The Creek Nation and the Culture of Consent

IN THE DECADES after the United States achieved independence, its representatives compelled the Creek people of present-day Georgia, Alabama, and Florida to reorder their social system into a coercive state. This, officials said, would make the Creeks “good neighbors” to U.S. citizens, and especially to the country’s problem child, the unruly state of Georgia. The U.S. then proved to be a poor neighbor itself, systematically humiliating and undermining the very Creek government it had demanded, effectively pushing the Native Americans into civil war, and ultimately abandoning all pretense of respecting the sovereignty of—or its treaties with—the Creek Nation.

Historian Kevin Kokomoor of Coastal Carolina University tells this story in . In return for transforming themselves into a reflection of