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208 chapter 9 Race, Revitalization, and Warfare in the Eighteenth-Century Southeast The Shawnees and the Creeks have been telling stories about each other for as long as either community can remember. Indeed, the relationship between them stretches back into “deep time,” to the period before Europeans began recording their histories. Archaeological and archival evidence shows that Shawnees have been living within the various Creek talwas, or towns, since the seventeenth century. Many of the colonial-era stories feature the Creek towns of Tukabatchee and Abihka, both of which are widely regarded as the “foundation towns” of the Upper Creek Confederacy.1 Louis LeClerk de Milfort, a Frenchman living among the Upper Creeks at the end of the eighteenth century, had heard stories about “an Indian tribe which had just been destroyed by the Iroquois and Hurons [which] came to implore the protection of the Muskogees.” According to Milfort, sometime late in the seventeenth century “the Creeks took them in and assigned them land in the center of the nation” at Tukabatchee.2 In the nineteenth century , Creek métis George Stiggins recalled hearing stories about a second group of Shawnee migrants who had moved into the Upper Creek towns sometime in the eighteenth century. Stiggins described how, at the time, the “Ispocogas” (Kispokothas) and Shawnees were two different “nations” brought together at Tukabatchee through an elaborate ritual exchange.3 Stiggins believed that the “Shawnees” were a large nation that coalesced with, and later subsumed, the five society clans. “Shawnee” thus became the umbrella term by which the Thawekila, Chalagawtha, Kispokotha, Pekowitha , and Mekoche identified themselves in the nineteenth century. According to Stiggins, coalescence between the Shawnees and Kispokotha took place during the Busk or Green Corn Ceremony, typically held in late July or early August. Stiggins’s understanding makes sense given RACE, REVITALIZATION, AND WARFARE / 209 the fact that the Green Corn Ceremony brings together a whole series of ritual events whose purpose is to renew the world by renewing the talwa in which the ceremony takes place. As a peace ceremony, the Busk, or Green Corn, is a ritual in which townspeople reaffirm their commitment to each other. During the late eighteenth century, naturalist and travel writer William Bartram described a Green Corn Ceremony he witnessed in the Alabama town of Mucclassee, within the Upper Creek Confederacy. Bartram noticed that on the fourth day of the ceremony “the high priest, by rubbing dry wood together, produces new fire in the public square, from whence every habitation in the town is supplied with the new and pure flame.” Every Creek talwa “had a hearth with a fire burning that represented the entire community and the people’s connection to their ancestors.” This sense of homeland, of place, symbolized by the sacred fire, became the means by which various community members reconciled their differences and bound themselves, on a yearly basis, to the land on which their town was located. Associated with the “ripening of the second or late crop of corn,” the Busk also marked the end of the agricultural season. As such, it became a kind of thanksgiving ceremony in which the Creek people, and the Shawnees living among them, offered thanks for life, which was symbolized by corn, their primary means of sustenance.4 During the Green Corn Ceremony at Tukabatchee, ceremonialists displayed sacred brass plates described in their origin stories and often linked to the Shawnees. In the nineteenth century, Creeks recalled that the Kispokothas “deposited with the keepers of the national square of one of their groups their calumet Tobacco Pipes Belts and war club called by them Attussa,” along with the twelve sacred brass plates of the “Ispocoga” nation. According to Stiggins, the union between the “Ispocogas” (Kispokothas ), the Shawnees, and the Tukabatchee Creeks did not last. “Through some unknown reason,” the Shawnees abandoned their Kispokotha Shawnee kinsmen and “formed a resolution to recede from the union.” Stiggins learned that the Shawnees abandoned Tukabatchee, leaving behind their Kispokotha relatives. Before they departed, the Shawnees “carried off six of the sacred brass plates . . . which the Shawanose have retained possession of ever since.” Creek people did not see these sacred brass plates again until the War of 1812, when Muskogees sympathetic to the revitalization movement led by Tecumseh, himself a Kispokotha, saw them in “the care of the old prophet at tippaconoe,” the multiethnic village associated with Tecumseh’s brother, Tenskwatawa, on the Tippecanoe River in northwest Indiana. Ties between the Kispokotha Shawnees and the Tukabatchee...

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