How a Mvskoke traditionalist leader forged a movement to resist the division of tribal lands and keep his people on the everlasting Medicine Way
 
Chitto Harjo (“Crazy Snake”) had several names—Wilson Jones, Bill Jones, Bill Harjo, Bill Snake—and people called him many things: troublemaker, rebellion leader, uncivilized Indian, martyr, murderer. Many called him crazy for fighting against progress and for his commitment to traditions that they believed were outdated and dying out. Yet in the eyes of many Mvskokes and traditionalists of other nations, he was a hero, a defender of the old ways, a Native patriot, and a leader of the Medicine Way.
 
These traditionalists believed in the Mvskoke worldview, which has inspired the Mvskokes and other Southeastern peoples to carry on their traditions as they have done for hundreds of years. In this engaging account, historian Donald L. Fixico tells the story of the Mvskoke people and their fight for survival and unity amid enduring tensions between white “civilization” and traditional culture. A personal story that begins with Fixico attending a Green Corn Ceremony with his father and young son, this engrossing narrative integrates traditional knowledge with historical method to present an Indigenous perspective on Mvskoke and Native American history.

“This may be Donald Fixico’s best book in a long and distinguished career. He tells the dramatic story of Chitto Harjo and the Crazy Snake Rebellion to reveal a larger and longer struggle. Both personal and thoroughly researched, this revealing and quite original history traces how Native communalism and the Medicine Way resisted Christianity and American individualism within the Muscogee Nation.”—Richard White, Stanford University

“Chitto Harjo (Crazy Snake) was a man caught in the grind between two worlds as the ancient one of the Muscogees met the overpowering one of Euro-American newcomers. Was he a troublemaker or patriot? Donald Fixico argues compellingly here for the latter, and by doing that he throws light on global colonization as a clash of spiritual and perceptual power as much as one of outward authority and command.”—Elliot West, author of Continental Reckoning: The American West in the Age of Expansion

Donald L. Fixico (Muscogee, Seminole, Shawnee, and enrolled Sac and Fox), originally from Oklahoma, is Regents and Distinguished Foundation Professor of History at Arizona State University. A former Newberry Fellow, UCLA Postdoctoral Fellow, and Ford Fellow, he is the author and editor of seventeen books.