Kathryn E. Holland Braund

Indians of the greater Southeast : historical archaeology and ethnohistory

Introduction by Bonnie G. McEwan 1. The Timucua Indians of Northern Florida and Southern Georgia, by Jerald T. Milanich 2. The Guale Indians of the Lower Atlantic Coast: Change and Continuity, by Rebecca Saunders 3. The Apalachee Indians of Northwest Florida, by Bonnie G. McEwan 4. The Chickasaws, by Jay K. Johnson 5. The Caddo of the Trans-Mississippi South, by Ann M. Early 6. The Natchez of Southwest Mississippi, by Karl G. Lorenz 7. The Quapaw Indians of Arkansas, 1673-1803, by George Sabo III 8. Cherokee Ethnohistory and Archaeology, by Gerald F. Schroedl 9. Upper Creek Archaeology, by Gregory A. Waselkov and Marvin T. Smith 10. The Lower Creeks: Origins and Early History, by John E. Worth 11. Archaeological Perspectives on Florida Seminole Ethnogenesis, by Brent R. Weisman

A southern portrait by another kind of artist

His portrait sits before me, the determined brown eyes gazing off into eternity. It is a handsome, mustachioed face, embellished with paint, capped by an elaborately wrapped red turban. Enormous incised silver bobs dangle from his ears. The coat, cinched at the waist by a red and yellow beaded belt, is deep indigo with lighter blue stripes. Someone has taken the time to carefully trim the shoulder seams and front opening of the coat with fringe – his wife no doubt. She is the most likely weaver of the sash as well. An ascot hints at the wealth and stylish adaptation of European fashion by this Native American man. Nahetluc Hopie, the man in this exotic garb, does not speak directly to me through the documentary record. But his powerful, strong visage speaks volumes about the state of the Creek people in the early nineteenth century. For this man, who in 1825 was speaking truth to power, was a member of a delegation of Creek men who traveled to Washington, DC to protest the Treaty of Indian Springs. Under that notorious treaty, William McIntosh, a much more famous Creek chief, illegally ceded all the Creeks’ Georgia land as well as portions of territory claimed by the state of Alabama to the United States. Nahetluc Hopie, or the Little Doctor, was one of 13 men who signed a new treaty that overturned the discredited McIntosh treaty. The diplomatic efforts of the Creek delegates were a signal achievement; the new treaty represented the first time in American history that a treaty ratified by the United States Senate was abrogated. Those Creek delegates – most of whom sat for the artist Charles Bird King – were not only the most illustrious Creek men of their era, but a diverse group that represented the various component towns and regions of the Creek nation. Collectively, their portraits reveal the divergent ethnicities and outlooks of a proud people as well as a tradition of treaty-making that stretched back into the eighteenth century (Figure 1). While it is the expression of the Nahetluc Hopie’s face that enchants me, it is the costume I study, for in the absence of adequate written documentation about this man or his place in the Creek world, I rely heavily on his self-presentation to reveal what it can about the man and his history. His portrait tells me a good deal. More, in fact, that the dry and inadequate documents I gather on my desk, convoluted as they are with half-truths, omissions, and a variety of spellings for every proper name that sometimes defeats even the most heroic effort to achieve understanding. Nahetluc Hopie, like all nineteenth-century Creek men, understood the power of portraiture. When they sat for artists, Creek men preened and painted and prepared their bodies to communicate who they were and why they were important. They not only wore, they wove, painted,