The Great Power of Native Women

Abstract

The Great Power of Native Women Alejandra Dubcovsky (bio) ACCORDING to a Creek story, a monstrous earthworm once impregnated the wife of a hunter. Feeling betrayed by his wife, the husband wanted to leave her in the woods, but his sisters interceded. They insisted that the pregnant wife be brought home so they could care for her. But their medicine was not enough, for when she gave birth many earthworms came out of her. These creatures burned down her house and killed the sisters helping with the delivery. The earthworms then wreaked havoc throughout the town and finally buried themselves deep in the ground. The story ends with the monstrous earthworms succeeding, for they, and not the women, "have continued to live there."1 This invasive, sexually charged monster targeted Native women as well as their practices—it exploited how Native women cared for pregnancies, how they decided who entered their towns, and how they dealt with foreign or contaminated entities. I thought about that story as I read Elizabeth N. Ellis's important new book, The Great Power of Small Nations, which tackles a similar monster: the European and American colonizers whose dangerous and invasive forces in North America sought to displace Native people and disrupt their practices. She explores the multiple, long, and violent legacies of colonization in the Gulf South by centering the many innovative and unrecognized ways Native peoples dealt with these earthworm-like Europeans. She invokes a world in constant motion, a world of nonpermanent, multinational settlements that fused together and broke apart, incorporated outsiders and migrants, and managed to sustain their nations despite these violent fault lines. Through these Indigenous diplomatic efforts, the Petites Nations of the Gulf South made and remade notions of belonging. Ellis shows the overlapping, intersecting, and yet ultimately unique histories of each of those nations, arguing that the diverse ways they each established their own land claims, governance, and sovereignty must be explored rather than overlooked. The Great Power of Small Nations focuses on the complexities of Indigenous politics and relationships, privileging Native histories and perspectives rather than European anxieties or fantasies. [End Page 740] Ellis's meticulous work thus offers a new reading of Native experiences with and within enslavement. Although there has been an explosion of innovative scholarship on Indian slavery since the publication of Alan Gallay's groundbreaking The Indian Slave Trade in 2002, few have explored the effects of slave raids and raiding on smaller Native nations.2 Ellis carefully reconstructs the complex struggles of the Natchez, Tensas, Tunicas, Yazoos, Chitimachas, Paniouachas, Tawasas, Alabamas, Koroas, and Apalachees, among others, to address the problem of enslavement by encroaching French and English traders as well as raids by the Chickasaw and Upper Creek peoples. While chronicling the general destabilization and violence of slave raids in the Gulf South, The Great Power of Small Nations remains firmly focused on their effects on the Petites Nations, a difficult feat considering the fragmentary and incomplete nature of surviving sources. Ultimately, Ellis finds that Petites Nations' responses to and strategies for addressing slavery could look quite different than those of larger Native nations, and, perhaps more importantly, were not uniform among the small nations she studies. If enslavement created a "world in chaos" (83) for some, it could mean safety and security for others. The Tensas and Chitimachas, for example, dealt differently with the rising threat of Indian slavery during the first decades of the eighteenth century. Ellis shows that "Tensa captives were bought, sold, and gifted to French settlers individually and in small numbers by other Native people" (82), whereas Chitimachas "were captured en masse" (93) by the French as part of their bloody military campaign. Despite being neighbors, the Tensas and Chitimachas experienced enslavement in radically different ways. In the course of exploring Indigenous responses to enslavement, Ellis uncovers a remarkable archive of records revealing Native women's critical place in the story of slavery along the Gulf Coast. For Tensas, women were the main targets of these slave raids, as revealed by their sudden presence in French Louisiana homes and plantations as well as by their noticeable [End Page 741] absence from their own communities. Many of the...