their removal in the native culture. ¹ More than thirty years later, in
his important Southeastern Indians text, Charles Hudson crafted what
has become the orthodox interpretation of not just Creek religion but
southeastern cosmology as a whole by combining Swanton's work on
Creek religion with his colleague James Mooney's observations of the
faith of Eastern Cherokees. The diseases and cures Swanton uncovered
also played an important part in Hudson's treatment of Native medi-
cine. ² J. Leitch Wright study of the Native South, The Only Land They
Knew, echoed Swanton. Like Hudson, Wright based his construction
of Native cosmology on this volume. ³ Other scholars built on the cul-
tural baseline established by Swanton and refined by Hudson and wrote
specific studies of Creek society and culture. Michael D. Green, for ex-
ample, used Swanton's elaborate discussion of the Green Corn Cere-
mony to anchor his study in a Creek conception of the world while Joel
Martin Sacred Revolt turned Swanton's work in new and controver-
sial directions. In her study of Creek trade, Kathryn Holland Braund
relied on Swanton to demonstrate the persistence of Creek religious
thought in the face of colonial expansion. ⁴

If Swanton's scholarship has shaped what historians have written
about the Creeks and the Native South, his use of informants has had
little influence on the same scholarship. The book is full of Creek in-
formants from Alabama, Oklahoma, and Texas as well as members
of other tribes, and they add an important dimension to the author's
work. What criteria he used in gathering their testimony, however, is
hard to say beyond the fact that he sought out old people who remem-
bered their traditions and whom he deemed "intelligent." His use of
their testimony is problematic because he attributed discrepancies be-
tween their memories and the historical record to local differences and
to the vagaries of personality and memory.

As a student of culture, John Swanton was, in hindsight, a bit naive.
Rather than accept that cultures change over time and that a culture
could adopt alien influences without forsaking its own values and be-
liefs, Swanton searched the historical record for cultural features that
he could match with his own informants' statements. In the process he
worked backward and forward to fashion a Creek culture that was in
his mind pristine. On this count he was explicit, and he refused to coun-
tenance any adaptation the Creeks made to Euroamerican cultures. In-
deed, in one case he doubted certain Creek beliefs about the moon be-
cause they "smack[ed] of white acculturation."

By refusing to accord any importance to cultural exchange and
change over time, Swanton misconstrued living Creek culture as irre-
deemably tainted. In the process he had to push aside such innova-
tions as horse raising, cattle trading, and cotton cultivation without
exploring the impact such material changes might have had on Creek
medicine and religion. Moreover, his unwillingness to consider Chris-
tian influences on Creek religion as authentically Creek renders his

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