Opinion: Tomochichi’s full history is worth knowing

This statue brings a welcomed opportunity to offer more nuance to the story people know, to educate the public about the past. Georgia schoolchildren only learn a few sentences about Tomochichi in their classes. Tomochichi is remembered as leading a village of Yamacraw Indians, promoting friendly relations with the English, and allowing Georgia founder James Oglethorpe to establish the city of Savannah.

Told this way, Tomochichi’s story sounds like the Southern version of the first Thanksgiving — an overly romanticized tale of the Yamacraw chief as Squanto to the Pilgrims. Today’s Tomochichi statue contains remarkable echoes of earlier sculptures of Massasoit now in Massachusetts, Utah, and elsewhere, the Pokanoket chief who, legend has it, sat down with those Englishmen for that first Thanksgiving.

Credit: contributed

Credit: contributed

We know that not all is as it seems with Thanksgiving, and Tomochichi’s history with James Oglethorpe is no different. Tomochichi was, in fact, an outcast from his home town, the Muscogee (Creek) village of Apalachicola. He established the village of Yamacraw with mostly Creek family members.

At the time of Tomochichi’s leadership, the Creek were recovering from a costly war with South Carolina fought over Carolina settlers’ perpetual kidnapping and enslavement of Native people. The English were in seemingly endless conflict with the Spanish, who still occupied Florida. Oglethorpe banned enslavement of Africans because he did not want to import them only to have them run to Florida and the Spanish, who promised to free anyone who would help them defeat the English. Oglethorpe, like his Carolina cousins, did not object to enslaving Native people. The Creeks and their allies had waged war on Carolina to stop this practice.

Tomochichi’s role in these conflicts isn’t clear, but Oglethorpe entered a war zone, not a wilderness. His reputation was already tainted by his English brethren. He did not have the upper hand and did not want his efforts to go the way of South Carolina’s, nor did he want to inadvertently help the Spanish.

Tomochichi, too, was probably a poor negotiator -- at first, he threatened Oglethorpe and his men with violence. For their safety, both men needed the protection of a Creek woman, Mary Musgrove, who was the niece of a key Creek leader. In fact, Mary Musgrove negotiated that first treaty between Tomochichi and Oglethorpe from her home on Yamacraw Bluff. A skilled translator and trader, she put both men in their places, and is personally responsible for many of the harmonious relationships that the early settlers managed. In Creek society, women held a great deal of influence over politics. But we don’t have a statue of Mary Musgrove, we have one of Tomochichi.

In light of the facts, we can appreciate how the standard version of Tomochichi and James Oglethorpe might obscure rather than reveal. After all, as one of my students pointed out, despite Oglethorpe’s dependence on the Yamacraw chief’s generosity, “there’s no university in Georgia named after Tomochichi.” Historically, Georgia’s subsequent settlers have not been anxious to return his kindness.

To be sure, the installation of Tomochichi in Atlanta this week begins to right that wrong, it is a sign of a new era. We can educate the public about the past without exploiting their history or elevating avowed racists. Monuments such as these can offer visitors and residents the chance to reflect on what the past means to us, to understand that we are part of a bigger picture and to see evidence that our actions have consequences far into the future.

But given the widespread dispossession of Native people that brought Georgia — and the city of Atlanta — about, we propose that how we honor an unheard history is as important as who we honor. Commemorative efforts should also meaningfully reflect the communities they are intended to honor.

Indigenous nations in the United States face two related obstacles that converge in this moment of the unveiling of the statue of Tomochichi. First is a widespread belief that we are no longer here, that we died out long ago, or that we have been replaced. The standard narrative of Tomochichi’s gift to James Oglethorpe reinforces this erroneous belief. It paves over the longer, more difficult and tragic events that unfolded later, and erases the crucial, complex role of a Native woman.

But even those events didn’t lead to our disappearance from this land. These events did, however, make possible a related belief: that Native people have lost everything, even the power or authority to decide who among us is Native, who belongs to our communities. A DNA test that demonstrates Native ancestry does not make someone a member of a tribe who can stand in for this history. As with the controversy over U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s Native ancestry, DNA does not equate to belonging. And because of the tragedies our nations have endured, we must continually assert our own definitions of who should speak for us.

Muscogee (Creek) people have continued to call Georgia home despite these tragedies. In 2014, at the 200th anniversary of the Battle of Horseshoe Bend, one of the events that launched the final period of Muscogee dispossession in Georgia, Muscogee Nation Principal Chief George Tiger spoke eloquently of this longer history. He said, “through adversity, we gain strength.” That is the message we hope visitors gain from Tomochichi in Atlanta.

Malinda Maynor Lowery is a citizen of the Lumbee Nation and Cahoon Family Professor of American History at Emory University. Beth Michel is a citizen of the Tohono O’odham Nation and associate dean of admissions at Emory University.