The Creek Nation and the Culture of Consent: Under threat from the United States, Creek people replaced consent with coercion. Then they lost everything.

• Author: Sturgis, Amy H.

IN THE DECADES after the United States achieved independence, its representatives compelled the Creek people of present-day Georgia, Alabama, and Florida to reorder their social system into a coercive state. This, officials said, would make the Creeks "good neighbors" to U.S. citizens, and especially to the country's problem child, the unruly state of Georgia. The U.S. then proved to be a poor neighbor itself, systematically humiliating and undermining the very Creek government it had demanded, effectively pushing the Native Americans into civil war, and ultimately abandoning all pretense of respecting the sovereignty of--or its treaties with--the Creek Nation.

Historian Kevin Kokomoor of Coastal Carolina University tells this story in Of One Mind and of One Government. In return for transforming themselves into a reflection of the United States, he concludes, the Creeks lost many of their traditions, all of their homelands, and thousands of their lives. Kokomoor doesn't fully articulate this, but they also lost a responsive and dynamic political system that existed before the U.S. ordered its makeover.

The accomplishments of the traditional Creek system are especially significant given that they were not a homogenous population. They were a collection of disparate peoples from different linguistic groups. "A Coweta man in the Lower Country who spoke Muscogee," Kokomoor notes, "would have needed a translator to do anything meaningful in either Hitchiti or Yuchi communities, even though they were only miles away and were considered just as Creek."

The system that evolved to bring coherence to this diverse landscape was based on noncoercive consent seeking. The "center of Creek politics had always been oratory and debate in the town's square ground," Kokomoor writes. Civil and military leaders--including the most powerful micos, or headmen--led through persuasion and by cultivating respect. Ad hoc figures of influence, such as the "Great Beloved Man," were recognized outside the traditional channels of leadership. A matrilineal clan structure allowed for kin-based retributive justice, and a dual organizational system of "war" and "peace" leadership structures further distributed authority and responsibility among the Creek communities.

The result was a decentralized, adaptable framework of predominantly local decision making that balanced the needs of the geographically distinct Upper Towns and Lower Towns, that placed no undue burden on any...