Indigenous Peoples have lived on this continent for thousands of years and flourished by cultivating crops (including corn, beans, and squash),^{3 Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States (Boston: Beacon Press, 2014), 16.} strategically hunting large game,^{4 Pekka Hämäläinen, Indigenous Continent: The Epic Contest for North America (New York, NY: Liveright Publishing Corp., 2022), 3-4.} and adapting to changes in climate and ecosystems.^{5 Hämäläinen, Indigenous Continent, 5.} They fostered ancestral wisdom traditions and cosmic belief systems that fostered sustainability.^{6 Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants (Minneapolis, Milkweed Editions, 2013); Fulvio Mazzocchi, “A Deeper Meaning of Sustainability: Insights from Indigenous Knowledge,” The Anthropocene Review 7, no. 1 (2020): 77–93.} Indigenous Peoples traveled via extensive road and waterway networks,^{7 Rubén G. Mendoza and Gretchen W. Jordan “Road Networks in Ancient Native America,” in Helaine Selin ed., Encyclopaedia of the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine in Non-Western Cultures (Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1997), 3780-3785; Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples’ History, 46.} produced hundreds of inventions and innovations,^{8 Emory Dean Keoke and Kay Marie Porterfield, Encyclopedia of American Indian Contributions to the World: 15,000 Years of Inventions and Innovations (New York: Facts on File, 2001).} created vast social and political systems in which women featured prominently,^{9 Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples’ History, 27.} and established cities and large communities with complex structures.^{10 Neal Salisbury, “The Indians’ Old World: Native Americans and the Coming of Europeans,” William & Mary Quarterly 53, no. 3 (July 1996): 439.}

Prior to the arrival of Europeans, over five million people are estimated to have inhabited what is now the United States,^{11 David Michael Smith, “Counting the Dead: Estimating the Loss of Life in the Indigenous Holocaust, 1492-Present,” 9; Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States.} forming over 500 nations^{12 Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples’ History, 11.} and communities that spoke over 200 languages^{13 Lillian Sparks, “Preserving Native Languages: No Time to Waste,” Sho-Ban News, December 29, 2011.} and were interconnected through sophisticated practices of exchange.^{14 Salisbury, “The Indians’ Old World,” 437.}

Before the formation of the modern nations between the 1500s and 1700s, many ancient Indigenous civilizations created community structures that prioritized equality and balance among people.^{15 Taiaiake Alfred, “Native American Political Traditions,” excerpt from Peace, Power, Righteousness: An Indigenous Manifesto (Ontario; Oxford University Press, 1999).} An era emerged where some communities in the Southeast formed hierarchical structures now referred to by anthropologists as “Mississippian chiefdoms.”^{16 Tiya Miles, “Dispossession,” in Nikole Hannah Jones, The 1619 Project (New York: One World, 2021), 141.} Chiefdoms like Moundville,^{17 Robin A. Beck, Jr., “Consolidation and Hierarchy: Chiefdom Variability in the Mississippian Southeast,” American Antiquity 68, no. 4 (October 2003): 648; Charles R. Cobb, “Mississippian Chiefdoms: How Complex?,” Annual Review of Anthropology 32 (2003): 63-84.} Cahokia,^{18 Robbie Ethridge and Sheri M. Shuck-Hall eds., Mapping the Mississippian Shatter Zone: The Colonial Slave Trade and Regional Instability in the American South (University of Nebraska Press, 2009), 5.} Coosa,^{19 Charles Hudson et al., “Coosa: A Chiefdom in the Sixteenth Century Southeastern United States,” American Antiquity 50, no. 4 (October 1985): 723-737; Cobb, “Mississippian Chiefdoms: How Complex?,” 63-84.} and Tascalusa^{20 Charles Hudson et al., “Coosa: A Chiefdom” 723-737.} featured enormous earthen mounds with different purposes, fortified towns with plazas, maize agriculture, shell-tempered pottery, and leaders—both men and women^{21 Tiya Miles in The 1619 Project, 141.}—that wielded considerable power over economic, political, and ritual domains.^{22 Beck Jr., “Consolidation and Hierarchy: Chiefdom Variability,” 649-650; Cobb, “Mississippian Chiefdoms: How Complex?,” 63-84.}

Death and Violence Directed at Indigenous Peoples

The arrival of Europeans to the continental United States in the late 1400s and 1500s brought to the continent mass violence, disease, and exploitation that would result in the loss of over 90% of the Indigenous population.^{23 Smith, “Counting the Dead,” 12.} False European narratives about Indigenous Peoples’ supposed subhuman or primitive status were used to justify widespread territorial aggression and subordination.

Surviving Indigenous Peoples coalesced and regenerated into modern Nations like the Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Seminole, and Muscogee.^{24 Salisbury, “The Indians’ Old World,” 455-57; Ethridge and Shuck-Hall eds., Mapping the Mississippian Shatter Zone: The Colonial Slave Trade and Regional Instability in the American South, 1-2.} However, the U.S. government waged war with and forcibly removed thousands of Indigenous Peoples, which—along with further disease and starvation—caused the Indigenous population to decline to just 300,000 by 1900.^{25 Equal Justice Initiative, “Forced Removal of Native Americans,” January 16, 2016.}

The federal government claimed over a billion acres of land from Indigenous Peoples through treaties, legislation, and violent conflict.^{26 Claudio Saunt, University of Georgia, “The Invasion of America“; PBS, “Indian Removal 1814-1858.”} The U.S. government also waged a deliberate campaign against Indigenous cultural heritage. Over 60,000 Indigenous children were forcibly sent to U.S. government-funded boarding schools to be “civilized.”^{27 Melissa Mejia, “The U.S. History of Native American Boarding Schools,” The Indigenous Foundation, visited February 19, 2024.}

In the 1970s, the U.S. government admitted to involuntarily sterilizing thousands of Indigenous women.^{28 The U.S. government admitted in the 1970s to sterilizing over 3,000 Indigenous women. Indigenous researchers estimate that as many as 25,000 (of 100,000 women of childbearing age) were sterilized. U.S. Government Accountability Office, “Investigation of Allegations Concerning Indian Health Service” (November 4, 1976), 3-4; Jane Lawrence, “The Indian Health Service and the Sterilization of Native American Women,” American Indian Quarterly 24, no. 3; Brianna Theobald, Reproduction on the Reservation: Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Colonialism in the Long Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2019).} Today, Indigenous Peoples continue to face challenges such as environmental threats,^{29 McGill University News, “Indigenous Peoples Around the Globe Are Disproportionately Affected by Pollution,” May 19, 2020.} poverty,^{30 Northwestern University, Institute for Policy Research, “What Drives Native American Poverty?” February 24, 2020.} lack of access to healthcare,^{31 Mary Smith, “Native Americans: A Crisis in Health Equity,” Human Rights Magazine 43, no. 3: The State of Healthcare in the United States (August 2021).} and political disenfranchisement.^{32 Patty Ferguson-Bohnee, “How the Native American Vote Continues to be Suppressed,” Human Rights Magazine 45, no. 1: Voting Rights, February 9, 2020.}

Indigenous Slavery and Bondage

Indigenous Peoples, who were long accustomed to economic, social, and political flexibility, entered into numerous relationships with Europeans—from the exchange of material goods, to diplomatic relations, to military engagements—and frequently dictated the nature of these relations.^{33 Salisbury, “The Indians’ Old World,” 453-54.} They established the deerskin trade and were adept at playing European powers off one another.^{34 Salisbury, “The Indians’ Old World,” 455-57.} European powers relied heavily on Indigenous Peoples for their own survival, seeking alliances to ensure safety, effective foreign policy, profit from trade, and use of natural resources.^{35 Donald P. Heldman, “Fort Toulouse of the Alabamas and the Eighteenth Century Indian Trade,” World Archaeology 5, no. 2 (October 1973): 163.}

By the early 1600s, Europeans had begun enslaving Indigenous persons,^{36 Brown University, “Colonial Enslavement of Native Americans Included Those Who Surrendered, Too,” News from Brown, February 15, 2017.} and by 1715 an estimated 25,000 to 50,000 Indigenous people in the South had been sold by British “slave traders.”^{37 Alan Gallay, The Indian Slave Trade (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2002), 299.} As the trafficking of Africans surpassed the enslavement of Indigenous Peoples, Europeans incentivized some Indigenous Peoples to be complicit, and even actively participate in the enslavement of Africans.^{38 Kathryn E. Holland Braund, “The Creek Indians, Blacks, and Slavery,” Journal of Southern History 57, no. 4 (November 1991): 606.}

Other Indigenous Peoples rejected American ideals that included chattel slavery.^{39 Holland Braund, “The Creek Indians, Blacks, and Slavery,” 630-32.} To escape slavery, some enslaved Black people fled to Muscogee nations, where they regained their freedom and became integrated into families.^{40 David A. Chang, The Color of the Land: Race, Nation, and the Politics of Landownership in Oklahoma, 1832-1929 (The University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 21.}

Later, during the struggle over slavery in the American Civil War, the Five Tribes—the Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Seminole, and Muscogee Nations—signed treaties with the Confederacy.^{41 Arrell Morgan Gibson, “Native Americans and the Civil War,” American Indian Quarterly 9, no. 4 (Autumn 1985): 387.} However, large numbers joined Union forces as well.^{42 Willard R. Johnson, “Tracing Trails of Blood on Ice: Commemorating ‘The Great Escape’ in 1861-62 of Indians and Blacks into Kansas,” Negro History Bulletin 64, no. 1 / 4 (January-December 2001): 11-12.} In 1866, a series of  treaties signed by the Five Tribes formally outlawed slavery in the territories controlled by Indigenous Peoples.^{43 Arrell Morgan Gibson, “Native Americans and the Civil War,” American Indian Quarterly 9, no. 4 (Autumn 1985): 406.}

In the West, the number of Indigenous persons forced into bondage increased significantly following the 1848 Gold Rush.^{44 Andrés Reséndez, The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016), 324-29.} An 1850 California law allowed white citizens to take Indigenous children away from their families as servants and to hold Indigenous adults in a position of servitude for minor offenses.^{45 Kimberly Johnston-Dodds, prepared at the request of Senator John L. Burton, President Pro Tempore, “Early California Laws and Policies Related to California Indians,” California Research Bureau (September 2002), 5-6,}

The Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment did not apply to Indigenous Peoples living in tribal territories because they were not considered citizens. They were not formally guaranteed equal protection under the law until 1924, when they were granted citizenship by the Indian Citizenship Act.^{46 Reséndez, The Other Slavery, 305.}

The Buffalo in Indigenous Life

Indigenous Peoples and buffalo (also known as bison) have lived together on the North American continent for over 12,000 years.^{47 C. Cormack Gates et al, American Bison: Status Survey and Conservation Guidelines 2010 (2010), 2.} Some 30 million buffalo roamed plains, woods, and tidewater regions prior to European colonization.^{48 Andrew C. Isenberg, The Destruction of the Bison: An Environmental History, 1750-1920 (Cambridge, UK ; Cambridge University Press, 2000), 12.} Two million of these buffalo lived east of the Mississippi River, including many within the present State of Alabama.^{49 National Park Service, “Buffalo Bellows: Buffalo East of The Mississippi” (September 16, 2016).}

Indigenous Peoples used buffalo for food and tools and traveled along their migration routes. Buffalo also played an important role in Indigenous cultural life. Some view the species as an “older brother” and a model for communal living.^{50 Kiera L. Ladner, “Governing Within an Ecological Context: Creating an AlterNative Understanding of Blackfoot Governance,” Studies in Political Economy 70, no. 1 (2003), 137-138.}

Some Muscogee ritually perform the Buffalo Dance to honor their historical connection to, and symbiotic relationship with, the animal.^{51 Ryan Abel Koons, Dancing Breath: Ceremonial Performance Practice, Environment, and Personhood in a Muskogee Creek Community, ProQuest Dissertations Publishing (2016), 269-278.} Traditionally, a buffalo horn was also blown during community meetings to signify that a consensus had been reached.^{52 Jean Chaudhuri and Joyotpaul Chaudhuri, A Sacred Path: The Way of the Muscogee Creeks (Los Angeles: UCLA American Indian Studies Center, 2001), 82.}

Europeans contributed to the widespread devastation of the buffalo population by overhunting, destroying habitats, and spreading diseases.

By the early 1800s, there were no buffalo left in Alabama or in many other eastern states.^{53 National Park Service, “Buffalo Bellows.”}

Subsequently, the deliberate targeting of buffalo herds during U.S. military campaigns against Indigenous groups and the construction of railroads across their western lands further reduced buffalo numbers dramatically.^{54 David D. Smits, ”The Frontier Army and the Destruction of the Buffalo: 1865-1883,” Western Historical Quarterly 25, no. 3 (Autumn 1994), 312-338; Gilbert King, “Where the Buffalo No Longer Roamed,” Smithsonian Magazine, July 17, 2012.} By the end of the 1800s, there were only a few hundred buffalo left in the entire U.S.^{55 Isenberg, The Destruction of the Bison, 12.}

Indigenous Peoples in the Alabama River Region

The modern Indigenous Nations that formed between the 1500s and 1700s descended from Mississippian chiefdoms.^{56 Salisbury, “The Indians’ Old World,” 450-51.} Muscogees—referred to as “Creeks” by Europeans^{57 Robbie Ethridge and Sheri M. Shuck-Hall eds., Mapping the Mississippian Shatter Zone: The Colonial Slave Trade and Regional Instability in the American South (University of Nebraska Press, 2009), 181.}—occupied large swaths of what would become Alabama in 1819.^{58 Joshua Piker, “Colonists and Creeks: Rethinking the Pre-Revolutionary Southern Backcountry,” Journal of Southern History 70, no. (2004): 503.}

The Muscogee Nation encompassed many socially and politically diverse peoples with their own languages, geographic origins, and creation stories.^{59 Steven C. Hahn, The Invention of Creek Nation, 1670-1763 (The University of Nebraska Press, 2014), 242.}

The fertile and strategic junction where the upper Alabama River meets the Coosa and Tallapoosa rivers was a center of the Alabama-Coushatta coalescence by the early 1700s.^{60 Ned J. Jenkins, “Tracing the Origins of the Early Creeks, 1050-1700 CE,” in Robbie Ethridge and Sheri M. Shuck-Hall eds., Mapping the Mississippian Shatter Zone: The Colonial Slave Trade and Regional Instability in the American South (University of Nebraska Press, 2009), 225-26.} The region offered protective bluffs and an ideal location to make alliances with neighbors that were forming into the upper region of the Muscogee Nation.^{61 Shuck-Hall, “Alabama and Coushatta Diaspora and Coalescence in the Mississippian Shatter Zone,” in Ethridge and Shuck-Hall eds., Mapping the Mississippian Shatter Zone, 259.}

Around 1717, the Alabama Nation invited the French to establish the bustling Fort Toulouse in the heart of its territory just miles away from here in present-day Wetumpka.^{62 Heldman, “Fort Toulouse of the Alabamas,” 163; Shuck-Hall, “Alabama and Coushatta Diaspora and Coalescence,” in Ethridge and Shuck-Hall eds., Mapping the Mississippian Shatter Zone, 263.}

Throughout history, the Alabama River was home to abundant animal life and vegetation, and its spring flooding rejuvenated the soil of Indigenous farmers, who also engineered dams to fish.^{63 Harvey H. Jackson, Rivers of History: Life on the Coosa, Tallapoosa, Cahaba, and Alabama (University of Alabama Press, 2015), 8-9.} Indigenous groups also used canoes to visit neighboring communities to forge trade and political ties.^{64 Jackson, Rivers of History, 9.}

Indigenous Peoples established numerous communities along or near the Alabama River, including the Tascalusa chiefdom called Atahachi—which likely sat approximately three miles below Montgomery along the Alabama River—and Uxapita, which sat where an interstate highway currently crosses the Alabama River in Montgomery.^{65 Jenkins, “Origins of Early Creeks,” in Ethridge and Shuck-Hall eds., Mapping the Mississippian Shatter Zone, 215, 221.} Other nations included Coosada,^{66 Vernon James Knight and Amos J. Wright, Historic Indian Towns in Alabama, 1540-1838 (University of Alabama Press, 2003), 49.} Oakfuskee,^{67 Knight and Wright, Historic Indian Towns, 37.} Tuckabatchee,^{68 Knight and Wright, Historic Indian Towns, 85.} Coweta,^{69 Angela Pulley Hudson, Creek Paths and Federal Roads: Indians, Settlers, and Slaves and the Making of the American South (University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 76.} Talisi,^{70 Jenkins, “Origins of Early Creeks,” in Ethridge and Shuck-Hall eds., Mapping the Mississippian Shatter Zone, 220.} Tubani,^{71 Knight and Wright, Historic Indian Towns, 162.} Tuskegee,^{72 Shuck-Hall, “Alabama and Coushatta Diaspora and Coalescence in the Mississippian Shatter Zone,” in Ethridge and Shuck-Hall eds., Mapping the Mississippian Shatter Zone, 261.} Autauga,^{73 Knight and Wright, Historic Indian Towns, 4.} Hookchoieooche,^{74 Knight and Wright, Historic Indian Towns, 103.} Pakana,^{75 Knight and Wright, Historic Indian Towns, 127.} and Nanipacana.^{76 Knight and Wright, Historic Indian Towns, 117.}

Between 1813 and 1836, 16,000 Muscogee People were removed from their Alabama homelands.^{77 Christopher D. Haveman, Dissertation, Auburn University, “The Removal of the Creek Indians from the Southeast, 1825-1838,” 360; National Park Service, Muscogee (Creek) Removal.}

Montgomery was key in the forced removal of Indigenous Peoples from the area. Muscogee who were captured in war while resisting forced removal were held in the Montgomery County jail in the 1830s.^{78 Haveman, Dissertation, “The Removal of the Creek Indians from the Southeast,” 247.}

In 1836, some 2,300 Muscogee were loaded onto steamboats in Montgomery and forcibly removed by boat and by foot on a “Trail of Tears” hundreds of miles long.^{79 Haveman, Dissertation, “The Removal of the Creek Indians from the Southeast,” 254.} Hundreds perished on this journey.^{80 Haveman, Dissertation, “The Removal of the Creek Indians from the Southeast,” 267.} Later that year, President Andrew Jackson ordered the forced removal of the remaining Muscogee People from their ancestral homelands.^{81 Haveman, Dissertation, “The Removal of the Creek Indians from the Southeast,” 269.}