Many of the southeastern people had built themselves stockaded farming villages, some of them impressively large, sometimes containing a hundred houses or more. Their structures were similar to the Iroquois longhouses, with gabled roofs and walls covered with thatch or even mud plaster. Only along the Gulf Coast and in areas that remained generally warm for most of the year, was housing a simple affair. The Calusa in Florida, for instance, were satisfied with simple roofed platforms, set above ground on log pillars and without any walls at all.
Food was never a problem throughout this region. Every village had its garden plots and fields where the people grew vegetables and tobacco, and lands they claimed private hunting grounds. The people went out in large groups to tend the fields and to go hunting, with everyone sharing the work and the results. There were black bear in the forest, wild turkeys, and dozens of small animals. Buffalo, whose grazing grounds were considerable distances from most of these tribes, became the object of annual hunts in which every able-bodied man was expected to take part. The waters teemed with fish, caught with hook and line, with spears, and even with bow and arrow. Sometimes, during the summer months when the water levels were usually low, the Indians threw mashed narcotic plants into the lakes; the numbed fish rose to the surface and were easily collected by the women and children.
Cooking was perhaps more varied than among most American Indians. Meats and vegetables were boiled in earthenware pots or roasted over an open fire, and salt was commonly used for seasoning. Maize, the most universally grown plant among agricultural Indians, was served in greater variety than anywhere else. It was prepared as a vegetable by itself, or as succotash when mixed together with beans. It was prepared as hominy, and used in corn cakes and corn soup. Parched maize was pounded in wooden mortars and made into meal that could be stored for months. It was eaten as a gruel, or, mixed with nuts, baked into a bread. Perhaps the only other plant so widely used was tobacco, already a customary after-dinner habit, sometimes mixed with the narcotic sumac leaves.
In these generally warm areas, clothing was of little concern to most of the people. Boys and girls usually ran naked until the age of eight or even ten, at which time girls began to wear a two-piece apron of plant fiber. Adult women customarily wore knee-length skirts and little else. By age twelve or thirteen, boys began to wear a buckskin breechcloth, the usual garment of the adult male. Only in colder weather and on special ceremonial occasions did men and women wear robes of fur or feathers, and for longer travels the men might wear leggings and high-laced moccasins. As a rule, the amount of clothing a person wore and the quality of such clothing depended on his rank within the society.
As if to compensate for the lack of impressive clothing, some of the southeastern tribes went to extremes in personal appearance and body decorations. The Natchez, for example, carefully shaped the heads of their infants by tying them on cradle boards, and from an early age on the children wore facial tattoos. More designs were later added according to a person’s rank and achievements, until some great warrior or chief’s wife was entirely covered with tattoos. Some of the tribes also painted their faces, and many of their women considered it especially attractive to blacken their teeth with ashes and tobacco.
Sexual attitudes were particularly liberal among the southeastern people. Young girls often were sexually active long before marriage, and were quite willing to accept gifts or even outright payment for their favors. Many a girl, in fact, was known to have acquired a sizeable dowry that way. But children born as the result of such affairs seldom fared very well; if the young mother was unwilling or unable to take care of the infant, in fact, it was often put to death by her family.
Within the family groups, the man held all the authority. Girls were taught early on to be submissive to men, and after marriage her husband held complete control over her, her property, and even her sexual life. While he was perfectly free to lend her at any time to anyone he pleased, his wife was expected to remain strictly faithful to him at all other times. And the senior male of a household was the absolute authority. Within his household might live his sons and their families, his grandchildren, even great and great-great grandchildren and nephews and their families; but everyone in this household called him father, and everyone obeyed him without question or hesitation.
Shamans among the Indians of the Southeast came in several versions, each with a specialized field of expertise. There were the healers, who fasted in preparation for a cure and who got into the proper spirit of things by smoking tobacco laced with sumac leaves. During the ceremony they chanted and made invocations to the spirits, and they danced with baskets containing their own special spiritual objects – usually some small roots, animal teeth, and stones and pebbles. The healer shaman then cut into the afflicted part of the patient’s body and sucked out the foreign object that had invaded it and which was believed to be the cause of all illness. Shamans also used the sweating frame, on which the patient lay covered with Spanish moss, while charcoal glowed on the ground beneath him. If an ill person recovered despite the shaman’s best efforts, the healer was assured a generous reward; should the patient die, however, that shaman could usually begin immediate preparations to follow him into the world beyond, courtesy of his late patient’s relatives.
Rainmakers attempted to persuade the rain to come by ritual dances, during which they sprayed water through a perforated reed, shook rattles, and held their personal power symbols toward the heavens. If they were too successful, and the rain turned into deluges, good-weather shamans were obligated to climb the rooftops, and in equally dramatic rituals urge the clouds to move on again. But shamanistic life among most southern Indians was a precarious existence; weathermen, too, frequently paid with their lives if they failed to produce the desired results.
Among the Creek, the shaman also presided over a unique ritual, the Green Corn Dance, a tradition they held in common with the Natchez, which actually amounted to a tribal general amnesty during which all offenses short of murder were forgiven. This was a remarkable event among a people steeped in long traditions of blood feuds and eye-for-an-eye, tooth-for-a-tooth notions of justice, showing at least an occasional sense of peace and tolerance. Offenders were known sometimes to hide out in the nearby woods until the time for the Green Corn Dance arrived, and then return to their villages to be forgiven and officially be reinstated as full members of the tribe.