A Kingdom of Water: Adaptation and Survival in the Houma Nation by J. Daniel d'Oney

Abstract

Reviewed by: A Kingdom of Water: Adaptation and Survival in the Houma Nation by J. Daniel d'Oney Elizabeth Ellis A Kingdom of Water: Adaptation and Survival in the Houma Nation. By J. Daniel d'Oney. Indians of the Southeast. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2020. Pp. xxiv, 199. $60.00, ISBN 978-1-4962-1879-7.) A Kingdom of Water: Adaptation and Survival in the Houma Nation is an accessible and engaging account of more than three centuries of Houma adaptation and resilience. This work also explicitly engages with the United Houma Nation's ongoing fight for federal recognition and is informed by the author's conversations with Houma community members. J. Daniel d'Oney's blending of contemporary political context and expansive historical research is sure to be of interest to scholars of Louisiana history and contemporary Indian policy. In the late seventeenth century, the Lower Mississippi Valley was home to many small Indigenous polities. The Houmas, who were one of these small Native nations, shaped the development of the region during the colonial era, and their ingenuity and innovation have enabled them to retain lands and [End Page 322] communities in the Gulf South through the present day. A Kingdom of Water helps explain how Houmas achieved this monumental feat. D'Oney's early chapters trace the development of Houma and French partnerships during the eighteenth century. The author's work builds on Daniel Usner's arguments about the importance of small Native nations for the Louisiana colony, and d'Oney emphasizes the power that Houmas exercised during this era. The second chapter critically appraises the consequences of the relationships between the Houmas and the French settlers. The Houmas' entanglement with them brought violence and epidemics to the nation, even as their alliances could be politically and economically advantageous. Throughout these first chapters, d'Oney also opens a conversation about the challenges of telling Houma history with sparse documentary records and through accounts written by colonists who did not understand Houma politics or society. This thread carries through the whole of the monograph, and the author's focus on how outsiders' erroneous and misleading reports have caused problems for generations of Houmas is one of the strongest interventions of the book and a critical part of d'Oney's ultimate argument about how misinformation has stymied the nation's fight for federal recognition. If Houmas were able to achieve influence and economic advantage through their partnerships with the French during the first half of the eighteenth century, after 1750 the onslaught of settlers into their homelands led to a steady decline in Houma power. Chapters 3 and 4 examine the wave of land losses around the turn of the nineteenth century as Louisiana and the U.S. federal government refused to recognize the Houmas as a sovereign Indian nation with territorial rights to their homelands. D'Oney highlights the way Houmas continued to integrate outsiders into their community as a means of survival during this era, but sometimes his language and analysis falter as he describes the collision of Indigenous modes of kinship with settler racial ideologies. The fifth chapter expands on the consequences of this erasure of the Houmas' ethnic and racial identities as Indians, and their political rights as a nation, in the mid-twentieth century. The final chapter, which focuses on the nation's fight for recognition, provides a powerful demonstration of how a combination of local business interests, federal policies, and misrepresented Houma history was mobilized to prevent Houmas from securing federal acknowledgment. D'Oney's analysis of the harm that Jim Crow–era racial ideologies caused Houmas resonates with Malinda Maynor Lowery's work on North Carolina and Brian Klopotek's work on Louisiana, and this book contributes to the growing body of scholarship on unremoved southern Native nations. Readers may wish that rather than highlighting conflicts between the United Houma Nation and other unrecognized Louisiana tribal nations, d'Oney had expanded his critique of recognition to examine how the federal process hurts all of these nations, but this critique is perhaps beyond the scope of the work. Regardless, d'Oney has provided a fresh and urgently needed narrative of Houma survivance...