98 An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States
presidency and carrying out of the final solution-elimination of all
the Indigenous communities east of the Mississippi through forced
removal. After the Choctaws and Chickasaws lost most of their ter
ritories, only the Muskogees continued to resist the United States.
The Muskogee Nation was a federation of autonomous towns
located in the valleys of the many rivers that crisscross what are now
the states of Alabama, Tennessee, and parts of Georgia and Florida.
The Lower Creeks inhabited and farmed in the eastern part of this
region watered by the Chattahoochee, Flint, and Apalachicola Riv
ers, while the Upper Creeks lived west of them, in the valleys of
the Coosa, Ta llapoosa and Alabama Rivers. Following US indepen
dence, the Muskogees were divided by settler colonialism. Lower
Creek villages became economically dependent on settlers and emu
lated settlers' values, including ownership of African slaves. This
was largely due to two decades of diligent work on the part of US
Indian agent Benjamin Hawkins. He was in charge of the US gov
ernment's "civilization" project, lending the settler moniker "Five
Civilized Tr ibes" to describe the great agricultural nations of the
Southeast. Hawkins's mission was to instill Euro-American values
and practices in Indigenous peoples-including the profit motive,
privatization of property, debt, accumulation of wealth by a few,
and slavery-allowing settlers to gain the land and assimilate the
Muskogees. At the time of independence, hundreds of settlers were
squatting illegally on lands of Muskogees of the Lower Creek towns,
and that is where Hawkins concentrated, leaving the Muskogees up
river alone. However, traditionalists among the Upper Creeks, who
had allied with Tecumseh and the Shawnee confederation, under
stood that they would be next, as they saw the twenty-year Hawkins
project transforming some citizens of the Lower Creek towns into
wealthy plantation and slave owners, while the majority became
landless and poor.
Traditionalist fighters, called Red Sticks due to the color of
their wooden spears, began an offensive against collaborating Up
per Creeks and settlers that ended in civil war during 1813. The
Red Sticks created chaos that affected Hawkins's scheme, as they
attacked anyone associated with his program. Their effectiveness,
however, provoked a genocidal counteroffensive not officially autho-