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The Graysons’ Dilemma: A Creek Family Confronts the Science of Race
- University of Nebraska Press
- Chapter
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The Graysons’ Dilemma A Creek Family Confronts the Science of Race claudio saunt Whether exploring the foundations of patriarchy in seventeenth-century Virginia, the dynamics of the southern campaign in revolutionary America , or the making of white supremacy in the Jim Crow era, historians of the South position race at the center of their narratives.1 Historians of the native South, however, grant race only a limited role in their accounts of Indian history. They have investigated the origins of racism in native America yet have minimized its impact on everyday social interactions, local economies , and community politics.2 In short, the historiography implicitly suggests that the Indians’ adoption of an ideology of race had little effect on their communities.3 The absence of race in literature on southern Indians may reflect disciplinary conventions rather than the daily realities of the South’s native peoples. Ethnohistorians hold as a central tenet that Indians should not be written about as if they were white or black Americans, and they contend that the themes of colonial history and the practices of colonists should not be transferred wholesale to native America.4 Those who write about the Southeast therefore emphasize the ways in which Native Americans drew on ancient Mississippian traditions, but rarely do they trace the impact of Mississippian traditions of a more recent age, namely racism in all of its many manifestations . Indians, deeply influenced by patterns established many centuries ago, seem immune from changes taking place in their own lifetimes.5 It would surely be folly to suggest that the central theme of southern Indian history is “the problem of race control,” as U. B. Phillips once remarked of southern history more generally.6 Yet southeastern Indians were Indian and southern. They lived in the same region as their colonial counterparts , their economy was closely linked to the larger regional and Atlantic market, and they married into white and black southern families. Biologically, culturally, socially, and economically, they had a number of the graysons’ dilemma commonalities with other southerners, even if, to be sure, they differed in significant ways. Their dual identity as part of the colonial South yet apart from the southern colonies is absent from most histories. Although the central theme of southern Indian history may not be the problem of race control , race in fact played a far larger role in native communities than scholars have yet realized. The pervasiveness of race in the lives of Indians reached a peak in the early nineteenth century. This period is traditionally considered part of the antebellum South, but for Native Americans, it more properly belongs to the colonial era. The United States forcefully introduced American cultural practices into Indian communities, dismantled their governments, and appropriated their land. In short, for vast areas of the South, the colonial era ends not with the American Revolution but with Removal, when southern states displaced the Five Tribes and when the federal government relocated its colonial subjects and policies west of the Mississippi. In the decades leading up to Removal, race structured all aspects of the relationship between Indians and colonists. It gave logic to U.S. colonial policy, affected the daily actions of the government’s Indian agents, and validated ordinary Americans’ contempt for native peoples. In turn, it shaped the actions of Indians themselves. The contours of this period may be roughly sketched by scouring the reports of Indian agents for passages that shed light on everyday life in the native South. But the full impact of race is perhaps better captured by exploring the story of a single family, the Graysons. From the 1780s to the present, this family has struggled to reconcile its Creek, Scottish, and African ancestry with the racial hierarchy born in the colonial South. The Graysons faced a particularly trying time in the nineteenth century, when the ascendancy of race culminated in the emergence of scientific racism. Their story illustrates that race and scientific racism reshaped Indian communities in profound and terrible ways. The Graysons trace their New World origins to the late 1700s, when Sinnugee , a Creek woman, took as her husband Robert Grierson (later changed to Grayson), a recent Scottish immigrant and deerskin trader who set up shop in Hilabi, a Creek town once located a few miles northeast of present Alexander City, Alabama. The historical record reveals almost nothing [3.85.63.190] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 11:21 GMT) claudio saunt about Sinnugee but that she belonged to the Spanalgee or...