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Chapter 5 Creating White Hearts: Anxious Alliances amid the Slave Trade Then the [Coweta] visitors addressed the [Tukabahchee] chiefs saying ‘‘We hear that you have a very powerful medicine which enables you to conquer everybody, therefore we have come to learn about it. Have you any warriors?’’ ‘‘Yes,’’ said they, ‘‘we have a few.’’ ‘‘Let us see them.’’ ‘‘We must whoop four times in order to call them up, they said. ‘‘All right,’’ answered the Coweta. Then they sent a messenger who returned presently with something wrapped up in a white deerskin. They unwrapped this and produced a short stick of miko hoyani-dja. Holding this they whooped once and the earth trembled and it thundered and lightened. After they had whooped the second time, the Coweta said, ‘‘That will do. You need not whoop any more.’’ But the Tukabahchee answered that they must go through to the fourth now that they had begun and they did so. The Coweta said, ‘‘Let us become friends and exchange medicines.’’ They did this and have been firm friends ever since. The Tukabahchee medicine was, as we have seen, the miko hoyani-dja; the Coweta medicine was the kapapaska. —Alindja, ca. 19101 Alindja said nothing to John Swanton about the wider circumstances behind the Cowetas’ and Tukabatchees’ alliance, but I cannot help wondering if his recollections refer to the turbulent years of the slave trade. The parallels, if not the connections, are intriguing. After 1674, as the Westos and their Carolinian trading partners destroyed and traded lives with terrifying ruthlessness, Indians in the Southeast faced two basic questions. How could one best survive? Who made the best partners for such an endeavor? Many southeastern Natives answered the first question by becoming slave raiders themselves. But if prudence seemed to encourage Carolina’s new partners to join those they could not beat, slave raiding was a bloody affair for hunters as well as hunted, and the English quickly proved themselves to be dangerously unpredictable. So between 1680 and 1707, residents of Coweta, its sister town of Cussita, and other towns of the Chattahoochee Valley answered the second ques- 96 Chapter 5 tion in ways Alindja would have understood perfectly: They forged ties with peoples like the Tukabatchees who could reduce the risks of association with violent English partners.2 In light of this strategy, Alindja’s exchange of miko hoyani-dja and kapapaska (the former a variety of willow and the latter known in English as spicewood) is all the more evocative. Cowetas and Tukabatchees were combining medicines devoted not to war but to the purification and renewal of the Green Corn Ceremony.3 As devoted as Carolinians were to war, profit, and empire, their Coweta, Tukabatchee, and associated Native allies remained as committed as Zamumo had been to the quest for peace, the gifts of friendship, and the power rooted in both. However direct the lineage between these developments and Alindja’s account two centuries later, his story provides not just an allegory for the years between 1680 and 1707 but a structure for exploring it. Before we can understand how and why Cowetas and Tukabatchees came to exchange powerful medicine, we must first learn how the Cowetas became such confident alliance builders in the first place. When Cowetas and the other towns of Apalachicola province finally made the difficult decision to join the English, they did so in partnership with the Yamasees. Once confederated with these eastern towns, Apalachicolas then deepened their ties with Tukabatchees and their neighbors to the west. These diplomatic successes then introduced a new question. How could these new allies keep the destructive power of war wrapped, like the Tukabatchees’ medicine, in the white deerskin of peace? The allies responded by pursuing war with vigor and treating its Carolinian sponsors with circumspection, and they devoted many of the proceeds of war to the ceremonies of peace. Their answers enabled Carolinians to maintain a profitable trade, but they also gave Spaniards and the newly arrived French, who offered gifts and ‘‘light’’ instead of trade and war, a paradoxical security in weakness. Such balances between peace and war and among competing empires enabled these new allies to engage in a new trade while retaining old exchange patterns. And so Cowetas and their friends to the east and west were able to shape a region in a way that no European wanted. The Apalachicolas’ Quest for Balance in the East The confidence that Alindja recalled...

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