THE UNITED STATES ACCEPTED AND NEVER CHALLENGED THAT ALL CITIZENS OF THE CHICKAMAUGA NATION ARE FULL BLOOD
The Five Tribes also believed that their culture and history distinguished them from other Native peoples. Cherokee chief Doublehead, for example, called Native peoples of the trans Mississippi west "the western wild Indians." Native leaders, however, generally eschewed such loaded terms, and instead referred to southern Indians collectively as "the Southern Nations," or, because most considered the Seminoles part of the Creek Nation, "the Four Nations." Part of that distinctiveness came from a creolized culture born of centuries of exchange with Europeans and Africans. When a federal Indian agent tried to persuade Bloody Fellow, a former Chickamauga war chief, to remove west, Bloody Fellow responded that "he had no inclination to leave the country of his birth. Even should the habits & customs of the Cherokees give place to the habits & customs of the whites, or even should they themselves become white by intermarriage not a drop of Indian blood would be lost; it would be spread more widely but not lost. He was for preserving them together as a people, regardless of complexion." Even as whites and Indians increasingly relied on racial idioms to define themselves against one another, they recognized that a shared past and generations of captivity and intermarriage bound them together.20
20. First quotation from Doublehead to Return]. Meigs, November 20, 1802, reel 1, microcopy 208, Cherokee Agency, Letters Received, Office of Indian Affairs; Bloody Fellow quotation from Miscellaneous Notes, reel 1, vol. 2, p. 23,John Howard
Payne Papers, microfilm copy, Edward E. Ayers Manuscript Collection, Newberry Library, Chicago. See also Sheidley, "Unruly Men," 8.
On southern Indians' self-conception see, for example, Speech of John Watts, in William Blount to Henry Knox, November 8, 1792, William Blount Letters, Filson Historical Society; Talk of Mad Dog [Efau Hadjo] to James Burgess and the Seminoles, August 2, 1798, box 1, Marie Taylor Greenslade Papers, P. K. Yonge Library, courtesy of the Florida Historical Society; Talk of the Choctaw Kings, Headmen, and Warriors to Mad Dog, White Lieutenant, Nine Hadjo and Apoyl of the Hickory Ground and all their elder brothers the Creeks in general,June :w, 1795, reel 801, Robertson Papers.
(C) This document was produced at the request of the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs on July 18, 2019, to document the History, Anthropology, Culture, Religion, and Archaeology of The Chickamauga Nation.