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Ethnohistory 49.2 (2002) 444-446



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Book Review

The Alabama-Coushatta Indians


The Alabama-Coushatta Indians. By Jonathan Hook. (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1997. xvi + 152 pp., preface, introduction, bibliography, index. $29.95 cloth.)

Jonathan Hook is an independent scholar of Cherokee ancestry with a Ph.D. from the University of Houston. His book, The Alabama-Coushatta Indians, is a study of the concept of "Indian identity" with the Alabama-Coushatta of Texas, once members of the Creek confederacy, as the focus. It will appeal to students of ethnic studies and Texan Indian history. As Hook states in his preface, his sources for this monograph are primarily interviews conducted between 1994 and 1996 with twenty-eight tribal members living on the Alabama-Coushatta reservation in Texas. Hook has interviewed more than a hundred other persons of American-Indian ancestry during his work for various Indian organizations, including the Intertribal Council of Houston, Texas (ITCH). As Hook states as a pitch for his book on the commercial website Amazon.com, "I wrote this book not from an academic perspective but out of personal experience. I was involved with many different activities on the reservation, from powwows to health issues to education. The book came out of that lived history." [End Page 444]

Hook examines the Alabama and Coushatta history (they were once distinct communities) in four parts: (1) initial contact and migration; (2) early reservation and missionary presence; (3) Indian New Deal, World War II, and federal termination; and (4) regenesis/ethnogenesis. The first cultural period constitutes a brief sketch of the tribe's history from 1540 to 1880, but the reader is left with questions: Why did the Alabama and Coushatta, but not other members of the Creek confederacy, begin a westward trek after the conclusion of the French and Indian War? Why did some community members remain behind? Hook states simply that the Alabama and Coushatta tribes migrated to Louisiana to "avoid British sovereignty" (25). About seven hundred Alabamas and Coushattas continued on to Texas in the 1840s and 1850s. Forced onto a common reservation in the mid–nineteenth century, the separate communities began to merge into one tribe through intermarriage and shared historical experiences. Outsiders made little distinction between them (32). The chapter might have highlighted individuals who made independent decisions that bound their families or communities to decisions. Who were the community leaders? Were there internal conflicts? How were the Alabama and Coushatta influenced by the other members of the Creek confederacy, and why did they sever relations with it? Hook's most original material features the impact of the market on cultural change. He notes that many Alabama and Coushatta Indians found employment on plantations. Those who did often adopted the surname of their white employer. Although naming patterns are a telling reflection of personal identity, Hook does not explain why these individuals readily took the names that the planters gave them (34). What Hook does best in this brief sketch of the Alabama-Coushatta's early history is describe the seventeenth-century cultural traditions of the Creek Indians in admirable detail.

In the next few chapters, Hook charts the persistence of the Alabamas' and Coushattas' cultural traditions, such as language, dress, polygamy, and the green corn ritual, into the late nineteenth century. About 1880 Presbyterian missionaries began to proselytize the reservation and quickly converted the community en masse to Christianity. The Indians welcomed the missionaries because they viewed ministers as healers, they accorded whites social prestige, they had a tradition of hospitality, and their chief, John Scott, believed that change was necessary for survival (48). Hook draws informative comparisons between indigenous religious beliefs and Christianity, his most important point being that Christianity emphasized individual survival and redemption rather than an ethic "designed to strengthen the community" (49). World War II was a culture shock to the Alabama-Coushatta who served in it. They experienced "high-paced materialistic culture" and increased exposure to "other tribal beliefs and practices" (68–69). [End Page 445] The U.S. government's policy shifts led the Alabama-Coushatta to assimilate to survive...

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