by Richard Green

For October 2005 Times 

Early in the 18th century, England and France were trying to strengthen their new colonies in the lower Mississippi Valley by vying for alliances with Indian tribes. The Chickasaws received representatives from both colonies, Carolina and Louisiana, in their villages arrayed along ridgetops in what is today modern Tupelo, Mississippi.

The Chickasaws were together, enclosed within several square miles, and yet they were apart, separated into four distinct settlements.
Was this settlement arrangement significant or random? No reading of the two best 18th century sources of information on Chickasaw life, James Adair and Thomas Nairne, could leave any doubt that nothing the tribe did was random.

Their social organization could be similarly characterized: they were together as a tribe; yet they were divided into kinship-based clans that tribal members agree were more important to them than tribal affiliation.
But no sources describe in detail the Chickasaws'social organization.

Most white colonists evidently couldn't see an advantage to studying this organization, or were never permitted to do so. And there were no anthropologists around to conduct interviews, make kinship charts, and list and classify all the clans. So, we don't know much about interaction inside a clan or among clans. We presume there were many clans and that the amount decreased with time. We don't know how or why they sometimes worked together and at other times worked independently or were in opposition. But, the intruding colonials certainly had an impact, which eventually led to the formation of multiple factions within the tribe.

Some scholars, notably archaeologist Jay Johnson and ethnohistorian Robbie Ethridge of the University of Mississippi, have attempted to explain these mysteries in another way. They begin by citing the dual nature of the social organizations of many Southeastern Indian tribes, including the Chickasaw.
According to these scholars, the tribes were divided into what anthropologists call the red and white moieties (moy-a-tees). Red was the traditional color representing war and white represented peace. Clans in the red moiety consisted of the warriors; clans in the white moiety were not warriors and supposedly promoted peace. Red clans lived together in red villages. And white clans populated white villages.

French colonists in the 1730s noted that the tribal villages were contained in two distinct settlements. They called one the Large Prairie, which was located about two to three miles north of the Small Prairie. Johnson and Ethridge have found that arrangement convenient to advance their hypothesis that the Large Prairie was red and pro-English and the Small Prairie was white and mainly pro-French.

Their suppositions were based on the study of colonial documents and artifacts excavated by archaeologists years before from the remains of a few villages in both large and small prairies. First, the English documents reveal that since the English wanted Indian slaves for plantation work, they armed the Chickasaws to increase their effectiveness in raiding other tribes; this would have appealed to the warriors or the presumed red division. The French were not opposed to slavery, but they were not in the slave business. Since they couldn't match the quantity and quality of the English trade goods, their attempt to gain allies was based more on diplomacy; this, presumably would appeal more to the white division.

Next, Johnson and other archaeologists associated some artifacts from the Large Prairie with the English (like deerskin scrapers) while finding many fewer of the same kinds in Small Prairie villages. They also said that some artifacts, associated more with the French (French-made gun parts), were found in slightly greater numbers in the Small Prairie villages, though the country of origin of many of the artifacts is difficult to determine.

The Flaws

When I began researching and writing a Chickasaw social history manuscript, I was grateful that these divisions and approximate settlement locations apparently had been worked out by Mississippi scholars. I included this basic information in the text of several chapters and cited the sources. Of course, there were problems. Why, for example, didn't English trader James Adair describe the two divisions in his 1775, 500-page book, History of American Indians? Descriptions of parts of Chickasaw society were covered by Adair who lived with the Chickasaws on and off during the 1740s and '50s.
Why wouldn't he have included such basic information about the tribe's overall organization?

Moreover, Captain Thomas Nairne, who spent a week observing and questioning the Chickasaws and writing lengthy reports via letters in 1708, mentioned a red and a white leader, but didn't tie any clans to these individuals. He listed three clans, "Tygar, muclesa* and raccoon", and said they dealt with everything but war. In other words, they dealt with civil matters. It seems misleading to refer to transform them into peace clans, as some writers have done. Nairne didn't call them peace clans. He did make references in his letters to red and white, and these clearly symbolized war and peace, but he didn't refer to clans or villages as red or white.

Not finding descriptive references to red and white Chickasaw clans or villages in any other 18th century English or French colonial records, I sought information about a closely related tribe culturally, the Creeks. In the early part of the 20th century, some Creeks had mentioned their red and white towns to the late Smithsonian anthropologist John Swanton.

I contacted Dr. Joshua Piker, an historian and noted Creek scholar with the University of Oklahoma. He said that 18th century Creeks commonly spoke about their towns being red or white. "But, we don't know what they meant or why a particular person chose to assert a particular color-based identity for a particular town at a particular moment." Moreover, he said he couldn't remember any pre-1775 references in the literature to Creek clans as red or white.

"We don't have a very good grasp on moieties in the 18th century Southeast,"
Piker said. "The Europeans weren't attuned to [the dual division] so much of our information is either missing or hopelessly jumbled. But part of our problem was our willingness to generalize across tribal lines, to ascribe to Creeks what was ascribed to Cherokees, or Chickasaws, for example."

This sketchy information on red and white divisions leaves several basic questions unanswered, such as how, when and where the red clans and white clans got together to make tribal decisions. Did the reds and whites always vote as two distinct blocks? Which division had the majority?  If male members of the white clans were not warriors, what did they do? The small number of Chickasaw men mentioned in the colonial literature who assisted their wives were derided by their fellows for doing women's work.

In my narrative, I decided to fill in some of the gaps with speculation to explain partially how the dual division functioned in the tribe's relationship with the English and the French. I drew an analogy between the red and white clans and the two major American political parties, but later jettisoned it as being too oversimplified.

Two Unknown Settlements

At about this point, I began interviewing a Tupelo area artifact collector and amateur historian, and this tenuous and patch-work red and white division scenario started to unravel.

Julian Riley said that after years of studying archaeological evidence and colonial records, he and two collaborators had mapped out not just two Chickasaw settlements but four. Aside from the Large Prairie and Small Prairie, there were two others to the south and west, arrayed along lengthy ridgelines overlooking Coonewah and Chiwapa creeks. In a 1980 paper authored by them, they traced the four settlement locations in the modern Tupelo area.

For two reasons, the men believed that warriors from these latter two settlements had been doing the bulk of the slave raiding on Choctaw villages. First, these Chickasaw settlements were closest to the Choctaw and presumably served the Chickasaw as buffer villages against Choctaw attacks.
These intermittent raids-in both directions--likely occurred from early English contact, in the late 1600s to the early 1720s. Second, the Tupelo men found a scenario that bolstered their belief. They learned from the French records that in 1722 "the Choctaw destroyed three Chickasaw villages that we now know were located on Chiwapa and Coonewah ridges. There is document and archaeological evidence that suggests that many of the inhabitants of these destroyed villages moved to Small Prairie villages."

For example, when the French and Choctaws moved to attack the Chickasaws in May 1736, these two groups disagreed about where to attack. The French commander, Bienville, intended to advance to the Large Prairie to destroy the villages that he suspected were harboring the Natchez fleeing from French retribution. But the Choctaw insisted that they attack the Small Prairie villages first, and they got their way. Why? "One word: Revenge,"
said Riley. "Those Choctaws knew where their attackers [or their descendents] had moved, and it was their blood that they were after."

It was evident to the Tupelo men that Chickasaw warriors lived in villages not just in the Large Prairie (the home of the alleged red moiety), but villages within all four settlements before the 1720s. It is also presumed that all able-bodied men, except priests and civil chiefs, were warriors, so they would have been distributed in all clans, whether known as red or white. This presumption is based on the Chickasaw division of labor recorded throughout the literature that held that females were farmers and raised the children and males were warriors and hunters.

These conclusions were not news to Chickasaws like Glenda Galvan, whose grandmother told her what she could remember about the ancient clans. "I remember Granny saying that each clan had a war chief, medicine man, warriors and hunters."

Confusing, Contradictory

If warriors were not concentrated in certain villages, does this mean that there were no red villages and white villages? Not necessarily, but again, the primary 18th century sources do not mention them. If Chickasaws did have red and white moieties, they could have been a remnant of pre-contact times.
Perhaps their purpose was ceremonial, or a means to divide tasks and responsibilities, according to Dr. Michael Green, a University of North Carolina historian.

At any rate, these designations probably had no practical meaning by the middle of the 18th century. By then, Chickasaws were just trying to survive against enemies that almost encircled them. The tribe had consolidated into a few small villages within a three of four square-mile portion of the Large Prairie, according to the collectors' 1980 paper. Tribal members remained in that small area until the late 1790s, when families realized that it was in their interest to begin leaving the villages to settle on dispersed, individual farms.

Nevertheless, certain memories of the tribe's dual division could have survived that period and beyond. They could be the basis of the information provided by 19th and 20th century Chickasaws to anthropologists. While in toto this information from Swanton, Speck and others on dual moieties is confusing and sometimes contradictory, it does offer a veritable smorgasbord of data for scholars working on a hypothesis.

Another problem is that while the informants of Swanton and Speck mentioned a dual division, ethnologist Henry Schoolcraft and others did not. After examining all of these sources, including James Adair, John Swanton blithely wrote that the recorders who didn't mention the dual division "seem to have missed it." There "can be no question regarding it [the dual division]," he concluded. Also, there can be no question that his opinion was influenced by his earlier study of Creek social organization, in which his Creek informants identified red and white towns by name.

Factors in Decision Making

If Chickasaws consisted of red and white moieties in 1700, what role did the divisions play in the deadly competition between the English and French to make an alliance with the tribe? Living in villages in the four settlements, how did the clan-based Chickasaws function as a tribe?

We will never know the inner workings. But we know the elements that were involved in decision-making. On the most basic level, Nairne wrote that no government could be contrived "where the equality of mankind is more Justly observed" than among the Chickasaws. This remark and other references indicate that all adult tribal members-including women--were free to make their own choices, whether it was voting for a chief or aligning with English or French traders.

A tribal member's thinking was influenced by members of his or her clan, especially the elder women in this matrilineal society. Moreover, since intra-clan marriage was forbidden and normally the husband went to live with his wife's family and clan, he could be influenced by them as well. Another important tier of the village was the clan chiefs, some of whom could be a war chief, a civil chief, or their assistants (referred to as tishu mingo); all exhibited their persuasiveness and rhetoric while conducting business in the village council house.

In matters of urgent national import, the leaders probably met at the council house identified by Nairne as Hollachatroe (also known as Falacheco), which he said was the "mother-Town." This forum, on Coonewah ridge, had the potential to provide even more points of view. Varied opinions and debate, especially over the encroaching English and French, probably led members of different clans to form factions that would hold together as long as necessary. It is likely that the organization of the villages and the four settlement areas reflected the location of clans and factions.

Near the beginning of the contact period, several factions probably emerged, representing combinations of pro and con bias. They developed from closely related clans, shared points of view, and probably the warnings of priests and prophets and a host of supernatural signs and symbols.

As the 18th century progressed and circumstances changed, new factions were forged, others disappeared. By the 1740s, it was definitely in the interest of all tribal members to be allied with the English. In the pre-contact context of the dual division, the red and the white, all Chickasaws had become red.

                                              *****

* I asked several people about muclesa, and no one was familiar with it, and only John Dyson, who has been studying the 18th century Chickasaw and Choctaw languages, was willing to speculate about its meaning:  "It is likely Imokla aa-asha', which would be run together in rapid speech as Imoklaasha', meaning 'their people are there' or 'their settlements are there.' It seems less an animal name than a descriptive band name or what Swanton calls --not altogether accurately-- 'house names' (inchokka' holhchifo) in Chickasaw."

Bibliography

Charles Hudson, The Southeastern Indians, (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1976).

Alexander Moore, Nairne's Muskhogean Journals, (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi).

James Adair, History of American Indians, three editions available; original published in London in 1775.

Frank Speck, "Notes on Chickasaw Ethnology and Folk-Lore," Journal of American Folk-Lore, 1907.

John Swanton, "Social and Religious Beliefs and Usages of the Chickasaw Indians," 44th Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology, Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1928.

J.N.B Hewitt, edited by John Swanton, "Notes on the Creek Indians," Bulletin
123 of the Bureau of American Ethnology.