first
The lands that my ancestors owned and the lands which I currently reside on are the traditional territories of Indigenous peoples. I acknowledge that I am a guest on the land of the Coast Salish peoples, the land which touches the shared waters of all tribes and bands within the Suquamish, Tulalip, and Muckleshoot nations. I encourage you to explore this map created by Native Land Digital, a Canadian not-for-profit organization, and gain an understanding of whose land you are a guest on.
First. The land on which the Parks family settled belonged to Native Americans of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation. I want to recognize the Indigenous peoples that came before white settlers violently and methodically stole their ancestral lands. Two years prior to when my ancestors arrived, Muscogee lands were signed away by Chief William McIntosh and his fifty supporters in 1825 through the Treaty of Indian Springs (Haveman 11). Muscogee land was signed into the hands of the US government, and its residents were forced to migrate to Alabama. In 1827, the same year that Thomas Byrd Parks arrived in Georgia, the United States finally acquired the last parcel of land to fully dispossess the Muscogee of their homeland (Schwartzman and Barnard 718).
On the last page of the Red Folio, my great-great-aunt Francie left a typed note. She wrote that our family members had come to Coweta County when “Indian lands were opened in 1827.” Through exploitative negotiations signed by chiefs that misrepresented the will of their peoples, tensions between Muscogee clans stoked by white officials, and the federal government’s failure to honor the promises stipulated in their treaties, land which had once belonged to the Muscogee had become legally available to be purchased by my ancestors. The “opening” of this land was not a serendipitous act of good fortune for the Parks.
For fifty years, the Muscogee resisted the seizure of their land and their sovereignty. Many still remained in Alabama while my ancestors settled in Georgia, resisting removal in spite of Andrew Jackson’s Indian Removal Act of 1830. Though, many were coerced into emigrating West due to Jackson’s deliberate creation of poor living conditions, which led to starvation and was exacerbated by disease (Haveman 90). Jackson’s Act violently separated 50,000 Indigenous People from their land which they were born on, fought for, and had stewarded for thousands of years. White settlers and their colonial greed forcibly removed the Muscogee people, including Cherokee, Chickasaw, Chocktaw, Kickapoo, Potawatomi, Seminole, and Shawnee people.
In 1832, all Muscogee land had been officially ceded, in exchange for land in Indian Territory. This is an excellent resource created by Native Knowledge 360Ëš, which is a part of the National Museum of the American Indian. Explore this site for a deeper understanding of the Muscogee Nation's removal.
First. I want to acknowledge the pain, the violence, and the trauma that the Muscogee people have endured. Their relocation to the territory in present-day Oklahoma is not the end of their story. But I want to acknowledge that my ancestors were involved in the dispossession of Muscogee lands. While there is no archival evidence of specific participation in the removal of the Muscogee, they are implicitly linked to this systematic land dispossession.
My family was one of the first beneficiaries of these violent acts. My ancestors reaped the benefits of the soil and the earth stewarded by the peoples indigenous to the land. My ancestors turned the land into a cotton farm upon which slave labor was used, Muscogee land turned into profit, a site of extraction and enslavement.
As a non-Indigenous, non-Muscogee individual who has directly benefited from the violent dispossession of Indigenous lands, I am beginning to become aware of my position in the perpetuation of colonialism. I am hopeful that through understanding my family’s history and its ties to the Muscogee communities that once lived on its lands, I can begin the process of decolonizing my family's narrative and bringing forth a different perspective to the history that’s been obscured from my family’s archives.
references
Haveman, Christopher D. Rivers of Sand: Creek Indian Emigration, Relocation, and Ethnic Cleansing in the American South. University of Nebraska Press, 2016. Project MUSE, https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/17/monograph/book/43900.
National Museum of the American Indian. The Removal of the Muscogee Nation. Designed and developed by Informated Software Solutions. Smithsonian Institution. 2017. Interactive story. https://americanindian.si.edu/nk360/removal-muscogee/index.html.
Native Land Digital. Native Land Digital. Digital map application. https://native-land.ca/.
Schwartzman, Grace M., and Susan K. Barnard. “A Trail of Broken Promises: Georgians and Muscogee/Creek Treaties, 1796-1826.” The Georgia Historical Quarterly, vol. 75, no. 4, 1991, pp. 697–718.