This is the third chapter of my manuscript in-progress: A Tale of Two Brothers: A Creek Indian Family’s Odyssey in Early America. This project focuses on two individuals – brothers Escotchaby and Sempoyaffee from the Lower Creek community of Coweta – to demonstrate how Creek peoples navigated the chaos of the eighteenth-century world via their family/kinship networks, be it their relationships with other Indigenous groups like the Cherokees or European empires. This chapter, in particular, highlights the intimate intra-Indigenous connections of early America, which historians of early America have long neglected and were a fundamental part of the Creek family world.
Bryan C. Rindfleisch is an Assistant Professor of History at Marquette University. Dr. Rindfleisch specializes in Early (Colonial) American, Native American, and Atlantic World history. His first book – George Galphin’s Intimate Empire: Intercultural Family, Trade, and Colonialism in Early America – focused on the intersection of colonial, Native, imperial, and Atlantic histories, peoples, and places in the eighteenth-century South. His current project explores the intersections of Creek and Cherokee peoples in the seventeenth and eighteenth-centuries and his teaching interests revolve around Early (Colonial) America and Native American history, particularly intercultural family and violence, the nature of empires and colonialism, and Indigenous resistance and decolonization movements throughout history.