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THE FRONTIER EXCHANGE ECONOMY OF CREEK COUNTRY Robbie Ethridge. Creek Country: The Creek Indians and Their World. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003. 369 pp. Illustrations, maps, appendices, notes, bibliography, and index. $59.95 (cloth); $22.50 (paper).
Creek Country explores the social, economic, and cultural implications of continuing encounter among Indians, Euro-Americans, and African slaves. Robbie Ethridge creates "a histoire totale that attempts to account for the regular events of regular people in daily life as well as the structural and historical underpinnings of their daily lives" (p. 3). Ethridge describes her work as historical ethnography. The Creeks, like most Indians, left few written records, therefore, Robbie Ethridge turns to oral traditions; the plentiful records left by Benjamin Hawkins, the U.S. Indian agent from 1796 to 1816; and archaeological research to describe the intercultural relations that evolved within this region. Hawkins's thickly descriptive records enable Ethridge to locate Creek towns and the multiple personalities that inhabited the landscape. Ethridge establishes a Creek perspective that, in effect, brings the reader in at ground level "so that the reader may imagine, for instance, what it was like for a Creek woman to walk with her sisters and cousins to the nearest stream to collect water" (p. 6).
The continuing incorporation of strangers into Creek country resulted in the formation of a regional identity, rather than one distinctive monolithic group. Ethridge's analysis of how Creek country became an identifiable region rests on an integrative dialectic: understanding the natural landscape, Indian inclusiveness toward strangers, the kinship structures of indigenous society, and the creation of a socio-political process of townships and provinces that gave rise to a political structure that became synonymous with the Creek Confederacy. For Ethridge, the landscape "defined Creek country" and the heart of the land was the river valleys (p. 91). Ethridge focuses the reader's attention on the environmental mosaic of the landscape. People moved into the area, both drawn by and often separated from each other by the natural features of that landscape. River valley lands with their rich bottomland soils housed the majority of communities and contained the highest levels of populations. Some town lands had been occupied for at least one hundred years. Adjacent upland forests were affected by dense settlement...