Native American Culture Areas::

The Southeast

• Cahokia
• Moundville
• Choctaw
• Creek
• Cherokee
• Calusa

The region of the Southeast covers roughly, the present-day states of Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, South and North Carolina, and Alabama. Tribes include the Seminole, Cherokee, Creek, Choctaw, and the Lumbee. The region is the warmest part of the northern temperate zone, with southern Florida enjoying a sub-tropical climate. The Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic borders this broad coastal plain, which is characterised by meandering rivers, oxbow lakes, broad valleys and vast swamps. Before the colonisation by Europeans, Southeastern diets were rich with fish, water fowl, white-tailed deer, racoons and other mammals, as well as such wild plant foods as nuts, fruits and berries. In coastal southern Florida, plentiful resources of shellfish and fish enabled a complex sedentary society to develop. Elsewhere, such settled and complex societies were enabled by the cultivation of corn, beans, squash, sunflowers and gourds. In general, the annual economic cycle of Indian nations in the Southeast revolved around the growing of crops and fishing in the warm season, and hunting deer in the cooler season.

When Europeans first arrived in the region, there were numerous chiefdoms spread across the interior. These complex societies each had a capital town containing massive earth mounds that supported temples and council houses. Often, these capitals were surrounded by large canals and stockaded. Each chiefdom supported several smaller towns, subordinate to the capital.

The largest of these chiefdom capitals was at Cahokia, in the Mississippi Valley. The problem of defining a culture area is highlighted here, for although Cahokia's location is outside the boundaries of the historic southeast, it is culturally located there. First inhabited around AD 600-700, during its heyday, Cahokia was situated at the centre of a major trading network that linked nations from Oklahoma to the Atlantic coast and from the Great Lakes to the Gulf coast. It reached its height by about AD 1250. With a peak population of 10,000 to 40,000, it was the largest city north of central Mexico. The entire Southeast culture area is renowned for its earth mounds. These generally fell into two types: platform mounds, whose flat tops served as ceremonial and elite residential bases; and burial mounds. Burial mounds were apparently used for important people, or to mark important locations, and it is generally believed that most Cahokians were buried in cemeteries. Cahokia's central earth mound rose four terraces, to a height of 30 metres. Smaller earth mounds were grouped around plazas. Most of the mounds supported public, ceremonial and civic buildings, and perhaps the houses of leaders. There were conical burial mounds and the entire central area of the capital was stockaded behind a wall of upright logs set in a deep trench, with watchtowers and gates.

Another important chiefdom had its capital at Moundville, in present-day Alabama. Earth mounds surrounded a central plaza. On top of these mounds were temples or ceremonial structures, and the houses of the leaders. High-ranking individuals, such as the holders of ritual offices, were buried in many of the mounds. The central plaza was separated from the settlement area by a wall, and the entire town was surrounded by a palisade. Moundville controlled several smaller towns that radiated out from the central town into the valley for a few miles. It has been estimated that Moundville drew labour from as far as 45 miles away.

These were hierarchical societies, each ruled under a high chief in a large town, which was surrounded by smaller towns and villages headed by subordinate chiefs. Chiefs had immense power and prestige, and they accrued appropriate possessions and special insignia. Their subordinates offered them tributes and deferred to them. Each chiefdom was expansionist and frequently invaded neighbouring territories.

Each person belonged to a clan, each of which was also hierarchically organised. According to French reports, the Natchez, for example, had two social classes: nobility and commoners. Natchez nobility contained three further ranks: Suns, Nobles, and Honoured People. The highest ranking chief or king was known as the Great Sun. All clans were matrilineal and exogamous - that is, people belonged to their mother's clan and marriage within the clan was prohibited. Clans crossed village and town boundaries, so that members of several clans inhabited each settlement.

The economic base of most interior southeastern nations was supported by agriculture. The 18th century Choctaw, for example, were so successful in cultivating and growing corn that they were able to export it also. Although corn was the main crop, beans, squash gourds and sunflowers were also grown. By the end of the 18th century, the Choctaws had added peas, watermelons, sweet potatoes and fruit trees to their agricultural production. After the corn first ripened in early summer, the Choctaw resumed fishing, hunting waterfowl and gathering wild foods, returning in the fall to harvest and store the ripe corn. After this work was completed, the men left to hunt such game as deer and bear, and the women gathered nuts and berries in the woods. By the middle of winter, the men had returned and everyone engaged in clearing the fields to prepare them for planting in the spring. Ceremonies and other ritual activities accompanied each stage of the annual economic cycle.

Dramatic changes in the Southeast occurred during a hundred-year period following the mid-16th century. The aboriginal chiefdoms broke up and were superseded by towns, tribes and confederacies. Epidemics of European diseases are most commonly blamed for the breakup of chiefdoms and the massive depopulation of the entire region. The social and political chaos shifted the tribal balance of power. Sites that had been populated for centuries were abandoned; the building of the distinctive earth mounds ceased; and the marked hierarchical nature of socio-political power disappeared. The founding of Charleston in 1670, the English capture and purchase of Indians for the slave trade in the West Indies, and the development the trade in deerskins for the European market added new disruptions to the region. During the 19th century, non-Indian settlement expanded across the southeast and Indians were pushed aside and their land taken. In the 1820s and 1830s, most Indians of the Southeast were forcibly deported to Indian Territory in present-day Oklahoma - many died in the process of removal. Despite this, a few tribes did manage to avoid deportation: the Catawba in South Carolina, the Tunica and Chitimacha in Louisiana, and the Lumbee in the Carolinas escaped it entirely, as did some bands of the Seminole in south Florida, a few Cherokee in western North Carolina, a few Creeks in southern Alabama, and many Mississippian Choctaw.

Once in Oklahoma, the removed tribes established themselves into new tribal governments, the most famous, perhaps, being that of what became known as the Five Civilised Tribes - the Cherokees, Choctaws, Chickasaws, Creeks and Seminole. However, this organisation lost much land to non-Indians in the 1880s and 1890s, and when Oklahoma attained statehood in 1907, it lost most of its remaining sovereignty.

From such massive social and political upheavals, the Creek Confederacy emerged in the Southeast. This was a loose confederacy based on a network of socio-political rather than residential towns. Within each town, people were affiliated to a ceremonial centre and a square or stomp ground, though actual residence could often be quite scattered and far from the centre. From the middle of the 19th century to the 1930s, the Confederacy was made up of some 25-30 such towns. There were 'White' Creek towns and 'Red' Creek towns. White towns concerned themselves with civil affairs of the Confederacy whilst Red towns tended to deal with military ones. White towns controlled the Confederacy's executive affairs; Red towns controlled legislative and judicial ones. The old days of considerable and entrenched hierarchies were gone, and towns were independent and self-governing. The Confederacy was generally governed by irregular council meetings of town leaders, which did not always meet as a single body.

Clans were still important within the Creek Confederacy, and they cut across residential lines - that is, representatives of many clans could be found in each town. But there was no formal, overall clan organisation. Clans tended to be totemic - that is, they took their name from animals or birds, members had special relationships to the clan species, but they did not trace descent from such totems.

The Cherokee provide us with the most detailed information of Southeastern religion, rituals and healing practices. Hundreds of medicinal plants were recognised by Cherokee doctors. Specific herbs were collected as needed for specific cases and then they were usually boiled in water. The medicine would either be rubbed on the patient's body or blown over the patient through a cane tube. Cherokee doctors also cured by singing or reciting spiritual formulas in order to belittle the spirit of the disease. A rival spirit would be invoked to drive it away. Colour and directional symbolism was also utilised in healing practices. Dreams also played an important role.

I shall end this article by describing a southeastern culture whose complexity and sophistication was not based on an agricultural but a maritime economy. The Calusa Indian nation had probably reached its peak around the time of Columbus. It was based in the southern peninsula of Florida. The Calusa built their capital city upon huge shell mounds on the peninsula's southwest coast. They farmed the sea by creating systems of lagoons for oyster beds and stone holding pens for a variety of fish and sea animals such as sea turtles and mullet. They took part in the extensive inland trading routes. But they also traded in the Florida Keys, the Bahamas and Cuba, travelling long distances in canoes that had been strung together and equipped with a sail. Such contraptions would hold up to fifty people at a time. Under the guidance of a hereditary leader or king, the Calusa built numerous transportation and trade canals through difficult inland terrain, as well as artificial islands in the coastal waters made up shell mounds. The Calusa were sophisticated artisans, suggesting a nation accustomed to leisure time.

By the end of the 15th century, the Spanish began arriving on the peninsula, but the Calusa managed to protect their kingdom against colonisation. But they could not protect themselves against European disease, and by the 18th and 19th centuries, with their population drastically reduced, small, surviving groups of Calusa joined bands of Creeks and other Indian groups and with them became the Seminole and Miccosukee Indian nations of today.