From Eufaula to Eufaula

A complex history weaves along the Trail of Tears to connect Eufaula, Alabama, with its namesake in Oklahoma. 

Words by Carrie Monahan
Photos by David Walter Banks & Michael Noble Jr.

Jessica Hatcher braids the hair of her husband Cody Holland, the third great-grandson of Jackson Lewis. 

Jackson Lewis was born in southeast Alabama in 1831, the year after President Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act into law. As his family prepared to abandon their homeland for the sandstone hills of Indian Territory, Lewis’s father, Tommy Harjo, embraced his wife and son: “Don’t look back,” he told them — like the angels warned Lot’s wife as she fled the destruction of Sodom. 

Tiger tears up at the mic, revealing that a white man killed Harjo before they could leave Alabama. Harjo was buried, following Creek custom, inside his house in a grave dug out from the dirt floor. A three-foot-high “spirit house,” made of split planks and clay, was raised over him, sheltering his soul on its way to the afterlife. Leaving home for Indian Territory, Lewis and his mother, Sa Cee Make, had no choice but to leave Harjo’s bones behind.

Traveling with his newly widowed mother, 8-year-old Cacoke (or “Little Jack”) almost drowned at the crossing of the Mississippi River. He fell off his pony into the raging water, but managed to grab its tail. As the pony pulled the boy to the other side, witnesses swore they saw a tiny man (estē lopócke) sitting on the pony’s head.

“This would be a sign that he possessed a powerful medicinal purpose,” says Tiger, Jackson Lewis’s great-great-grandson. “From the day the river was crossed, the little people were teaching him how to doctor sick people in the new land with new herbs and plants.” Settling among other displaced Creek people, Lewis and his mother ended up 3 miles east of Eufaula in North Fork Town: a Texas Road trading post that’s now buried under the largest lake in Oklahoma.

In his adopted home, Lewis was respected as a stickball player, hunter, entrepreneur, Baptist deacon, Mason, and member of the Creek National Council. But the multihyphenate was best known as a talented doctor who healed both Native and white people alike, despite never learning a word of English. After much of his tribe, who were promised sovereignty and the preservation of slavery, sided with the South during the Civil War, Lewis served as a medic in the Confederate Army’s 2nd Creek Infantry Regiment. His expertise in the traditional ways of Muscogee medicine was instrumental in the writing of anthropologist John Swanton’s “Religious Beliefs and Medical Practices of the Creek Indians,” a 1928 Smithsonian Institution report that would forever change how historians think and write about the Indigenous South.

There are two Southern places called Eufaula: a Mvskoke word that loosely, and prophetically, translates to “from here they split up and went many places.” One is on the Canadian River in eastern Oklahoma, the other on the Chattahoochee River in southeast Alabama. Each sits on an eponymous manmade lake — a point of confusion for vacationers, though the lake on the Alabama-Georgia border is officially known as Walter F. George Reservoir. Likewise dammed in the 1960s for the purpose of federal flood control, Oklahoma’s Lake Eufaula was carved from 105,000 acres of mostly Muscogee land — depending on one’s interpretation of Indian Territory.

In 1837, my fourth-great-grandfather, Reuben Clark Shorter, crossed the Chattahoochee from Georgia and settled in the other Eufaula, where he earned the nickname “General Shorter” for financing the ethnic cleansing of what is now Barbour County, Alabama. With the last of the Creeks slaughtered, starved, or removed, Shorter went on to forge his cotton empire over millennia’s worth of Indigenous bones. That empire, of course, was built by the human beings he enslaved — 119 of whom were divided among his descendants upon his death in 1853.

Today in Eufaula, Alabama — where many white residents cling to a fantasy of cavaliers, cotton fields, and bygone prosperity — pamphlets celebrate Shorter as a “famous Indian fighter.” His grandson’s Neoclassical Revival mansion headquarters the Eufaula Heritage Association, responsible for the Eufaula Pilgrimage, Alabama’s oldest tour of homes, held since 1966. Among the town’s 700 historic structures is an 1850s Greek Revival home built for my third great-grandfather, Charles Mathuron Couric: a French orphan turned cotton broker whose son married General Shorter’s granddaughter.

A born-and-bred New Yorker, I first came to Alabama at age 15 to bury my maternal grandfather. Back then, Papa, who retained his Georgia drawl despite decades living in the suburbs of D.C., was the only real-life Southerner I’d ever known — the reason why my sister and I ate grits and pronounced “pee-can” pih-KAHN. Fifteen years before he died, he’d written a letter to his children with detailed post-mortem plans: he would be cremated, transported 800 miles southwest, and interred in his father’s hometown on the bluffs of the Chattahoochee.

Walking with my cousins through our third- great-grandfather’s mansion, I could only imagine the cruelty that built its six Doric columns and 14-foot ceilings. Five years later, I’d return as a college student to conduct research for my thesis, staying in the house for several weeks with its longtime owner, Ann Smith. A widow six decades my senior, Miss Ann soon became my honorary “Memaw,” telling me her life story and teaching me her lexicon (“fixing to,” “make a picture,” “might could”) over chicken salad and chess pie at her kitchen table.

That summer, I found myself standing in a Walmart parking lot where enslaved Eufaulans once picked cotton and later an unmarked patch off AL-30 where a white mob, including my grandfather’s uncle, lynched a Black teenager named Iver Peterson in 1911. Acknowledging the culpability of my own ancestors, my thesis explored Eufaula’s legacy of racial violence and the will of its white descendants to forget.

Last year, I resumed my ancestral excavation, this time digging deeper into my family’s role in Indigenous displacement and genocide. Having encountered Oklahoma’s Eufaula on Wikipedia, I knew only that the homonymous towns were linked by the Trail of Tears. What became of the Creeks whom “General Shorter” helped remove? The ones who had staved off starvation, smallpox, and steamboat wrecks on their way to Indian Territory? What about their descendants?

Finding a page called “Eufaula Indian Community” on Facebook, I sent a message asking to speak with Tribal elders about their Chattahoochee roots. A few days later, I got a call from Jon Tiger, who shared with me the extraordinary story of his ancestor, Jackson Lewis. Last June, when I reached back out about driving from Eufaula, Oklahoma, to Eufaula, Alabama, to report on their disparate narratives of Indigenous history, Tiger invited me to Jackson Lewis Day: a family reunion coinciding with the weekend-long Muscogee Nation Festival in nearby Okmulgee.

The Couric-Smith House in Eufaula, Alabama. Photo by David Walter Banks.

Landing in Tulsa, I blast the AC and “Oklahoma!” as soon as I get in my rental car. As I cruise south in my white Chevy Malibu, there are few indications I’m in Indian Territory, save for an occasional Muscogee Nation license plate. I dictate roadside observations to Siri: near Bixby, a compound called “Blue Flame 47” (according to Reddit, a possible cult); passing Haskell, my first armadillo (dead, I think); in Boynton, an abandoned limousine sprouting weeds from its busted windows.

Eufaula, a town of less than 3,000 in rural McIntosh County, much resembles the lakeside town I know on the Chattahoochee: bait and tackle shops, RV parks, churches of denominations I’ve never heard of. There’s a Wild West frontier feel to the landscape, though — reflected in the glut of weed dispensaries fueled by Oklahoma’s lax licensing laws in recent years. Downtown features a Braum’s Ice Cream & Dairy Store, a Sooner State staple known for its $5 bags of burgers, and a Creek Nation Casino that from the outside resembles a cluster of shipping containers.

Before sunset, I head to Captain John’s, a bustling seafood spot serving up Cajun specialties, including fried gator tail. The place is packed with white families with sunburnt kids and dads in T-shirts printed with sayings like “THIS IS MY BEER SHIRT.” In one corner, a wooden cigar store Indian stands stern-faced in a red, white, and blue loin cloth. Sporting a giant war bonnet, it’s clear that he isn’t Creek — though neither are most Eufaulans. Today, most of the land once defined as Indian Territory — long since divided into allotments, flooded with land rushers, and annexed to form the State of Oklahoma — is mostly owned by white people. Indeed, the Muscogee split up and went many places from this Eufaula too, where less than a quarter of residents now identify as solely or partly Indigenous American.

Surprisingly, in 2020, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in McGirt v. Oklahoma that Congress had never disestablished the Muscogee (Creek) Nation’s 5,000-square-mile reservation in eastern Oklahoma. In 1866, Congress signed a series of Reconstruction treaties dividing Indian Territory among the so-called Five Civilized Tribes — the Muscogee (Creek), Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Seminole — removed from the Southeast a generation earlier. In maintaining that Congress, despite 150 years of legislation disempowering Native tribes, had never dissolved those treaties, the Court reaffirmed most of eastern Oklahoma as reservation land. Though a major win for tribal sovereignty, that reservation status is limited to the enforcement of the Major Crimes Act, which has granted the federal government jurisdiction over violent crimes committed by or against Native Americans in “Indian Country” since 1885.

The Muscogee Nation Festival is held in Okmulgee — the primary backdrop for the fic-tional town of “Okern” on FX’s “Reservation Dogs” and the Nation’s capital since 1868. I arrive to find hundreds of locals gathered to watch the morning’s Festival Parade. 

Highlights include a potpourri of Native royalty, from “Miss Oklahoma Indian Bikers Princess” to “Junior Miss Indian Tulsa Princess,” waving from the hoods of cars; the Muscogee Lady Legends, a senior women’s basketball team, blowing bubbles on a flatbed trailer; and Principal Chief David Hill and Second Chief Del Beaver throwing candy from golf carts. From the Muscogee (Creek) Nation EMS to the Lighthorse Police to the College of the Muscogee Nation, the procession reflects the diverse facets of the Nation as a legal, economic, and cultural entity. But it also reflects the diverse, and sometimes discordant, definitions of what it means to be Muscogee.

The Muscogee Nation Honor Guard, composed of veterans from World War II through Operation Desert Storm, carries Muscogee Nation and American flags alike — marching as proud dual citizens notwithstanding the betrayal and brutality of history. Meanwhile, the Muscogee Creek Indian Freedmen Band, descended from Black families the tribe once enslaved, pumps up the crowd to Michael Jackson’s “P.Y.T.” despite the Nation’s refusal to make them Muscogee citizens.

By 1860, the Muscogee had enslaved 1,532 individuals of African descent, some of whom had accompanied their enslavers on the Trail of Tears. After the Civil War, the same set of treaties that defined eastern Oklahoma as “Indian Territory” also granted the Five Tribes’ nearly 10,000 newly emancipated freedmen “all the rights and privileges of native citizens.”

Three decades later, the Dawes Commission, breaking up sovereign tribal territories into individual family allotments, relegated the Five Tribes’ Freedmen to separate rolls. In 1979, that separate status enabled the Muscogee (Creek) Nation to disenfranchise hundreds of Black Muscogee by limiting tribal citizenship to descendants “by blood.” Nonetheless, using the Supreme Court’s reliance on the 1866 Treaty in McGirt, two descendants of Muscogee Freedmen are currently locked in a years-long legal battle with the Nation’s citizenship board.

On the edge of the festival’s craft fair tent (where Jon Tiger is selling artwork between tables of turquoise jewelry, mini medicine bags, and “LAND BACK” T-shirts), 57-year-old Bobbie Irvin, a descendant of both a Creek Freedman and a Creek by Blood, polishes the red, vintage Indian motorcycle he rode here from Kansas City. A member of the Mvskoke Riders, he is promoting the upcoming Trail of Tears Commemorative Motorcycle Ride — an annual biker caravan from Cherokee, North Carolina, to the Seminole Nation headquarters in Wewoka, Oklahoma. Though Irvin, a retired cop, has had his citizenship card since 1995, he says he only began to fully embrace his Native identity a few years ago.

“When I retired, I said, ‘You know what? I need to find out more about my people,’” Irvin says, pointing out the Muscogee Nation logo freshly tattooed on his bicep. But despite his commitment to his heritage and ancestry by blood, there are still limits to his acceptance as a Black Muscogee. 

Even his friend and fellow Mvskoke Rider Dan Beaver admits Irvin would not be welcome on his traditional ceremonial grounds “because he don’t look Native.”

Bobbie Irvin, a descendant of both a Creek Freedman and a Creek by Blood, has a tattoo of the Muscogee Nation’s logo, a rebrand in the wake of McGirt v. Oklahoma (2020), on his forearm. Photos by Michael Noble Jr.

Beaver is displaying one of the hand-crafted gunstock war clubs (eto nvfketv), of which he says he is the last known person to make. In dark sunglasses and a Mvskoke Riders motorcycle vest, he is also showing off the black Harley-Davidson he revved and rode alongside Irvin in this morning’s parade.

“You’re going to run into two types of Natives here,” Beaver explains. “You’ve got the traditionalists like myself, and you’ve got the ones who’ve been colonized.” He considers several of his own family members, practicing Baptists like most Muscogee, among the latter. But the prejudice, he says, goes both ways — noting an uncle who “blasts” Beaver to his church congregation for celebrating the Green Corn Ceremony (posketv).

A “Miracle Baby” born in the early 1970s, a time when the Indian Health Service sterilized tens of thousands of Native women involuntarily, Beaver owes his life to his traditionalist upbringing — namely, his mother’s avoidance of white doctors. But when asked if he ever feels tempted to abandon his traditionalist ways, he responds, “Every day,” revealing the anguish of protecting his identity in a country that’s long sought to destroy it. “You gotta step back and look at the United States flag,” Beaver says. “How many times was that flag flying over my dead ancestors?”

A former Muscogee Nation Lighthorseman, or tribal police officer, Beaver has witnessed firsthand the complications of the McGirt decision for law enforcement. In the wake of the decision, he explains, local police have become reluctant to respond to incidents that may or may not involve Tribal citizens: “They’ll get a call saying there’s a fight at an Indian home, they’ll pull up and say, ‘Oh, it’s an Indian home,’ and take off, call Lighthorse. They won’t even confirm there’s some Indians in there.”

On the fairgrounds a few hundred yards away, festivalgoers ride the Tilt-A-Whirl in a sea of stars and stripes. Supplied by a non-Native company from Arkansas, the carnival is full of semi-trailers covered in bald eagles and the preamble to the U.S. Constitution. Later, at the rodeo I mistakenly presumed would be Muscogee, the white announcer applauds local law enforcement, then warns the audience, “If you’ve never offered to put that uniform on, don’t you ever disrespect these individuals or disrespect that American flag that’s flying behind me.”

Looking around the bleachers, I am starting to wonder who the Muscogee Nation Festival is actually for. After all, Sir Mix-a-Lot (yes, as in “Baby Got Back”) is tonight’s headliner, and by 7 p.m., the crowd is much bigger — and less Native-looking — than earlier. Then again, who am I to say what Muscogee (Creek) looks like?

Despite outside efforts to treat them otherwise, the people now known as the Muscogee have never been a monolith. The name itself, which did not appear on maps until the end of the 18th century, comes from the Mvskoke language spoken by the “Upper Creeks” — the name white traders gave to the Indigenous settlements along the Coosa and Tallapoosa Rivers in Alabama. The “Lower Creeks,” who mostly spoke Hitchiti and Alabama dialects, lived farther south along the Chattahoochee and Flint Rivers, where greater proximity to European settlers sped up the process of acculturation. (Rebranding after McGirt, the Nation announced in 2021 that it was dropping “Creek” from its logo. “Muscogee (Creek) Nation,” however, remains written on the tribal seal and all official business.)

The age-old clash between traditionalists and assimilationists reached a fever pitch in 1814 at Horseshoe Bend, when Chief Menawa’s Red Sticks, a faction of Upper Creek warriors opposed to the encroachment of white settlers, suffered a devastating defeat at the hands of General Andrew Jackson’s U.S. troops and Native allies. Instrumental to Jackson’s victory was a contingent of Lower Creeks led by William McIntosh, a half-Scottish chief and slaveholder whose controversial support of U.S. interests led to personal financial gain and his execution by Menawa in 1825. 

Three years later, McIntosh’s son, Chilly, would lead the first “voluntary” wave of 3,000 Lower Creeks into Indian Territory. Remembered as pragmatists or traitors, the McIntosh Faction would wield great influence in the Creeks’ new homeland — hence their namesake of McIntosh County, Oklahoma. As for the county seat of Eufaula, which sprang up in the 1870s with the arrival of the Missouri-Kansas-Texas Railroad, the name was suggested by the Five Tribes’ federal Indian agent, inspired by the Muscogee tribal town turned cotton shipping port in Alabama.

The morning after the Muscogee Nation Festival, I meet Jon Tiger for Sunday school at West Eufaula Baptist Church — the congregation where Jackson Lewis was baptized in 1856 and served for decades as a deacon. Its roof partly blown off by a spring storm, the church’s interior features several paintings by Tiger, including one by the altar of Christ bleeding on the cross, and Mvskoke language hymnals full of songs like Cesvs Vcvnokeces (“Jesus Loves Me”).

In the second pew, Tiger is taking a break from Jackson Lewis Day preparations at the community center and listening to Tom Pickering, his pastor and brother-in-law, discuss the Babylonian Captivity. Wearing jeans and sipping a McCafé, Pastor Pickering likens the Israelites, exiled from Judah to Babylon, to his own people, another “conquered nation” forced from their home. But also like the chosen people, “God takes care of us,” Pickering says. “When we were removed, we found oil. When they took that land too, God said, ‘Not so fast,’” he adds, hinting, it seems, at divine intervention in the Supreme Court.

In the parking lot, Pickering tells me that during his 17-year tenure on the Muscogee National Council, he would often argue that the Five Tribes’ territories “had never been relinquished” — a position confirmed by McGirt. The ruling’s implications are limited — and, as the past few years have shown, highly contested by the likes of Justice Brett Kavanaugh and Oklahoma Governor Kevin Stitt, a Republican of dubious Cherokee ancestry lately bent on removing roadway signs for tribal reservations across the state. But if the boundaries of 1866 still hold, did the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers build Lake Eufaula on Muscogee territory?

On Sept. 25, 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson arrived via helicopter to dedicate Eufaula Dam before a crowd of 50,000 Oklahomans. Deeming the long-awaited federal project “a new link between the Southwest and our industrial heartland,” the president promised flood control, electricity, and new jobs. Luxury recreational lodges — subsidized by federal funding and complete with golf courses, swimming pools, and full-service marinas — were already in their final construction stages. Reporting on the carnival-like atmosphere, the Okmulgee Daily Times noted that “a group of obvious Indian ancestry” had “spread out quilts on the ground and had a picnic dinner — what more appropriate when their forebears roamed these wooded spots long before the coming of the white man?”

Unlike northeast Oklahoma’s Osage Nation, which received $7.4 million from the Army Corps for the land it needed to build Skiatook Lake in 1981, the Muscogee (Creek) Nation had not retained comprehensive mineral rights to its reservation land. Thus the federal government was able to buy up the land for Lake Eufaula via eminent domain, compensating individual property owners (who were mostly white by 1960) but not the Nation itself.

Built on farmland amid the golden age of DDT, Lake Eufaula has been the site of periodic toxic algae blooms — fed by nutrient-rich runoff and known to cause dermatological, respiratory, and even neurological illnesses. From its headwaters in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, the Canadian River flows through over a thousand miles before it reaches the lake, picking up urban wastewater and pesticide residue along the way. Though the lake is in compliance with federal drinking water standards, the Environmental Working Group has found that the levels of nine potential carcinogens exceed its health guidelines.

Cancer rates in McIntosh County are also higher than the national average, with lung cancer rates nearly twice as high (and higher still for Indigenous Americans). Meanwhile, the average life expectancy in Eufaula — compounded by rural poverty and inadequate access to healthcare — is barely 60 years.

“They don’t know what it is,” says Pastor Pickering. “But let me tell you what I believe it is. It’s the water.”

In 2013, the Army Corps identified “increased nutrient and bacteria loading” as a significant water quality concern for Lake Eufaula — a consequence, in part, of increased shoreline development. Yet, at the time of their study, the Corps had just leased 420 acres of lakefront property to Carlton Landing — a new master-planned resort town the state would later charge with dumping millions of gallons of wastewater from its sewage lagoons into the lake.

The living haven’t been the only locals displaced or disrupted by development. In addition to large-scale archaeological surveys, the Army Corps had to rehome remains from dozens of cemeteries before the deluge. With limited time, however, they couldn’t dig up everything, or everyone (see the 2013 discovery of a nearly complete prehistoric skeleton in nearby McAlester). Today, many reinterred remains reside in Fishertown Cemetery, down a gravel road of modular homes in Texanna. Some are marked by moss-flecked tombstones engraved with “Unknown.”

Not so for Jackson Lewis, who died in 1910 and is interred down the road from his church where his descendants still pray. Seventy-five years after surviving the forced removal of his people, Lewis took sick at the home of his daughter Lucinda, whose log cabin once stood at the top of a hill now off Highway 9. One night, he lay in the yard on a bed by the fire when “a supernatural being appeared,” Tiger tells his fellow descendants. “It looked like a white chicken — called a lokv. Lucinda Lewis picked up a log and ran it off. This would tell of Jackson’s death.”

Adorned with a small United States flag, his flat headstone reveals his name, death date, and Confederate military service. It is also inscribed with the words “INDIAN TERRITORY,” though Oklahoma had been declared a state three years earlier, marking the dissolution of land controlled by Native Americans. Perhaps it’s a posthumous reclamation of what was lost.

Jackson Lewis’s gravesite down the road from his church in Eufaula, Oklahoma. Photo by Michael Noble Jr.  

As I leave Oklahoma for Alabama, I realize how little I know about these people who split up and went many so many ways. The story of Jackson Lewis, severed from his homeland by the likes of my forebears, ties the two Eufaulas together, and as I make my way southeast, driving the routes of removal in reverse, I wonder if I’ll find any trace of him on the Chattahoochee.

My Google Maps unknowingly set to “avoid highways,” I drive at dusk along the Natchez Trace Parkway, a 444-mile scenic route along an old forest trail once used by Indigenous travelers, European explorers, highwaymen, and wayfaring preachers alike. While screaming along to “Cowboy Take Me Away,” I hit an enormous bird — a black bird — but it’s hard to tell what kind from the explosion of feathers in my rearview mirror. 

Four days and four states later, I am approaching my ancestral homeland again. Rolling past a mecca of fast-food drive-thrus and doublewides swallowed by kudzu, I notice that the license plate on the Chevy Tahoe in front of me says “ALABAMA — NEVER CONQUERED” and features a cartoon Native American wielding a tomahawk.

Perhaps it is no surprise that many white residents of Eufaula — a place with a 35-foot-tall Confederate monument in the center of town — embrace a certain version of local history. At my first Pilgrimage, in 2018, a teenage tour guide pointed out the library’s wall print of Yoholo Micco, Eufaula’s “last Creek Indian chief,” but neglected to mention his death in Arkansas on the Trail of Tears. The namesake for the local nature trail, Yoholo Micco has become a kind of mascot for this Eufaula — not unlike its Lakeside School Chiefs.

“I don’t think [Yoholo Micco] even lived here, ever,” says Margaret Russell, a white Eufaulan archaeologist who has studied the Deep South’s Indigenous past for almost 60 years. She points out that the chief was from the Upper Creek Town of Yufala on the Tallapoosa River, not the Lower Creek town for which Eufaula is named.

Russell and I first met eight years ago when I interviewed her for my thesis in the library of the Couric-Smith house. After realizing our shared interest in debunking fictionalized local history, we struck up a friendship despite the six decades between us. Wearing a charm of the Pueblo trickster figure Kokopelli on her necklace, Russell says she does not identify as a troublemaker herself but admits, “I’m not a conformist, I know that.”

In the 1830s, Russell’s family left South Carolina for cheap land in Alabama, settling in what was “merely an Indian village then,” according to her great-grandmother, Victoria Virginia Hunter Clayton. An enslaver’s daughter who grew up to marry a Confederate general, Clayton’s 1899 memoir recounts her mother’s relief “to be free from savage faces peeping and prying around the premises” after removal. Only after the Creek people were gone would the white citizens of Irwinton, as Eufaula was then known, call their stolen land by its Creek name. At long last, Russell’s and my marauding ancestors were free to plant cotton on this side of the Chattahoochee — or at least enslave others to do so.

At Old Creek Town, a popular recreation area overlooking Lake Eufaula (which Alabamians persist in calling the reservoir), Russell and I sit at a picnic table by the playground and picture the cotton fields that once covered the land. Watching a teenage couple fish, she says she used to waterski on the lake before it was overrun by alligators — imported from Savannah in an attempt to “balance out nature” in the 1970s.

“There were alligators here a couple hundred years ago,” says Russell, looking out across the water through a giant pair of Solar Shields. “But the Indians killed them and ate them — and white people did, too.”

The area was last inhabited by a Creek village in the mid-eighteenth century, according to the archaeologists who excavated thousands of pottery sherds from “Site 1 Br 35” in the summer of 1960. In addition to trash pits full of charred corn cobs, a team from the University of Alabama found three burials containing the remains of one adult and two children “in a fragmentary condition.” Their grave goods, however, had stood the test of time — from a Queen Anne-style brass button to a glass wine bottle to an iron spike. To the archaeologists who found them, the site’s abundance of European trade materials was proof that by 1750, the Creek people were well headed to assimilation.

On our way to the parking lot, Russell inspects the ground with each step, looking for pipe fragments and potsherds in the grass. The problem with salvage archaeology — the excavation of sites threatened by construction, natural disasters, or other forms of destruction —  is that it’s always rushed. Indeed, in the years since Congress passed the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990, several Indigenous groups have sued the Army Corps over the disposal of remains and artifacts while constructing its reservoirs — from Oklahoma’s Osage Nation (Mark Twain Lake) to Florida’s Miccosukee Tribe (Lake Okeechobee) to South Dakota’s Yankton Sioux Tribe (Lake Francis).

“There’s no way we could have stirred up everything,” Russell says. The same is true for Oklahoma’s Lake Eufaula, whose construction submerged evidence of human occupation as far back as 12,000 B.C. Long before the Five Tribes reached Indian Territory, hunter-gatherers traversed the land in the shadows of mammoths and mastodons. Thousands of their distinctive, notched projectile points, known as Clovis points, have been found across North America — from the Southwest to the Great Plains to the Atlantic Coast. Shortly after the lake’s completion, a local collector discovered two Clovis points, exposed by erosion, at an RV park in Checotah, Oklahoma. Meanwhile, on the Chattahoochee, a similar point turned up at a race track just south of Columbus, Georgia.

Russell’s latest project involves mapping out former Creek allotments in Eufaula and indexing their transfer to white settlers, including both our forebears. To do so, she is using the Creek Census of 1832, taken after the Creek Nation ceded its sovereign claim to all land east of the Mississippi in exchange for “legal” titles to land tracts within their former territory. But as historian Michael Witgen has explained, property titles did not confer outright ownership under U.S. law — a distinction the federal government continually exploited in the name of Manifest Destiny. Indeed, Creek removal began just four years later.

She has inspired me to search for the land originally allotted to the family of Jackson Lewis. Of the five Tommy Harjos listed among the “heads of families” in the 1832 census, there is one at the Lower Creek town of Kasihta, which Jon Tiger mentioned on Jackson Lewis Day. Across the Chattahoochee from Eufaula, Kasihta is now buried beneath Lawson Army Airfield at Fort Moore, Georgia.

If Harjo did receive his promised title to 320 acres of land, the parcel would have been some 50 miles northwest in Chambers County, Alabama, where a tiny town called Cusseta remains. Perhaps he resisted giving up his land and was killed by a speculator. Though I’ll likely never know, I can’t help but wonder if I descend from the unnamed white man who shot him.

Not far from the edge of Alabama’s Lake Eufaula, the grave of my ancestor Reuben Clark Shorter overlooks the Chattahoochee. Buried throughout his former property are the remains of the hundreds my family enslaved, a few in an area labeled “SLAVE — SERVANT PLOT,” but most in scattered, unmarked graves.

“Genocide and slavery do not have an edge,” writes Tiffany King, a professor of African American Studies at the University of Virginia. “The violence moves as one.” Framing the country’s twin legacies of Indigenous displacement and Black enslavement as mutually reinforcing systems, King offers the metaphor of “the shoal.” A shallow area in a body of water created when sediment accumulates over time, shoals symbolize the tense intersection between water (representing Blackness and displacement by the Middle Passage) and land (representing Indigeneity and displacement by Indian Removal). Hidden below the water’s surface, the shoal forces the mariner to slow down and circumnavigate. 

Can we think of the drowned earth beneath these twin Lake Eufaulas as shoals? Sediments in shallow waters stretched across liminal lands, traversing the contours of states, territories, and nations? More than a century after removal, the cycle of federal repossession and relocation persisted, drowning lands, livelihoods, and legacies in the name of “progress,” [a word used six times in President Johnson’s speech at Eufaula Dam in Oklahoma.] 

In my own navigation of my family’s past and its tethers to my present, I too have avoided the shoals.  My homeland’s past — despite efforts to selectively forget — is my past, too. After all, violent dispossession requires violent disavowal, the spoils of which I realize I’m still reaping.  Beneath the water’s surface lay the sediments of abolition and decolonization, building up over time. Might the mariner, stranded on the shoal, learn to abandon her ship?  ◊

Carrie Monahan is a writer living in Brooklyn, New York. In the fall, she will start her doctorate in history, focusing on race and land dispossession in the South.

David Walter Banks is a documentary and portrait photographer based in Atlanta, Georgia. His current focus is environmental-issue based projects related to swamps and wetlands in the American South. 

Michael Noble Jr. is a freelance photojournalist based in Colorado Springs, Colorado. With a discerning eye for light, his work reflects his skill to find distinctive angles, crafting images that resonate with authenticity and ignite meaningful conversations. Noble’s images have been showcased in esteemed global media outlets such as The New York Times, Washington Post, ESPN, and Bon Appétit.

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Featured in Issue No. 10