Dec 30, 2021

Creek Nation Road runs between Ga. 124 and Ga. 332 in Jackson County. The name might be curious to some, but old-timers and history buffs know why it came about.

Creek Indians once roamed the county in large numbers. They co-existed with the Cherokees, though at times the tribes fought each other and were considered rivals.

Beth Laughinghouse of the Jackson County Historical Society said her uncle, Freddie Phillips, lived on Creek Nation Road and was all the time finding Indian artifacts on his property.

A historical account by Frary Elrod, late superintendent of Jackson County Schools, relates a story where the Creeks and Cherokees settled a boundary dispute with a stickball game. The two tribes had lived peacefully in the same territory, but each had its own hunting lands. The Cherokees are said to have won the ball game, thus the disputed territory. Native Americans in other locations had settled their disputes with stickball games, which are similar to today’s lacrosse.

It wasn’t always peaceful between the Cherokees and the Creeks as a battle between them was fought in east Jackson County near Hurricane Shoals between the Mulberry River and Locoda Trail.

The popular Hurricane Shoals creek and campground were stomping grounds for Native Americans. The Indian name was Yamtacoochee. The Tumbling Waters Society of Jackson County says the Hurricane Shoals settlement was the site of the county’s first church, and it also contained a fort, foundry, school and grist mill.

In 1818, somebody in the Legislature proposed digging a canal from the Chattahoochee River south to the North Oconee River in Jackson County. Residents in the area opposed it because their beloved Hurricane Shoals and surrounding area would be flooded, they said.

In a speech that reached the height of exaggeration, John Stebbins ridiculed the idea, according to “The Early History of Jackson County” by J.G.N. Wilson: “What, Mr. Speaker, will become of me and my family when the Chattahoochee, three miles wide, a thousand feet deep and 10 miles higher than the sea is turned loose at the rate of 40 miles per minute on lower Georgia? Why, sir, it will wash every one of us away, and if we don’t get drowned, we will wake up some morning and find ourselves astraddle of logs floating about in the Atlantic Ocean. Yes, sir, the mountains of North Georgia will come tumbling down here and knock our statehouse into a cocked hat, and people will look out of their top windows to see if old Father Noah is again sailing around in his big ship. Besides all of this, if we turn the vast volume of water that is in the Chattahoochee from the channel where God made it run, the Gulf of Mexico would go dry, and the fish, whales, alligators and snakes in it would stink so bad that nobody could live in 10,000 miles of its shore.”

The proposal failed, though it’s unknown how much Stebbins’s speech had to do with it. The controversy, however, inspired some Jackson County residents to unsuccessfully seek to form a new county named for Unicoy, an Indian princess.

Native Americans built a holy ground on the North Oconee River near Hurricane Shoals. A statue is said to have stood on a mound there. Another holy place was established on Barber’s Creek near Winder. Called Nodoroc, it was a swamp of boiling mud that the Indians thought produced evil spirits. They erected a temple on the site.

Jackson Trail is a roadway marking where Gen. Andrew Jackson traveled through the county. Jackson ran off the Creek Indians along the Georgia-Alabama border. Incidentally, the county is named for James Jackson, a Revolutionary War veteran, not Andrew Jackson.

We think of the Cherokees as North Georgia’s Native Americans because they occupied the mountains and much of the area north of the Chattahoochee River. But the Creeks had a prominent presence in the area, significantly in Jackson County. Both the Cherokees and the Creeks were part of the Trail of Tears in which they were forced out of Georgia into the Oklahoma territory in the mid-1830s.

Original post: https://www.gainesvilletimes.com/columnists/johnny-vardeman/column-area-creeks-trace-native-american-history/

Dec 30, 2021

Research has shown that Native American mascots provoke racist stereotypes and harm the self-esteem of Native youth. But what happens when a mascot is removed, as several college and professional teams have done?

“I remember seeing lots of racist reactions to the Cleveland Indians’ decision to discontinue their mascot ‘Chief Wahoo,'” says Tyler Jimenez, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Washington and lead author of two studies in the journal Group Processes and Intergroup Relations. “This research tries to understand why some people react in this way.”

More than 2,000 mascots referencing Indigenous terms and images are estimated to exist in the US today, from high school to pro sports, including the Atlanta Braves, with their “tomahawk chop” chant that gained renewed attention during the 2021 World Series.

For the new studies, researchers surveyed people’s attitudes relative to the removal of two other well-known mascots: the Cleveland Indians’ Chief Wahoo, eliminated from uniforms and merchandising in 2018; and the University of Illinois’ Chief Illiniwek, discontinued in 2007. (The Cleveland Indians during the 2021 season announced a name change to the Guardians.)

The studies also explored the role of two related beliefs, namely racial colorblindness—the idea that race has no bearing on decisions or events—and worldview threat, an individual’s perception that the way society functions is under attack.

The research took the form of two separate online studies. The first, conducted in 2018, recruited a little more than half of its nearly 400 participants from Ohio and Maryland—where, at the time, two mascot-related developments had occurred.

The Washington Redskins had just announced they would continue to use their name and mascot, while the Cleveland Indians had just removed theirs. (The Redskins dropped their name and logo in 2020 and are known as the Washington Football Team.)

The study posed a fictional legal dilemma for participants to read about—vandalism, committed by a Native American, at either the Cleveland ballpark or Maryland stadium; or, as a neutral scenario, vandalism at the Kansas City Royals ballpark related to ticket price hikes. Each participant was randomly assigned one of the readings and asked to recommend bail for the arrested perpetrator.

Results showed that Ohio residents set the highest bail in the Cleveland case—substantially higher than the other scenarios, and when compared to participants from other locations. Maryland residents set only a slightly higher bail for the case in their home state than they did for the Cleveland or Kansas City scenarios.

The findings suggest that prejudice against Native Americans might increase in areas where a mascot has been removed, Jimenez says.

The second study relied on the use of hundreds of thousands of responses from Project Implicit, an online platform for collecting data about bias and educating about prejudice and stereotypes, co-created by Tony Greenwald, an emeritus professor of psychology at the University of Washington. Among the many topics Project Implicit covers are ideas about and bias against Native Americans.

Jimenez’s study used datasets from Project Implicit participants nationwide between 2004 and 2019, and two smaller subsets: one from the year before and after the removal of Chief Wahoo in Cleveland, and another from the year before and after the removal of Chief Illiniwek at the University of Illinois.

Based on responses to Project Implicit questions, prejudice against Native Americans increased in the year after a mascot was removed—specifically among Ohio residents after the discontinuation of Chief Wahoo; and, after the removal of Chief Illiniwek, among residents not only of Illinois, but also among those of all other states.

That may have been due, Jimenez and his coauthors write, to the fact that the NCAA, not the team, made the decision to discontinue the mascot, which affected teams across the country because it banned any team with a Native American mascot from appearing on TV.

Over time, evidence of anti-Native American prejudice in Illinois declined, suggesting that a spike in such attitudes following the removal of a mascot might not last, the authors write.

The increase in racism, however temporary, should not be seen as a reason to retain Native American mascots, Jimenez says. Instead, these findings could inform how to approach removing mascots so as to mitigate racist attitudes and actions.

“Native people have been pushing sports teams to stop using Native ‘themed’ mascots for decades. Adding to this push, our findings suggest that more needs to be done,” Jimenez says.

“In addition to removing these harmful mascots, we should prepare for backlash by developing prejudice reduction interventions and directing resources to Native people, tribes, and other organizations.”

Original post: https://www.futurity.org/native-american-mascots-prejudice-2672702-2/