Yuchi Indian Histories before the Removal Era

Yuchi Indian histories before the removal era, edited and with an introduction by Jason Baird Jackson, Lincoln, University of Nebraska Press, 2012,xxxiv, 246 pp., ill., 23cm. $30.00 (cloth), ISBN: 978-0-803-24041-4This edited volume was created to present evidence that the Yuchi (Euchee), a native North American people, have had and still have a unique cultural identity that has survived five centuries that should allow them to be recognized as a distinct political entity today. Instead, the Yuchi are seen, when they are recognized at all, as part of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation, a polity that is, therefore, given the authority to speak and act on their behalf. This is despite the fact that the Yuchi speak their own unique indigenous language that is unrelated to any known language in the Americas. Jason Baird Jackson himself is an ethnographer who writes that he has developed rich personal relationships with the Yuchi people of today, and he brings their voices into this edited volume by bringing together scholarship on linguistics, historical archaeology, history, and oral history spanning from before contact with Europeans to the removal period. The main argument of this volume is that the default story that the Yuchi were progressively assimilated into a homogenous Creek society is false. Jackson writes that Yuchi tradition and post-removal ethnography suggest there are other stories to tell, despite commonalities in material life.The first chapter presents evidence compiled by Mary S. Linn that the Yuchi language is considered a "language isolate." She suggests this is probably due to the decline in the language through the death of native speakers or the shift of speakers to other languages. Such shifts happen to enslaved populations or when more prestige can be gained through the other language. Most importantly, this means that the Yuchi language cannot be firmly placed within any known language or language family at this time. Following Linn, John E. Worth presents the earliest documentary evidence of the Yuchi in written history. He shows that the Yuchi lived in a relative degree of autonomy compared to more visible groups and possibly hailed from a more remote original location than previously accepted. He provides a hypothetical reconstruction of regional social geography around the time of the Juan Pardo Expedition (1566-1568), attempting to locate their homeland during the European contact period.Other reviews of historical material follow, including a narrative account of the Yuchi community recorded during the South Carolina Board of Indian Trade's May 1714 inquest into the Cherokee attack on the Yuchi town of Chestowee. Daniel T. Elliott attempts to uncover the complexity of Yuchi social and cultural history by turning to the archaeological record. Elliott describes and interprets a village site known archaeologically as Mount Pleasant, located in the Savannah River region. Mount Pleasant is positively linked with the Yuchi. Recovered artifacts include ball clay tobacco pipe fragments, small pieces of dark green spirit bottle glass, and a small number of metal items. Elliott also discusses diagnostic traits of Yuchi pottery found at the site as well as European artifacts modified to suit aboriginal purposes. Subsequent chapters include a synthesis of ethnohistoric and archaeological evidence, a review of political relations between the Yuchi and the Creek, and arguments about cultural coalescence in the Southeast. The book concludes with a chapter written by Brent R. Weisman discussing the fate of the Yuchi among the nineteenth-century Florida Seminoles.One would be hard pressed to find a more formidable group of scholars to argue on behalf of Yuchi autonomy. Although Jackson writes in the introduction that the evidence compiled is but a "start," the material is convincingly and meticulously well presented. …