assessment of historic and contemporaneous Creek religion ahistorical.
Without looking at such important innovations, his portrayal of Creek
culture stands as a testament to a futile search for what he called the
"aboriginal character."

In the end, the reader may well ask that if Swanton's writing is
so problematic, why read him at all? The most important reason is
that Swanton's work lies at the heart of an interpretation of south-
eastern Native cultures that has dominated scholarship from the 1930s
until the 1990s. Although Swanton's model of Creek culture has shaped
the historiography, it would be worthwhile to reinvestigate it to decide
whether or not circles, crosses, and so forth were in fact essential cul-
tural building blocks, In his study of Cheyenne culture, for example,
anthropologist John H. Moore took apart the ethnographic canon on
which Cheyenne history had been based and presented an interpreta-
tion of their history that would have been otherwise unimaginable. ⁵ Is
Swanton due for such a revision? Several important topics discussed
in the book that never figured in the overall analysis certainly merit
further study. How did gender figure into Creek cosmology? How did
Creek men and women partition power and influence? And, perhaps
most important of all, how did contact with Europeans and Americans
affect Creeks' conception of themselves, the world, and their place in
it? Anyone who wants to undertake such an important project has to
begin with John R. Swanton Creek Religion and Medicine.

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