Gunpowder and Creek Diplomacy in the Pre-Revolutionary Native South

Abstract:This essay investigates the sociocultural and diplomatic impact of gunpowder on Creek communities between the end of the Seven Years' War and the beginning of the American Revolution. It argues that access to gunpowder, a non-renewable commodity that could not be produced locally, shaped the ways in which Creek headmen navigated the geopolitical shifts of this period in order to protect existing beliefs and practices surrounding authority and power. Placing Creeks at the center of the narrative allows for the deployment of ethnohistorical methodologies that facilitate a deeper exploration of how specific European goods could impact Indigenous culture. Separating gunpowder from the existing scholarship on firearms allows scholars to consider how Indigenous peoples both collectively and individually interpreted and shaped the world around them in the Prerevolutionary period.