Journey to the West: The Alabama & Coushatta Indians (review)

A P R I L 2 0 1 0 149 The encyclopedia is intended more for the educated general reader rather than the scholar well-versed in southern music scholarship because many of its themes have been outlined previously and in greater depth in the various scholars’ book-length projects. That said, Charles Wolfe’s posthumous entry on Gospel Music, White (to distinguish it from the previous entry, Gospel Music, Black) is at once informative and sophisticated. There are some troublesome portions in the encyclopedia, however. It is never clear, for example, what criteria were used for choosing and then writing entries for the second section. Some musicians were chosen for their commercial success, it seems, while others were chosen for their contributions to the music. Comedienne Minnie Pearl is included, but musicians Lefty Frizzell and Merle Haggard are not. Scholar Gavin Campbell almost convinces me that Britney Spears should be included here, but her notoriety in recent years makes her inclusion problematic. Finally, there is a section on Blues-Singing Women in Section Two, but no similar selection for Blues-Singing Men, suggesting that women singing the blues are odd enough to warrant a section of their own, whereas men singing the blues are more normative and fundamental to the genre. But for these faults, the general reader or the scholar not well versed in less well-known southern genres of music will find this encyclopedia a handy introduction to southern music. KRISTINE M. MCCUSKER Middle Tennessee State University Journey to the West: The Alabama & Coushatta Indians. By Sheri Marie Shuck-Hall. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2008. xiii, 278 pp. $34.95. ISBN 978-0-8061-3940-1. Within the emerging field of Indian emigration, the forced removals such as the Cherokee Trail of Tears have received much attention while the voluntary removals have been largely ignored. Sheri Marie ShuckHall ’s diasporic community study, Journey to the West, rectifies this by emphasizing the resourcefulness of the Alabamas and Coushattas in their quest to maintain their sacred “center” in the face of white encroachment . While acknowledging that external circumstances ultimately made their migrations involuntary, Shuck-Hall argues that the Alabamas and Coushattas proactively used migration as an escape whenever their autonomy was threatened. T H E A L A B A M A R E V I E W 150 Both the Alabamas and Coushattas emerged from simple chiefdoms of the late Mississippian period (after 1450). Although they lived hundreds of miles from each other (the chiefdoms of the Alabamas in present -day eastern Mississippi and west Alabama and the chiefdoms of the Coushattas in present-day east Tennessee) and “developed separately,” both the ancestors of the Alabamas and Coushattas had linguistic and cultural similarities (p. 37). Disease and slave raids compelled these small chiefdoms to migrate to the area around the confluence of the Alabama, Coosa, and Tallapoosa rivers in present-day Alabama in the seventeenth century. The chiefdoms consecrated new land, established new town settlements, and forged kinship and clan connections among each other. In the search for mutual protection, these weakened chiefdoms coalesced into the powerful Alabama and Coushatta. Throughout the eighteenth century, the Alabamas and Coushattas forged trade alliances with the French and English. Although closer to the French than the British after the construction of Fort Toulouse, the Alabamas and Coushattas never pledged allegiance to any one group and played the European rivals off each other to their own benefit and forged alliances with other southeastern Indian groups including the Creek Confederacy. This changed after the British victory in the French and Indian War. Fearful of British intentions and hostilities between other southeastern Indian groups, hundreds of French-allied Alabamas and Coushattas migrated to Spanish Louisiana. Others, however, maintained peaceful relations with the British and remained behind in Alabama. In Louisiana, the Alabamas and Coushattas once again used diplomacy to maintain their autonomy in the face of white encroachment. They allied with their powerful Indian neighbors and again played the white powers off against each other, but abandoned these alliances when they proved no longer useful. After the French sold Louisiana to the United States, most of the Alabamas and Coushattas...