Natchez Country : Indians Colonists, and the Landscapes of Race in French Louisiana Hardback

by George Edward Milne

Part of the Early American Places series

Hardback

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Description

At the dawn of the 1700s the Natchez viewed the first Francophones in the Lower Mississippi Valley as potential inductees to their chiefdom.

This mistaken perception lulled them into permitting these outsiders to settle among them.

Within two decades conditions in Natchez Country had taken a turn for the worse.

The trickle of wayfarers had given way to a torrent of colonists (and their enslaved Africans) who refused to recognize the Natchezâ€™s hierarchy.

These newcomers threatened to seize key authority-generating features of Natchez Country: mounds, a plaza, and a temple.

This threat inspired these Indians to turn to a recent importâ€”racial categoriesâ€”to re-establish social order.

They began to call themselves â€œred menâ€ to reunite their polity and to distance themselves from the â€œblacksâ€ and â€œwhitesâ€ into which their neighbours divided themselves.

After refashioning their identity, they launched an attack that destroyed the nearby colonial settlements.

Their 1729 assault began a two-year war that resulted in the death or enslavement of most of the Natchez people. In Natchez Country, George Edward Milne provides the most comprehensive history of the Lower Mississippi Valley and the Natchez to date.

From La Salleâ€™s first encounter with what would become Louisiana to the ultimate dispersal of the Natchez by the close of the 1730s, Milne also analyses the ways in which French attitudes about race and slavery influenced native North American Indians in the vicinity of French colonial settlements on the Mississippi River and how Native Americans in turn adopted and resisted colonial ideology.