweta, told a story of his people’s origins to the British of Savannah, Georgia. The British secretary’s summary of the two-day account, which includes descriptions of migration, the acquisition of sacred knowledge, and encounters with friends and foes, also includes the above description of the “bloody minded” Cussitas’ peace and union with the Apalachicolas. Two centuries after Zamumo had received his gift with such enthusiasm and long after mounds had ceased to serve as monuments to chiefly power and town cohesion, feathers remained symbols of power, encapsulating a spiritual iconography as old as Europe’s Gothic cathedrals. But while feathers lacked the durability of stone, Zamumo’s and Chekilli’s small gifts sealed human relationships that were no less weighty.
What endowed insubstantial objects with such power? Marcel Mauss, one of the first anthropologists to consider the power of things in people’s lives, argued that gifts were the product of an obligation to offer, to receive, and to reciprocate that he located in the “spirit” of the gift. As he explained, the object of exchange possessed its own spiritual power that compelled recipients to become givers in order to avoid suffering the ill-effects of holding on to this power too long. Exchange in turn maintained the relationships that held society together. Such gifts, as objects that had no price and offered no material gain, were different from (and, for Mauss, more important