Hook describes what is known of the various European intrusions into Creek (Muskhogean) culture and how these changed hte tribal life of the Alabamas and Coushattas, eventually leading them to the reservation they now share in Southeast Texas.

This is a collection of tribal mytology unique to this particular group of people.

When Europeans battled for control over North America in the eighteenth century, American Indians were caught in the cross fire. Two such peoples, the Alabamas and Coushattas, made the difficult decision to migrate from their ancestral lands and thereby preserve their world on their own terms. In this book, Sheri Marie Shuck-Hall traces the gradual movement of the Alabamas and Coushattas from their origins in the Southeast to their nineteenth-century settlement in East Texas, exploring their motivations for migrating west and revealing how their shared experience affected their identity. The first book to examine these peoples over such an extensive period, Journey to the West tells how they built and maintained their sovereignty despite five hundred years of trauma and change. Blending oral tradition, archaeological data, and archival sources, Shuck-Hall shows how they joined forces in the seventeenth century after their first contact with Europeans, then used trade and diplomatic relations to ally themselves with these newcomers and with larger Indian groups--including the Creeks, Caddos, and Western Cherokees--to ensure their continuing independence. In relating how the Alabamas and Coushattas determined their own future through careful reflection and forceful action, this book provides much-needed information on these overlooked peoples and places southeastern Indians within the larger narratives of southern and American history. It shows how diaspora and migration shaped their worldview and identity, reflecting similar stories of survival in other times and places.

The Alabama language, a member of the Muskogean language family, is spoken today by the several hundred inhabitants of the Alabama-Coushatta Indian Reservation in Polk County, Texas. This dictionary of Alabama was begun over fifty years ago by tribe member Cora Sylestine. She was aided after 1980 by linguists Heather K. Hardy and Timothy Montler, who completed work on the dictionary after her death. This state-of-the-art analytical dictionary contains over 8,000 entries of roots, stems, and compounds in the Alabama-English section. Each entry contains precise definitions, full grammatical analyses, agreement and other part-of-speech classifications, variant pronunciations, example sentences, and extensive cross-references to stem entries. The Alabama-English section is followed by a thorough English-Alabama finder list that functions as a full index to the definitions in the Alabama-English section.

An American Indian language belonging to the Muskogean linguistic family, Koasati is spoken today by fewer than five hundred people living in southwestern Louisiana and on the Alabama-Coushatta Indian Reservation in Texas. Geoffrey D. Kimball has collected material from the speakers of the larger Louisiana community to produce the first comprehensive description of Koasati. The book opens with a brief history of the Koasati. The chapters that follow describe Koasati phonology, verb conjugation classes and inflectional morphology, verb derivation, noun inflectional and derivational morphology, grammatical particles, and syntax and semantics. A discussion of Koasati speech styles illustrated with texts concludes the book. Because examples of grammatical construction are drawn from native speakers in naturally occurring discourse, they authoritatively document aspects of a language that is little known.

Author David La Vere offers a complete chronological and cultural history of Texas Indians from twelve thousand years ago to the present day. He presents a unique view of their cultural history before and after European arrival, examining Indian interactions-both peaceful and violent-with Europeans, Mexicans, Texans, and Americans.

When the U.S. government ended its relationship with dozens of Native American tribes and bands between 1953 and 1966, it was engaging in a massive social experiment. Congress enacted the program, known as termination, in the name of ?freeing? the Indians from government restrictions and improving their quality of life. However, removing the federal status of more than nine dozen tribes across the country plunged many of their nearly 13,000 members into deeper levels of poverty and eroded the tribal people?s sense of Native identity. Beginning in 1973 and extending over a twenty-year period, the terminated tribes, one by one, persuaded Congress to restore their ties to the federal government. Nonetheless, so much damage had been done that even today the restored tribes struggle to overcome the problems created by those terminations a half century ago. ø Roberta Ulrich provides a concise overview of all the terminations and restorations of Native American tribes from 1953 to 2006 and explores the enduring policy implications for Native peoples. This is the first book to consider all the terminations and restorations in the twentieth century as part of continuing policy while detailing some of the individual tribal differences. Drawing from Congressional records, interviews with tribal members, and other primary sources, Ulrich delves into the causes and effects of termination and restoration from both sides.