Historian Steve Brandon asserts that this "adaptation and incorporation of aspects of white culture" was a tactic employed by the Five Nations peoples to resist removal from their lands. Sociologists, anthropologists, and interdisciplinary scholars alike are interested in how and why these native peoples assimilated certain features of the alien culture of the white settlers who were encroaching on their lands. ![]() The word "civilized" was used by white settlers to refer to the Five Tribes, who, during the 18th and early 19th centuries, actively integrated Anglo-American customs into their own cultures. The Indians were also expected to acquire slaves and use them like their white plantation neighbors did. The women were to become housekeepers, caring for children and weaving cotton for clothing. They were expected to use draft animals and to give up maize as a main crop and instead raise wheat and cotton. In white American terms, Indians became civilized by the men giving up hunting and becoming farmers, displacing the women who traditionally had been the primary farmers. The policy assumed that civilized Indians would require less land, and would need money, so that they would be willing to sell the excess land to white settlers. ![]() The United States accordingly adopted a policy of civilizing Indians while Washington was president. George Washington believed that the only way Indians could survive in proximity to white settlers was for them to become civilized. As a consequence of evolving attitudes toward ethnocentric word usage and more rigorous ethnographical standards, the term "Five Civilized Tribes" is rarely used in contemporary academic publications. Texts written by non-indigenous scholars and writers have used words like "savage" and "wild" to identify Indian groups that retained their traditional cultural practices after European contact. The term "civilized tribes" was adopted to distinguish the Five Tribes from other Native American tribes that were described as "wild" or "savage". The descendants of these tribes, who primarily live in what is now Oklahoma, are sometimes referred to as the Five Tribes of Oklahoma, although several other federally recognized tribes are also located in that state. In the 21st century, this term has been criticized by some scholars for its ethnocentric assumptions by Anglo-Americans of what they considered civilized, but representatives of these tribes continue to meet regularly on a quarterly basis in their Inter-Tribal Council of the Five Civilized Tribes. However, white encroachment continued and eventually led to the removal of these tribes from the Southeast. For a period, the Five Civilized Tribes tended to maintain stable political relations with the white population. ![]() Įxamples of such colonial attributes adopted by these five tribes included Christianity, centralized governments, literacy, market participation, written constitutions, intermarriage with white Americans, and chattel slavery practices, including purchase of enslaved Black Americans. White Americans classified them as "civilized" because they had adopted attributes of the Anglo-American culture. The term Five Civilized Tribes was applied by the United States government in the early federal period of the history of the United States to the five major Native American nations in the Southeast: the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Muscogee (Creek), and Seminoles. Native American grouping Illustrations of members of the Five Civilized Tribes painted between 17 (clockwise from top right): the Sequoyah, Pushmataha, Muscogee, Chicksaw, and Osceola
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