Matters of Size: Petites Nations, Slavery, and Non-Coalescence in the Gulf South's Overlapping Shatter Zones

Abstract

Matters of Size:Petites Nations, Slavery, and Non-Coalescence in the Gulf South's Overlapping Shatter Zones Denise I. Bossy (bio) IN the early 1760s the Tunica nation numbered roughly a hundred people. They also wielded a geopolitical power entirely disproportionate to their modest size. Over the course of the previous century, the Tunicas had navigated two different waves of commercialized slaving—by the English and then by the French—as well as French colonial settlement and three wars waged respectively by the much larger Natchez, Chickasaw, and Choctaw polities against the French between 1729 and 1750. Next they faced the British and Spanish takeover of former French territorial claims along the Gulf Coast at the conclusion of the Seven Years' War in 1763. They navigated this new period of imperial wrangling over Native lands and alliances much as they long had: through extensive social and political networking and strategic intraregional movements. As Elizabeth N. Ellis skillfully reveals in her illuminating The Great Power of Small Nations, the Tunicas were part of a world of small Indigenous nations whose numbers belie the power they wielded to redirect, contain, and survive the violence unleashed by English, French, and Spanish colonization. Totaling between seventeen thousand and twenty thousand people in the 1670s, the roughly forty Petites Nations of the Lower Mississippi valley each had fewer than a thousand residents, and most numbered just a few hundred. It was by creating multinational settlement regions where discrete polities maintained their political sovereignty that the Petites Nations were able to capitalize on the geopolitical safety and economic advantages usually reserved for appreciably larger communities. Like many other nations in the Native South during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Petites Nations incorporated Indigenous migrants. They also sought refuge as well as offered it to one another. Through this process of accepting migrants and periodically relocating for protection, the Petites Nations built a host [End Page 731] of flexible networks linking them to other Indian nations, small and large. By establishing polyglot, multicultural, elastic provinces, these small nations retained their political and cultural independence while leveraging collective strength through their connections to their close neighbors and their more expansive social and political networks. Over the past two decades, historians and anthropologists have energetically studied the rise and expansion of a pernicious trade in enslaved Native people initiated by English traders operating out of Virginia and subsequently South Carolina from the 1640s through 1715. The prevailing framework for understanding the devastation wrought by the advent of colonial slaving, coupled with the spread of new diseases and the expansion of a protocapitalistic exchange system, is the "Mississippian shatter zone." As conceived by anthropologist Robbie Ethridge, this zone of violence, slaving, and disease hammered the old Indian world of the Native South from the Atlantic coast to the Mississippi River. It resulted in a new epoch marked by unprecedented levels of refugeeism and population loss as numerous Indigenous peoples found themselves uprooted, dislocated, and destroyed.1 The Petites Nations first began to experience the effects of slaving when refugees poured into their settlements in the mid-seventeenth century. By the 1690s they had become the direct targets of slaving, particularly by the Chickasaws to their north, who partnered with colonial traders operating out of Charles Town. This first wave of English-sponsored attacks enslaved an estimated 18 percent of the Petites Nations' total population, or at least three thousand kin. Some, such as the Mobiles and Tohomes, lost almost half of their loved ones to slaving. As Ellis shows in full relief, a second wave of particularly devastating French-sponsored slaving from 1700 to the 1730s thrashed the Petites Nations further. While she builds on prior scholarship in tracing that story, she punctuates the equally destructive effects of French slaving, driving home the point that not just the English but also the French were "substantively responsible for escalating slaving violence in the Southeast" (97).2 [End Page 732] Chronically short on women and enslaved laborers, French colonial settlers and officials developed both a sex trade in enslaved Indian women and a policy of rampant wartime Native enslavement. In 1707, for example, the governor of Louisiana launched what became a...