African Creeks: Estelveste and the Creek Nation (review)

2??8Book Reviews105 largely missing. Stanley Hordes's essay on New Mexico's crypto-Jewish population of course dedicates considerable attention to this area, but most other references to die region are only in passing, and the introductory essay represents a missed opportunity to reflect on this gap. The book's misleading map of New Spain contributes to this oversight, showing as it does the modern U.S. border with Mexico—and in the Soudi, the modern borders with Guatemala and Belize —as the boundaries of New Spain. Like these nations, New Mexico and Texas appear shaded so as to suggest their complete separation from New Spain; Florida and California are entirely absent. Still, this volume does a better job than many on New Spain in this respect as it devotes two sections to the frontier and includes perspectives from Baja California, Coahuila, and elsewhere. The strengths of diis fine volume, including its engaging scholarship, colorful stories, and topical breadth easily outweigh any minor shortcomings. Religion in New Spain represents a strong contribution to the field, with essays that are accessible , interesting, and wonderfully free ofjargon. Texas Woman's UniversityMartina Will de Chaparro African Creeks: Estelveste and the Creek Nation. By Gary Zellar. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2007. Pp. 368. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, index. ISBN g78o8o6i38i52. $34.g5, cloth.) In the past decade, scholarship on southeastern Indians has increasingly focused on the question of race and identity: When and why did Natives embrace or adopt Euro-American racial categories in their own ordering of society? In African Creeks, Gary Zellar focuses his attention on the post-removal reordering of the Creek Nation and makes two compelling claims. First, Zellar claims that for longer than previously acknowledged African Creeks successfully integrated themselves into the Creek Nation, a nation that repeatedly rejected efforts to connect race, identity, and citizenship. Second, rather than universalize his conclusions to account for all southeastern Indians, Zellar prudently explains diat this history of sustained toleration is exceptional to the Creeks. A single answer for the entire southeast, he claims, does not exist. Zellar begins his narrative with a brief discussion of Mississippian norms and pre-removal history, but the bulk of the volume explores the issue of citizenship in post-removal Creek society. For most of Zellar's assessment, Creek Indians emerge as a "tolerant" people who allowed Africans to live among them. Throughout the nineteenth century, Zellar claims that Estelveste (black people) were botii segregated from and integrated into Creek society. They forged "a separate African Creek identity within the confines of Creek Indian culture" (p. 32). With separate but integrated identities, African Creeks formed freed people 's towns almost immediately after they obtained their freedom. As much as these towns were independent, Zellar emphasizes that they were "firmly grounded in the Creek cultural milieu" (p. 114). On several occasions, Zellar reminds us that Creek behavior was abnormal ?o6Southwestern Historical QuarterlyJuly for its southern and southeastern Indian neighbors. Toleration may have existed among the Creeks, but this was not the case elsewhere. During Reconstruction, for example, U.S. senators were repeatedly frustrated by the actions of Creek Indians and African Creeks when they tried to treat African Creeks as freed people . At about the same time, violent confrontations repeatedly took place between African Creeks and Cherokee Indians, neighbors who "during the postwar period did not exhibit the fluidity and flexibility found in die Creek county" (P- 124). Zellar's study focuses primarily on the political and the public, as it follows the history of race and citizenship through the maze of late-nineteenth- and early -twentieth-century Indian history. Only through federal interference through the Dawes Act and die allotment of lands did this era of tolerance end. At the turn of the twentieth century African Creeks had "full political, legal, and economic rights as citizens of the Creek Nation." Yet, within a decade, "the foundation of those rights—Creek citizenship and the right to hold and improve any part of the Creek domain—was kicked out from underneath them in the guise of reform and progress" (p. 257). Jim Crow would thereafter structure Creek society . African Creeks emphasizes the formalist interpretations ofsources and...