Webpage editor's notes:
I first became aware of these groups of modern Florida and Georgia Creeks about 20 years ago, not long after I began researching Seminole history. As far as these people researching their genealogy and rediscovering a culture that they had lost, I am all in favor of it. People knowing and practicing their roots, I applaud anyone who does this. I think it is beneficial to anyone practicing the local Native American ways because it gives them a greater understanding of their natural surroundings. I am sure that there are honest, hard working people in these groups that want to connect with their past, and are Creek descent. Much of the population of Northern Florida includes people with Creek ancestry. But what identifies them as Creek verses people of Creek descent who have assimilated into the local white population? Why do they seek to form tribes or bands that have not existed since Indian removal? Can one recreate a community that had disappeared? I believe that these articles answer these questions.
Unfortunately over time, I noticed many alarming characteristics of these recently organized groups that keep repeating themselves. Not only the internal schisms where they split apart with regularity, but also the personality cults. Some of their leaders are not even of any Creek lineage. Cult leaders rise who seek to fraudulently obtain government funding, or go to prison for illegal drug use which they claim as Native American religious practices. Not one group has shown itself to be different. Some are better than others, and even have file cabinets of documents to their claims. But in the end, they always turn out the same. Yes, these newspaper articles were written almost 30 years ago, and most of the people mentioned in them have passed away. Unfortunately I have found the groups today to be no different from those in 1976. Different faces but rehearsing the same play. Notice that these groups no longer gain the interest of anthropologists and historians. Maybe after so many years people have gotten tired of the same fraud.
Read the articles for yourself; they are self explanatory.
October 19, 1976
Creek tribes split
in fight for funds
His title is ceremonial-Creek
chief dresses for TV
October 20, 1976
Indian funds are sometimes
misspent
Monday, October 18, 1976
The Creek Indian nation east of the Mississippi has risen from the ashes left by Andrew Jackson's infamous Indian wars of the 1800's, with Creek descendants proclaiming for the first time their Indian blood, however thinned by generations of intermarriage.
The Creek Indians were a mighty empire in the Southeastern United States until white encroachment, and were removed by the federal government across the Mississippi River in the 1830's. A few Creeks hid out and escaped exile, and their descendants are now pursuing their ancestral culture-after many generations of "white" living. In the first of a three-part series, Times staff writer Jim Seale examines the new Creek movement.
By Jim Seale Times Staff Writer
From the urban caverns of Atlanta to the hills of Tallahassee and across Florida's panhandle to Alabama, a movement that started almost 30 years ago has emerged as a full blown socio-cultural phenomenon attracting the attention of anthropologists and politicians.
The Creek Indian nation east of the Mississippi has risen from the ashes left by Andrew Jackson's infamous Indian wars of the 1800's, with Creek descendants proclaiming for the first time their Indian blood, however thinned by generations of intermarriage.
The several thousand Creek descendants in the Southeast are donning colorful goose feather headdresses for weekend powwows, forming tribes and demanding and getting payment for historical wrongs done their ancestors.
Anthropologists are sometimes baffled by their often unexpected mixture of Plains Indian trappings, Bible-thumping Protestantism, Creek Indian ritual and tourist-oriented commercialism.
But if their fidelity to Creek tradition is often questioned, their new movement has rocked the American Indian world with its explosive growth.
Escambia County, at the western tip of Florida, counted only 103 Indians in the 1960 federal census. Ten years later, the number calling themselves Indians quadrupled-with most of those claiming Creek ancestry. Escambia's seat is Pensacola, a hotbed of the new Creek movement.
Within the last few years, they have won grants for extensive manpower programs, Indian arts and crafts classes and preschool day care.
Some, urged on by businessmen, have grandiose plans for Creek Disneylands. A group in Cairo, Ga., plans a wholesale return to reservation, which is in its stages and is staffed with VISTA volunteers.
A Florida State University anthropologist who did field studies of a Creek group said the eastern Creeks have moved from an almost total loss of identity to "the psychological, social and cultural rebirth of a 'forgotten people': the eastern Creeks."
The Creek nation, an empire of 55 towns located on rivers and steams (hence the name Creek) when confronted by Spanish explorers four centuries ago, came closer to cultural extinction than any other now active eastern tribe.
After losing their final military battle to Old Hickory's ragtag band of frontiersmen in 1814, the last mass of the Creek nation was removed in chains to Oklahoma-where a large tribe of Creeks now flourishes. A large number died of grief, starvation or exposure to the elements during the forced trek.
But many other Creeks escaped the "Trail of Tears," as historians call the removal of eastern tribes, by posing as whites or Spaniards-which was easy for some because by 1800 many Creeks had intermarried with fair-haired Scottish traders. It wasn't until this century that most dared to speak of their heritage.
Most of the new Eastern Creeks are descended from the "closet" Creeks who dared not acknowledge their bloodline until more than 100 years later. These new zealots have retained few of the physical Indian features, and so have not been victims of racial discrimination.
Many other Eastern Creeks today are descended from the fuller-blooded Creek community of Poarch, Ala., which was created when Andrew Jackson allowed a few Creeks who helped him exterminate other Creeks to stay on their East Alabama farmland. The brown skin, absence of facial hair and oval faces of their ancestors still appear in Creeks of Poarch and their children. They are among those who can remember being barred from theaters and fine restaurants as late as the 1940s.
It was Poarch's group of Creeks-under the leadership of a poor dirt farmer named Calvin McGhee-who started the current Creek revival in 1947 by demanding equal education from their county school board in nearby Atmore.
The successful campaign for integration snowballed into an ambitious lawsuit to get payment for lands taken from their ancestors. The Creeks' claim was granted by the Indian Claims Commission in 1962, but it wasn't until 1972 that the checks, figuring out to $112.13, were sent to Creek descendants.
The Indian Commission's payment of $3.9 million amounted to 23 cents for each of the acres taken in an 1814 treaty. It was "only crumbs" but opened the door for federal aid to Creeks and other hitherto-unrecognized descendants of Eastern tribes, said Lenore Thompson, one of the Creeks' lawyers in the claim.
But the award also "opened the Pandora cash-box of commercialism" for the Creeks, as one Tallahassee Creek medicine man put it.
No one would have to be one-fourth, one-sixteenth or even one-thirty-second Creek to get his share of the $3.9 million, under federal guidelines. All a Creek descendant had to do was trace his lineage back to Creek tribal newspapers.
News of the award was trumpeted in newspapers all over the Southeast. "Everywhere, all of a sudden, they started coming out of the woodwork for the money," said Buford Rolin, a 36-year-old Pensacola construction company office manager who attended Poarch's segregated "Indian school" while Calvin launched his campaign.
Alabama farmers who had always feared professing their Indian blood, Pensacola factory workers descended from Poarch Creeks who migrated in the 1920s, Tallahassee bureaucrats never before interested in their lineage-all of them were suddenly hiring genealogists to link them with the ancient Creek nation.
More than 7,200 in the Southeast were eventually paid their allotment, and they await the outcome of another pending claim for compensation for 5.2 million acres taken from Creeks in 1832.
In the four years since the claim was paid, the Creek groups have retained and expanded their influence, and continue posting for the news media at colorful weekend powwows and performing western Indian dance routines in spacious new malls.
After the weekend festivals are over, they return to their predominantly middle-class lives and jobs.
His father's ability to find herbs "that would break a fever" in the piney North Florida woods was one of the few bits of Creek knowledge left in his family when Huddy Steward was growing up.
Stewart, now a robust 60-year-old retired Baptist preacher in Pensacola, is active in one of Pensacola's five Creek clans and is teaching the members the ancient Creek language-Muskogee-from a manual.
Like many of Pensacola's Creeks, Stewart was born in Alabama and his farming parents migrated to Florida in search of higher paying industrial jobs. Stewart was born in the dirt farming country of Monroe County, Ala., but his part-Irish, part-Creek mother forced his father to move from their Creek community when Stewart was young.
Even though he only looks tanned, Stewart recalls "being called a little black bastard in school, like kids will do," because of his ancestry. "We lived kind of to ourselves, a lot of people didn't want anything to do with us, but we never denied our Indian ancestry."
Stewart sits on the three-county Creek Indian council of northwest Florida which was created two years ago by the state legislature and which is setting up programs for Creek descendants. The Creek council in Atmore, Ala., near Poarch, is more than 10 years old and has even more extensive manpower and health care programs to care for Creek descendants.
The Cairo, Ga., Creek group of Neal and Peggy McCormick, who were courted and recognized by then Gov. Jimmy Carter in a 1973 executive order, is building a self-sufficient Creek reservation on a few hilly acres. It will have homes, a health center, a small factory for making building materials and-for the tourists-a gift shop of Indian crafts and a re-created Creek village of 200 years ago.
The tourist appeal, and the non-Creek trappings, make the new Creek movement little more than a money-grubbing scheme to some-including some Creeks.
Gawking tourists and news reporters accept the big painted feathers and other apparel as genuine Creek. While members of Creek groups admit their ancestors wouldn't recognize most of their costume, they say it's the only way a public nurtured on the photogenic John Wayne Indian will recognize them as Indians.
Even the self-proclaimed chiefs of most Creek groups speak no Muskogee, but some Creek groups have Indian language experts helping them learn. Few Creek groups have the traditional ceremonial square, surrounded on four sides by palm-thatched arbors which encompass a sacred fire. Even Calvin McGhee, who founded the modern eastern Creek movement, never worshipped on a sacred Creek ceremonial square.
And all but a purist Creek group in Tallahassee are nauseated by the thought of taking the bitter "black drink," or scratching themselves with needles or animal claws until they bleed, as their ancestors did at yearly ceremonies to purify themselves.
Some insist they are as Creek as their great great-grandfathers, but merely use different rituals. "A person can be Creek without causing damage to his body, and I don't believe we'll ever inflict wounds on ourselves," almond-complexioned W. V. Williams, a Pensacola chief who is a deacon in his Baptist church, said while sitting on an overstuffed chair in his thickly carpeted living room.
"I see the God I worship and the Great Spirit as the same," said auburn-haired Ann Pate, a Pensacola Creek descendant, from a sparsely furnished office where she runs an Indian manpower program.
But none will desert their Christian churches to worship the Creek supreme being, the Master of Breath.
"This has no depth of meaning to us as a religion-a lot of the Creeks religious things weren't right," said Stewart, a fundamentalist Baptist.
"I don't believe we could ever get back to the religion, unless maybe we withdrew from society," Rolin, a lay reader in his Episcopal church, said. "It's a whole way of life, the Creek religion, not just going to church on the corner once a week."
Almost all of them desire to remain what some purists in the new Creek movement label "weekend Indians" and don't plan to leave white society for reservations.
Some say the new movement is nothing more than flirtation of middle-class types with a few Creek Indian rituals. "Just between you and me, these groups are just clubs," said one university professor who has worked with Creek groups. "It's a social thing."
The western Creeks in Oklahoma and Florida's Seminole and Miccosukee reservation tribes see the eastern Creeks as white, middle-class hobbyists who have never suffered for their heritage as they have.
"The question is, are the eastern Creeks really Indians?" said George Tiger, public information officer for the 24-member Creek council in Oklahoma.
Chief Howard Tommie of south Florida's Seminoles-who centuries ago were part of the Creek nation-said, "Now everyone wants to be Indian, including these fly-by-night (eastern Creek) Indians who never became Indian except to capitalize on federal funds."
Some Seminoles and Oklahoma Creeks say they also have a grudge against their cousins because their ancestors joined the side of Andrew Jackson in the Indian wars.
The Seminole and Miccosukee leaders deny the eastern Creeks' charge that their representatives lobby in Washington against the Creeks getting funds. The eastern Creeks say their critics on the reservations really resent their splitting up the federal funding pie.
"Chief Tommie would like there to be no Creeks left in Florida so he would get all the money," said Perloca Linton, a Florida Creek leader.
But despite assertions by other Indians that the new Creeks don't comprise a true culture, anthropology departments of southern universities are sending their most promising graduate students to study the Creek groups.
"It's amazing how they keep the dichotomy so well of this fundamentalist Baptist religion, the southern agricultural culture and the Indian culture," remarked a Georgia State University anthropology student studying a Creek group. Her paper will be titled "Instant Indians."
"They've taken the fact they can trace their lineage, and they've found a way to gain prestige though it-plus monetary gain they didn't have before," the anthropology student said.
She adds: "They're doing it for a monetary thing-they're quite explicit about it."
That most Creek groups began around a commercial core is conceded by Rolin and almost all Creek leaders. Some Creek descendants are unhappy with the endless arts and crafts show circuit taken up by some of their friends.
Rolin hopes that some of the novelty will wear off, leaving only those truly interested in their Creek heritage active in the movement. "That's when I think they'll come to have a deeper understanding of their ancestors' culture," he said.
Many Creek descendants are like 45-year-old Carolyn McCaniel, a clerk who was not raised with knowledge of Creek culture and who joined a Creek group for the satisfaction of exploring her lineage.
"Just for myself, I'd like to find out about the Creeks. I would like my children to learn the language and benefit form it," she said.
For Rolin, who doesn't need to wear beads and feathers to be recognized as Creek, simply exploring his lost Creek past and calling America's attention to it is enough.
"I'd like to find out more about my culture. That, and having the Creek Indians recorded as part of history again, are my goals."
Monday, October 18, 1976
Calvin McGhee's battle for recognition made the Creeks in Alabama feel like a tribe again. His movement spread to Florida and Georgia and encouraged other eastern tribes to rise up.
The birth of the modern Creek nation east of the Mississippi began in 1947 when a blue-eyed, charismatic Alabama dirt farmer decided he would no longer abide the ramshackle wood-frame schoolhouse provided for the children of his Creek community.
The far-flung movement that followed the first campaign of Calvin McGhee-the Martin Luther King of the modern Creek nation-was fed by the 1960s civil rights crusades. But he started with the schoolhouse issue almost 10 years before the 1954 civil rights decision that triggered the cause of black rights.
McGhee emerged after World War II as a leader in the Creek community of Poarch, Ala., near Atmore. Poarch had grown from a dozen or so Creeks who helped Andrew Jackson in his war against the tribe, and who were allowed to stay on their land.
By the 20th century, the Poarch Creek mixed-bloods no longer spoke their native tongue and lost most of the Creek religions and cultural tradition but were considered Indian enough to be excluded from Atmore's white schools, shops and restaurants.
In McGhee's time, most of the Poarch Creeks, who farmed at home and were at times migrant fruit pickers to supplement heir income, were illiterate. On Saturday when they went to the nearby city of Atmore to buy goods, they had to stay on a certain street.
For a Creek elementary school, local officials provided only a shanty and a teacher's salary. That was the limit of the Creeks' education. Creek children in outlying communities, who lived closer to Atmore than to Poarch, were bused to Poarch for classes.
Disgusted at the lack of response to Creek pleas for adequate education, McGhee filed suit against the school board in 1947. Before the suit was resolved, the school board relented and built a modern classroom. Poarch elementary school graduates were given the right to ride the bus into Atmore, and, for the first time, to attend high school.
The settlement was a compromise, for the school board originally offered to let McGhee's children attend their white schools if the tenacious little farmer would drop the matter-a suggestion he angrily rejected.
Before McGhee, most Alabama Creeks were indifferent to their ancestry. But this near-illiterate crusader, whose education ended at third grade, didn't stop with the issue of equal education but set a goal of redress from the federal government for protracted wrongs.
During his struggle, the Creeks in Alabama began to feel like a tribe again, and his movement spread to Florida and Georgia and encouraged descendants of other eastern tribes to rise up and be recognized again.
He formed Creek political organizations and had Creeks registered to vote, and soon ambitious Alabama politicians scrambled to have their pictures taken with the newly renowned Indian leader.
"Before Calvin, we weren't overlooked at the state level because we were Indian," recalls Buford Rolin, now a 36-year old Pensacola office worker who attended the old segregated Poarch school. "It was because they didn't know we were there."
To better remind them, Calvin bowed to a Hollywood stereotype and showcased himself in Plains Indian gear of buckskin and long feather headdresses-the only attire many Americans to this day recognize as Indian. The dress was a far cry from the traditional Creek trappings, which consisted of little more than Spanish moss skirt for women and plain vanilla loincloth for men. But the Plains Indian costume was definitely more photogenic.
By 1950, McGhee was ready to launch his second campaign-a legal battle seeking payment for millions of Creek acres taken during the 1830's removal. Creek descendants from all over Alabama held a mass meeting and officially organized as a tribe again, with Calvin their leader. During his election, Calvin was in Frostproof, [Florida] picking oranges to make ends meat.
The eastern Creeks discovered that their Oklahoma cousins, whom they hadn't seen since their removal in 1836, had already filed such a multimillion dollar claim. Alabama's Creeks, claiming to represent all descendants of their tribe east of the Mississippi, petitioned the new Indians Claims Commission to join the Oklahoma Creeks' suit.
The commission refused, saying there were no Creeks left east of the Mississippi. The U.S. Court of Claims a year later disagreed and ordered the commission to let Calvin's Creeks share in whatever award was made.
The issue finally came up for a commission vote in 1962. A confident Calvin stepped before the skeptical commission and, by using a Biblical allegory he had to memorize to be able to read, reminded the commissioners that the Creeks had once been a mighty empire of 55 towns before the Americans destroyed their way of life.
Nebuchadnezzar had pillaged Jerusalem and carried off most of the Jews. When the Jews finally returned, the tiny band of their brethren who escaped removal had built up Jerusalem's walls again, McGhee related to the commission.
"We're been building the walls of the Creek nation back up," he said, and the commission's opposition melted.
Lenore Thompson, at 70 still a busy lawyer in Bay Minette, Ala., interrupted a thriving law career in 1947 to work for McGhee's penniless band because of ancestral guilt.
His great-grandfather commanded a Georgia militia group in the 1800s that was formed to push Creeks off their land. "I felt someone in my lineage ought to do something for them," Thompson said.
Times have changed, and now the white businessmen of Atmore are eager to attract tourists by Creek museums and the like. For a long time after Calvin's suit against the school board, "merchants would stand with their backs to me on the streets," Thompson said.
Calvin, who died in 1970, never lived to see the $112 checks the Creek descendants received in 1972 from his victory before the Indian Claims commission. But his friends and relatives in Poarch were now getting high school diplomas, working in Atmore's carpet and lingerie factories, and trading their rotting shacks for brick houses.
Tuesday, October 19, 1976
Photo on front page: Gary Rings/Tampa Times
Preparing for the powwow
A youngster is garbed by his parents in a colorful Indian feather outfit
in preparation for a Creek powwow. The powwow is one of many that Creek
descendants have been celebrating on weekends. The festivities are usually
held to honor Creek customs, have a little fun, and, some critics charge,
make a fast buck. The lush feathers would not be recognized by their Creek
ancestors, most of whom wore simple loincloths before meeting white men.
(See stories and pictures in today's Local Focus section).
One of the chiefs of Pensacola's Creek Indian clans, a 45-year-old gravestone
chisler named Joe McGhee, presides in full headdress over a recent Creek
powwow outside Pensacola. Photo: Gary Rings/Tampa Times
The modern way
This Pensacola youth begins a frenzied whirling in the style of western
Indian dances. But all the dyed feathers are part of a modern Creek Indian
powwow, even though Creeks never wore such photogenic garb until the 20th
century.
The Creek Indians were a mighty empire in the southeastern U.S. until the white man came and the federal government moved them across the Mississippi River in the 1830's. A few Creeks hid and escaped exile, and their descendants are now re-forming into tribes and pursuing their ancestral culture after generations of "white" living. In this second of a three-part series, the factionalism among modern day Creeks is explored.
By Jim Seale
Times Staff Writer
There's a new Creek war raging. This time it's not the Creeks vs. Andrew Jackson, but Creeks on the bureaucratic warpath fighting other Creeks.
"These days, the Creek's greatest problem is not the whites but other Creeks," said one Tallahassee Creek descendant.
Creek descendants by the hundreds have been proclaiming their Indian blood in the Southeast in recent years. They are forming tribes, gathering for weekend powwows and applying for federal aid.
But the intertribal warfare has state and local officials in a quandary over which group is entitled to administer Indian programs.
"I'm not looking forward to making the decision on which Creek group in Florida will administer part of a $255,000 federal grant," said the director of Gov. Reubin Askew's council on Indian affairs.
"I can't handle their internal petty problems. They (each Creek faction) try to get you on their side," she said.
Five warring Creek "clans" in Pensacola-a center of the new Creek movement-jockey for preeminence and federal dollars. Three of them are competing for the same federal grants.
The five clans, none of which will have much to do with the others, were originally unified before a bitter splintering process began in 1973.
It began with the Lower Muskogees of Wesley Thomley, a 51-year-old paper mill worker who claims to be chief over all Florida Creeks. Thornley's loosely knit Lower Muskogees, composed of the many Pensacola-area Creek descendants newly fired up about their heritage, began attracting attention by dancing at public events.
But a faction within the growing Lower Muskogees split away in 1973 over dissatisfaction with the scheduling of dance practices, and formed the Coweta clan, dominated by its evangelical Baptist leaders.
The next year, the Cowetas suffered a bitter schism of their own that involved the management of the dance group, plus charges of favoritism in assigning dance roles and racial discrimination.
The Tuckabatchees, whose leaders are more nearly full-blooded Creek than those of other Pensacola clans, emerged from the Cowetas as the most traditionally Creek of Pensacola clans. Several Tuckabatchees said they left the Cowetas after being called "nigger" at a tension-filled Coweta meeting in 1973, a charge denied by Coweta chief W. V. Williams.
A domestic Tuckabatchee quarrel between a member, Tom Crook, and his wife led to Crook's leaving the group to form the Coosawattie Creek clan, said Crook and other Tuckabatchees. Crook, a 49-year-old factory mechanic, said his group is composed of many local Eagle Scouts and other non-Creeks, as well as Creek descendants.
A young construction company office manager named Buford Rolin, one of Pensacola's few "Indian-looking" Creek descendants, sought to bridge the divisions by creating a three-county Creek Indian council, which was formed in 1975 by the Florida Legislature.
"These little groups were springing up here and there and calling themselves the chief," said the silver-haired Rolin in his soft Alabama accent, more than one year after becoming council chairman. "I thought the council could organize things."
But the recently expanded 11-member council became a new source of controversy from the minute Gov. Reubin Askew announced his appointments to the body.
Those included fire Cowetas, two Lower Muskogees, Rolin and another Creek descendant who, like Rolin, deliberately stayed away from the clans to maintain neutrality.
Though council members claim the next vacancy will be filled by a Tuckabatchee, members of the clan cried foul over their exclusion. Thomley, who lobbied heavily in Tallahassee against the council's creation but keeps his seat, bad-mouths it between meetings and complains his group is outnumbered on the council by his archrivals, the Cowetas.
Thomley joined "that fake council" only "to see how crooked it would get, and it turned out the way I thought it would."
The tribal war entered a new phase last spring. Pensacola's fifth clan was born when Perloca Linton, who had been active with Creek movement founder Calvin McGhee and was once a Thomley ally, announced she was forming a group that would elect its chief.
Though council members said seats will be elective as soon as a Creek roll is drawn up, Mrs. Linton and her followers decry the Askew-appointed council for being beholden to whites.
The internecine battles spilled over onto the pages of the Panhandle's leading newspaper, the Pensacola News-Journal, which reserved editorial space for Creek leaders regarding Mrs. Linton's controversial election.
Just before the June 19 balloting, the News-Journal, along with much of non-Indian Pensacola, entered the fray. The newspaper supported the legislature's council over Mrs. Linton's group.
Fewer than 400 voted, which even election sponsors said was disappointing but blamed on the News-Journal's opposition.
Leroy Morris, an obese, 51-year-old TV wrestling program narrator who lives in Pensacola's fashionable North Hill section, won the election and became the area's fifth clan chief.
Morris said he will head a council of representatives from seven panhandle counties-over which he will be chief. Subcouncils in each county will also be formed, he said.
His election opponent, Crook, now says he was "used" by Mrs. Linton in the affair to get an opponent for Morris, who he said Mrs. Linton campaigned for. Crook and his supporters also charged Mrs. Linton with not telling them the location of two polling places.
The contention leaves four Creek groups in Pensacola seeking to administer Indian programs-and not one of them will work with another.
Mrs. Linton's seven-county council plans a census of Creek descendants in Florida and will apply for federal Indian grants. The legislature's council also intends to make up a census and to seek grants.
Tomley said he will keep his council seat but said his clan will join an "Amalgamated consortium" run by a Creek group in Georgia which will compete with both councils for the same grants.
Meanwhile, a private, nonprofit agency with a Pensacola office, the Community Action Program Committee, Inc., will not turn its Indian manpower program over to the councils but will continue applying for federal grants, agency staffer Ann Pate, a Creek clan member, said.
Alliances are sometimes attempted, but currently the Cowetas won't talk to the Lower Muskogees. The Tuckabatchees spurn Thomley's attempts at union with his clan, and they won't stay in the same room with the Cowetas. The Cooswatties remain enemies of the Tuckabatchees.
All clan leaders oppose Mrs. Linton, whom they see as the real power behind Morris, and who is accused of opposing the other organizations merely because she is not running things any more.
Mrs. Linton who calls herself "the mother" of the modern Creek nation east of the Mississippi, proudly remembers the days when she was a girl Friday to the late Calvin McGhee, founder of the modern Creek nation.
"My only concern is for the Creek people. But I'm afraid I see more and more clans and more and more disunity," she told The Times in her comfortable Pensacola home, which contained few traces of Indian culture.
Other Pensacola Creeks are skeptical. Ed Tullis and other Creek descendants see her as a long-time sponge on their kind, recalling the days when she was a one-woman genealogy agency and charged many a fee for tracing their lineage.
"For 20 years she's made her living off Indians and she doesn't want it to end," Tullis said. Of her claim to a formative role in the Creek movement, Hugh Rozzelle, a lawyer in many of McGhee's legal struggles, said, "This effort went on 16 years, and she got in on the tail end as far as I'm concerned."
They also snicker at Morris' claim of Creek blood. They claim he announced at a Creek powwow he emceed in the fall of 1975 that he wasn't an Indian and became an honorary tribe member at the weekend affair.
"Leroy's father would turn over in his grave if he knew Leroy was running around in feathers," said Carolyn McDaniel, a Coweta Creek who has known Morris "all my life."
Morris acknowledged he hasn't proven his Creek ancestry to the federal government's satisfaction, but denies ever denying Indian lineage.
Rival clan leaders accuse Thomley of the same grasping motives they attribute to Mrs. Linton. Thomley feels his title of chief over all Florida Creeks is undercut by the other councils, which don't recognize his authority, they say.
Thomley retorts: "They hate me with a passion because they all want to be chief."
Numerous Creeks across Florida have been asked by Thomley and Mrs. Linton's group to join their organizations. The recruiting campaign has become so intense that Creek leaders have even sought to "sign up" children during class hours, complained Jack Bridges, a spokesman for the Escambia County school board.
"The more people we represent the more federal funds we can qualify for," Morris explained.
Besides the "pure hatred" which Morris said some eastern Creeks feel for each other, there's the suspicion that the Oklahoma Creeks and Florida's two Seminole and Miccosukee reservation tribes are out to undercut their federal funding.
Soon after a Times reporter began inquiring into the Creek movement, the rumor spread among Pensacola and Tallahassee Creeks that the Times staffer was a Seminole agent trying to find Creek skeletons for future use.
"You are probably getting paid by the people in south Florida or those Creeks in Oklahoma," Thomley said.
"It's a question just where you did come from. We really do wonder," said Ann Pate, a Thomley clan member who runs an Indian manpower program investigated by the Times.
The intertribal warfare boils down to a battle of grantmanship, Creek leaders know. Whichever one gets the federal grants will win the Creek civil war.
Amidst the backbiting by prosperous clan chiefs itching to administer federal grants for other economically-deprived Creeks, the genuinely needy Creek is being ignored, said Joe Mooney, the non-Indian director of a county agency that used to serve as staff to the legislature's council.
The sharecropping of north Florida Creek descendants isn't the livelihood it used to be, Creek leaders claim, and the condition of rural Creeks is getting worse.
Mooney said, "I've seen young women from rural areas around here come into these council meetings with no teeth, and their physical condition is terrible. These people are still suffering the effects of past discrimination against Indians."
Photo: Gary Rings/Tampa Times
He's a Plains dresser
The Paunchy, self-proclaimed chief of the Florida Creek Nation, Wesley
Thomley, poses in his Plains Indian headdress with his wife, Ruth Billie,
and Phlecia Partain, the young winner of a Creek beauty pageant. While
few Creeks recognize Thomley's claim to the throne, Thomley is probably
the most photographed of all Creek leaders.
Wesley Thomley clings fast to his purely ceremonial title of chief of the Creek nation in Florida even in the middle of one of the worst civil wars in the tribe's history.
Tomley, a paunchy, 51-year-old paper mill worker form the Pensacola area, is recognized by few Florida Creeks as their leader. Florida's Creek descendants are having trouble deciding which tribal group they recognize as being official, with Pensacola being the battle grounds for five warring Creek "clans."
What Thomley lacks in support from his tribes, he makes up for in sheer media appeal. More than any other Florida Creek leader, he is most often pictured in newspapers across the Southeast-usually in colorful Plains Indian headdress.
Ancestral intermarriage has bred some of the Creek blood out of Thomley, and he said if he didn't dress as a Plains Indian no one would recognize his prominence.
"Up at a festival one time they asked us to wear traditional Creek costumes. I wore mine the first day and I didn't have a single person come up and talk to me," Thomley said.
"You see, you dress for TV," added his wife, Ruth Billie, helping her husband into his headgear of dyed feathers.
Thomley and his wife recently talked to a Times reporter in their home about the tribulations of being Creek leaders these days. During the interview, the chief posed in costume for a Times photographer while Mrs. Thomley occasionally fired orders to their black housemaid.
Thomley was born and raised in the dirt farming country of Monroe County, Ala., where he said he never encountered prejudice even though neighbors knew of his Creek lineage.
"Will you come in here and hit this thing on the head?" shouted Mrs. Thomley to the maid, as a large cockroach raced out from under the legs of her chair and stopped inches from her ankles.
Thomley explained that he became active in the recent Creek movement "for the purpose of helping the Indians."
"That AIM group-the radical American Indian Movement-I think they had a good point in what they were asking for," a costumed Thomley said while sitting on his front porch. "But the way they went about it, I don't agree with that."
"Wesley, you better get your comb out and comb your hair," Mrs. Thomley interrupted, before telling the maid "go down to the corner and bring up something to drink."
Thomley can't speak the native Creek tongue, but said because he was brought up as a white he never had the chance to learn.
While Thomley keeps a firm grasp on his crown, three other men make competing claims to the big title-chief of the Creek nation east of the Mississippi. The claimants include:
--Houston McGhee, a middle-aged, carpet factory worker in Atmore, Ala., and the handpicked successor of his father, the late Calvin McGhee, who founded the modern Creek movement and the closest thing to a universally recognized chief the eastern Creeks ever had.
McGhee, who does not have a phone and could not be reached for comment, is described as a retiring type who won't make the weekend powwow circuit or pursue the news media enough to keep his tribe united. "He's almost a non-existent leader," said Jack Gregory, a university professor who worked with Pensacola's Creek clans.
--Arthur Turner, a 67-year-old from Florala, Ala. Turner said he was elected by a Creek council of from nine to 18 members, "depending on how many we need."
Turner said his 380-member group wants federal funds for a planned Creek arts and crafts school, and to build a replica of an old Creek village to attract tourists.
He called Thomley who is allied to one of his rival claimants a "Johnny come lately" to the Creek cause. Thomley left Turner's group several years ago after the Florala council would not name Thomley the chief, as had been planned, Turner said.
--Neal McCormick, a Cairo, Ga., country and western music singer who claims to be the great great grandson of Creek chief William McIntosh. McIntosh was put to death by fellow tribesmen in the 1800's for signing away millions of Creek acres without consulting the tribe.
McCormick and his wife Peggy, who were honored in a 1973 executive order of then-Georgia Gov Jimmy Carter, have purchased land in Cairo they are trying to turn into a reservation. A museum of Creek culture, schools and a health center will be built on the reservation, Mrs. McCormick said.
Mrs. McCormick, who manages the reservation affairs, pointed out that Creeks in Georgia were not torn by the same rampant factionalism that plagues Florida Creeks.
"Over there lately everybody wants to be chief, everybody wants to be lead dancer, everybody wants to be princess."
October 20, 1976
Local Focus, Section E
Photo: Gary Rings/Tampa Times
Dancing to the drumbeat
The drums at a Pensacola powwow pound the beat to which young, feather-clad
Creek descendants dance. While some Creeks refuse federal funds, which
they say is bowing to commercialism, other Creek groups pursue the federal
funding trail relentlessly. Some groups have misspend the money, officials
claim.
The Creek Indians controlled a mighty empire in the southeastern United States until the white man came and the federal government moved them across the Mississippi River in the 1830s. A few Creeks hid and escaped exile, and now their descendants are re-forming into tribes and pursuing their ancestral culture after generations of "white" living. In the last of a three-part series, Times staff writer Jim Seale examines how federal funds to modern-day Creeks are being spent.
By Jim Seale
Times Staff Writer
The new eastern Creek Indian movement has brought the Southeast a lot of festive weekend powwow dancing, a new awareness of Creek Indians' role in American history and personal fulfillment to modern day Creek descendants.
But red-faced federal officials admit it has also been the subject of misspending of federal funds, plus outright fraud.
Creek descendants in the Southeast have been proclaiming their heritage for the first time, forming tribes and cashing in on the increasing amount of federal aid available to non-reservation Indians.
In the case of a $60,000 federal grant awarded to an "Indian" group in Eastpoint, and a belated federal survey revealed the recipients were not Indians.
For another $86,000 grant to a Cairo, Ga., Creek group last year, part of which funded arts and crafts classes in Pensacola the program director said money from arts and crafts sale went into a private fund.
"It seems we were taken in. The people in that program were not really Indian," said Hakim Kahn, a federal official overseeing the $60,000 Eastpoint grant.
"The whole thing was kind of embarrassing to my boss," said Khan, who journeyed to the tiny gulf coast fishing community in the program's last weeks to see its results.
Khan's survey came to light after a Tampa Times reporter investigated complaints of Eastpoint's Creek descendants, who said they were not included in the program.
Mrs. Opel McMillan, who received and administered the grant, said she had destroyed all program records when a Times reporter asked to see them. Contacted earlier, her husband Howard said the records were in their home.
"When I told her (Mrs. McMillan) I'd come down to check on her program she got kind of touchy," Kahn recalls. "All she wanted to know was whether she would get her funding next year."
"This program was kind of a new thing for us and everything was hurried. Now we are more knowledgeable about the Indians," Khan said. "This is just the one case that slipped by."
Mrs. McMillan insists Khan is mistaken, and that those in her handicraft, carpentry, welding and crocheting classes were Indian even though they didn't have the documents to prove it.
Sun-wizened old Ed Evans, chief of the Creek descendants in economically-depressed Eastpoint, said, "She wouldn't talk to nobody about the money she got."
"Those who really need that Indian money don't get it," said Evans, sitting in the squalid, trash-littered yard outside the two ram-shackle trailers he and his wife call home.
Billy Granger, a non-Indian neighbor of Evans, said he was paid under Mrs. McMillan's program to teach carpentry to several young boys for several weeks-even though Khan said federal guidelines intended the program for Indian adults.
On one occasion he supervised the boys during class time while they built a structure a man paid him to construct, Granger said. Granger said he couldn't remember how much he was paid under the program, but he said his classes only lasted a few weeks.
"I don't think my classes were too successful. The boys didn't take it seriously enough," Granger said.
Money from the sale of arts and crafts made under a federal program went into the private tribal fund of Pensacola clan chief Wesley Thomley, said Peggy McCormmick, a Cairo Creek leader who administered the program.
Because the action violated federal rules, the Cairo group headed by Neal and Peggy McCormick was assessed $5,000 by United Southeastern Tribes (USET), a Nashville-based agency that distributed the $86,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Labor.
Pensacola youths who attended the classes in the summer of 1975 said they were told by the program's administrators that the crafts they made would be put into a museum.
But they complained that they saw their work being sold months later at arts and crafts shows in the Pensacola area, with the items advertised as the work of the clan of Thomley-whose wife helped run the Pensacola classes for Mrs. McCormick.
Mrs. Thomley and Mrs. Linton, who taught the classes for several weeks, acknowledged the handicrafts were sold but both said the revenue was put back into the program.
Thomley heads one of five warring Creek clans in Pensacola, and is an ally of McCormick, whose claim of chief of all Creeks east of the Mississippi is disputed by many Pensacola Creeks.
USET official Bobby Crooks, who monitored the McCormicks' program, said Mrs. McCormick "did her best to screw USET out of whatever she could."
There was suspicion of their program when our officer came down there to do a mini-audit. He said we should further explore it because there were questionable costs," Crooks said.
Crooks also said the McCormicks had no authority to distribute funds to Pensacola and Tallahassee, where arts and crafts classes were held.
The McCormicks will probably get no more funds through USET because of the incident.
The department of labor in August began investigating the grant "probably" because of the Tampa Times investigation, Crooks said.
"He is a big, black, nigger-looking liar," said the fiery Mrs. McCormick from her wood paneled Cairo office, when asked about Crooks' comments.
"The money that came from the crafts sale is none of Bobby Crooks' business. We had every right to sell those crafts," said Mrs. McCormick, who acknowledged paying back about $5,000 to USET, but said she admitted no wrongdoing by the payment.
When a Tampa Times reporter asked to see the program records, Mrs. McCormick said she didn't have time to go through them all.
USET is responsible for any funds misspend under the grant, said Sandy McNabb, of the office of Indian and native American programs which supplied the McCormick's grant.
"We'll do an audit of the program, but information we have shows about 50 per cent of the costs were disallowed costs under the guidelines," Bob Columbo, who works under McNabb, said.
Pensacola Creek leaders complain that a grant for a $75,000 Indian manpower program, being run by a Thomley clan member, is not being spent impartially.
The grant is being used to put 18 youths of Indian descent through vocational rehabilitation, said Ann Pate of private, non-profit Community Action Program Committee, Inc. of Pensacola-which is in charge of the program.
But leaders of clans opposed to Thomley say Mrs. Pate, a member of Thomley's Lower Muskogee group, is discriminating against members of other clans in accepting program clients.
"This is a completely illegitimate program," said W. V. Williams, chief of the Coweta clan.
Mrs. Pate refused to release the names of 18 people in the program, but said none of them were members of Thomley's clan.
The federal freedom of information act mandates that such names be public information, said McNabb, whose office awarded the grant. "Those names are public information, but there's no specific penalty" for violating the act, McNabb said.
State and federal officials controlling the purse strings to Indian money, said Creek groups east of the Mississippi present a special dilemma to them when it comes to choosing which Creek group will administer funds locally.
Even though many eastern Creeks are very Caucasian-looking, most of the more than 30 federal agencies dispensing Indian programs don't require proof of ancestry-which officials admit leaves the programs open to white infiltration.
Another problem is discriminating between the often competing claims of Creek groups, some of which are new, unstable organizations, officials say.
"In the past, these programs have been lax. But they (federal agencies) don't give you any restrictions to work with," said Jan Tuveson of Governor's Council on Indian Affairs, which decides which Creek groups to award grants too. "Fortunately, we don't have much money so no one can rip us off too much."
Because there is no clearing-house for the Indian grants given out by more than 30 separate federal offices, there's no guarantee that Creek groups deservedly cut off by one federal office won't shop around and get funding from another, McNabb said.
McNabb, whose office awards manpower grants to scores of Indian tribes on and off reservations, said Creeks are no more disorganized than other non-reservation groups.
But a "bleeding-heart press," along with the rest of American society suffering with newly realized guilt over America's crimes against Indians, contributes to some of the Indian flimflam, one part-Indian federal offical said.
"As a result, the white man puts the money on the stump and just goes," he said. The official recalls the case of a fly-by-night tribe whose manpower grant was withdrawn.
"What a nightmare. We gave them a grant for a manpower program, but they decided they wanted to start a restaurant with it instead and spent $50,000 on that before we stopped them."
After the agency called a halt to the shenanigans, the local newspaper related an Indian tale of woe with a banner headline: "Another Treaty Broken."