This research paper discusses the cultures of Native American peoples as they existed during the creation of the American nation from 1775 to 1815. It focuses upon the traditional cultures of the Eastern Woodlands Indians, the Iroquois in the North, the Algonquian Shawnee in the Northwest Territory and the Muskhogean Creek Confederacy in the Deep South and Gulf region.
Over the centuries, a plethora of Indian tribes east of the Mississippi evolved and developed a wide diversity of cultural institutions and patterns of life, uniquely adapted and attuned to their natural environment and historical circumstances. All of them were significantly disrupted and altered by contact with European settlers. By the time of the American Revolution, most of the Algonquian tribes in New England and other Indians along the Atlantic coast had been substantially eliminated as autonomous cultures. West of the Hudson River, the relatively sophisticated, politically cohesive and militarily potent Iroquois culture adapted successfully to the threats posed by the arrival of the white man for several centuries. However, the outcomes of the French and Indian War and the American Revolution, as well as cultural atrophy, led to its eventual demise. The migrations forced upon the Algonquian Shawnee nation propelled it into a leadership position among the tribes in the Northwest Territory who were threatened by white settler expansion after the Revolutionary War and led to belated efforts to internally revitalize its culture, but the Shawnee too by 1814 had lost their long struggle to maintain their cultural autonomy. The Creek Confederacy drew together the disparate elements of the Muskhogean Indians in the frontier areas of the Deep South to counter the growing influence of European powers and colonies, but deeply-rooted divisions within Creek tribal units and leaders undermined its effectiveness as settler pressures on its homelands intensified and left th...