The public is invited to a talk by Christopher Haveman, author of Rivers of Sand: Creek Indian Emigration, Relocation, and Ethnic Cleansing in the American South, on Tuesday, November 15 at 4 p.m. at Pebble Hill.

At its height the Creek Nation comprised a collection of multiethnic towns and villages stretching across large parts of Alabama, Georgia, and Florida. By the 1830s, however, the Creeks had lost almost all this territory through treaties and by the unchecked intrusion of white settlers who illegally expropriated Native soil. With the Jackson administration unwilling to aid the Creeks in removing the squatters, the Creek people suffered from dispossession, starvation, and indebtedness. Between the 1825 Treaty of Indian Springs and the forced migrations beginning in 1836, nearly twenty-three thousand Creek Indians were relocated—voluntarily or involuntarily—to Indian Territory. Rivers of Sand fills a substantial gap in scholarship by capturing, for the first time, the full breadth and depth of the Creeks’ collective tragedy during the marches westward, on the Creek home front, and during the first years of resettlement.

Christopher D. Haveman is Assistant Professor of History at the University of West Alabama. He is a specialist in the history of the Southeastern tribes. He teaches and writes in the areas of American Indian history and the history of the United States from the colonial through the Jacksonian eras. He holds a Ph.D. from Auburn University.

The event is free, open to the public, and will be followed by refreshments. Books will be available for purchase and signing. Support for this event comes from the Auburn University Special Lectures Fund. The Caroline Marshall Draughon Center for the Arts & Humanities at Pebble Hill is located at 101 S. Debardeleben Street, Auburn.

For more information on the program, call 334-844-4903 or visit www.auburn.edu/cah.