Conversations with the High Priest of Coosa by Charles M. Hudson

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This book begins where the reach of archaeology and history ends, writes Charles Hudson. Grounded in careful research, this extraordinary work imaginatively brings to life the sixteenth-century world of the Coosa, a native people whose territory stretched across the Southeast, encompassing much of present-day Tennessee, Georgia, and Alabama.

Cast as a series of conversations between Domingo de la Anunciaci¹n, a real-life Spanish priest who traveled to the Coosa chiefdom around 1559, and the Raven, a fictional tribal elder, Conversations with the High Priest of Coosa attempts to reconstruct the worldview of the Indians of the late prehistoric Southeast. Mediating the exchange between the two men is Teresa, a character modeled on a Coosa woman captured some twenty years earlier by the Hernando de Soto expedition and taken to Mexico, where she learned Spanish and became a Christian convert.

Through story and legend, the Raven teaches Anunciaci¹n about the rituals, traditions, and culture of the Coosa. He tells of how the Coosa world came to be and recounts tales of the birds and animals--real and mythical--that share that world. From these engaging conversations emerges a fascinating glimpse inside the Coosa belief system and an enhanced understanding of the native people who inhabited the ancient South.

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Conversations with the High Priest of Coosa

The University of North Carolina Press

Introduction

Archaeologists and historians can suggest answers to some of these questions, but they cannot tell us definitively about the philosophical or religious thought processes of these people. This book begins where the reach of archaeology and history ends. Blending extant information with carefully considered fiction, Conversations with the High Priest of Coosa endeavors to represent the world of the Indians of the late prehistoric Southeast as they believed it existed. Defining a work such as this one is a challenge. Some may think of it as a historical novel, and I certainly hope that, at some level, many readers will enjoy it as they would a more traditional work of fiction. My preference-borne out of many years of research and teaching in the field of anthropology-is to call this work a fictionalized ethnography, for although it is most definitely a fictional work in a number of important respects, I have endeavored to make it as true to cultural and social facts as it is in my power to do.

My aim in this book is to reconstruct the belief system, or world view, of a late prehistoric southeastern people for which there exists hardly any primary documentary evidence. This belief system shaped the mentality of the people of the Coosa chiefdom, a once powerful polity whose existence became so lost to history that its homeland in northwestern Georgia and the Tennessee Valley has only been satisfactorily located in the past twenty years. This Coosa chiefdom existed alongside other similar chiefdoms in a social world-called Mississippian by archaeologists-that dominated most of the American South between the eleventh and sixteenth centuries. But that world collapsed more than three hundred years ago, and today the polity of Coosa and its neighboring chiefdoms, and the larger world in which they existed, are nowhere to be seen.

To say that Coosa and its world disintegrated is not to say that Coosa people are extinct. Although many Coosas died in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (most particularly because of Old World diseases), some of them survived, and their descendants have been scattered. Many of them live now in the state of Oklahoma as Creeks, Koasati, Seminoles, and so on, and it is possible that bits and pieces of the cultural traditions and beliefs of the Coosa are retained by some of these descendants. Yet after so much time, to ask one of these distant living descendants about details of the old Coosa belief system would be about the same as asking a contemporary German about the belief system of the ancient Germanic tribes who did battle with Roman legions.

There are, however, a few existing sources that can shed some factual light on these time-shrouded questions about the Coosa world. Historians, archaeologists, and others have given particular attention to the records of three Spanish expeditions that penetrated Coosa in the 1500s. In 1540 the Hernando de Soto expedition traveled through the length of Coosa, from north to south. From the documents of the Soto expedition, scholars learned that Coosa was a paramount chiefdom. That is, the chief of Coosa commanded a simple chiefdom, some twelve and a half miles in diameter, living along a stretch of the Coosawattee River in what is now northwestern Georgia. But this same chief of Coosa was also a paramount chief, wielding power or influence over several other simple chiefdoms to the north, up to about present-day Knoxville, Tennessee, and south to about present-day Childersburg, Alabama. The Soto chroniclers recorded scraps of information about the physical layout and social structure of Coosa, but they wrote essentially nothing about the inner world of Coosa beliefs, knowledge, and traditions.

The next group of Spaniards to reach Coosa was a detachment of men from the Tristán de Luna expedition. Luna attempted to found a colony at Pensacola Bay in 1559, but his colonists soon ran short of food, and most of them moved northward to the town of Nanipacana on the Alabama River. When they failed to procure the needed food at Nanipacana, they sent a detachment of men farther north to revisit Coosa, which the Soto chroniclers had described in such glowing terms. They arrived in Coosa in April 1560 and remained there for over a month before returning to Nanipacana. From there they fell back to Pensacola Bay, where the expedition further disintegrated and the people experienced great privation before abandoning the colony.

From documents from the Luna expedition, scholars have been able to derive better information about the geographical and social context of Coosa than they could from earlier records from the Soto expedition. Domingo de la Anunciación, a priest who went with the detachment of men, wrote letters from Coosa and also contributed to a much later account of what happened there. He described physical features of the main Coosa town and even some of the customs of the people. While he was there, he had with him as translator a woman whom Soto's men had enslaved twenty years earlier and had taken to Mexico. From Anunciación's writings, it is clear that through the offices of this translator he had an informed grasp of what transpired there, but sadly his writings reveal next to nothing about the inner world of Coosa thought and belief. This deficiency is particularly disappointing because, of all the sixteenth-century Spaniards who visited Coosa, Anunciación had the education and sensibility-and the necessary competent translator-to tap into the mysteries of that world.

The third expedition to Coosa was led by Captain Juan Pardo, who took a small contingent of men northward from the newly established colony of Santa Elena on Parris Island, South Carolina. In 1567 he went up the Catawba River to the vicinity of Asheville, North Carolina, and then across the mountains to Chiaha, a chiefdom in the Tennessee Valley that was affiliated with the paramount chief of Coosa. The documents of the Pardo expedition yield insights into the political structure of the chiefdoms of South Carolina and eastern Tennessee, plus a few invaluable words of the languages spoken in eastern Tennessee, but they reveal virtually nothing about the Coosa belief system.

With the historical record revealing so little, scholars have turned to other forms of evidence in their effort to understand Coosa-particularly the archaeological record. Archaeological research on Coosa began with the inquiries of amateurs in the middle of the nineteenth century and began to be conducted professionally in the early decades of the twentieth century. It was only at midcentury, however, that truly modern research began. By the 1980s and 1990s archaeologists had accumulated enough information from excavations and surveys in Coosa country to be able to say quite a lot about the material life of the people who once lived there. Archaeologists can now describe their houses and public buildings, their means of procuring food, the layout of their villages, and many other aspects of Coosa life. Most notably, they have constructed a map of the locations of the constituent towns of Coosa, as well as the towns of other chiefdoms in the paramountcy. Interested readers can find an admirably concise account of both the archaeological and historical information on Coosa in Marvin T. Smith's Coosa: The Rise and Fall of a Southeastern Mississippian Chiefdom (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2000).

I was a member of the consortium of scholars who in the 1980s and 1990s reconstructed the routes of exploration of Soto, Luna, and Pardo, and who located Coosa on the landscape and worked out some of its social and political characteristics. I well remember the excitement we felt as piece after piece of information fell into place to make up the picture of Coosa we have now. And yet, after all those pieces were in place, our reconstructed Coosa was only a skeletal representation of what was once a vibrant society. Perhaps because I had been trained as a social anthropologist, I longed to hear the people of Coosa talking about their world as they experienced it. I longed to hear a Coosa expound on the hidden causes of things.

If only we had a description of Coosa philosophy comparable to that produced by the French social anthropologist, Marcel Griaule, who studied the Dogon of west Africa in the 1930s and 1940s. Griaule made repeated and prolonged visits to the Dogon for fifteen years until he began asking questions an ordinary Dogon person could not answer. His questions exceeded the bounds of their "simple knowledge." At this point, he was directed to Ogotemmêli, an old blind man who had thought long and hard about the world as it existed for the Dogons. Ogotemmêli agreed to be interviewed by Griaule, and in a series of remarkable conversations over a period of thirty-three days, he revealed to him the inner nature of the Dogon world. Griaule recounted this experience in his book Conversations with Ogotemmêli, one of the jewels of twentieth-century French social anthropology.

Recalling the experience of Griaule, I asked myself: What if Domingo de la Anunciación had encountered a Coosa wise man who had enough understanding of Europeans to engage with him in conversations about the Coosa world? Like Ogotemmêli did with Griaule, such a Coosa wise man would no doubt have perceived Anunciación-ignorant as he was of Coosa beliefs and knowledge-as a mere child, and logically he would have first told him stories suitable for a child. Then, logically, he would have proceeded to tell him about other, more complicated matters. But unfortunately, such a meeting of minds never took place. Anunciación never sought out a Coosa version of Ogotemmêli, and a factual account of the Coosa world from the inside out can never be had.

There was, then, only one possibility left. I decided that I would do for Coosa in fiction what Griaule had done for the Dogon in nonfiction. Domingo de la Anunciación would serve as a fictionalized European inquirer, with a fictionalized version of his female Coosa translator-whom I have named Teresa-by his side. I could easily invent a Coosa wise man the equal of Ogotemmêli. I determined to discipline and inform my fiction with as much indirect factual evidence as I could muster; I wanted the Coosa world I portrayed to be as close to the real thing as this limited form would allow. Yet, to what ethnographic source could I turn for religious and mythological content that would be most analogous to the real Coosa world view? I could have drawn upon the recorded oral traditions of well-documented preliterate peoples of similar political structure in Southeast Asia, Polynesia, or the southwestern United States. This solution, however, would hardly have been acceptable given the significant differences between those peoples and the people of Coosa.

An alternative strategy, and the one I took, was to use extant but fragmentary oral materials from the various Native American peoples of the seventeenth- to twentieth-century Southeast, employing threads of fiction to stitch these pieces together into something like a coherent system of belief. Though fragmentary, this southeastern ethnographic material is more than merely analogical. Some of the sources I have used came from biological (and, presumably, cultural) descendants of the Coosa chiefdom. Other sources came from people who were descendants of some of the other chiefdoms living in the Mississippian world of which Coosa was a part.

The sharing of ideas and symbols throughout this Mississippian world is supported on at least two counts. First, John Swanton, the Smithsonian anthropologist who was the preeminent collector and transcriber of oral literature from native peoples of the American Southeast, noted that many of the stories he collected were shared by seemingly disparate people in the early twentieth century, when he did his fieldwork. One might dismiss this claim by arguing that such sharing of stories was a late occurrence, a twentieth-century phenomenon among Indians who were by that time mostly or completely assimilated into American society. But there is a second body of evidence that a southeastern world of meaning existed during the Mississippian period, namely, a set of very specific Mississippian symbols and items of ritual paraphernalia that were shared all across the southeastern United States. The Southeastern Ceremonial Complex, first identified by Antonio Waring and Preston Holder in 1945, is a group of artifacts, symbols, and motifs far too specific in their shared traits to have been independently invented. If people at sites as widely separated as Mt. Royal, Florida, and Spiro, Oklahoma, shared such specific symbols, it stands to reason that they also shared many ideas and understandings.

It is also notable that some of these Southeastern Ceremonial Complex symbols are consistent with creatures of the imagination in the oral traditions and rituals of widely separated southeastern peoples. For example, as late as the early twentieth century both Creeks and Cherokees told stories about a monstrous serpent with deer horns on its head. Such a horned serpent-sometimes with wings-is one of the motifs of the Southeastern Ceremonial Complex, and there are other, more abstract, symbols that are consistent with later southeastern social practices and rituals. For example, the Southeastern Ceremonial Complex looped square-a square with loops at each of the four corners-is a dance pattern that endured into the twentieth century.

Yet another body of evidence argues for the legitimacy of using oral traditions from the seventeenth through the early twentieth century as evidence of beliefs that plausibly were held in Coosa in the sixteenth century. John Gregory Keyes, in a study of the mythology of Native Americans in the Southeast throughout this extended period of time, found substantial continuity in the motifs that made up the stories. What changed over the centuries were the social meaning and function of the myths. The very earliest recorded stories from the Southeast legitimize the hierarchical standing of ruling elites; they set forth a ranked order of supernatural beings who prefigure the hierarchy in the chiefdom itself, and they serve as charters for rituals and ceremonials. All of this is missing in later stories, but the constituent motifs show impressive stability through time.

It should be noted that I am not using later historical materials as a means for arguing for the existence of earlier historical actualities, a practice early ethnohistorians called "upstreaming." I claim much less-namely, that in this case it is reasonable to use fragmentary cultural materials from a later era as a basis for writing disciplined fiction set in an earlier time.

The people of sixteenth-century Coosa spoke several languages of the Muskogean-language family. Therefore, whenever possible I have drawn on stories and legends from Muskogean-speaking groups, particularly Creek, but also Alabama, Koasati, Seminole, and, to a lesser degree, Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Apalachee. But when there are gaps in Muskogean materials-and there are quite a few-I have drawn liberally from the customs and traditions of Cherokees, Natchez, Tunica, and others.

Because the materials collected by James Mooney, Franz Olbrechts, and Jack and Anna Kilpatrick on the Cherokees are far more copious and internally consistent than for any other southeastern group, I have in several places drawn on Cherokee culture and ritual practice in an effort to address important aspects of Coosa life for which there is no obvious corresponding Muskogean information. There is, for example, no Muskogean equivalent of the Cherokee story of Lucky Hunter or Corn Woman, the origin of bears and the bear-man, the origin of disease and medicine, the anger of the Sun, or the witch Spearfinger. I have adapted these Cherokee stories to my purpose, and in places I have added a Muskogean cultural veneer to them.

The existing record of Muskogean-speakers is also inconsistent regarding color and directional symbolism. Swanton collected no fewer than seven different variants of Muskogean color symbolism, and none of them possesses the symbolic integrity of the Cherokee system. Therefore, in an effort to maintain the integrity of my reconstruction of Coosa symbolism, I have had little choice but to fit out Coosas with the more consistent system of the Cherokee, which was likely similar to that of Muskogean-speakers. In a few instances I have modified Muskogean myths to agree with Cherokee color and directional symbolism.

(Continues...)

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