The American Civil War was disastrous for the Muscogee people. The first three battles of the war in Indian Territory occurred when Confederate forces attacked a large of neutral Muscogee (Creeks) led by Opothle Yahola. For the majority of the Muscogee people, desired neutrality proved impossible. Eventually Muscogee citizens fought on both the Union and Confederate sides. The reconstruction treaty of 1866 required the cession of 3.2 million acres -- approximately half of the Muscogee domain.
Here is a link to our histoy: http://www.muscogeenation-nsn.gov/history/history.htm
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Thanks for that little snippet! Q
ReplyDeleteGood reading Bob. It sounds like the concept of 'land ownership' was not part of Creek way of life
ReplyDeleteSandy,
ReplyDeleteOh it was part of our way of life, the problem was they took land from the tribe, for any reason they could. Some was taken because some Creeks fought for the South even though some were neutral and some were fighting for the north. The real problem was that the government wanted the land and wanted to end all communal ownership of land by the tribes in the Indian Territories. This is what the Dawes Act and Curtis Acts tried to accomplish and did to a certain point. They wanted to make all Indians gentlemen farmers, and they they took the excess lands and opened them up to settlement by whites. It's was greed, not that my ancestors didn't understand the concept of owning land. The Dawes Act was to end the Indian Nations from being Soverign Nations of their own and to dismantle tribal governments. It never came to past as they envisioned it too. We are still here and still have soverign rights as a Nation within a Nation.
I took a little time this evening to read a bit about it, this piece on the web was particularly disturbing:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.dickshovel.com/cleansing.html
I'm glad the Dawes Act failed to do what it intended, but the Native Americans had already suffered so much
I was just watching a little moss covered bird hop about on the squirrel cam. Not all your visitors are furry!
ReplyDeleteAnd how are you? Rested from your trip?