The Yuchis, one of the more resilient peoples of the southeastern United States, were forcibly relocated to Indian Territory along with their neighbors in the 1830s. In the early 1900s, as this study shows, much of their traditional way of life remained.

Yuchi life at the dawn of the modern era is portrayed in fascinating detail here, as observed and recorded by noted anthropologist Frank G. Speck in 1904–8. Speck’s fieldwork, combined with information gleaned from the experiences of a number of Yuchi men, describes numerous facets of Yuchi culture, including language, subsistence practices, decorative arts, domestic architecture, clothing, religious beliefs and rituals, healing practices, mythology, music, social and political organizations, warfare, games, and life-transition rituals and customs, such as birthing, naming, marriage, and burial. Affording a precious glimpse of a Native community in transition a century ago, Ethnology of the Yuchi Indians stands as an essential introduction to the history and culture of a vibrant southeastern Native people.

Frank G. Speck (1881–1950) is the author of such classic works as Midwinter Rites of the Cayuga Long House, available in a Bison Books edition. Jason Baird Jackson is an assistant curator of ethnology at the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History and an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Oklahoma. He is the author of Yuchi Ceremonial Life: Performance, Meaning, and Tradition in a Contemporary American Indian Community (Nebraska 2003).

"A seminal introduction to the history and the culture of this Native American peoples and is a welcome and renewed addition to the library of Native American Studies"—The Midwest Book Review