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BOB — University of Nebraska Press / Page 114 / / Creeks and Southerners / Andrew K. Frank 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 [First Page] [114], (1) Lines: 0 to 19 ——— 0.0pt PgVar ——— Normal Page PgEnds: TEX [114], (1) chapter 7 The Insistence of Race In the years surrounding McIntosh’s execution, European Americans increasingly embraced a racial definition of whiteness. Although a debate raged over the ability of Indians to Americanize, many Americans became certain of the immutability of the identities of Indian countrymen and the whiteness of their Creek children. This change had two significant ramifications. First, a series of conflicts occurred as a result of disagreements over the identities of Indian countrymen and their Creek children. Even as the children of intermarriages continued to interpret, mediate, and otherwise soothe intercultural frictions, they also became the sources of conflict. Sometimes they created tensions; at other times they were the central topics of the tensions. Second, the change allowed some Indian countrymen and their Creek children to reject their Creek residences and become free white members of southern society. As the reality of Indian removal became more imminent, some Creeks, whether adopted Indian countrymen or the children of Creek mothers, claimed their white heritage, muted their Creek backgrounds, occupied eastern lands, and otherwise avoided going west with the rest of their villages. Their racial ambiguity provided an option unavailable and undesirable to the majority of Creeks. This volume began with the case of Ambrose Brissert, the man mistakenly arrested as a spy because he was “dressed like an Indian” in Pensacola. If you recall, the Spanish magistrates had to accept the Creek identity of that Englishborn man, albeit reluctantly, because his Creek kin and Fus-hatchee neighbors insisted upon it. The Creeks were willing to fight,or at least willing to use threats of violence, to protect their kin and their right to determine who was and who was not a Creek. Not surprisingly, Brissert was not the only resident of a Creek village who had his identity questioned or misunderstood in the early American southeast. Throughout the pre-removal era, dozens of Indian countrymen and their Creek children were the focus of cultural misunderstandings. In each case racial logic prevented European Americans from grasping the structure of Creek society and the identities of its members. For Indian countrymen the belief in the immutability of the white race affected the European American understanding and treatment of marriages be- BOB — University of Nebraska Press / Page 115 / / Creeks and Southerners / Andrew K. Frank The Insistence of Race | 115 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 [115], (2) Lines: 19 to 21 ——— 0.0pt PgVar ——— Normal Page PgEnds: TEX [115], (2) tween Indian countrymen and Creek women. When George Galphin married a Creek woman, for example, Indian agent David Taitt continued to refer to“Galphins Indian Wench & her Children.”1 Rather than accept the emerging Native identity of Galphin and his choice to cross the cultural divide, Taitt viewed him through the lens of southern masculinity. Galphin had not succumbed to Native culture; he was subduing it. The Indian women remained passive entities in the arrangement, simply allowing themselves to be used by European American men.2 The perception of Indian women as wenches paralleled the larger problem of seeing exterior motives for all Creek behavior. Just as Taitt believed that Galphin was using his Creek wife, not following Creek customs or becoming a Creek himself,Taitt and other EuropeanAmerican leaders consistently assumed that Native diplomacy was the extension of their foreign enemies. For example, Spaniard Luis de Unzaga repeatedly claimed that only interference by the United States could lead to hostilities between the Spaniards and Creeks.3 Englishman Henry Ellis similarly blamed the Creeks’May 16, 1760, attack on resident traders in Oakfuskee on the French, who desired to create a “Rupture between those Indians and us.” In the process Ellis ignored the unruly behavior of traders and the diplomatic designs of Handsome Fellow, the leader of the assault.4 By denying Creeks the ability to make choices on their own terms, these instances helped...

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