by Richard Green

April 2009 Times

This article is part of an occasional series associated with the goal of preserving the approximately 300 acres that remain of Chokkilissa', meaning deserted dwelling or place. Located on private parcels of land in north Tupelo, Mississippi, Chokkilissa' was the Chickasaw’s economic, cultural and political hub for much of the 18th century.

 The effort to preserve the site and eventually construct a Chickasaw Cultural Center on a portion of the land is an ongoing collaborative effort of the Chickasaw Nation and several public and private partners.

If we could travel back in time to the Chickasaw settlement area of Chokkilissa' between the tumultuous generation of 1740 to 1760, we would notice eventually that the several villages (making up the three to four mile square settlement) were populated by many more women than men. This was primarily due to decades of almost incessant warfare with the French and their tribal allies.

And time travel is virtually the only way we could learn anything about these women as individuals. Not a single woman’s name has survived from that era. That this is so initially seems paradoxical given that tracing the tribe’s ancestral descent is done through the maternal line.

Futhermore, this complete lack of information regarding individual women is remarkable given the number of eyewitness scribes. Some of the English traders and soldiers who provided the supplies that helped the tribe survive enemy attacks kept written records and even journals. One of them, James Adair, wrote extensively on Indian culture in a detailed book, History of American Indians, which was largely based on his experience with the Chickasaws, including the probability that he married and had children with one or more unidentified Chickasaw women.

As frustrating as it is that he almost never wrote about any individual Chickasaws, at least Adair briefly described the work that women customarily performed along with their tools, which evolved through contact with Europeans. For the most part, the descriptions in the book probably resulted from Adair’s own observations while he lived within Chokkilissa'.

From the accounts of Adair and other traders who were able to reach the consolidated villages inside the embattled settlement of Chokkilissa', we see that women did most of the work connected with running the household. Archaeological evidence shows us what they used and when (within a range of years) in some cases. Even before the mid-eighteenth century, women had an assortment of European tools that made the work less burdensome and time-consuming. Purdue University historian Wendy St. Jean wrote that some Chickasaw women married traders in part or in whole to obtain these convenience items for themselves and their kin.

With metals pots, they did not have to spend so much time fashioning pottery for cooking. With cloth, they did not have to spend hours processing and brain-tanning deerskin for clothes. With horses and plows, they could work a field or garden in a fraction of the time that they formerly spent breaking up the soil with hand tools.

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What seldom has been considered by white historians was the likelihood that some Chickasaw women, influenced by certain Chickasaw clan elders or by virtue of being in a very conservative clan, either refused to use these trade goods or used them sparingly. They continued to craft their wares in the old ways or use European convenience items to make or modify their own products.

Although Adair did not mention such women, many post-Removal Chickasaws used traditional tools, according to Joshua Hinson, a Chickasaw cultural historian. So why, he asks rhetorically, would every 18th century Chickasaw have relinquished the use of native made products. Hinson cited the discovery of post-Removal basketry, some pottery, and traditional wooden tools such as the corn pounder, horn spoon, the bow and arrow, and the blowgun. He also mentioned that Chickasaws are known to have passed down knowledge of traditional food preparation, skin tanning methods and planting techniques.

Adair gave the impression that much of the traditional clothing had been replaced by cloth provided by the traders. He said they formerly wore dressed deerskin shirts in the summer and shaggy animal skins in the winter. But he also noted that some of the head men still “wear a long wide frock made of the skins of the wild beasts, in honour of that ancient custom.”

Adair didn’t describe the preparation of deerskin for clothing, but if he had, it likely would have been similar to the method used by traditional Chickasaw storyteller Glenda Galvan. In 1999, she wrote an article in The Journal of Chickasaw History illustrating how the ancient technique of brain tanning transforms rawhide into buckskin.

Although the implements used by Galvan and her 18th century ancestors are somewhat different, the process is believed by Galvan to be much the same. To begin, one scrapes the deerskin free of all pieces of fat, meat, and membrane. Prior to European contact, the scraper was a piece of chert, which is a hard sedimentary rock. Later, some of the Chickasaw women scraped the hides with metal tools.

After the skin is relatively clean, it is stretched out on a wooden frame by attaching rawhide strips to holes on the edges of the deerskin and to nails placed around the perimeter of a frame. The skin should be completely dry before removing the hair with the scraper. The skin then is soaked in a large vessel of warm water. Once removed, any holes in the skin made during scraping are sewn up with animal sinew saved by the hunter for that purpose.

A pureed deer brain or two thoroughly blended with warm water is “dashed” onto the skin that has been re-stretched on the frame. Using a flat tool, the mixture is thoroughly rubbed into the skin. Both sides are done until the skin is almost transparent. The skin is removed from the frame and the excess moisture is wrung out. The final step, drying the skin, is the most arduous. It must be vigorously rubbed for two to three hours until it is dry and has a texture similar to flannel. No wonder many (but certainly not all) Chickasaw women abandoned the craft when cloth via the English traders became readily available.

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Spring planting was a very important day, imbued with both spirituality and practicality. Adair described a day in early May, preordained by a hopayi, a “beloved man” who gave the order to begin the planting. An orator shouted, “that the new year is far advanced#that he who expects to eat, must work#and that he who will not work, must expect to pay the fine according to the old custom or leave the town.” The others will not work for “an healthy idle waster.”

On this task, both men and women work.  As Adair noted, even “war-chieftains” such as Paya Mattaha labor in the fields. With the great status we confer on our military leaders, it’s difficult to imagine a great war leader toiling in a field. But this is a vivid example of how profoundly different Chickasaw society and culture was from European, even at this relatively late date in colonial contact.

An hour after dawn, Adair wrote, residents of the several villages begin with the field that has been agreed upon and “fall to work with great cheerfulness.” An orator “cheers them with jests and humorous old tales, and sings several of their most agreeable wild tunes, beating also with a stick in his right hand, on the top of an earthen pot covered with a wet and well-stretched deer-skin. Thus they proceed from field to field, till their seed is sown.” (While this is useful information, imagine how much more meaningful this would be if Adair had taken extra minutes to record the jests, tales, and lyrics.)

They planted different beans, peas and three types of corn, small niblet Indian corn, “hommony-corn,” and a white corn called “bread corn.” The latter corn, which in July will be pounded and kneaded by the women with chestnuts, wrap the contents into green corn blades, and boil into a bread that Adair said was “very tempting to the taste.” According to Joshua Hinson, bread corn, called banaha, is still made by Chickasaw women and is still “tempting to the taste.”

Women prepared several other culinary concoctions. One, a thin cake mixed with bear oil, used to be baked on thin broad stones placed over a fire, but “now they use kettles.” The bread loaf is placed over glowing coals that have been swept to opposite sides of the hearth and is covered with an earthen basin until done. Apparently thinking that Indian fare might consist of little more than endless meals of deer and bear, corn and beans, Adair wrote he was surprised to see (and taste) the “great variety of dishes they make out of wild flesh, corn, beans, peas, potatoes, pompions [a type of gourd], dried fruits, herbs and roots.” He said the diversity of the meals rivaled the European varieties.

Women, too, can be seen doing virtually all of the manufacturing work, though we do not know if every woman did all of the kinds described or if some women specialized in certain crafts for clan or tribal members. Women, particularly in winter, produced small carpets out of hemp that grew to six feet in length. They also spun buffalo hair into a fine yarn and added bits of dye that resulted in different designs. Men made serviceable and sometimes beautiful stone pipes, although the most attractive varieties found in Chickasaw archaeological sites are thought to have come from other tribes as trade goods. For baskets, women split large swamp canes into narrow slivers, then dyed and thatched them together into a “beautiful variety of pleasing figures.”

By 1750, most families presumably would have accumulated a supply of metal pots, pans, and containers. But these were heavy and bulky and therefore difficult and expensive for traders to transport over hundreds of miles. Furthermore, traders by then were bringing only the essentials, mainly guns and ammunition. Adair said the women were still fashioning earthen pots from two to ten gallons, a large variety of pitchers, bowls, basins, and “a prodigious number of other vessels.”  Some women simply preferred to make their own; the raw material was literally at their feet in the clay soil. After the vessel was fashioned, they placed the products over a large fire of smoky pitch pine, which made them “smooth, black and firm.”

Pieces of this pottery crafted by 17th and 18th century Chickasaw women are found on the ground in modern Tupelo, Mississippi, above the buried remnants of Chokkilissa’ and the other primary settlements. In 1996, Joanna Underwood, a Chickasaw potter, stopped in Tupelo on her way back to Oklahoma from Atlanta, Georgia, where she had exhibited her pottery in the Festival of Fires associated with the Summer Olympics.

Joanna stopped in Tupelo because she understood that an archaeological team from Mississippi State University was just starting to excavate a village site in an earlier settlement area, Chokka’ Falaa’ (Long Town) that was “in the way” of a multi-million dollar medical center expansion. “Pottery pieces were everywhere. I picked up several and could see parts of designs that I had only seen in books. ” Joanna said she felt the presence of her ancestors in that place. “It was like being in someone’s home who isn’t there anymore. It was exciting and a little scary.”

Likewise, it was scary at Chokkilissa' for Joanna’s female ancestors, elders who stood in wooden towers, risking their lives by guarding the cultivated fields and the villages against enemy warriors. But younger women also risked being captured or killed as they continued the traditional task of gathering firewood and water. This was especially dangerous in the 1750s because these resources had to have been depleted near the villages. This meant round-trips of two miles for water and perhaps even longer distances for firewood.

Aside from the domestic tasks, women were also responsible for the disposition of captives brought in by warriors. (For detailed article see December 2005 Times.) The range of options included adoption, enslavement, torture, and execution. If the prisoner had captured or killed known Chickasaws, the women from the aggrieved family would be seeking revenge. If the prisoner could not be associated with a particular crime, the sentence was probably delivered and executed by a group of women representing the clan mothers, according to Galvan and Chickasaw artist and historian Jeannie Barbour.

A prisoner whose arms were bound and was tethered by the neck to a war pole would be tortured by the women, and if a burning piece of wood had been secured by one of them to the pole above the prisoner’s head, his fate was sealed.

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Sources
Charles Hudson, The Southeastern Indians, Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1976.
Wendy St. Jean, “More Than a Love Affair,” The Journal of Chickasaw History, Volume 1, Number 4, 1995.
Joshua Hinson, personal communication, October 17, 2006.
James Adair, History of American Indians, Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2005.
Glenda Galvan, “Brain Tanning Transforms Rawhide into Buckskin,” The Journal of Chickasaw History, No. 2 (1999).
Glenda Galvan and Jeannie Barbour, personal communication, October 31, 2005.
Richard Green, “Chickasaw Potter Blends Southeast Style with Raku,” The Journal of Chickasaw History, Volume 4, Number 1 (1998).
Jay Johnson, John O’Hear, Brad Lieb, et al, Final Report, The Chickasaws, Economics, Politics, and Social Organization in the Early 18th Century, National Endowment for the Humanities, September 2004.

John Dyson, personal communication, March 2009.