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

Abstract

With Natchez Country: Indians, Colonists, and the Landscapes of Race in French Louisiana George Edward Milne contributes an ambitious and compelling monograph on French and Natchez relations in Louisiana. He examines the development of French and Natchez societies in the Natchez homelands along the Mississippi River from 1682 to 1733. Using a wide variety of archaeological and documentary sources, Milne analyzes how Natchez and French people understood their worlds and each other, and how both peoples pursued their respective political and economic agendas. After they had worked for decades to coexist in Louisiana, in 1729 the Natchez massacred their French neighbors and drove the survivors from their territory. Ultimately Milne’s insightful volume argues that by the late 1720s the Natchez people had come to understand themselves as fundamentally different from and incompatible with their French neighbors, and they relied on a racial ideology to articulate their desire to rid themselves of these “impudent immigrants” (79).As Milne chronicles the interactions of the French and the Natchez, he devotes roughly equal attention to the efforts of the Natchez elite to expand and control their chiefdom and to French colonizers’ efforts to establish lucrative settlements in the Lower Mississippi Valley. Although Milne provides a thorough analysis of the influences of Atlantic networks in Louisiana, he devotes less attention to the Natchez villages’ relationships with their Indian neighbors. Given that Choctaw involvement in the 1729 Natchez War was a decisive factor in the conflict, further analysis of Indigenous relationships would have enhanced Milne’s astute discussion of Natchez diplomacy.Milne’s volume offers an insightful reinterpretation of the sporadic violence and conflicts that shaped Natchez-French relationships in the Lower Mississippi Valley. Through his analysis of the tensions between the politically elite Grand Village and the outlying and subordinate towns, Milne highlights how divisions within the Natchez polity shaped the conflicts among Natchez peoples and their French neighbors. Rather than approach the series of violent conflicts between the French and Natchez towns in the years before the 1729 massacre as individual wars, Milne suggests that these clashes are better understood as moments of crisis and as points at which the Natchez elite sought to eliminate their political rivals. Milne also illustrates how seemingly chaotic acts, like the mutilation of French cattle and horses that wandered into Natchez farmlands, were part of a larger, complex political dialogue between the two nations and a way in which the Natchez attempted to assert control and reinforce borders in their lands.Most significant, Milne persuasively argues that the Natchez massacre represents a critical turning point in Native American and colonial relations, as the Natchez used race to explain the difference between their people and the French. Unlike previous scholars, who have argued that the Natchez massacre of 1729 resulted from land pressure or the diplomatic failings of a single French commander, Milne points to Natchez anxiety about the influx of enslaved Africans into their homelands and to their increasing perception of Europeans as threats to their society. As he explains, their interactions with Europeans and enslaved Africans led the Natchez to begin to call themselves “red men,” a term that Milne argues helped them conceive of themselves as a unified people and assert sovereignty in the face of European encroachment. Milne’s contribution to our understanding of French and Native relations and to the emergence of racial ideologies among both European and Indian peoples is sure to be of interest to all scholars of early America.