Yamasee

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For the Nuwaubianist group that calls itself "Yamassee Native Americans", see Yamassee.

The Yamasee were a Muskogean Native American tribe that lived in coastal region of present-day northern Florida and southern Georgia near the Savannah River. Starting in the late 16th century, the Spanish established Catholic missions in the area in which the Yamasee lived. In the 1670s the Westo tribe forced the Yamasee to move south from the Savannah River. They were mentioned regularly on Spanish mission census records in northern Florida and the missionary provinces of Guale and Mocama, but usually did not convert to Christianity and remained somewhat segregated from the Christian Indians of Spanish Florida.

Pirate attacks on the Spanish missions in 1680 forced the Yamasee to migrate again. Some moved to Florida. Others returned to the Savannah River lands, safer after the destruction of the Westo. The Yamasee near the Savannah River became allies of the new colony of South Carolina, while those in Florida grew increasingly disenchanted with the Spanish. They revolted against Spanish rule in 1687 and fled to South Carolina where they were allowed to settle. For years, the Yamasee and the Carolinians conducted slave raids upon Spanish-allied Indians and attacks on St. Augustine itself. However, in 1715, the Yamasee began to attack British colonists due to dissatisfaction over the fur trade. Some neighboring tribes allied themselves with the Yamasee against the British, launching a conflict that came to be known as the Yamasee War, which lasted into 1716. The British settlers were aided by Cherokee, the Creek, and colonists from Virginia, and defeated the Yamasee at Saltketchers on the Combahee River.

The Yamasee then migrated south to the area around St. Augustine, Florida and became allied with the Spanish against the English. In 1727, the British attacked the tribe's settlement and slaughtered most of them; this and conflicts with the Creek decimated the Yamasee population. The survivors eventually assimilated into the Seminole tribe.

[edit] Language

The Yamasee spoke an unknown language. It is partially preserved in works by missionary Domingo Báez. Diego Peña was told in 1716-1717 that the Tuskegee also spoke Yamasee (Hudson 1990).

Hann (1992) claims that Yamasee is related to the Muskogean languages based upon a report that a Yamasee spy within a Hitchiti town could understand Hitichiti and was not detected as a Yamasee. However, Diego Peña obtained information in 1716 and 1717 that shows that Yamasee and Hitchiti-Mikasuki were considered separate languages. Francis Le Jau stated in 1711 that the Yamasee understood the Creek and also that many Indians throughout the region used Creek and Shawnee as lingua francas. Inconclusive evidence has been offered suggesting the Yamasee language was similar to Guale resting on two facts: (1) a copy of a 1681 Florida missions census states that the people of Nuestra Señora de la Candelaria de la Tama speak "la lengua de Guale, y Yamassa" [the Guale and Yamasee language], and a summary of two 1688 letters sent by the Florida governor mention prisoners of the "ydioma Yguala y Yamas, de la Prova de Guale" [the Yguala and Yamas language of the province of Guale]; and (2) the Guale called the Cusabo Chiluque which is probably related to the Creek word čiló·kki "Red Moiety". However, the Spanish documents are not originals and may have been edited at a later date. The name Chiluque is probably a mere loanword and seems to have also been borrowed into the Timucua language. Thus, the connection of Yamasee with Muskogean is unsupported.

[edit] References

Boyd, Mark F. (1949). Diego Peña's expedition to Apalachee and Apalachicolo in 1716. The Florida Historical Quarterly, 16 (1), 2-32.
Boyd, Mark F. (1952). Documents describing the second and third expeditions of lieutenant Diego Peña to Apalachee and Apalachicolo in 1717 and 1718. The Florida Historical Quarterly, 32 (2), 109-139.
Gallay, Alan. (2002). "The Indian Slave Trade: The Rise of the English Empire in the American South, 1670-1717". New Haven & London: Yales University Press.
Goddard, Ives. (2005). The indigenous languages of the Southeast. Anthropological Linguistics, 47 (1), 1-60.
Hann, John H. (1991). Missions to the Calusa. Gainesville: University of Florida Press.
Hann, John H. (1992). Political leadership among the natives of Spanish Florida. The Florida Historical Quarterly, 71 (2), 188-208.
Hann, John H. (1994). Leadership nomenclature among Spanish Florida natives and its linguistics and associational implications. In P. B. Kwachka (Ed.), Perspectives on the Southeast: Linguistics, archaeology, and ethnohistory (pp. 94-105). Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press.
Hann, John H. (1996). The seventeenth-century forebears of the Lower Creeks and Seminoles. Southeastern Archaeology, 15, 66-80.
Hudson, Charles M., Jr. (1990). The Juan Pardo expeditions: Explorations of the Carolinas and Tennessee, 1566-1568. Washington, D.C. Smithsonian Institution Press.
Hudson, Charles M., Jr. (1997). Knights of Spain, warriors of the sun: Hernando de Soto and the South's ancient chiefdoms. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press.
Waddell, Gene. (1980). Indians of the South Carolina lowcountry, 1562-1751. Spartansburg, SC: The Reprint Company.
Worth, John E. (1995). The struggle of the Georgia coast: An eighteenth-century Spanish retrospective on Guale and Mocama. Anthropological papers of the American Museum of Natural History (No. 75). New York.
Worth, John E. (1998). The Timucuan chiefdoms of Spanish Florida (Vols. 1 & 2). Gainesville: University of Press of Florida.
Worth, John E. (2000). The Lower Creeks: Origins and early history. In B. G. McEwan (Ed.), Indians of the Greater Southeast: Historical archaeology and ethnohistory (pp. 265-298). Gainesville: University Press of Florida.
Worth, John E. (2004). Yamasee. In R. D. Fogelson (Ed.), Handbook of North American Indians: Southeast (Vol. 14, pp. 245-253). Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution.