ABOUT THIS BOOK

Tracing identity, law, and legacy in an inheritance dispute that reveals the intersection of two cultural and legal systems: Creek Indian and Euro-American.

In 1846, in the Chancery Court of Mobile, Alabama, William “Red Eagle” Weatherford’s son, by the Indian woman Supalamy, sued his half siblings fathered by Weatherford with two other Creek women, Polly Moniac and Mary Stiggins, for a greater share of Weatherford’s estate. While the court recognized William Jr. as the son of William Sr., he nevertheless lost his petition for inheritance due to the lack of legal evidence concerning the marriage of his biological mother to William Sr. The case, which went to the Alabama Supreme Court in 1851, provides a record of an attempt to interrelate and, perhaps, manipulate differences in cultures as they played out within the ritualized, arcane world of antebellum Alabama jurisprudence.

Although the case has value in the classic mold of salvage ethnography of Creek Indian culture, Red Eagle’s Children, edited by J. Anthony Paredes and Judith Knight, shows that its more enduring value lies in being a source for historical ethnography—that is, for anthropological analyses of cultural dynamics of the past events that complement the narratives of professional historians.

CONTRIBUTORS: David I. Durham / Robbie Ethridge / Judith Knight / J. Anthony Paredes / Paul M. Pruitt Jr. / Nina Gail Thrower / Robert Thrower / Gregory A. Waselkov

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

J. Anthony Paredes is a professor emeritus of anthropology at Florida State University and is the founding series editor of the Contemporary American Indian Series at The University of Alabama Press. He is the coeditor of Anthropologists and Indians in the New South and Classics of Practicing Anthropology: 1978-1998, among other books.

Judith Knight is retired from The University of Alabama, where she worked at the Alabama Museum of Natural History for six years and at The University of Alabama Press for another twenty-five years, primarily as a senior acquisitions editor specializing in anthropology, archaeology, and ethnohistory.

REVIEWS

“Red Eagle’s Children is a very interesting book, and a well-conceived one. It touches the necessary bases in terms of providing background information and analysis of the case in question, and its editors have recruited a very strong roster of specialists to write the individual chapters.” —Joshua Piker, author of Okfuskee: A Creek Indian Town in Colonial America

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

Introduction by J. Anthony Paredes

Chapter 1. A Brief Sketch of Creek Country in the Early Nineteenth Century by Robbie Ethridge

Chapter 2. Formation of the Tensaw Community by Gregory A. Waselkov

Chapter 3. Early Alabama Law and Chancery Practice by David I. Durham and Paul M. Pruitt Jr.

Chapter 4. Edited Transcript of Case 1299: Weatherford vs. Weatherford et al. by Judith Knight

Chapter 5. A Modern Creek Indian Reflection on Weatherford vs. Weatherford et al. by Nina Gail Thrower (recorded and transcribed by Robert Thrower)

Appendix: Reproduction of “Reports of Cases Argued and Determined in the Supreme Court of Alabama,” during January Term and a Part of June Term, 1852. Reported by J. W. Shepherd Vol. XX."

References

List of Contributors

Index