Fathers and brothers: Familial diplomacy of the Creek Indians and Anglo-Americans, 1733 to removal

This dissertation brings a study of Indian-white diplomacy in the American Southeast together with a cultural analysis of family systems, in an effort to understand the relationship between Creek Indians and Anglo-Americans in colonial Georgia and the early American republic. The "written talks" exchanged by Creek and Anglo-American diplomats, as well as treaty transcripts from the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and other records reveal that when Creeks and whites came together to make alliances, negotiate land cessions, or simply complain about stolen horses, they commonly invoked kinship to assert their claims or make their requests. Why? What connections did both peoples perceive between the family and polity? In what ways did the experiences and ideals of family and kinship relations shape the political relationship between Creek Indians and whites in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries?; Both Creeks and Anglo-Americans modeled the relations of power and obligation, within the political world after the relationships within their own families, but they possessed two very different systems of kinship and politics. When struggles for land, peace, and sovereignty brought them together, Indians and whites turned to the institutions of kinship to help them describe and negotiate the political relationship between their two peoples. For example, the Creek repeatedly invited Anglo-Americans to join their confederacy as "brothers," while the British and Americans sought to incorporate the Indians into their empire and republic as subordinate "children." While the shared language of kinship offered the Creek and Anglo-Americans some common ground, the different obligations and responsibilities they attached to the figures of fathers, sons, mothers, and children also gave rise to frequent misunderstandings, both deliberate and unintended. So long as their diplomatic relationship endured, however, the politics of kinship offered both peoples a language for critiquing each other's society and government, and a vehicle for asserting their own political and cultural authority.