The Cooperating Association of the Ocmulgee National Monument
| Naional Park status for
Ocmulgee? ONMA |
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| http://www.macon.com/203/story/649743.html Posted on Sat, Mar. 14, 2009 Why Ocmulgee National Monument should be designated a national park By Richard L. Thornton In 1825 the Treaty of Indian Springs between the United States and a small faction of Creek leaders, led by William McIntosh, essentially gave away most of the Creek-owned lands in Georgia. McIntosh and a group of minor town leaders had been bribed by agents working for the state of Georgia, and in fact were not the elected leadership of the Creek Nation. The treaty included provisions in which certain Creeks were given one-square-mile tracts of land in Georgia, and the Creek Nation as a whole was guaranteed a six-square-mile reserve on the south side of the Ocmulgee River across from Macon. This tract is considered sacred by the Creeks as the fountainhead of our civilization, and more recently the location of the formation of the Creek Confederacy at Ochesee (Lamar Village). It was probably intended that many of the 20,000+ “Friendly Creeks” living as state citizens outside the boundaries of the Creek Nation would move to this reserve and augment the economic development of Macon. What actually happened, though, was that land speculators and squatters quickly overran the Ocmulgee Reserve and drove the resident Creeks out. The Creek leadership in Alabama and Oklahoma were in disarray for at least a decade, and so could do nothing about this travesty. That is history. Nothing can be done about this miscarriage of government at this late date. That’s right: The land where the Coliseum and Ocmulgee National Monument are located is theoretically owned by the Creek Nation and the Creek descendants still living in Georgia. It is a Creek Reserve, which the Creeks never governed after 1825. During the early 1930s, civic leaders in Macon promoted the idea that the complex of Native American community sites on the south side of the Ocmulgee River should be acquired by the federal government and made into a national park. A 2000-acre tract was identified. Citizens from Macon donated their pennies, nickels and dollars toward the purchase of the tract. Once most of the land was acquired, an agreement was entered with the National Park Service by which if given the land by the people of Macon, a national park would be developed on the site. The donated land officially became federal property in 1936. Almost immediately archaeologists were hired to supervise Work Projects Administration and later Civilian Conservation Corps crews in a massive excavation of the federally owned land, plus several other sites occupied by the Creek ancestors along the Ocmulgee River. Unfortunately, the projects employed too few administrators and supervisors. Many of the finest artifacts went out the gates under the overcoats of workmen and are now in private collections around the world. Incredibly, very few of the hundreds of boxes of artifacts that were retained have ever been opened or studied. That is correct. The vast majority of artifacts unearthed in the 1930s have never been seen or studied by archaeologists in the 70 years since then. World War II ended archaeological studies at Ocmulgee. The federal government acquired more parcels delineated in the original 2,000-acre park plan, but not nearly enough. Worse still, large chunks of the land originally purchased by the school children of Macon either went back into private hands or was used to build expressways, public housing or public buildings such as the Coliseum. The National Park Service designated the tract a “national monument,” not a “national park” as promised. It did complete the beautiful museum in 1951. The “monument” designation has condemned Ocmulgee to chronic under-funding and under-exposure. For many years, there has not even been a professional archaeologist assigned to Ocmulgee National Monument. In recent years, books on Native American archaeology barely mention Ocmulgee or don’t mention it at all. Archaeologists from outside the Southeast repeatedly regurgitate the poorly researched assumptions made by Ocmulgee’s archaeologists in the 1930s, when little else was know about the Native American civilizations in the Southeast. So why should the federal government invest money into expanding and improving Ocmulgee National Monument into a full-blown “park” when the nation’s economy is in such dismal circumstances? The most compelling answer is economic development. The Macon area, and Georgia in general, badly need an economic shot in the arm. Macon is centrally located and at the intersection of several major transportation routes. Increased economic activity in Macon would benefit the heart of the state. That increased economic activity would be a direct result of improving a very important archaeological zone into a major educational and recreational destination for heritage tourism. I said “a major archaeological zone.” Why do archaeologists elsewhere and federal bureaucrats not seem to consider Ocmulgee important? In recent years the archaeological community has been discovering what Creeks have been telling them all along: Ocmulgee was where advanced Native American culture began in the Eastern United States. The recent discovery that the big mound at Cahokia, Ill. (Monks Mound) was started a hundred years after the Great Temple Mound at Ocmulgee goes a long way in proving that point. We also have been telling archaeologists forever — often to deaf ears — that the Creeks had contacts with the Mayas. We still have Maya and Totonac words in our language and Maya traditions in our heritage. We think Ocmulgee was founded by salt traders with Mesoamerican roots. In fact, hundreds of large ceramic brine drying trays (identical to those used by the Maya) were found at Ocmulgee in the 1930s. A recently uncovered Maya city in Guatemala, named Waka, seems to be related to Ocmulgee. Its location and site plan is identical to Ocmulgee’s. It is located on an escarpment and river front that is the exact same distance from the ocean as Ocmulgee. There were also hundreds of identical brine drying trays found at Waka. Waka was abandoned about 20 years before Ocmulgee was founded around 900 AD. We think that some illiterate commoners and escaped slaves from Waka eventually found their way to Georgia, and decided to establish a salt trading center modeled after their mother town, which was razed by a rival city during a bitter war. There is other potential for economic development. Theoretically, the Ocmulgee Reserve is still the territory of the federally recognized Muscogee (Creek) Nation. In reality, the probability of the Creek Nation asserting its rightful title to the huge tract of land is near zero. However, what if Georgia and the Creek Nation came to an agreement to settle ownership claims by designating a section of the tract as the Creek Ocmulgee Reserve? As land that was always owned by the Creek People, then it is also under federal law, a location where that tribe may operate commercial enterprises such as casinos, which are not necessarily subject to the laws of the state that surrounds the sovereign territory. Do you get my drift? And there is a cultural reason, too, for raising the status of Ocmulgee to a national park. When I was six my parents took me to Ocmulgee after we feasted on Pig ‘N Whistle barbecue. My mother pointed to a skeleton of a mikko (king) then on display at Ocmulgee. She said, “Richard, this could be one of your ancestors.” Many, many Georgians, whether nominally of European or African heritage, have a bony knot or ridge on the back of their heads just above the neck, and don’t know where it came from. That is a Creek knot. If you have that knot, you have Creek heritage. Your ancestors could be buried at Ocmulgee, too. Richard L. Thornton is a registered architect and city planner and a member of the Perdido Bay Muscogee (Creek) Tribe of Georgia and Florida. He can be reached at RThorntonAIA@aol.com budroe
wrote on 03/14/2009 10:33:24 AM:
I
agree. I have heard a presentation by Mr. Thornton before. He has
extensively researched Native American cultures, including linguistics,
pottery and architectural designs. He has created scale models of
Ocmulgee and Etowah, including 3D computer recreations, and has written
several books. Most archaeologists focus on one time period, in one
general area or even one specific location. Then, they specialize on
one aspect, such as pottery identification or the excavation of a mound
or building. Mr. Thornton directs his research toward understanding the
larger picture. He studies the layout of Native American towns and
compares them to town designs in the Southeast and to South America. He
studies language because words migrate with ancient peoples and many
words survive the ages, while buildings don't, so, they can help define
what peoples settled where and where they came from. |
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