Yuchi Indian Histories Before the Removal Era

In Yuchi Indian Histories Before the Removal Era, folklorist and anthropologist Jason Baird Jackson and nine scholars of Yuchi (Euchee) Indian culture and history offer a revisionist and in-depth portrait of Yuchi community and society. This first interdisciplinary history of the Yuchi people corrects the historical record, which often submerges the Yuchi within the Creek Confederacy instead of acknowledging the Yuchi as a separate tribe.By looking at the oral, historical, ethnographic, linguistic, and archaeological record, contributors illuminate Yuchi political circumstances and cultural identity. Focusing on the pre-Removal era, the volume shows that from the entrada of Hernando de Soto into the American South in 1541 to the Yuchis’ internal migrations throughout the hinterlands of the South and their entanglement with the Creeks to the maintenance of community and identity today, the Yuchis have persisted as a distinct people. This volume provides a voice to an indigenous nation that previous generations of scholars have misidentified or erroneously assumed to be a simple constituent of the Creek Nation. In doing so, it offers a fuller picture of Yuchi social realities since the arrival of Europeans and other non-natives in their Southern homelands.  

"The editor and contributors deserve congratulations for sustaining the nearly invisible Yuchi story line. Hope for future information rests in the questions raised by these and other scholars. This publication makes clear that the possibilities are enormous for ethnohistorians, historians, archaeologists, anthropologists, ethnologists, ethnographers, linguists, ethnobotanists, and geographers."—J.H. O'Donnell III , Choice, "Future scholars of the Yuchi will undoubtedly begin with the conclusions and frameworks of Yuchi Indian Histories before the Removal Era. The essays in the volume are uniformly accessible and simultaneously insightful yet cautious in their conclusions. Scholars of the early South (native or otherwise) will appreciate their insights."—Andrew K. Frank, Journal of American History, "This volume will stimulate a spate of new archaeological and ethnographic fieldwork, archival research, and linguistic analyses of the Yuchi."—Cameron B. Wesson, Plains Anthropologist, "This important new collection further illuminates the intricacies of the political climate of the colonial Southeast and highlights the history of an important, understudied group."—Natalie Inman, Journal of Southern History, "Yuchi Indian Histories before the Removal Era will interest historians of the Native Southeast and anyone with a stake in the Yuchi past, present, and future. That group, as this book shows, should include scholars across multiple disciplines."—Jessica R. Cattelino, Journal of Anthropological Research

Jason Baird Jackson is a professor of folklore and director of the Mathers Museum of World Cultures at Indiana University. He is the author of Yuchi Ceremonial Life: Performance, Meaning, and Tradition in a Contemporary Native American Community (Nebraska, 2003).