A New Year That Survived Removal

Muscogee, or Creek, religious life turns on the poskita, the Green Corn Ceremony, an annual renewal rite held each summer at ceremonial grounds called tvlwv. The ceremony marks the Muscogee new year, brings a period of amnesty for offenses short of serious crimes, and includes fasting, the kindling of a new fire and a ceremonial medicine, and this article does not set out how the ceremony is conducted or how the medicine is prepared; authority over both sits with each ceremonial ground under its own leadership rather than with any outside record.

Its public history is one of survival under exceptional pressure. The Muscogee were forcibly removed from their southeastern homeland to Indian Territory in the nineteenth century, a displacement that dismantled entire communities, and the poskita traveled with the people who survived it, reestablished at new ceremonial grounds in what is now Oklahoma. That the Green Corn Ceremony continues to be held today, at ceremonial grounds each answering to its own ground authority rather than to a single national body, is itself the public fact worth recording, a religious calendar that outlasted the removal meant to erase the nation that kept it, carried forward not by publication but by the grounds that never stopped holding it.