Story by Mitch Emmons
Representatives of the Oklahoma Muscogee Creek Nation float the Tallapoosa River to honor connection with ancestors
A delegation from the Creek Nation last month canoed an ancestral route along the Tallapoosa River at Tallassee as part of a tour of historic sites in their native homeland.
“We made this a part of several stops,” said John “John-John” Brown, a special projects coordinator with the Cultural Center and Archives located at the Muscogee Nation in Okmulgee, Oklahoma.
The group’s ultimate destination was Moundville, Alabama, where they participated in an annual Native American festival and competed in a traditional archery shoot.
Accompanying Brown were sisters Pogie and Andra Freeman, along with their mother, Cecelia Chalakee of Tulsa, Oklahoma.
“We shoot competitively using bows that we make in the traditional way,” Pogie Freeman said.
The delegation also made a stop at Horseshoe Bend National Military Park at Daviston, Alabama, to see the traditional dugout canoe on display there. The dugout is one of two such canoes that the Creeks carved from a poplar tree cut from the banks of the Tallapoosa River as part of a special project in which the cut trees were taken from Alabama to Oklahoma for the canoe building. The second canoe remains with the Muscogee Nation there, and the two serve as a symbolic link between the Oklahoma Creeks and their native Alabama.
“The canoe really is what drove the Tallapoosa River float,” said Charles Chambers, a resident of the Red Hill Community in Elmore County and an avid Native American history scholar.
Chambers first met and was befriended by the Oklahoma Creeks as a participant in the dugout canoe project last year.
“Since they were bringing the canoe back to Alabama to put it on display, and since they also were coming to participate in the festival at Moundville, we talked and decided that a float along the Tallapoosa following the historic route of their ancestors and traveling past significant centers of Creek culture would be a great thing to include in their trip.”
“It really made the trip more special,” added Andra Freeman.
“The river has always been central to Creek life,” said Brown. “The river gave us life – fish, game, many other things – and it served as major travel routes. The river is sacred.”
The Oklahoma delegation floated a section of the river that is well known to local canoeists and kayakers. They put boats in the water at the public ramp at the falls, just behind the Caseworks plant on Highway 229 and took out about five hours later at the 229 Bridge. This part of the river flows gently with no whitewater, and it contains several sand bars that make good rest stops, depending on the water level. Due to the drought, the water was low on the day of the historic float, but the current was steady.
At the beginning of the Tallapoosa River canoe float, the Oklahoma delegation conducted a ceremony blessing the river in their traditional way, speaking the words in the Muscogee language.
“We do this because this is who we are,” Brown said. “We still are the Creek people. This is the home of our ancestors. This land and this river are sacred.”
The trip began at about 7:30 a.m., and when the boats were pulled from the water at about noon, the Friends of the Tuckabatchee Committee of the Talisi Historical Preservation Society had spread a table with lunch for the tour group.
“We also have interest in the river cane that grows in abundance here,” Brown said. “The river cane is used as arrow shafts and the stalks are split to use in our traditional basket weaving.”
Brown is an expert in and teaches the Creek traditional bow-making craft and skills. The Freeman sisters are traditional basket weavers.
Brown said that keeping the Creek traditions and ways alive among the people is an important undertaking, but it is one that can be difficult to do.
Before Alabama was even a part of the Mississippi Territory in the early frontier settlement and westward expansion of the United States, most of the land belonged to the Native American Muscogee (Creek) Confederacy.
This powerful culture had thrived for hundreds of years in organized towns and villages that dotted the banks along Alabama’s rivers and streams. One of the four mother towns of the Creek Confederacy, Tuckabatchee spanned a broad flat overlooking the Tallapoosa River just outside of what today is the City of Tallassee. Laid out in a deliberate array of homes with courtyards, civic buildings and a central town square, Tuckabatchee was a metro-center of Creek society, rich in trade, travel, politics and all manner of cultural activities. From its overlook above the flowing waters of the Tallapoosa River, it remained a highly significant place in the lives of the Creek people until most were removed from the Southeast to the Oklahoma Territory in the 1830s.
As European influx grew in America, so did the dilution of traditional Native American ways. White settlers and Native Americans intermarried. Cultures merged. Pure traditional ways became less prevalent, and with the War of 1812 and the Creek Indian War that waged as a part of that conflict along the western frontier of a young United States, the situation was more pronounced. Even the Creeks themselves, who were divided as Upper and Lower Creeks, were embroiled in their own politically driven civil war.
Most Lower Creeks aligned with the American government and supported the adoption of new ways. Most Upper Creeks rejected American encroachment into their ancestral lands and hostilely resisted. Those Creeks that banned together to war against the American expansion became known as the “Red Sticks” because they adorned their war clubs and other symbols of battle with red paint.
After General Andrew Jackson’s army of well-armed regular U.S. soldiers, frontier militia and Native American allies overwhelmingly defeated the determined but out-numbered and lesser-armed Red Stick Creeks at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend in 1814, life for nearly all Native Americans in Alabama grew harder.
By the 1830s – under the presidency of Jackson – the Indian Removal Bill was passed. Most of the Native American people living in the southeastern United States were forcibly removed to reservation lands in the Oklahoma Territory. This epic is known in the history books as the “Trail of Tears,” the name given to it by the victims because of the hardship and heartbreak endured.
Brown and the Freemans are descendants of those Creeks who were removed from Alabama. To them, returning to their native home is significant and key in keeping their cultural traditions from becoming lost altogether.
“Following removal, traditional ways were frowned upon, and the Creek people were discriminated against for participating in traditional ways,” Brown said. “Few things were written down. Because of that, many have been lost, including much of our language.”
Representatives from the Muscogee Creeks in Oklahoma make pilgrimages like this one every year to keep the cultural traditions alive and to maintain the connection between the people and their ancestral grounds.
The river remains a forever-flowing vein linking the people to the land.
