Beyond Rise and Fall: Size, Power, and Survival in the Gulf South

Abstract

Beyond Rise and Fall:Size, Power, and Survival in the Gulf South Julia Lewandoski (bio) DURING the long eighteenth century, the Petites Nations of the Lower Mississippi Valley practiced a political system that allowed them strength and flexibility—or, rather, strength through flexibility. Whether in times of crisis or alliance building, Petites Nations peoples often formed multinational settlements, and their shared customs of offering refuge to migrants enabled them to rebuild after epidemics or deadly violence. But just as fundamental to this system was the ability of nations or smaller groups within them to break away. These processes of disintegration and reconstitution made survival possible under successive colonial regimes and in the midst of an economy shaped by enslavement. And they enabled the Petites Nations to nimbly direct the wider political geography of the Gulf South for more than a century. Elizabeth N. Ellis's portrait of the eighteenth-century Petites Nations in The Great Power of Small Nations is carefully researched and richly rendered. She conveys the complexities of multinational diplomacy in part with a vivid description of the corn porridge, which was ground, boiled, and thickened with venison and bear fat, that Biloxi women offered in greeting to international visitors. She invokes the sounds of the French medals worn by Tunica leader Lattanash—clinking alongside his copper and shell bracelets and anklets—as he asserted his multiple alliances and displayed Tunica power. Vignettes such as these reveal the ways that Ellis skillfully and imaginatively interprets the colonial archives of Louisiana. The men, women, and nonbinary leaders and members of these small nations appear as complex humans, making difficult choices under changing circumstances. Ellis has not drawn an idealized or flattened portrait of noble Indigenous resistance based on unilateral cooperation. She describes a political system that enabled long-term opposition, renegotiation, and independence under colonialism. Ellis roots the power of the Petites Nations in a "culturally institutionalized approach to negotiating refuge" (29), facilitated through a common repertoire of ceremonies, gifts, speeches, and diplomacy. Nations with more land and resources offered refuge to migrants [End Page 751] fleeing violence or enslavement, as the Tensas welcomed the Mosopeleas in the 1670s, and as the Natchez folded in the Tioux and Grigras in the early eighteenth century. The specificity and equanimity of this portrait of Petites Nations geopolitics should provoke scholars to reimagine Indigenous power far beyond the Gulf South. Historians of Native North America often highlight the histories of large nations, confederacies that commanded European respect, and territorial empires as they expanded and contracted.1 The identification of these examples of early American Indigenous power has been a welcome corrective to prior narratives of victimhood and dependency. But that historical emphasis has implicitly assumed that Native peoples required equivalent size and political organization to compete with settler formulations. In contrast, Ellis describes Petites Nations' power without relying on an underlying European definition of national or imperial dominance. She accomplishes this by observing closely how Petites Nations' politics and territoriality functioned across the Gulf South. The precision of her approach has produced a model for scholarship on alternate forms of Native power reflecting on-the-ground realities in early America. She unpacks forms of control rooted in the cultures and epistemologies of the nations who developed these systems over centuries, rather than in European assumptions about what constituted power. Historians look for patterns and narratives, and they often prefer change to continuity, as revealed in the popularity of the rise-and-fall trope. Ellis pushes us to reconsider the temporal frames that historians often impose on Native peoples. Throughout their century of control over the Lower Mississippi Valley, Petites Nations peoples never consistently sought political consolidation. They drew power from periods of multinational organization, even when such agreements were impermanent, and they also drew strength from the disintegration of alliances. They repeatedly declined to develop centralized political systems or to confederate into larger polities over several centuries—and this did not diminish their potency. Previous scholars have taken quite different views, often interpreting this lack of confederation as a temporary lapse between eras of centralization. They have portrayed the Petites Nations as "remnants" (8) of the [End Page 752] disintegration of grand...