Situated geographically in the Creek Nation in northeastern Oklahoma, the Euchee (Yuchi) Tribe of Indians maintains elements of a heritage that, while similar in some respects to that of other southeastern Native groups, remains distinctive. Noticed by Europeans in the late-seventeenth century, the Yuchi inhabited the middle Tennessee Valley until removal in the early 1800s forced them westward. Their heritage, evident in much day-to-day life, finds particular expression at three ceremonial grounds located south of Tulsa. Jason Baird Jackson has been working with the Yuchi for some twenty years. This collaboration has produced several previous books on the group’s expressive culture as well as many periodical articles and book chapters. The present volume brings together some of these shorter pieces and presents a coherent perspective on a range of folklore forms which represent the continuity of Yuchi culture into the twenty-first century. Jackson carefully relates Yuchi culture to general southeastern traditions and stresses how their heritage responds to their current existence as part of and alongside mainstream American society.

Jackson examines four major components of Yuchi traditional culture from a folklore perspective: verbal art, vernacular material culture, culture as performance, and worldview. He introduces his studies with a general overview of Yuchi history and ethnography and provides a sense of Yuchi place as he takes the reader on a driving tour of current communities.

The four chapters on verbal art, two of which were written in collaboration with linguist Mary S. Linn, explore what students of American Indian folklore have come to expect from the oral literatures of the Southeast—that is, trickster tales and oratory—as well as speech genres that have not received much scholarly attention previously. The trickster tales, presented only in English, pit Rabbit against Alligator and Fawn against Wolf. Jackson and Linn offer ethnopoetic transcriptions of performances that, as Jackson notes, would most likely be rendered in Yuchi, an isolate with no apparent connections to other southeastern languages, only in pedagogical situations nowadays. The chapter on oratory examines a speech delivered at the end of festivities at one of the ceremonial grounds and stresses how the speech, spoken traditionally by an intermediary rather than the tribal leader, serves an integrative function at the event. Particularly interesting is a chapter treating a set of “calls,” formulaic announcements used to inform those gathered at a ceremonial ground that a dance is about to begin. Here Jackson (in collaboration with Linn) presents transcriptions in the Yuchi language with interlinear translations. This chapter affords the opportunity for examining the state of the language, preferred for ceremonial discourse, among the Yuchi, where only four persons were using it as their first language in 2011. The final chapter on verbal art uses oratory to identify gender roles in Yuchi life, particularly its ceremonial dimension.

Jackson devotes three chapters to Yuchi material culture. His description of the role of Pseudognaphalium obtusifolum, known as tsodasha in Yuchi, as a medicine that prevents maladies occasioned by ghosts or malevolent spirits, not only describes use of the plant among contemporary Yuchi but also surveys earlier ethnographic data recorded by Frank Speck and others. Jackson also considers use of tsodasha among other Native groups from the Southeast and to a lesser extent in the Northeast. Consistency in the value of this plant as spirit medicine over a wide area demonstrates both cultural coherence among geographically related communities and the logic of their medical systems. Next, ceremonial dress affords a way for contemporary Yuchi to project their continuing distinctiveness and to connect with an ancestral past. While the shirts and vests worn by men and the dresses worn by women at ceremonial ground events represent an identifiable Yuchi “look,” those who create these items of clothing have adopted modern technology to assist their efforts, a practice that from a Yuchi perspective does not affect their significance as markers of identity. Jackson also shows how architecture at campgrounds reinforces Yuchi identity. Family-based camps, usually focusing on arbors located near the ceremonial grounds, provide tangible points of contact with traditional culture and afford hospitality especially to outsiders who enjoy the elaborate meals that accompany ceremonial occasions.

The final two chapters in the collection deal with matters that transcend particular genres but which can be illuminated using analytical approaches from folklore studies. While the Yuchi participate in the intertribal powwow culture that infuses much of Native North America, they distinguish that activity from their indigenous traditions, which highlight the Stomp Dance, a more locally focused event. Jackson shows how the Yuchi (and other southeastern peoples) use the Stomp Dance to maintain a distinctive community identity instead of adopting the generic Indianness that powwow culture may encourage. The volume concludes with a chapter on Yuchi worldview manifested in distinctive understandings of spiritual power. The understandings emerge in folklore forms such as myth, traditional medicine, and prophecy.

Except for this final chapter on worldview and the driving tour that helps to introduce the volume, everything in Yuchi Folklore has been previously published. Jackson, though, has taken the opportunity to add to the originals, and he has effectively integrated them into a coherent book. Even if that were not the case, having these essays accessible in a book-length work in which they can be read together represents an important contribution not only to the study of Yuchi culture (for which we are indebted to Jackson for a number of titles) but also to our understanding of Native southeastern cultures more generally. Moreover, readers may want to emulate some of Jackson’s methods and approaches even if their own interests lie outside of American Indian traditions.

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[Review length: 930 words • Review posted on November 21, 2013]