Customer Reviews

Creation Myths and Legends of the Creek Indians

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Dr. Grantham, a Creek Indian himself, spent years carefully researching SE Indian myths and legends, and has pulled together both the modern and the ancient into one book. If you are a professor or just interested in Creek Indian myths and legends, buy this book! The book is well organized, reads beautifully, and is perfect for professors seeking to teach this subject. The organization of the book enables the student to refer back and forth through various topics, and includes a useful dictionary and phonetic guide. It is excellent for the classroom or your personal library.

This book is an excellent resource for both the professional historian and archaeologist and the general reader, and I highly recommend it for several reasons.

First, the book provides both a synthetic treatment of Creek cosmology and beliefs and the original stories, myths and legends, in multiple versions, as told by Creek informants themselves. No history can be complete without the inclusion of multiple viewpoints, and Grantham is careful to include all known versions of each Creek tale for comparison and comprehension.

Second, the book makes an excellent, concise, comparative study of the beliefs of the Creeks and those of other Native American groups of the Southeast and elsewhere, and is quite good at noting elements which are common to them all. In terms of understanding the growth of Creek culture as such from those Native American groups encountered at the time of contact, this comparative study is both important and helpful.

Third, Grantham covers not only the "myths and legends" of the title, but the actual ways in which these tales were incorporated into the daily lives, practice, and ritual of the Creek people, and in which their systems of belief were reflected in their daily lives. It helps the modern reader, specialist or interested layperson, remember that systems of belief are a part of daily life in a way that many traditional archaeological or historical studies do not fully recognize.

For anyone interested in Native American cultural studies, history, or archaeology, particularly those cultures of the Southeast, I highly recommend this book.