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 entradaof 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.

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