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Chapter 1 The Spirit of a Feather: The Politics of Mississippian Exchange The Cussitas were always Bloody minded But the Pallachucola [Apalachicola ] People made them Black Drink as a Token of Friendship And told them their Hearts were white And they must have White Hearts and lay down their Bodies in Token That they Should be White. . . . [The Cussitas] strove for the Tomahawk but the Apalachicola People by fair persuasion gained it from them And Buried it under their Cabin[.] The Pallachucola People told them their Captain Should all one with their People and gave them White feathers. . . . Ever Since they have lived together And they Shall always live Together and bear it in remembrance. —Chekilli, 17351 In 1735, Chekilli, the principal leader of the Creek town of Coweta, told a story of his people’s origins to the British of Savannah, Georgia. The British secretary’s summary of the two-day account, which includes descriptions of migration, the acquisition of sacred knowledge, and encounters with friends and foes, also includes the above description of the ‘‘bloody minded’’ Cussitas’ peace and union with the Apalachicolas. Two centuries after Zamumo had received his gift with such enthusiasm and long after mounds had ceased to serve as monuments to chiefly power and town cohesion, feathers remained symbols of power, encapsulating a spiritual iconography as old as Europe’s Gothic cathedrals. But while feathers lacked the durability of stone, Zamumo’s and Chekilli ’s small gifts sealed human relationships that were no less weighty. What endowed insubstantial objects with such power? Marcel Mauss, one of the first anthropologists to consider the power of things in people ’s lives, argued that gifts were the product of an obligation to offer, to receive, and to reciprocate that he located in the ‘‘spirit’’ of the gift. As he explained, the object of exchange possessed its own spiritual power that compelled recipients to become givers in order to avoid suffering the ill-effects of holding on to this power too long. Exchange in Spirit of a Feather 13 turn maintained the relationships that held society together. Such gifts, as objects that had no price and offered no material gain, were different from (and, for Mauss, more important than) the commodities that promised profit through the manipulation of monetary values. Where the former promoted relations between giver and recipient, the latter promoted relations between individuals and the objects they sought. Subsequent students of giving have refined Mauss’s ideas, saying that the power of any object resides not in the object itself but in the relationships that exist between giver and recipient. They have also noted how Mauss exaggerated the distinction between gifts and commodities, showing that commodities could become gifts and vice versa depending on the context of the exchange. Whatever their take, these scholars all agree that bonds within and between societies depend in some part on individuals’ spirit of giving, their willingness to seal intangible relationships with material exchanges.2 Gifts mattered so much to Zamumo and Chekilli because reciprocity ensured the strength of the towns they led. Exchange among townspeople maintained equilibrium and hierarchy within the town while exchanges with outsiders provided leaders with rare and powerful objects. Both sets of relationships enabled townspeople to regulate their cosmos with appropriate ceremonies and to maintain friends and resist enemies with large, well-fed, and well-armed populations. Zamumo said as much when he exulted over the feather from de Soto: large harvests, powerful armies, and growing populations would all reinforce his power and perhaps his town’s independence from Ocute. The calculations that informed these conclusions derived their power from centuries of practice . Zamumo was the heir to some six centuries of cultural practices that had first begun in 900 c.e., when people near today’s St. Louis began constructing what would become the largest city in North America. The people of this city called Cahokia introduced a new architecture of massive earthen temple mounds, but they also introduced new relations of exchange. Other southeastern communities adopted Cahokia’s new political economy, but as these successor societies grew in number and competed with one another, they expanded the networks and volume of prestige goods circulating throughout the Southeast . It was in this fluid environment of the sixteenth century that leaders like Zamumo sought new patrons like de Soto even as they acknowledged old ones like Ocute. It was also from these competitive networks of exchange that southeastern townspeople would fashion new...

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