Page 143 - Knighted_2018

represents a crucial part of the Smithsonian Institute's argument denying cultural affiliation of
modern Native nations and Mississippian people. This reasoning is highly flawed. The continuity
of occupation by Muskogean people in the Middle Georgia area, documented since the earliest
European contact, supports the argument that Mississippian societies morphed into modern
Native American nations without a huge influx of alien peoples or their culture.

In the region of present-day Georgia and Alabama, Muskogean peoples united to form the
Creek Confederacy. At its height, the Creek Confederacy consisted of more the 65 individual
towns46 allied against common threats.47 This confederacy is the basis of the modern Muscogee
(Creek) Nation. The oral history of the Creek Nation tells that the Creek Confederacy began at,
and centered around, the ancestral mounds of Ocmulgee.48 By the middle of Benjamin Hawkins'
service as Indian Agent to the tribes of the Southeast in the first decade of the 1800s, Creek
occupation at Ocmulgee ceased due to continued land grabs by white Georgians.49 Even though
they no longer actively lived at the site, Hawkins was astutely aware of Ocmulgee’s importance
to the Creeks, and noted in letters to his superiors the dangers of attempting to take that particular
patch of land through coercive treaties.50 The Creeks managed to maintain control over the
Ocmulgee Old Fields51 in spite of an increasingly demanding state and federal government. The
Treaty of Fort Jackson resulted in the loss all lands east of the Ocmulgee River, but created a
special reservation around the Ocmulgee mounds which remained in Creek control.52 For a brief
respite, the Creeks kept guardianship over their sacred past. The implementation of the Indian

46 Town affiliation was, and remains, an important part of Muscogee personal and social identity.
47 Davis, interview by author, February 1, 2018.
48 Spain, interview by author, February 2, 2018.
49 Thomas Foster, ed.,The Collected Works of Benjamin Hawkins, (Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press,

2003), 173.
50 Foster, ed.,The Collected Works of Benjamin Hawkins, 440-446.
51 Ocmulgee Old Fields is a term for the Macon Plateau and its surrounding flood plains.
52 Foster, ed.,The Collected Works of Benjamin Hawkins, 427.

138