Alabama’s original sin is the assumption that the state was a pristine white people’s land before colored races arrived and messed things up. Actually, with one small historical correction, a good case can be made for the opposite interpretation of history.
For 10,000 years the land we call Alabama was occupied by bronze-colored Native Americans who did just fine by the land and each other before the rest of us arrived. The white “rest of us” reached the state’s interior in the person of Hernando DeSoto and 500 Spanish soldiers with muskets, horses, and savage dogs, seeking gold and leaving Small Pox as a devastating legacy. Thousands of Native Americans who did not succumb to the disease perished in the Battle of Mabila, probably the deadliest battle between indigenous people and a caravan of white invaders in American history.
For the following two centuries, white men from Spain, France, England, and the United States fought each other over the right to rule land they had stolen from Indians.
Their rationale for such aggression was the alleged moral and mental superiority of whites over colored races. But comparing the earliest grinding tools, intricate projectile points, and pottery found in Russell Cave or Alabama bluff shelters, it appears that prehistoric people were pretty much alike in Bama or Britain. Moundville’s magnificent burial mounds—built around 1200 A.D.--as well as the cultural objects found there, make clear that this town near the Warrior River was the center of an extensive political and agricultural empire. Their chiefs settled disagreements mostly by arbitration. Their concept of land ownership was communal: land belonged to the entire tribe, not to individuals. This pattern created a sense of tribal identity based on the earth, forests, rivers, and animal life. Women did most of the agricultural and household labor as well as crafting utilitarian and artistic pottery. Men hunted, fished, prepared intricate stone projectile points, gambled, and played ball. All treated the natural environment with respect, as if it were a vital component of existence, a shared resource to be protected, not a private possession to be used up.
By the time Europeans arrived, distinctive tribal identities (Cherokees, Creeks, Chickasaws, Choctaws, Alabama-Coushattas, Yuchis) resulted in specific residential zones. By the 17th Century, white hunters, traders, and explorers had established a profitable deer skin trade through Pensacola, and intermarriage between whites and Indians had altered Indian life. Whites introduced alcohol which led to epidemic disruption of social structures. Slavery came as well, with some mixed race Indian/white men moving into the planter class.
Others--such as Sequoyah, a Cherokee leader whose father had been a white hunter--tried to help their people integrate into an increasingly white and hostile world. Sequoyah initially became a blacksmith/silversmith in DeKalb County. But after seeing his first printed book in English, he devoted the rest of his life to creating a written Cherokee language, leaving his wife to do the farming. She took revenge by burning his writings. Like many Cherokee warriors, he volunteered to fight the “Red Stick” Creeks with Andrew Jackson, and they played a decisive role in the future president’s victory at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend, which opened Creek lands east of the Alabama River to white settlement. Following the war, he voluntarily moved west to Arkansas where in 1828 he began publishing the nation’s first indigenous language newspaper, THE CHEROKEE PHOENIX.
Thanks to his alphabet, white missionaries could translate the Bible into Cherokee. One of their converts, Catharine Brown, lived her Christian life so faithfully as a teacher in Alabama and Arkansas mission schools, that she became the subject of a fascinating 1832 memoir, one of the earliest books about southeastern Indian life. Before her tragic death in 1832 at age 23, she had become a kind of Protestant saint to her people.
Historian, theologian and author Wayne Flynt speaks.
Notwithstanding such stories, President Andrew Jackson largely cleared Alabama of Native Americans, both Creeks whom he fought against and Cherokees who were his allies. The Indian Removal Act passed by Congress in 1830 sent the Choctaws west to the Oklahoma Indian Territory in 1831, the Creeks in 1834, Chickasaws in 1837 and the Cherokees the following year.
Approximately one-quarter of the men, women, and children forced from their land died on the “Trail of Tears,” a ratio similar to deaths about the same time among slaves bound for Mobile from Africa. Their forced relocation opened 25 million acres in the Southeast to white settlement. On that land, whites created the vaunted “Cotton Kingdom,” which by the Civil War accounted for half of all U. S. exports and one-fifth of America’s gross domestic product. In fact, the land between the Chattahoochee and Mississippi rivers, once occupied by Native Americans, became arguably one of the wealthiest places on earth.
Not until DNA analysis became an American obsession in the 21st Century--thanks to Ancestry.com and various genealogical television programs--did Alabamians discover, often to their dismay, that if you believe you are of pure Caucasian ancestry, don’t investigate your genetic background. And virtually every proud “first” family in Alabama can boast of Native American roots.
Our bronzed ancestors left other remains behind as well: place names for towns and rivers; mounds and bluff shelters packed with archaeological treasures; fields full of arrow heads; thousands of years of earth knowledge about environmentally friendly life within nature rather than trying to conquer it; stories handed down from generation to generation, the chards and fragments still alive in some families.
A few Indian descendants escaped Andy Jackson’s racial dragnet and married African Americans or whites. The Poarch Band around Atmore prospered by using a gambling monopoly in a state that believes betting is unchristian until football season or when lottery jackpots reach colossal sums. Some 3,600 members of the MOWA Band of Choctaws near Mobile at first denied Indian ancestry because white officials lumped them with blacks, refusing entry to “white” schools. After the dismantling of racial apartheid, they had to reconstruct their history to achieve the advantages of a newly enacted affirmative action.
I am a beneficiary of this new pride in Indian ancestry. Among those left behind in northeast Alabama by the Trail of Tears was the half-Cherokee grandmother of Kelly Swann Rogers Flynt, my beautiful daughter-in-law, she of the brilliant mind, high cheek bones, and jet black hair. Kelly bears no grudges. But she does remember. So should we all!
Flynt wrote the “Bicentennial Revision” of ALABAMA: HISTORY OF A DEEP SOUTH STATE. This is the third in his 12-part bicentennial story of Alabama.