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The Alabama-Coushatta Indians.
By Jonathan B. Hook.
College Station: Texas A & M University Press, 1997. xvi, 152 pp. $29.95. ISBN 0-89096-782-2.
In this thought-provoking cultural study, Jonathan Hook offers a unique insider's perspective on a southeastern tribe that has been ignored by scholars, the Alabama-Coushattas. Hook presents the tribe as a case study in the cultural transformation of Native Americans and issues of ethnic identity. What defines a Native American? The author, an enrolled member of the Cherokee nation, draws from both his own background as a Native American and the experience of the AlabamaCoushattas as he seeks answers to this question.
Hook takes on the prodigious task of tracing the history of the Alabama-Coushatta community over the past three hundred years. He begins by introducing the Alabamas and Coushattas, two tribes who settled near the Alabama River in the early eighteenth century and later joined the Creek Confederacy. After a series of migrations prompted by European and American political and military pressure, the tribes found a permanent home in East Texas. Hook argues that despite their encounters with whites, the Alabama-Coushattas retained most of their traditional beliefs and practices until the last two decades of the nineteenth century. The two tribes, according to Hook, isolated themselves from the white population and prohibited non-Indians from residing on their land after the 1840s. The challenge came in the 1880s, when Presbyterian missionaries challenged Alabama-Coushatta cultural continuity and achieved "virtually complete conversion in a generation" (p. 35).
read more at http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3880/is_200001/ai_n8897527
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