American Indian Culture and Research Journal

Seventeenth-century Florida, like Chile, was a colony known for constant war, and unlike that other distant outpost, Florida had two borders and two seacoasts to defend, plus a declining Christian Indian population and the competition of English colonists for the trade and loyalty of the Indian nations. Between 1680 and 1706 the hinterland succumbed to tribes armed from Carolina, and the Spanish presence was reduced to St. Augustine. The native inhabitants all but disappeared. Scrub oak and palmetto grew over the wooden council houses and the ashes of churches and forts; Virginia creeper covered the cannons. Fruit trees and horses, cattle and hogs reverted to the wild. In the eighteenth century Lower Creeks from the Southeastern highlands drifted into the empty peninsula to interbreed with runaway blacks and become the Seminoles. Only an archaeologist can detect the signs of a life that once was: the elevated bed of an old road, or a rectangular patch of reddish earth where a clay-daubed convent burned. One Hispanic Indian who should not fade into oblivion was the chief Patricio de Hinachuba. In the rough waters of the times he steered a daring and dangerous course, balancing Spanish factions, Indian rivalries, and even English attackers to get the best terms for his province, Apalache, and his town, Ivitachuco. This noble was a devout son of the Church who did not let the friar run his town, a brave captain who fought no unnecessary battle, and a loyal supporter of the Crown whom the Spanish could not take for granted. Feinting and dodging like a player on the Ivitachuco peiota team, don Patricio never lost his head and never forgot his priorities.

On the borderland of Canadian settlement southeast of Montreal, the Mohawk woman Coocoochee was born about 1740, grew to maturity, and acquired skill in herbal medicine and the special ability to contact the powerful world of the spirits. Although her childhood was sheltered in territory remote from the North American fighting frontier, her adult years were destined to be spent in a traumatic environment threatened almost perpetually by warfare. Five times over a period of a quarter-century her household was uprooted, forced to move either by a sense of insecurity, by Indian defense strategy, or by direct attack. Following the initial transfer of Coocoochee's family from the hinterland of Montreal to the Ohio country about 1769, subsequent dislocations were brought about by major developments in Indian-White warfare west of the Appalachian mountains. Coocoochee lived during an era that was critical for all Indian people in eastern North America. In the annals of western history, her life spanned the French and Indian War between France and England (1754-1760), Lord Dunmore's War against the Shawnee in Ohio (1774), the American Revolution (1775-1783), and the Indian-White warfare continuing in territory northwest of the Ohio River until 1794. For Indian people, this was a time when the kings of France and England unfairly extended their imperial rivalry into the Indians' country, and when American land speculators and frontiersmen turned Indian land into individual personal property. No matter how these generalized developments on the historic scene may be analyzed today, in the eighteenth century they constituted a series of direct threats to the way of life and very survival of Coocoochee and her family.

In a moving speech delivered a few years before his death in 1813, the great Shawnee warrior Tecumseh recalled the tragic events that had claimed the lives of so many Indian people. "Where today are the Pequot?" he lamented. "Where [are] the Narraganset, the Mohican, the Pokanoket and many other once powerful tribes of our people? They have vanished before the avarice and oppression of the white man, as snow before a summer sun." By his bitter words Tecumseh hoped to inspire a grand Indian resistance movement that would halt the deadly process. But the ultimate failure of Tecumseh's plan meant that the decimation of Indian tribes would continue. In a few short years the Mingo, Miami, and Wea were added to the list of nearly-shattered tribes. Tecumseh's own people, the Shawnee, were scattered beyond the Mississippi, thoroughly dispossessed and demoralized. But one significant Eastern tribe emerged from this turbulent period with its identity and dignity intact. "Where today" are the Stockbridge? Despite severe hardships, the Stockbridge Indians of Tecumseh's time could answer readily. This small but influential tribe managed to hold together-from those years into the present-in the face of tremendous social and political change.

American Indian Tribal Religions Series: A Review Essay With Suggestions For Future Research Clara Sue Kidwell Father Berard Haile. Love-Magic and Butterfly People: The Slim Curly Version of the Ajilee and Mothway Myths. American Tribal Religions Series, No.2. Flagstaff: Museum of Northern Arizona Press, 1978. 172 pp. $13.95 Karl W. Luckert. Coyoteway: A Navajo Holyway Healing Ceremonial. Tucson: University of Arizona Press; Flagstaff: Museum of Northern Arizona Press, 1979. 243 pp. $24.95; pap. $13.95 Karl W. Luckert. A Navajo Bringing-Home Ceremony: The Claus Chee Sonny Version of Deerway Ajilee. American Tribal Religions Series, No. 3. Flagstaff: Museum of Northern Arizona Press, 1978. 208 pp. pap. $14.95 Karl W. Luckert. The Navajo Hunter Tradition. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1975. 239 pp. $10.50; pap. $5.95 Karl W. Luckert. Navajo Mountain and Rainbow Bridge Religion. American Tribal Religions Series, No. 1. Flagstaff: Museum of Northern Arizona Press, 1977. 157 pp. pap. $6.95 Navajo chant practice, with its richly developed symbolism and ceremonialism and its wide-ranging social implications, constitutes one of the great religious systems of the world. The Navajos' origins as a distinctive People, Dine, began in darkness and ignorance in worlds below this, according to their own traditions. Historically, it is known that they appeared as nomads in the Southwest around 1500 A.D., and that their Athabaskan language links them with the Athabaskan speakers of the interior of Alaska. From these very humble beginnings, they have evolved a highly complex system of religious belief and practice that constitutes the basis of the Navajo Way.