Yuchi

The Yuchi, also spelled Euchee, are a Native American people whose original homeland lay in the south-eastern United States and who now live mainly in north-eastern Oklahoma. They call themselves Tsoyaha, "Children of the Sun", and speak a language isolate unrelated to any other known tongue. Most Yuchi today are enrolled citizens of the Muscogee Nation, while keeping a distinct identity, ceremonies and language.

Sixteenth-century Yuchi towns stood in the valley of the upper Tennessee River, in what is now eastern Tennessee. The Spanish expedition of Hernando de Soto in 1541 described a powerful people it called the Uchi, linked with the Chisca. Neighbours had their own names for them: the Shawnee called them Tahokale and the Cherokee Aniyutsi. One of their 18th-century towns, Chestowee in what is now Bradley County, Tennessee, was destroyed in 1714 by Cherokee warriors encouraged by two South Carolina traders, an event often seen as marking the Cherokee rise to regional power.

Under Cherokee pressure, Yuchi communities moved south and east into South Carolina, Georgia and Alabama, and some into the Florida panhandle. A Savannah River settlement in today's Effingham County, Georgia, lasted from about 1722 to about 1750, and the British set up a trading post and small garrison there. Euchee Town on the Chattahoochee River, about ten miles downstream from the Muscogee town of Coweta, impressed the naturalist William Bartram in 1778 as the largest and most compact Native town he had seen, with large, well-built houses. The Yuchi traded deerskins and captives with the southern colonies, but disease and war with the Cherokee cut their numbers sharply during the 18th century. After the American Revolution they drew closer to the Creek Confederacy, and some moved to Florida with Muscogee migrants and became part of the Seminole.

In the Creek War of 1813–1814 many Yuchi joined the Red Sticks, the traditionalist faction opposed to the more acculturated Lower Towns. In Florida, Yuchi fought beside the Seminole in the Second Seminole War led by Uchee Billy, who was taken prisoner in 1837. During the 1830s federal authorities expelled the Yuchi and their Muscogee allies from Georgia and Alabama and sent them west to Indian Territory, part of the wider removals remembered as the Trail of Tears. They settled in the north and north-west of the Muscogee Nation, where three Yuchi towns founded in the 19th century, Duck Creek, Polecat and Sand Creek, still continue.

Between 1890 and 1895 the Dawes Commission registered some 1,200 Yuchi as an autonomous tribe, but it later classed them as part of the Muscogee Nation to simplify allotment, a decision that cut across their separate status. During the 1990s a Sapulpa-based body, the Yuchi Tribal Organization, sought federal recognition as an independent tribe; the Bureau of Indian Affairs refused in 2000. The Euchee Tribe of Indians, based in Sapulpa, Oklahoma, remains unrecognised. Around 2,000 people are estimated to be ethnically Yuchi.

The Yuchi maintain three ceremonial grounds in Oklahoma, where the Green Corn Ceremony is held in late summer; some also belong to the Native American Church or Methodist congregations. The Yuchi language has been in steep decline: estimates of fluent first-language speakers fell from a dozen or more in the late 1990s to only a handful by around 2010. Community classes in Sapulpa, led by the Euchee Language Project, have trained a new generation of learners, with about 12 second-language speakers reported in 2016.

Our 1492 map draws an approximate Yuchi homeland, labelled S'atsoyaha (Yuchi), in the hill country of Tennessee and neighbouring states. It lies beside the Cherokee, the Shawnee, the Choctaw, the Chickasaw, the Muscogee and the Catawba.