Creek Language Archive
Creek Texts by Mary R. Haas and James H. Hill
edited and translated by Jack B. Martin, Margaret McKane Mauldin, and Juanita McGirt
When Dr. Mary R. Haas died in 1996, she left behind several thousand pages of notes and texts in the Creek (Muskogee) language collected in eastern Oklahoma from 1936 to 1940. The majority of the texts in the collection come from the unpublished writings of James H. Hill of Eufaula, an especially knowledgeable elder who composed texts for Dr. Haas using the standard Creek alphabet. Twelve other speakers, including one Seminole and one Creek freedman, served as sources for dictated texts. The texts cover traditional folktales, descriptions of ball-games and traditional activities, autobiography, history, sermons, and prayers.
We would like to thank the National Endowment for the Humanities for supporting this project. We are also grateful to the late Mary R. Haas and the American Philosophical Society for allowing us to publish these materials. J. Michael McCarty made many of the recordings.
