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Nebraska
Press Series 1
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Yuchi Ceremonial Life: Performance, Meaning,
and Tradition in a Contemporary American Indian
Community
Jason Baird Jackson, Cloth: 2003,
xx, 345, CIP.LC 2002031957 ISBN : 0-8032-2594-6
Studies in the Anthropology of North American
Indians Series
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The Yuchis are one of the least known
yet most distinctive of the Native groups in the American
southeast. Located in late prehistoric times in eastern
Tennessee, they played an important historical role
at various times during the last five centuries and
in many ways served as a bridge between their southeastern
neighbors and Native communities in the northeast. First
noted by the de Soto expedition in the sixteenth century,
the Yuchis moved several times and made many alliances
over the next few centuries. The famous naturalist William
Bartram visited a Yuchi town in 1775, at a time when
the Yuchis had moved near and become allied with Creek
communities in Georgia. This alliance had long-lasting
repercussions: when the United States government forced
most southeastern groups to move to Oklahoma in the
early nineteenth century, the Yuchis were classified
as Creeks and placed under the jurisdiction of the Creek
Nation. Today, despite the existence of a separate language
and their distinct history, culture, and religious traditions,
the Yuchis are not recognized as a sovereign people
by the Creek Nation or the United States.
Jason Baird Jackson examines the significance
of community ceremonies for the Yuchis today. For many
Yuchis, traditional rituals remain important to their
identity, and they feel an obligation to perform and
renew them each year at one of three ceremonial grounds,
called “Big Houses.” The Big House acts
as a periodic gathering place for the Yuchis, their
Creator, and their ancestors. Drawing on a decade of
collaborative study with tribal elders and using insights
gained from ethnopoetics, Jackson captures in vivid
detail the performance, impact, and motivations behind
such rituals as the Stomp Dance, the Green Corn Ceremony,
and the Soup Dance and discusses their continuing importance
to the community.
Jason Baird Jackson is an assistant
curator of ethnology at the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum
of Natural History and an assistant professor of anthropology
at the University of Oklahoma.
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