Creeks and Southerners explores the lives of bicultural Creeks—people with Creek mothers and European fathers—who lived in the American Southeast in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Seven thematic chapters cover the Creek practice of kinship adoption, the influence of European men and Creek women on their children, the role of bicultural Creeks as intercultural negotiators, and the divided loyalties of some Creeks of European and Indian descent. Throughout, Frank argues that Creeks defined themselves in nonracial, matrilineal terms. Creek Indians, he concludes, had a "nonracial worldview" well into the early nineteenth century (129).
Frank draws impressively on a multitude of sources to craft numerous fascinating portraits of bicultural Creeks. These individuals, drawing [End Page 299] on skills learned from their European or American fathers, frequently served as interpreters, diplomats, and economic innovators. Though colonists used racial terms such as "half-breed" and "mestizo" to describe them, Frank argues that Creeks, who determined clan membership and identity matrilineally, saw them solely as Creek (129). "For most of the pre-removal period," Frank writes, "paternity and race had little effect on identity" (8).
Yet Creeks and Southerners never considers the possibility that Creeks could have identified themselves by both kinship and race at one and the same time. By drawing more deeply on anthropological, sociological, and historical literature, Frank might have clarified the relationship between clan and racial identity. In particular, Brubaker and Cooper's work on identity might have brought some precision to a term that appears throughout the book. 1 Moreover, scholarship by Hodes, Holt, and others might have offered useful approaches to thinking about the role of race in the early modern Atlantic world. 2
Given the thoroughness of Frank's research, it is puzzling that he excludes Africans and Afro-Creeks from his discussion of biculturalism. The omission of people of African descent from this investigation of identity in a slave-holding society calls into question the book's overall argument that matrilineality trumped race. In fact, at times, this conclusion seems forced, as in the epilogue. Frank invokes a Creek origin story to show that Creeks still adhered to a nonracial worldview in the early nineteenth century. Yet he cites a narrative that was first recorded in 1842 in Indian Territory, after the Creeks had been removed from the Southeast at gunpoint. The story, about the creation of "white people," "Indians," and "negroes," suggests that Creeks believed that "people were essentially the same," writes Frank, but it could be just as convincingly read to suggest the opposite (129). Frank then introduces a different origin story to illustrate the "increased importance of race" by the twentieth century (131). This time he cites a narrative first recorded in 1823. On the occasion of its telling, the speaker said that it had been handed down to him from his forefathers. 3
Footnotes
1. Rogers Brubaker and Frederick Cooper, "Beyond' Identity,'" Theory and Society, XXIX (2000), 1–47.
2. Martha Hodes, "The Mercurial Nature and Abiding Power of Race: A Transnational Family Story," American Historical Review, CVIII (2003), 84–118; Thomas C. Holt, "Marking: Race, Race-making, and the Writing of History," American Historical Review, C (1995), 1–20.
3. William G. McLoughlin, "A Note on African Sources of American Racial Myths," Journal of American Folklore, LXXXIX (1976), 332.