“THE WORLD AT OUR DOOR” SCOTTISH AND IRISH SETTLERS AMONG MUSCOGEE (CREEKS) AND OTHER SOUTHEAST TRIBES, 1700 - 1830

By the time of the American Revolution, the colonial shores of the Atlantic had welcomed more than 250,000 Scottish and Irish immigrants to its harbors. With centuries of both war and subjugation in their blood, these Irish, Ulster Scots (known also as Scots-Irish), Highland Scots and Lowland Scots dispersed into cities, the Southeast frontier, and homelands of a confederacy of tribes called the Muscogee (Creek), or Mvskoke, and of neighboring tribes, the Choctaw, Chickasaw, Cherokee, and Seminole people, known today as the ‘Five Civilized Tribes’. As a foray into Indigenous research methodology and multicultural historiography, this paper investigates historical narratives of Southeast tribes compared with that of the immigrant Irish and Scottish. With a primary focus on Muscogee Creeks, the work examines the Mississippian Culture Period, migration to villages and towns, the formation of the Creek Confederacy, traditions, warrior society paradigms, spirituality, matrilineal society, kinship, and identity. It also delves into ancient Irish and Scottish history, foreign invasion, ethnic overlaps and intermarriage, customs, warfare, patrilineal society, and British imperialist domination. The study compares and contrasts these histories and civilizations, the immigration of Gaels into America, reasons for and results of intermarriage, social mores, and the making of the tradesmen, “Indian countrymen,” and the deerskin trade that drove the region. Adding to the New Indian Story of Native American and European multiculturalism, this work seeks to synthesize the story of transformation in the Southeast, the contest for power among British, Spanish, French, and American leadership, and intrusions of federalism. It examines issues of race, kinship, and identity, and the phenomenon of the “shatter zone.” Amid the fight for survival, sovereignty, and cultural continuance of tribal nations, a new “mixed” generation of intermarriage arose as tribal leaders: culture bearers, cultural brokers, English-speaking interpreters, treaty makers, and traitors. Brief attention is given to Muscogee Creek mixed heritage leaders William McIntosh, William Weatherford, and Alexander McGillivray. Like a painted palette of este-cate (‘red people’)—of blood and bone of ancients—striated with imposing visceral textures and ephemeral colorants of the Five Civilized Tribes, this canvas of histories, of mixed and altered destinies, emerges as salient and as powerful as the irrepressible Indian people it represents