Indians of the Lower Mississippi and Trans-Mississippi to the end of the French Regime (presentation text)
Patricia Galloway
Louisiana Purchase Bicentennial Conference, 2003
Introduction
When Eric Wolf wrote his groundbreaking book about colonialism, Europe and the People Without History, he did not mean to suggest that noneuropean people had no history, but that Europeans defined them as such, because their ideas about their pasts were not recognizable to Europeans as “history.”[1] Similarly, Johannes Fabian, in Time and the Other, pointed out that noneuropeans were considered by Europeans to be somehow stuck in the past. Such a “denial of coevalness,” he argued, not only made noneuropean colonized people into useful metaphors for earlier stages of European cultural development, but solidified the notion that noneuropeans did not belong in a modernizing world.[2]
European history was seen as the only “real” history and Europeans as its only effective actors. Thus Amerindians have been included in natural history museums as anthropologized specimens and in histories as part of the introductory geographical setting chapter, while their ongoing history has been excluded from the historical museum and the main part of the historical text. That this situation has not changed much should be recognized in the fact that even histories explicitly devoted to Native groups are most frequently told from the European outside, looking in at the self-presentation that Native people adopted for outsiders’ benefit.
Generally, though, historians abandoned Native history to archaeologists. Archaeology depends upon material remains to construct sequences in terms of changing patterns in artifact clustering, either in geographical distributions or vertical strata of cultural deposits. Although in many and perhaps most cases these sequences do have a substantial temporal element, they also depend dialectically upon classifications imposed upon the artifacts themselves and hence are built upon categories just as firmly Western as are the temporal notions they are said to help define. In the hands of archaeologists patterns of artifact and settlement change became exemplars for schemes of cultural evolution, structured upon technology. In the end archaeology inevitably built its sequences backward from a European-dominated present, echoing the nineteenth-century European framing of progress in terms of stone, bronze, and iron ages; of hunting-gathering, herding, and agriculture, a progress that always terminated in European excellence and guaranteed that noneuropeans would be judged primitive and backward by comparison. Hangovers from this kind of thinking still haunt a more postmodern archaeology.
Obviously this is a caricature; since Native scholars have begun to intervene in and take control of the discourse about their own history, both history and archaeology have been awakened to their biases. Thus to write a thing called “history” about the Native past at all is problematic at the present decolonizing juncture, and central to any such effort must be an emphasis on seeking to hear the voices that have been so long silenced. The first step in this direction requires that we problematize the documentary, material, and oral archive on which historical writing is based, as well as the control of that archive. If North American Native peoples are recognized to be fully equipped with historical tradition, then we are compelled to ask how we may understand that tradition and take it into account.
It is a commonplace today to deride the exceptionalism of American history-writing, the assertion that the American ethnogenesis was morally privileged in some way. Yet in the context of cultural contact and comparison, every people’s history is exceptional, unique—and so are those of the Native groups Americans came to call “tribes.” For the lands that would be the southern part of the Louisiana Purchase, I shall attempt briefly to show how.
Amerindian Advent
Amerindians were the human explorers and settlers of the last unsettled continent on the globe: the first pioneers of the Americas. Whether their time is measured in thousands of years or is considered “ancient,” as peoples they emerged in truth from the earth of the Americas because it was that earth with its unique ecological complement that shaped them as they shaped it. Their science mastered its environments as they discovered what was safe to eat and how to hunt and eventually manage the unique animals they encountered. They made whole cultures from global cooling and warming episodes. Their technology mastered travel modes across the length and expanse of the continent.
These pioneers of more than ten thoudand years ago hunted the dramatic Pleistocene megafauna—giant sloths and beavers, sabertooth tigers, bison, mammoths—as long as they and the cold of a waning ice age lasted (though they also undoubtedly hunted smaller mammals and gathered foods as well). There is no real knowing how much impact their hunting had on these animal populations, which in any case were probably more strongly affected by climate changes to a warming and drying trend that in its turn favored not only the expansion of the human population but the alteration of the environment.[3] With the warming in climate came a gradual increase in sedentariness as people continued to hunt seasonally but began to establish permanent living sites based upon the collection and eventually the cultivation of squashes and oily seed-bearing plants like sunflower and sumpweed. In the South, archaeologists have come to understand during the last twenty years that large populations and even monumental architecture marking centers for periodic gatherings came about remarkably early—as early as 4000 BC—without agriculture.
Nevertheless a significant cultural development was the arrival, apparently from Mexico via the American Southwest, of another and more important seed: maize. This crop, which began to be popularly grown around AD 900, revolutionized Native life in the Americas as life in west Asia had been changed by wheat, life in Africa by millet. Maize enabled the further expansion of populations and compelled their concentration on the lands appropriate to its cultivation.[4] Because these lands were those of large alluvial valleys, it was the great river valleys of the continent’s center that saw the emergence of increasingly highly organized populations with leaders whose power began to be significant enough not only to extend trade and communication far and wide but to raise much larger communal structures upon the landscape: the so-called “mound-builders” of AD 1000-1500.
Anthropologists refer to these organized populations as chiefdoms because of the conventional nomenclature applied to their leaders. The largest of them, that centered on the enormous and complex city in the continental center now called Cahokia, was a vast polity, and its leader was certainly much like a king. By the European fourteenth century there was a significant number of such polities, each quite distinctive in the style if not the overall manner of organization of its culture. Across the central and southern part of the continent there were many varieties of this “Mississippian” set of practices, manifesting enormous and tiny civic-ceremonial centers and sophisticated and countrified settlements. Most recognized the importance of women’s fertility and work on the land by organizing their genealogy and landholding on the maternal principle, and they organized their ceremonialism around the events of the agricultural year.
These polities did not eventually coalesce into a single nation. Instead they rose and fell on their own timetables, driven by population growth and resource exhaustion. Eventually many of them proved to be somewhat fragile in their dependency upon multiple annual crops and abundant seasonal game, particularly when another spell of climate change, the so-called Little Ice Age that preceded and coincided with the period of European exploration and early settlement, made maize crops too uncertain to support large populations in close concentration. Cahokia’s decline took place in the late thirteenth century, when its population dispersed; others lasted longer, into the fifteenth and even sixteenth centuries, to be seen by early European explorers.[5]
European Advent
To say that 1492 changed everything is of course true: chaos theory has taught us that a single butterfly can do that. Native peoples had been trading, negotiating, and warring literally for millennia with Native Others, had abundant traditions for doing these things, and had already themselves changed their ways many times. But two significant additional sources of change were introduced by Europeans, both of them to have serious, even calamitous implications: European microbes and European technologies. As is now well-known, an array of European diseases, from smallpox to malaria to measles, products of the crowding of large populations and of greatest danger to Native groups also so concentrated, were the quite unintended passengers that proved most powerful in the often slow-motion European conquest of the Americas. Further, Europeans also brought with them weapons technologies superior in potential killing power, transportation technologies with a longer reach, and technologies of communication and governance that could enable a more detailed control than that possessed (or even desired) by the polities they found when, beyond all expectation, they encountered a populous continent that lacked those kinds of coordinated technologies. In neither case, however, did these two engines of change have complete immediate effect. Native people were on the whole healthier to begin with than Europeans, and were highly proficient in their own technologies of war, transportation, communication, and governance—and what they brought to the confrontation was powerful enough in its own way to change European practice and thinking, if not to overcome them.
The impact of the European arrival was not immediate for the Louisiana Purchase region, unless we accept with Dobyns that the 1519 smallpox epidemic carried to Mexico by Cortès was able to spread among Native people as far as northern Mexico, Texas, and the lower Mississippi River valley.[6] Since Native people across the entire continent had well-developed communication routes, including the Caribbean islands, it was certainly possible for word of the coming of strangers to run on ahead of their actual appearance, but certainly not at Internet speeds: more likely, it would take a year or more for news to be passed across the continent, more if it had to cross ethnic boundaries where there was active warfare. All of these characteristics lessened the chance for the spread of acute disease, but news could travel even if the messenger died.[7] Thus it is not perhaps surprising that early efforts to explore the Gulf Coast by sea were met with something less than enthusiasm by Native peoples, as Panfilo de Narvaez found in 1528. It has been suggested that possible Spanish slaving along the coast, reflecting Ponce de Leòn’s efforts on the Florida peninsula and otherwise unrecorded, might account for it. What the Narvaez expedition saw along the Gulf coast was the widespread and varied exploitation of fisheries together with mistrust by the Native people, while Cabeza de Vaca and the other survivors of the expedition, making their way into the interior after being cast away on the south Texas coast, observed the seasonal patterns of resource extraction of large groups of hunter-gatherers in northern Mexico who had clearly not heard of the coming of strangers.
It does not seem that many people in the interiors, even had they heard of it, had taken in the potential significance of what was going on along the coasts: it might not be unusual to hear about odd things being seen in foreign lands. They got a rude awakening when the Hernando de Soto expedition made its way through the southern interior from 1539-42 and Coronado, coming from New Mexico to present-day Kansas in 1541, nearly met him. Soto came with a colonizing equipage of 600 men, a herd of pigs, and riding horses, all living things capable of carrying disease. Coronado brought men and horses as well, and was in a position to set up conditions for a trade in horses that would have its own dramatic impact on the Plains and the South.
Both came with the intention of discovering extraordinary riches. Although there were gold deposits here and there in the regions they saw, neither Soto nor Coronado found them. Soto hoped to find large populations that could be enslaved or laid under corvée tribute by means of the physical control of their leaders, and this did not work either: everywhere Native stratagems of resistance thwarted both of them. A good part of their failure can be attributed to the Native communication networks mentioned above. On several occasions Soto seized “chiefs” only to find that clothes did not make the man and he had been fooled by a volunteer. Both Soto and Coronado were literally misled by guides willing to sacrifice their lives. So although the sixteenth-century Spanish expeditions into the Purchase lands did indeed encounter impressive centralized polities that they dearly hoped to be able to dominate, they did not succeed in doing so. After Soto had died in the attempt, his lieutenant Moscoso led his men westward, only to find, beyond the strong and numerous Caddo groups that they dared not treat with less than politeness, thinly populated lands. The Spanish were glad to be able to make it back to the Mississippi and escape with their lives. Although Soto was followed to the Mobile-Pensacola area by Tristán de Luna some years later in an effort to make a settlement, Luna’s attempt was no more successful, even if it suffered less loss of life.
Protohistoric Intermission
From the 1560s to the last quarter of the seventeenth century the lands of the Purchase were essentially let alone by Europeans, and we must depend on the evidence of oral tradition and silent objects buried in the earth to tell what happened. Clearly European-precipitated changes took place. Spanish expeditions had left behind human wastes in their camps, a few human escapees, and numbers of animals all along their routes, and although the diseases potentially transmitted might not have been acute, they certainly had the potential to add significantly to the disease load of Native peoples all across the South and the trans-Mississippi, weakening populations for disease outbreaks once European contact resumed. In addition, although Spain made no more attempts for the moment to tackle the deep North American interior, they continued to travel, stop, and make contacts along the coast of their “Spanish Sea,” so that acute disease could continue to be spread to Native contacts. The impact of European disease, it has been argued, was to precipitate serious “virgin soil epidemics” in populations that had not previously experienced those specific diseases and had no immunity to them. Population losses of 60%-90% have been mentioned, and clearly demographic disaster of such magnitude would have destroyed most functioning social structures.
But the material evidence of archaeology stubbornly suggests that losses were not everywhere so serious, being worst where riverine access was easier, and that some polities or polity fractions survived intact enough to attract to themselves other less intact groups. There was a great deal of population movement and reconsolidation during this so-called “protohistoric” period of only marginal contact with Europeans, reflected in archaeological remains and traditional migration accounts. Confederacies like the Creek and Choctaw east of the Mississippi and the Caddo to the west emerged into history from populations that had been variously stressed by disease.[8] What Europeans saw in the late 1700s were groups with distinct “villages,” “divisions,” or “races” that were organized in more or less loose confederations for mutual defense and marriage partnering, spread usually along contiguous watercourses or ecological zones. Egalitarian in a general way, these confederations were still often led by men who sometimes inherited their rank. They shared out some ceremonial functions in such a way as to cement their linkage, and the relations between segments could be articulated in terms of formal ranking, with historical precedent in their previous relations to one another. These groups were therefore usually less centrally organized than their constituent elements had been before (the Natchez were the exception that proved the rule). The people who lived in these groups had of course not forgotten how to hunt, fish, gather, or grow maize, and they had also retained traditions of governance and religious beliefs that became the underpinnings of organizations that would prove to be impossible for Europeans to master politically and resistant to European religious proselytizing.
Return of the Repressed
Although English and Spanish settlement along the eastern seaboard of North America and the Florida peninsula had been well established by the seventeenth century, it was not until the French explorations at the end of that century—Marquette and Jolliet in 1674 and La Salle in 1682—that a permanent European presence began to be established in the Mississippi Valley. The French explorers discovered new conditions compared to what Soto had seen, the results of the migrations and confederations just discussed. They also discovered people who were perfectly aware of the growing pressure of Europeans on the borders of their regions. European threats were working now through Native people they had armed, and the people of the interior were cautiously interested in developing alliances themselves with Europeans who would be willing to provide support for defense.