Totkv Mocvse/New Fire presents the work of Earnest Gouge, an important early Creek (Muskogee) author, and makes available for the first time-in Creel and English—the myths and legends of a major American Indian tribe. In 1915, Earnest Gouge was encouraged by ethnographer John Reed Swanton to record Creek legends and myths. Gouge's manuscript lay in the National Anthropological Archives for eighty-five years until two Creek-speaking sisters, Margaret McKane Mauldin and Juanita McGirt, and linguist Jack B. Martin, began translating and editing the document. In Totkv Mocvse/New Fire, Gouge's stories appear in parallel format, with the Creek text alongside the English translation. The stories cover many themes, from the humorous allegories of Rabbit, Wolf, and other personified animals, to hunting stories designed to frighten a nighttime audience in the woods. An insightful foreword by Craig Womack and Jack Martin's introduction frame the stories within Creek literature and history. Martin and Mauldin also provide brief introductions to each story, highlighting key elements of Creek culture.

“We're seeing people that we didn't know exist,” the director of FEMA acknowledged in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Sacral Grooves, Limbo Gateways offers a corrective to some of America's institutionalized invisibilities by delving into the submerged networks of ritual performance, writing, intercultural history, and migration that have linked the coastal U.S. South with the Caribbean and the wider Atlantic world. This interdisciplinary study slips beneath the bar of rigid national and literary periods, embarking upon deeper—more rhythmic and embodied—signatures of time. It swings low through ecologies and symbolic orders of creolized space. And it reappraises pluralistic modes of knowledge, kinship, and authority that have sustained vital forms of agency (such as jazz) amid abysses of racialized trauma. Drawing from Haitian Vodou and New Orleanian Voudou and from Cuban and South Floridian Santería, as well as from Afro-Baptist (Caribbean, Geechee, and Bahamian) models of encounters with otherness, this book reemplaces deep-southern texts within the counterclockwise ring-stepping of a long Afro-Atlantic modernity. Turning to an orphan girl's West African initiation tale to follow a remarkably traveled body of feminine rites and writing (in works by Paule Marshall, Zora Neale Hurston, Lydia Cabrera, William Faulkner, James Weldon Johnson, and LeAnne Howe, among others), Cartwright argues that only in holistic form, emergent from gulfs of cross-cultural witness, can literary and humanistic authority find legitimacy. Without such grounding, he contends, our educational institutions blind and even poison students, bringing them to “swallow lye,” like the grandson of Phoenix Jackson in Eudora Welty's “A Worn Path.” Here, literary study may open pathways to alternative medicines—fetched by tenacious avatars like Phoenix (or an orphan Kumba or a shell-shaking Turtle)—to remedy the lies our partial histories have made us swallow.

A Listening Wind, a collection of translated original texts and commentary edited by Marcia Haag, highlights the large array of Indigenous linguistic and cultural groups of the U.S. Southeast. A whole range of genres and selected texts represent language groups of the Choctaw, Creek, Chickasaw, Yuchi, Cherokee, Koasati, Houma, Catawba, and Atakapa. The traditional and modern Native literature genres showcased in A Listening Wind include stories that speakers perceive to be in the past (or “fixed”), genres that have developed alongside these stories, and modern story types that have sometimes supplanted traditional tales and are now enjoying trajectories of their own. These texts have been selected to demonstrate particular literary themes and the cultural perspectives that inform them. Introductory essays illuminate how they fit into Native American religious and philosophical systems. Overall this collection discloses the sometimes hidden connections among genres as well as their importance to language groups of the Southeast.

Presents an encyclopedia of American Indian literature in an alphabetical format listing authors and their works.

This volume focuses on the theoretical and analytical challenges that languages with complex morphologies pose for the theory and typology of word-level prosodic phenomena. The morphological complexity and phonological length that are characteristic of words in these languages make them a particularly fruitful ground for investigating the effects of both phonological and morphological factors in the assignment of prominence. The first three chapters in the volume explore general theoretical issues pertaining to word prominence in synthetic languages, including the issue of 'wordhood' and the empirical, theoretical, and methodological issues with delineating word-level prominence and the higher-level prosodic phenomena in these languages. These are followed by a series of case studies on stress, accent, and tone in a geographically and genetically diverse set of languages with highly synthetic morphologies including languages of the Americas, Europe and Asia, and Australia. The volume adopts an interdisciplinary perspective, combining phonetic, phonological, and morphosyntactic insights. It will be of interest not only to phonologists and morphologists, but to all those interested in the typological and theoretical issues relating to polysynthetic languages.

Ancestral Mounds deconstructs earthen mounds and myths in examining their importance in contemporary Native communities. Two centuries of academic scholarship regarding mounds have examined who, what, where, when, and how, but no serious investigations have addressed the basic question, why? Drawing on ethnographic and archaeological studies, Jay Miller explores the wide-ranging themes and variations of mounds, from those built thousands of years ago to contemporary mounds, focusing on Native southeastern and Oklahoma towns. Native peoples continue to build and refurbish mounds each summer as part of their New Year’s celebrations to honor and give thanks for ripening maize and other crops and to offer public atonement. The mound is the heart of the Native community, which is sustained by song, dance, labor, and prayer. The basic purpose of mounds across North America is the same: to serve as a locus where community effort can be engaged in creating a monument of vitality and a safe haven in the volatile world.

Historians have traditionally viewed the “Creek War of 1836” as a minor police action centered on rounding up the Creek Indians for removal to Indian Territory. Using extensive archival research, John T. Ellisor demonstrates that, in fact, the Second Creek War was neither brief nor small. Indeed, armed conflict continued long after “peace” was declared and the majority of Creeks had been sent west. Ellisor’s study also broadly illuminates southern society just prior to the Indian removals, a time when many blacks, whites, and Natives lived in close proximity in the Old Southwest. In the Creek country, also called New Alabama, these ethnic groups began to develop a pluralistic society. When the 1830s cotton boom placed a premium on Creek land, however, dispossession of the Natives became an economic priority. Dispossessed and impoverished, some Creeks rose in armed revolt both to resist removal west and to drive the oppressors from their ancient homeland. Yet the resulting Second Creek War, which raged over three states, was fueled not only by Native determination but also by economic competition and was intensified not least by the massive government-sponsored land grab that constituted Indian removal. Because these circumstances also created fissures throughout southern society, both whites and blacks found it in their best interests to help the Creek insurgents. This first book-length examination of the Second Creek War shows how interethnic collusion and conflict characterized southern society during the 1830s.