Important animals in the Muscogee (Creek) Nation?

you could try contacting the nice folks at the Nation's website for more information. If you have not found it the website is at

http://themuscogeecreeknation.com/index.php?option...

I find that going right to the source is the easiest way to find out information about Native Americans and First Nations peoples. They are usually very kind and extremely helpful.

Computers can be quite handy but they're also quite stupid. Try it again, but this time spell the name with a "k." That's the way my books spell it. These books suggest that their culture was similar to that of the Chickasaw, Choctaw, and Cherokee -- all were descendants of the earlier Mississippians who had built the famous mounds or "earth islands" which symbolized fertility and oneness with the land. These were supposedly manifestations of Green Corn spirits. Look up Mound Builders to find out more about these earlier peoples as my books are rather dated on this fascinating topic. These mounds are associated with burials in modern legends and, among the Choctaw, with the Great Mother.

I did not see much about specific animals, but I did find that women owned the lodges in which a couple lived, owned the fruits of their own labor, and if a couple split up, the woman retained the children. This suggests that their society, like that of the Navaho and Hopi much farther to the west, was matrilineal -- tracing ancestry through the mother's side rather than through the father's side as most people in the West do. Women often controlled the trade in furs with the first white traders, for this reason. However, this had a definite down side, as this made them the first to catch such diseases as smallpox and measles, which were especially deadly for Native Americans, who had little or no resistance at first.

My sources also suggest that the Muskogees only originated after contact with whites, from a mix of Yamasees, Cherokees, Catawbas, and other neighboring peoples who had been devastated from fighting with white people in the Carolinas, especially in the Tuscarora War in the early 1700s. I discovered a particular Muskogee named Brims, called Emperor Brims by the English and French in the 1730s, who was the headman of a town called Coweta, who advocates neutrality between these two European factions in the New World as the Muskogee nation emerged.

While I cannot find many details on important animals in these people's culture, I believe that you could find much more on the closely related Choctaw and Cherokee, many of whose descendants now live in Oklahoma. Try looking up these tribes also, but do not look in Wikipedia. Use Google and use the spelling that I use here, as these are apparently the forms that scholars are most familiar with. I hope that I have been somewhat helpful to you, even though I could not give you precisely the answer you wanted. Good hunting!

Ring tailed possums and black footed ferrets.