Euchee | Native American | American Indian
John William Bass, Sr., a retired judge in Cairo, Ga. had pioneer ancestors who came down through Alabama to the Euchee-Scottish community called Euchee Valley on the Choctawhatchee River in what was once Spanish Florida. In a DNA fingerprint test, he matched Euchee (n=6) in the top position and Native American Florida (n=105) at rank #13. Iberian and Scottish ranked #2 and #3. Bass ended up attending Choctawhatchee High School in Fort Walton Beach, Fla., where he was a star player on the Choctawhatchee Indians’ champion basketball team and was voted president of the class of 1967. DNA Consultants’ principal investigator Donald N. Yates (who was class secretary and has Cherokee-Choctaw admixture) has known Bass for more than 50 years.
Although noted by colonial officials as among the oldest, and one of the most widespread and important American Indian “tribes” in the present-day Eastern United States, the Euchee lack a unified identity, culture, ethnology and history. They are the subject of much misinformation and even disinformation.
They have never been studied from the point of view of DNA, and their near-extinct language, declared by anthropologists to be a unique isolate, has never been captured in a dictionary or properly analyzed and compared. Few authoritative books or articles exist about them.
Other spellings of the group’s name are Uchee, Uchi, Yuchi and Yuchee, which can be taken to come from “white people” (compare yucca “white plant”). They were described as Azuli on old maps, or Children of the Sun—Tsoyaha in their own language. Their realm stretching from Georgia to Virginia was called Azulia. They are probably better understood as a past confederation of different peoples, reflecting many discrete waves of immigration across the Atlantic, including from the Mediterranean and Iberian Peninsula and from the British Isles and Scandinavia. By many, they are considered part of the Atalans, Atlantic-facing seafarers and migrants who began mining riches and colonizing America (called Atala) starting about 2000 BCE, before the invasion of Asiatic and Mexican tribes.
The Euchee, like the Sea People of the Old World, like Minoans, Greeks, Thracians, Celts and others in Old Europe, and like the Apalachites of the New World who were their neighbors, worshiped the Mother Goddess, whom they called Wahané, or Old Woman. The Sun to them was originally female, and the Goddess created all, nourished all and took all back to the Sun at death, to be transformed into new life. Indians were born from the goddess’s drops of menstrual blood falling to earth. Her boy-child was Son of the Sun, and the people accordingly were Children of the Sun.
Other indigenous people in North America regard the Euchee as masters of the secret arts of stone work and mining. One of their culture-heroes is Gohatoné, Iron or Metal Man. (See Frank Gouldsmith [Speck], Ethnology of the Yuchi Indians, Philadelphia: University Museum, 1909.) An interesting survival of Euchee animal tales, mixed with African folklore, appeared in the Uncle Remus stories made famous by Georgia writer Joel Chandler Harris. Alone among Indians, apparently, the Euchees fashioned figurines out of stone carried with them wherever they traveled and transmitted stories attached to them about their famous ancestors.
Some Euchees are known as Georgia’s “White Indians,” some are quite dark-skinned (like the Savannah River group), some have blended with the Creeks, others have joined the Seminoles. Most blended very successfully with white settlers. They themselves claim to have originated from across the Eastern Sea or Atlantic, beyond the Bahamas, and may be connected with the ancient Egyptians, who also called themselves Children of the Sun (see W. J. Perry, The Children of the Sun, first published in 1923).
The earliest name of Georgia’s Chattahoochee River (literally Choctaw River), along which they and the Apalachite Indians, as well as the Choctaws, settled, was Hitanichi, from the word hitana, “beautiful, pleasant, noble, white, chief” in the Taino, Apalachite and Ancient Egyptian languages. Tomahitans, a now-disused, more general term, comes from Ancient Egyptian TmHt, “land of the white people,” which designated either Libya (with its Sea Peoples) or America, the White Continent.[1]
Much of what has been written about the Euchee is false or out of date, claims Richard L. Thornton, an architect, historian and member of the Perdido Bay Creek Tribe who has some Euchee admixture himself. His article, “The Uchee (Yuchi)… Everything You Wanted to Know but Were Afraid to Ask!” is perhaps the most complete modern source of information.
The Euchee Reference Population STR Profile DNA Project was undertaken by DNA Consultants in conjunction with Earl Hill, Thomas Castle, Trevor Smith and Thomas Stafford, Jr. in 2022. It followed the protocol and standards of Kelly Carrothers et al, “Native American Population Data Based on the Globalfiler Autosomal STR Loci,” Forensic Science International: Genetics 24 (Sept. 2016) e12-e13, DOI:https://doi.org/10.1016/ j.fsigen.2016.06.014, a public scientific compilation of American Indian short tandem repeat frequencies.
Although the number of participants in the study was extremely small, many customers with Euchee connections taking DNA Consultants’ STR frequency forensic test reported matches. A Euchee-modal profile consistently matched mostly northern and western European populations and, distantly, other American Indian groups, suggesting the unique position of Euchee Indians in American history. A salient feature in the modal results was a very low African level and a totally absent East Asian and Southeast Asian component, confirming the non-Siberian, non-Mongolian and non-Pacific origins of the Euchees according to their own traditions.
Some individuals with Euchee ancestry belong to the Savannah River Band of Euchee (Uchean) Indians, a group not state or federally recognized. Others are officially recognized as members of the Muscogee Nation or some other tribe, such as the Piqua Shawnee Tribe of Alabama. There are bands of Euchee Indians throughout their original homeland of present-day southeastern United States including Tennessee, Florida, Georgia, Alabama, South Carolina, North Carolina and Virginia. Other groups of Euchee are concentrated in Oklahoma, especially around Sepulpa. There are also significant populations of Euchee descendants in Hawkinsville, Sparta, Irvington and Sandersville, Ga. (information of Richard L. Thornton). Before Andrew Jackson reduced their numbers, the Euchee were strong throughout Middle and East Tennessee, where they commonly buried their dead in stone-box graves.
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More Information
Forensic Reference Population Begun for Euchee (Uchi) Indians (news item, October 19, 2022)
Shawnee Reference Populations Introduced (news item, Aug. 6, 2022)
[Richard Thornton], The Americas Revealed – Unraveling the Past of the Americas, Everything you Wanted to Know about the Uchi but Were Afraid to Ask (blog post, July 23, 2019)
[1] Donald N. Yates and Teresa A. Yates, Cherokee Studies II: More Real People Who Proved the Geneticists Wrong (Longmont: Panther’s Lodge Publishers, 2021), p. 192, as reported by the French Protestant naturalist Charles de Rochefort in 1681 and savant C. S. Rafinesque in 1824.
