In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

BOB — University of Nebraska Press / Page 46 / / Creeks and Southerners / Andrew K. Frank 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 [First Page] [46], (1) Lines: 0 to 17 ——— 0.0pt PgVar ——— Normal Page PgEnds: TEX [46], (1) chapter 3 Kin and Strangers In the aftermath of the particularly bloody battle of Tallapoosa in 1813, U.S. general Andrew Jackson discovered an Indian infant“sucking his dead mothers breast.” Jackson, apparently believing that the motherless child would not be cared for by the surviving Creeks in the village, took the fate of the orphaned child into his own hands. After feeding the infant with some sugar water, the future president wrote to his wife, Rachel, to explain that “charity and christianity says he ought to be taken care of and I send him to my little Andrew [Jackson Donelson, his adopted son] and I hope [we] wil[l] adopt him as one of our family.”1 Indeed, in the following years the family did. Jackson insisted that Lyncoya receive a grammar school education, eventually arranged a harnessmaking apprenticeship, called him “son,” and even tried to have him enrolled at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. The future president and advocate of Indian removal believed that Lyncoya—despite his Indian birth, lineage, and appearance—could embrace American culture and, of course, naturally desired to do so. As a privileged slaveholder and successful soldier, Jackson concluded that he had the best chance of shaping his Indian child into an American.2 Because of this optimism, the future president and his neighbors reportedly expressed surprise when in later years Lyncoya continued to exhibit “Indian” behavior. Jackson’s frustration at Lyncoya’s apparent resistance to accepting American culture, however, never diminished the president’s belief that Lyncoya would eventually “mature” and Americanize. James Parton, a nineteenthcentury biographer of Jackson,wrote that Lyncoya’s“Indian nature”could never be erased. Despite his insistence on a connection between human biology and behavior, Parton does record the shock Lyncoya’s juvenile acts—as opposed to the naturally Indian acts—received. “A lady of Nashville tells me, that when, as a little girl, she used to visit the Hermitage with her parents, this Indian boy was a terror; as it was his delight to spring out upon the other children from some ambush about his house, and frighten them with loud yells and horrible grimaces.”3 Many eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century white southerners shared Jackson’s belief in the potential of Native Americans to learn and live by European American ideals and customs. Few believed that this process would be BOB — University of Nebraska Press / Page 47 / / Creeks and Southerners / Andrew K. Frank Kin and Strangers | 47 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 [47], (2) Lines: 17 to 25 ——— 0.0pt PgVar ——— Normal Page PgEnds: TEX [47], (2) quick, many used this doubt to justify Indian removal, and others expressed doubt that it would ever occur.Yet a belief in the theoretical potential for Indian acculturation was widely shared. The assumption that race and culture were not linked motivated a host of religious and cultural missionaries and agents to enter Creek villages and try to foster various forms of acculturation. This belief represented a continuation of a Jeffersonian understanding of Indians, and as Bernard Sheehan and others have demonstrated, it often justified violent assaults on Indian culture and society. EuropeanAmericans could feel sympathy for individual Indians and believe in their own humanitarianism, while simultaneously denigrating and destroying Native traditions and customs.4 Creeks also disassociated race from culture, as they defined members of their villages in ways that minimized the importance of biology and physical appearances . Instead Creeks typically determined identities and nationality with more mutable categories.Adoption rituals and an emphasis on matrilineal clans routinely turned outsiders into insiders, and strangers into kin. They used tattoos , haircuts and hairstyles, body paints, and animal greases to manipulate their physical appearances and their identities. As a result Indian countrymen and their Native children had little problem, at least physically, blending into eighteenth-century Creek society. Few residents of the eighteenth...

Share