"White & Clean" & Contested: Creek Towns and Trading Paths in the Aftermath of the Seven Years' War

In the last generation, scholars intent on removing "tribe" from their narratives of colonial-era Native American history have repeatedly invoked "community" in its place. This development notwithstanding, community-centered projects are rare; Indian towns now appear in the literature, but not as the driving force behind the action being chronicled. This article focuses on the debate among Upper Creek towns as they struggled to define the nature of their relationship to the British between 1763 and the early 1780s. In so doing, it traces the limits of regional and national alliances in the colonial era while arguing for the centrality of the local in Native life. In the eighteenth century, Creek history was community history.