Gadsden Museum of Art

Entangled

October 4, 2025 to October 31, 2025

Opening October 4 from 5-8 pm

The title “Entangled” came from the native concept of time as cyclical, layered, and connected with space, as opposed to Western or “settler” time, which is linear, focused on progress.  For the Europeans, progress was related to moving from uncivilized to civilized, the land from uncultivated to productive and from open/empty to surveyed and legally owned through legal deeds.  Similarly, the rivers were subject to harnessing for industry: “Putting Loafing Streams to Work”.   From a native perspective, the land and rivers belonged to all and were sacred.  Civilization as defined by the settlers ignored the fact that the Muscogees had their own communal fields, traditions, and governance.   These tensions came to a head in the 19th century in Alabama.

This exhibit focuses on the Coosa and Tallapoosa Rivers, hunting grounds and villages of the Muscogees. It was on the Tallapoosa that the Muscogees were defeated at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend, culminating with the granting of most of their land (21 million acres) to the US government in the Treaty of Fort Jackson.    This land was sold to settlers from the mid-Atlantic states who wished to extend their wealth through cotton production enabled by enslavement.

I am entangled in this story.  On my grandfather’s side, I am descended from the enslaver, Sam Wallace, who, in 1838, moved his intact tobacco plantation from Virginia to Shelby County, Alabama, to grow cotton along the Coosa River.  He had initially come to this area as a soldier in the War of 1812, fighting in the Creek Wars with Andrew Jackson.  On my grandmother’s side, I am descended from a Muscogee woman, Fanny, who was married to James Moore, an Indian trader who lived in Tuckabatchee on the Tallapoosa River (outside present day Dudleyville).  Though referred to as the first settler in Tallapoosa County, he was a Muscogee citizen. He and his adult children received land allotments in 1832 as tribal members.  As young adults, his four oldest children, looking for freedom from prejudice, moved to Texas and Oklahoma.  I am descended from the youngest daughter who married the young non-native family friend, who was sent by James Moore to assist his emigrating children to reach and establish themselves in Texas. Their party had become ill in Louisiana, with two dying.

The patterns of the 19th century continued into the 20th century and beyond, with Jim Crow laws and systems that reinforced the inequities of slavery and the forced removal of the Muscogee, the rise of the monoculture agriculture economy with continued cotton production and later the timber industry.  The rivers were dammed to create hydroelectric power, with some species pushed to extinction. The European view of time, progress, and industrialization was fully dominant.

Although the Tallapoosa and Coosa Rivers are separated by a gallery wall,  the story is  one.