Okfuskee: A Creek Indian Town in Colonial America (review)

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.

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).

In Part I, Piker traces Okfuskee relations with the British of South Carolina and Georgia. Because Okfuskee enjoyed such a privileged place in Charlestown's trade, its leaders were jealous when in the 1750s the larger Creek Confederacy began to favor Savannah and Lower Creek towns in Georgia's favor grew prominent in Creek national affairs. By 1760, Okfuskee headmen were so frustrated at the British that some encouraged their warriors to loot trading houses and kill obnoxious British traders and packhorsemen. Piker calls the attack a "correction" to the Okfuskee's loss in economic and political power (59). Rather than a declaration of war, the Okfuskee's attack on traders represented a show of force designed to put the British on guard. It was "an effort to head off a more permanent separation" (61). Embroiled in war with the Cherokees, South Carolina wanted to avoid war with the Creeks at all costs and eagerly accepted Creek overtures following the incident. Herein lies the only minor shortcoming of the book: Piker's focus on the British leads him to understate the influence of the Creeks' Cherokee and Chickasaw neighbors. Although Piker admits that the Creeks wanted to avoid war with the Cherokees, he dismisses the possibility that the Cherokees pressed for or even instigated the Creek attack. Nor does Piker mention the negative repercussions that the Creeks' violent actions had on Chickasaw-Creek relations. If the Creeks viewed their actions as "correction," other tribes saw it as either a sign of loyalty or betrayal to their common military-trade alliance. In the decades following 1760, the Okfuskees tried to mend fences with the British but their relations were plagued by confrontations between Okfuskee hunters and backcountry settlers. Angered by the intrusion of cattle into their corn fields and hunting grounds, Okfuskees asked that "the path should be kept green," an environmental-friendly metaphorical variant on the "red" or warpath and the "white" or trading path (100).

Piker's narrative is nuanced and subtle and adds greatly to our understanding of the Okfuskees' perspective on the changes that radically altered their world. Some highlights of Part 2 include Piker's examination of the role of the "Master of the Ground," the headman who "assigned space within the town's communal agricultural fields to individual clans" (116). By focusing on busk (the celebration of the ripening of the corn in the communal fields), Piker helps us to see the potential conflict between individualistic European-style farming and...