Yuchi Folklore: Cultural Expression in a Southeastern Native American Community
306
Yuchi Folklore: Cultural Expression in a Southeastern Native American Community
306Paperback(New Edition)
-
PICK UP IN STORECheck Availability at Nearby Stores
Available within 2 business hours
Related collections and offers
Overview
In countless ways, the Yuchi (Euchee) people are unique among their fellow Oklahomans and Native peoples of North America. Inheritors of a language unrelated to any other, the Yuchi preserve a strong cultural identity. In part because they have not yet won federal recognition as a tribe, the Yuchi are largely unknown among their non-Native neighbors and often misunderstood in scholarship. Jason Baird Jackson’s Yuchi Folklore, the result of twenty years of collaboration with Yuchi people and one of just a handful of works considering their experience, brings Yuchi cultural expression to light.
Yuchi Folklore examines expressive genres and customs that have long been of special interest to Yuchi people themselves. Beginning with an overview of Yuchi history and ethnography, the book explores four categories of cultural expression: verbal or spoken art, material culture, cultural performance, and worldview. In describing oratory, food, architecture, and dance, Jackson visits and revisits the themes of cultural persistence and social interaction, initially between Yuchi and other peoples east of the Mississippi and now in northeastern Oklahoma. The Yuchi exist in a complex, shifting relationship with the federally recognized Muscogee (Creek) Nation, with which they were removed to Indian Territory in the 1830s.
Jackson shows how Yuchi cultural forms, values, customs, and practices constantly combine as Yuchi people adapt to new circumstances and everyday life. To be Yuchi today is, for example, to successfully negotiate a world where commercial rap and country music coexist with Native-language hymns and doctoring songs. While centered on Yuchi community life, this volume of essays also illustrates the discipline of folklore studies and offers perspectives for advancing a broader understanding of Woodlands peoples across the breadth of the American South and East.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780806143972 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Oklahoma Press |
| Publication date: | 09/20/2013 |
| Series: | Civilization of the American Indian Series , #272 |
| Edition description: | New Edition |
| Pages: | 306 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.80(d) |
About the Author
Jason Baird Jackson is Director of the Mathers Museum of World Cultures at Indiana University and author of Yuchi Ceremonial Life: Performance, Meaning, and Tradition in a Contemporary American Indian Community.
Mary S. Linn is Associate Curator of Native American Languages at the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History.
Read an Excerpt
Yuchi Folklore
Cultural Expression in a Southeastern Native American Community
By Jason Baird Jackson
UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA PRESS
Copyright © 2013 University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, Publishing Division of the UniversityAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8061-4397-2
CHAPTER 1
Yuchi History, Culture, and Society
Since relocation to Indian Territory (present-day Oklahoma) in 1836, the Yuchi have lived in a single contiguous settlement area in the northwestern corner of the Creek Nation (comprising parts of modern Tulsa, Okmulgee, and Creek Counties). This area is located at the eastern margin of the prairie-plains region. During the twentieth century, the Yuchi maintained three autonomous "tribal town" settlements in present-day Oklahoma—Duck Creek, near Bixby; Polecat, near Sapulpa; and Sand Creek, near Bristow (fig. 1.1). Lacking federal recognition as a separate tribe, they were incorporated within the Creek Nation.
Before 1836, the Yuchi lived in autonomous towns located throughout the Southeast. Tracing Yuchi settlement history back into the seventeenth century has proven difficult as the varied names used in documents to refer to social groups can only be linked to one another in a tentative fashion. Moreover, Yuchi communities responded to the disruptions of the colonial period by settling in a number of different areas concurrently and by moving great distances (Jackson 2012).
Just before relocating in the West, the Yuchi resided in the Flint and Chattahoochee River drainages. The most important Yuchi settlement at the time of removal was Yuchi Town, located on the present-day site of Fort Benning on the Georgia-Alabama border (associated with archaeological site 1RU63; Braley 1998; Foster 2012). Several Americans visited this town and produced written accounts of it (Bartram in Waselkov and Braund 1995; Hargrave et al. 1998; Hawkins 1848; Weisman 2000). At contact with Europeans, the Yuchi population was probably concentrated on the upper and middle Tennessee River (Bauxar 1957a, 1957b, 1995; Riggs 2012; Swanton 1922; Worth 2012).
EXTERNAL RELATIONS
Unlike other Southeast groups, who played the colonial powers off one another, the Yuchi appear to have remained primarily oriented toward the English, having actively participated in the British trade of deerskins and Indian slaves. Their only period of conflict with the English was the Yamasee War. In contrast, Yuchi warfare played a role in the depopulation of the Spanish mission system in Florida. There is little direct evidence of Yuchi-French relationships. After the American Revolution, Yuchi relations with the United States paralleled those of the Creek Confederacy within which the Yuchi were politically submerged. Yuchi individuals relocating into Florida during the eighteenth century may have contributed to the emergence of the multiethnic Seminoles, although there is also important evidence of Yuchi cultural persistence in Florida (Hann 1988b; Swanton 1922; Sturtevant 1971; Weisman 2012; Worth 1995, 1998, 2000).
Yuchi cultural patterns reveal long-standing ties of alliance and association with the Shawnee and secondarily, at various times, with other Algonquian groups (Sauk, Delaware, Kickapoo, Ottawa, Peoria), as well as with their Creek allies (Hahn 2012; Piker 2012; Warren 2012). Ties to the Sauk intensified after settlement in Oklahoma, when the two peoples became neighbors. In the life of Yuchi ceremonialists in the twentieth century, close social relationships were maintained with Sauk Peyotists and the ceremonial ground communities of the Absentee Shawnee and the Creek, particularly the tribal towns of Cussetah, Eufaula, Tallahassee, and New Tulsa. Less intense but enduring relationships linked the Yuchi to most of the northeastern tribal communities in Oklahoma (Jackson 2003b).
LANGUAGE
Classifications of Native North American language relationships have described Yuchi (y??ch?) as a linguistic isolate, that is, a language without known relatives. A proposed link between Yuchi and the Siouan language family (Sapir 1921) has never been confirmed (Goddard 1996; Linn 2001, 2012). Yuchi possesses a complex noun class system that differentiates animate and inanimate objects. Animate entities are separated into two classes—Yuchi beings and all other animate entities. Inanimate objects are differentiated in context based on relative position in terms of three categories—sitting, standing, and lying. These systems interact with patterns in which forms of speech vary by the gender of the speaker (Linn 1997, 2001).
Prior to the widespread use of English among the Yuchi, they shared with their neighbors a high degree of multilingualism, knowing and using Creek, Shawnee, and Sauk in particular. During much of their later history, Yuchi people used Creek as a lingua franca, as few non-Yuchi ever learned or used the Yuchi language. In 2002 there were nineteen speakers of Yuchi. This number has fluctuated since that time due to the passing of first-language speakers but also through the increasingly successful efforts of young Yuchi adults to achieve second-language fluency in Yuchi.
This chapter is built around a specifically identified "ethnographic present" moment, the 1990s, when Yuchi community leaders worked most intensively with me in pursuing collaborative research. All general cultural patterns described in the past tense for the 1990s should be understood by readers also to be vital and characteristic of the community in the present day.
SUBSISTENCE
In the 1990s, the Yuchi maintained distinctive Native foodways. Traditional foods were more commonly prepared for special occasions than for everyday use, but their consumption was widespread. After World War II, few Yuchis were involved in subsistence agriculture or gardening, but the plants that were once their staple crops remained at the center of traditional diet. Corn was prepared in numerous ways. Highly esteemed was dried hard corn cooked with a lye solution made from wood ashes. This food is most often known by its Muskogee name, sofkee, but is called tsoši in Yuchi. Other dishes included hominy with meat, fried fresh corn, dried sweet corn soup, cornbread, and a beverage made from finely ground corn mixed with water and sweetened. Squash, pumpkin, cabbage, potatoes, and beans in great variety were also central to Yuchi cooking. Melons were well liked, and some families preserved the belief that, like fresh corn, they should not be eaten before the annual green corn ceremony.
Among wild plants, two were held in highest regard. Wild onions were harvested and eaten each spring. Churches and ceremonial grounds annually held special "wild onion dinners" to raise funds for their activities. Actually a species of wild garlic, these onions were cooked mixed with eggs. Wild grapes were used to make "grape dumplings"—a sweetened dessert food. In the twentieth century, various wild greens were still occasionally harvested, but this once common practice had diminished significantly.
Like some of their staple vegetables, the meats used in Yuchi cooking were mostly from domesticated species introduced after contact with Europeans. Salted pork, a frontier commodity, was used in a wide number of dishes, and fresh pork took the place of venison in ritual foods. Beef was also important. Of wild game, squirrel was most significant. In the late twentieth century, venison reappeared in the Yuchi diet with rebounding deer populations and the establishment of modern hunting seasons. Yuchi men continued to hunt with both bow and arrow and firearms, a pattern going back to the early colonial era.
Many Yuchi dishes emerged from the mixture of Native, Anglo, and African cultures in the American South, and they share the techniques and tastes of rural southern cooking. Other dishes, such as sauerkraut, were retained from the foodways of the rural Midwest of the early twentieth century. Fry bread was an important food, probably adopted from Native sources in Oklahoma.
The prominence of celebratory foods and feasting in Yuchi ceremonial ground life is taken up in chapter 8. The foodways discussed here are equally prominent whenever Yuchi people gather together as families or as a community.
ARCHITECTURE
In the 1990s, Yuchi housing was assimilated to available American commercial types. By the midcentury, non-Yuchi carpenters were typically hired to build Yuchi homes. Distinctive Yuchi features were found in outbuildings. Older log or frame structures were often preserved as storage buildings when families modernized their homes. "Brush arbors" like those built at the ceremonial grounds and churches were regularly built adjacent to homes to house outdoor activities. Round sweat lodges were built and used by some Yuchi families. Involvement in the Native American Church led to Yuchi ownership and use of Plains-style tepees (Jackson 1997c, 2004a).
At Yuchi ceremonial grounds, the square plaza was bordered on north, south, and west by rectangular brush arbors under which the men were seated during activities. These open buildings were made of post oak frames, roofed with black willow boughs. Encircling the square were family camps whose presence preserved the social order of compact, pre-Removal towns. Camp buildings were also open-sided arbors, but these were larger and were more diverse in construction technique. Unlike the arbors on the plaza, camp buildings incorporated modern building materials such as plastic tarps, bailing wire, and commercial lumber. Camps housed extended families during ceremonial ground events (Jackson 1997a, 1997b, 1997c, 1998a, 2003b).
Although no longer used during the 1990s, family camps were an important part of life at Yuchi churches during the twentieth century. Church camp houses were more elaborate buildings, with walls, screened windows, and other Anglo-American building features. With the advent of easy transportation, Yuchi people no longer encamped for church events, and European American–style "fellowship halls" served the social functions once centered in family camps. Yuchi church buildings were European in form but Yuchi in arrangement, in that the central space of the church ground was a congregational space (the church house, sometimes extended or augmented with a large brush arbor) surrounded by a circle of family camp houses. This is a pattern the Yuchi shared with their Creek and Seminole neighbors (EUCHEE 1997; Schultz 1999), and like modern ceremonial grounds, it is an echo of older southeastern Indian town arrangements.
After removal to the West, Yuchi settlement patterns became more dispersed. This process accelerated with allotment and the settlement of Yuchi people in nearby municipalities. Despite this pattern, many people, particularly ceremonial ground participants, maintained social ties to their ancestral towns. The ceremonial ground site that each town maintained physically expressed this town identity. The legacies of allotment are evoked in chapter 2, while the centrality of ceremonial grounds to town identity is taken up in chapters 9 and 10.
Yuchi domestic architecture in the nineteenth century featured hewn log cabins of the type common on the eastern frontier. The uncertainty of links between the early Yuchi and particular precontact archaeological sites makes describing older Yuchi architectural styles difficult. The Yuchi of 1904–1908 recalled a domestic building style very similar to the oval, bark-covered winter lodges of the Delaware and other Eastern Algonquian groups (Speck 1909, 40–41). As such buildings were still in use among their neighbors to the west, this report may reflect Yuchi ideas based on analogy to familiar models. Descriptions of Yuchi architecture from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries do not describe such dwellings (Bartram in Waselkov and Braund 1995; von Reck 1980). John Swanton (1946, 399) suggested that the bark-covered house remembered by Frank Speck's consultants was their version of the Southeast council ("hot") house. Arbors used by the modern Yuchi certainly date much earlier. The significance of Yuchi vernacular architecture is considered further in chapter 8.
CLOTHING AND ADORNMENT
While daily dress in the 1990s was like that of their non-Native neighbors, Yuchi traditional clothing, worn during community celebrations, preserved older clothing forms and styles that were once characteristic of everyday life in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Yuchi dress preserved garment types once generally characteristic of clothing on the American frontier.
For men, the most characteristically Yuchi garment was known in English as a "green corn jacket." Its form, characterized by a large ruffled cape, is derived from European frock coats. This style is found, with local modifications, throughout eastern North America. For women, traditional clothing was a loose cotton dress worn with a large apron. These garments were worn during the showy evening dances of the green corn ceremony (fig. 1.2) and at secular community festivals. Handmade dance clothes were worn during nighttime stomp dances, either a loose skirt and a store-bought blouse or a two-piece matching outfit for women and Indian-design vests or ribbon shirts by men. With such dress, both men and women wore tasseled belts of yarn made on small looms, with hole and slot heddles, or with the finger-weaving technique (Jackson 1998b; Sturtevant 1977).
Obsolete clothing forms that survived into the early twentieth century included (for men) wool breechclouts, wool and hide leggings, cloth turbans, and cloth shoulder bags. Mature women preserved older clothing styles much longer for daily wear than did their male counterparts. Older women wore "Yuchi dresses" daily into the 1950s, usually with a kerchief tied in their hair. Male and female moccasins, indistinguishable in form, ceased being made in the mid-twentieth century. They were of the eastern, soft-sole type, being constructed of a single T-shaped piece of deer hide sewn closed atop the foot with a center seam (fig. 1.3). In the last years of their use, moccasins were reserved for infants and for wear around the home. The few images available suggest that nineteenth-century Yuchi dress was similar to that of the Creek and Shawnee. There may have been Sauk influence on certain clothing forms characteristic of the late nineteenth century (Speck 1909, 50). Dress and adornment among the Yuchi are examined more fully in chapter 7.
TECHNOLOGY
In the first decade of the twentieth century, pottery was already obsolete, except perhaps for the making of water drums. Plaited basketry (fig. 1.4) continued well into the century for use in sifting and fanning baskets but was obsolete by the 1990s. Yuchi continued to make carved wooden spoons (fig. 1.5), along with wooden mortars and pestles of the Eastern Woodland type. Jewelry of nickel silver and silver, in Southeast styles, was made around 1900, a practice that was retained to a small degree under the influence of Plains groups and pan-Indian activities in Oklahoma.
The strongest area of craft activity, beyond sewing clothes and quilts, was the production of musical instruments for use in ceremonial ground dances. Yuchi craftsmen regularly produced leg rattles made of either tortoise shells or commercial tin cans. In the 1990s, this activity was largely the domain of men, in contrast to practice among the Creek and Cherokee where women and men were both involved in the making of "shells." Leg rattles made from tin cans became popular in the Oklahoma stomp dance community in the mid-twentieth century, and in the 1990s the majority of Yuchi women wore such cans instead of shells. Coconut hand rattles were used in ceremonial ground dances, but each ground possessed a pair among its heirlooms, so demand for new rattles for personal use was not high. Water drums were made quickly prior to dances in which they would be used. A watertight bucket or bowl was covered with a rubber inner tube head, secured with bands also cut from the tube (Jackson 1998b, 2003b; Speck 1909).
Until the adoption of automobiles by the Yuchi in the early to mid-twentieth century, horses and wagons provided transportation. Until the mid-twentieth century, passenger rail lines passed through the towns of Sapulpa and Bristow. Paved roads, including U.S. Route 66, connected these communities as well as the Duck Creek settlement area to Tulsa.
In the 1990s, the varied arts and crafts associated with the Native American Church and with the dances of the powwow were practiced by Yuchi people. During the late twentieth century, several contemporary artists of Yuchi heritage established national reputations for work that explored Yuchi themes. Notable among these artists were Richard Ray Whitman, Wanda Green, Steven Deo, and Joe Dale Tate Nevaquaya.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Yuchi Folklore by Jason Baird Jackson. Copyright © 2013 University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, Publishing Division of the University. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
List of Illustrations,Acknowledgments,
Introduction,
Notes on Usage,
1. Yuchi History, Culture, and Society,
2. Driving to Duck Creek,
3. Trickster Tales, with Mary S. Linn,
4. Calling in the Members, with Mary S. Linn,
5. Traditionalization in Ceremonial Ground Oratory,
6. Gender, Reciprocity, and Ritual Speech,
7. Spirit Medicine,
8. Dressing for the Dance,
9. Architecture and Hospitality,
10. On Stomp Dance and Powwow Worlds in Oklahoma,
11. Lizards and Doctors,
Afterword,
Notes,
References,
Index,