Gone to Texas

Funny how history works out. Here is Texas, largest of the lower forty-eight. Its borders encompass a quarter-million square miles and virtually the entire Southern Plains. At one time, it was home to thousands of Indian peoples. Some were rather large and powerful nations, such as the Comanches, Apaches, Kiowas, Wichitas, Tonkawas, and Caddos. There were almost as many smaller ones: Coahuiltecans, Karankawas, Jumanos, Atakapas. But here in the twenty-first century, none of these peoples live in Texas. The Coahuiltecans, Karanakawas, Apaches, and Jumanos were either pushed into Mexico or New Mexico, or else they no longer exist as nations. The remnants of the Atakapas are in western Louisiana. The Comanches, Caddos, and the rest all live in Oklahoma. Today Texas has only three Indian nations and all are, as Shuck-Hall calls them, "diaspora" nations. The Tiguas, a Pueblo people, came to El Paso during the Pueblo Revolt of 1680; the Kickapoos, an Indiana people, moved to Mexico but now live near Eagle Pass; the Alabama-Coushattas, near Livingston in East Texas, are the subject of this book.

For the second half of the nineteenth and most of the twentieth centuries, the Alabama-Coushattas had the only Indian reservation in Texas. That is a significant accomplishment considering how energetic nineteenth-century Texans were in driving Indians from the state. Shooting them down was condoned, but forcing them into Indian Territory was acceptable. And so Texas was ethnically cleansed of Indians, except for the Alabama-Coushattas.¹

Sheri Marie Shuck-Hall argues that the Alabama-Coushatta's ability to keep their identity, government, and land came from a superior diplomatic skill. Throughout their history, from the Mississippian Period of the 1000s when they lived in Mississippi and Tennessee respectively, to their eighteenth-century sojourn in central Alabama, and then the early nineteenth century in Texas, the Alabama-Coushattas managed to ally themselves with powerful entities when it suited them, break from them when it did not, and play competing powers against one another, all while managing not to anger either side. When this did not work and their identity and sovereignty were threatened, they were willing to abandon their homes and move west, several times over.

Over the past couple of decades, as ethnohistory gradually wrested Indian history from anthropology, "tribal histories" have become popular. On one hand, they have been necessary, since so many Indian peoples, particularly smaller nations, had been relegated to the backwaters of American history. On the other, they are good subjects for young ethnohistorians. I cut my own academic teeth on the Caddo Indians.² Now Shuck-Hall provides a solid tribal ethnohistory of the Alabama-Coushattas, the first since Jonathan Hooks' The Alabama-Coushatta Indians in 1997.³

Shuck-Hall examines the Alabama-Coushattas through the lens of "diasporic studies." It was, she says, the Alabama-Coushatta's diasporas, several of them throughout history, that helped solidify a host of autonomous towns into two interdependent chiefdoms—the Alabamas AND the Coushattas—and finally into a single people. I heartily agree. There is nothing like a diaspora to give a people a shared history and shared culture. Just about all Indians of the East had their diasporas, or their own journeys to the West, and it gave them a collective outlook different from that of other Indian peoples. Here I might argue with Shuck-Hall's belief in the Alabama-Coushatta's unique diplomatic skills. Bands of Cherokees, Choctaws, Creeks, Shawnees, Kickapoos, Delawares, and others also sought refuge in Texas. I would have loved to have seen more on how their journey westward made the Alabama-Coushattas see themselves as part of a larger Eastern Indian identity, different from those Indians they would encounter in the West.

Still, Shuck-Hall does not neglect Alabama-Coushatta identity. She begins each chapter with oral tradition, often using the trickster Rabbit as a metaphor for the Alabama-Coushatta's ability to outsmart their adversaries and maintain...