Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: Weaving Alliances with Other Women
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PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 6/10/1953
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https://as.vanderbilt.edu/history/bio/daniel-usner * http://www.oah.org/lectures/lecturers/view/1853 * https://networks.h-net.org/node/2295/reviews/111121/osburn-usner-weaving-alliances-other-women-chitimacha-indian-work-new
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LC control no.: n 91066258
LCCN Permalink: https://lccn.loc.gov/n91066258
HEADING: Usner, Daniel H.
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100 10 |a Usner, Daniel H.
670 __ |a His Indians, settlers, and slaves in a frontier exchange economy, c1992: |b CIP t.p. (Daniel H. Usner, Jr.) publ. info. (assoc. prof. of history, Cornell Univ.)
670 __ |a American Indians in the lower Mississippi Valley, 1999: |b CIP t.p. (Daniel H. Usner, Jr.) data sheet (b. 06-10-53)
953 __ |a bd65 |b sf15
PERSONAL
Born June 10, 1953.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer and educator. Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, director of American Indian Program, 1999-2002; Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN, chair of history department, 2004-07, Holland N. McTyeire Professor of History. Served on council of Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture.
MEMBER:American Society for Ethnohistory (member of council, president, 2010-11).
AWARDS:Jamestown Prize, Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, and John H. Dunning Prize, American Historical Association, both for Indians, Settlers, and Slaves in a Frontier Exchange Economy. Fellowships from organizations, including the Cornell University Society for the Humanities, American Council of Learned Societies, Huntington Library, Council for International Exchange of Scholars, Newberry Library, Vanderbilt University, and School for Advanced Research in Santa Fe.
WRITINGS
Contributor of articles to publications, including Ethnohistory, Journal of Southern History, and Native American and Indigenous Studies. Contributor of chapters to books.
SIDELIGHTS
Daniel H. Usner is a writer and educator. He serves as the Holland N. McTyeire Professor of History at Vanderbilt University. Previously, Usner was the chair of the school’s history department. Before joining Vanderbilt, He worked at Cornell University, where he served as the director of the university’s American Indian Program. Usner has also served on the council of the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and as the president of the American Society for Ethnohistory.
Indians, Settlers, and Slaves in a Frontier Exchange Economy
In 1992, Usner released Indians, Settlers, and Slaves in a Frontier Exchange Economy: The Lower Mississippi Valley before 1783. The volume received the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture’s Jamestown Prize, as well as the American Historical Association’s John H. Dunning Prize. In it, he focuses on the geographical area that included Louisiana and West Florida, a province that included parts of present-day Alabama, Florida, and Mississippi. Usner examines the economic alliances between the diverse groups that populated the region. Several Native American tribes were based there, and the region was also home to military outposts and colonial settlements. Though the groups had conflicts with one another at times, they also relied on commerce with each other. Usner also looks into the ways in which the groups communicated.
Nancy Shoemaker, contributor to the Journal of Social History, commented: “The book is most interesting in its discussion of how Indians, Africans, and Europeans all contributed knowledge and skills to a common economic community.” Shoemaker added: “Usner’s research is an important addition to the literature on colonial economic development and will no doubt lead to further research into this region’s history.” Writing in the Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Patricia Galloway suggested: “The value of the book as social history is unquestioned, and it will doubtless fulfill Usner’s goal of bringing Louisiana into the mainstream of American colonial history. As economic history, however, it leaves aside some of the knotty questions of what is meant by a ‘frontier exchange economy.'”
American Indians in the Lower Mississippi Valley
American Indians in the Lower Mississippi Valley: Social and Economic Histories is a collection of eight essays by Usner. He highlights the problems the Native tribes of the Lower Mississippi Valley faced during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The growing cotton industry encroached on their territories, and colonial authorities limited their rights. Also, they experienced large drops in their populations, due to wars and disease. Usner offers an analysis of the relationship between French colonists and the Natchez Indians, which ended badly. He also examines how Native peoples in the region dealt with the cotton economy.
Reviewing the book in the Journal of Interdisciplinary History, James Taylor Carson remarked: “Usner is able to provide fresh insights into topics as varied as the formation of the seventeenth-century Natchez chiefdom and the presence of native women in New Orleans markets in the early twentieth century.” Daniel K. Richter, critic in the American Indian Quarterly, commented: “The structure of the American Indians in the Lower Mississippi Valley as a set of essays, rather than as a seamless narrative, produces a pattern in which nearly every chapter begins with an overview of historiography and in which generalizations sometimes crowd out individual stories. Nonetheless, the collection provides a productive, coherent framework for understanding Indian experiences in a too-long-neglected region of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century North America.” Writing in the Journal of Social History, Mary Young suggested: “Daniel Usner follows a first book on the frontier exchange economy of the ‘colonial’ Lower Mississippi Valley with a more far-reaching analysis of the function of Indian agency and informal interracial exchanges of microbes, goods, labor, language, and games in the same region from the beginning of European contact through the early twentieth century. His emphasis on Indian agency, and on the frontier as a zone of cultural interaction rather than a racial border, places this work, self-consciously and successfully, at the center of the ‘newest’ Indian history.” An English translation of a French review by Nelson Ouellet, contributor to the Canadian Journal of History, stated: “The contribution that historian Usner offers us is very important for our understanding of the history of Indians in the southern states before the intensification by Andrew Jackson’s administration of the federal policy of exclusion.” Ouellet added: “American Indians in the Lower Mississippi Valley is a book that is at once indispensable to the specialist and filled with research and reflection for the student and the non-initiate.” Jennifer M. Spear, reviewer on H-Net: Humanities and Social Sciences Online, asserted: “Scholars are taking new looks, armed with tools and methods from ethnohistory and cultural studies, at how Indian nations in the southeast came to be and how they resisted and adapted to the changes brought about by European colonialism in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Dan Usner’s American Indians in the Lower Mississippi Valley, the latest book in the University of Nebraska Press series on Indians of the Southeast, is a welcome contribution to this vibrant field.” Spear added: “Usner’s detailed analysis of the demographic and economic changes in the Lower Mississippi Valley has given us a great place from which to build.”
Weaving Alliances with Other Women
In Weaving Alliances with Other Women: Chitimacha Indian Work in the New South, Usner focuses on the women of the Chitimacha tribe in southern Louisiana. Specifically, he examines the friendships of a Chitimacha woman named Christine Paul. Paul, a basket weaver, became close with Mary Bradford and Caroline Dormon, both white women. Bradford and Dormon helped Paul find buyers for her weavings outside the Chitimacha community. Usner discusses the racial, economic, and cultural factors that affected these friendships and informed relationships between Natives and whites in the region.
Mikaela M. Adams offered a favorable assessment of the work in the Journal of Southern History. Adams asserted: “Although slim, Usner’s volume is packed with rich details and thoughtful analysis. His section on Chitimacha land loss is particularly revealing; it illustrates that indigenous dispossession in the South did not end with the removals of the 1830s and 1840s. This book is ideal for classroom use and will appeal to scholars of Native America, women’s history, material culture, and the New South.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
American Indian Quarterly, spring, 2000, Daniel K. Richter, review of American Indians in the Lower Mississippi Valley: Social and Economic Histories, p. 312.
Canadian Journal of History, April, 2000, Nelson Ouellet, review of American Indians in the Lower Mississippi Valley, p. 177.
Journal of Interdisciplinary History, winter, 1994, Patricia Galloway, review of Indians, Settlers, and Slaves in a Frontier Exchange Economy: The Lower Mississippi Valley before 1783, p. 554; summer, 2000, James Taylor Carson, review of American Indians in the Lower Mississippi Valley, p. 120.
Journal of Social History, fall, 1993 Nancy Shoemaker, review of Indians, Settlers, and Slaves in a Frontier Exchange Economy, p. 159; fall, 2000, Mary Young, review of American Indians in the Lower Mississippi Valley, p. 231.
Journal of Southern History, November, 2016, Mikaela M. Adams, review of Weaving Alliances with Other Women: Chitimacha Indian Work in the New South, p. 954.
ONLINE
H-Net: Humanities and Social Sciences Online, https://www.hnet.org/ (August 9, 2017), Jennifer M. Spear, review of American Indians in the Lower Mississippi Valley.
University of Georgia Press Website, http://www.ugapress.org/ (July 25, 2017), author profile.
Vanderbilt University, Department of History Website, https://as.vanderbilt.edu/ (July 25, 2017), author faculty profile.*
Daniel H. Usner, Jr.
Holland N. McTyeire Professor of History
Daniel Usner is the author of Indians, Settlers, and Slaves in a Frontier Exchange Economy: The Lower Mississippi Valley before 1783 (University of North Carolina Press, 1992), which won the Jamestown Prize from the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and the John H. Dunning Prize from the American Historical Association. His other books are American Indians in the Lower Mississippi Valley: Social and Economic Histories (University of Nebraska Press, 1998), Indian Work: Language and Livelihood in American History (Harvard University Press, 2009), and Weaving Alliances with Other Women: Chitimacha Indian Work in the New South (University of Georgia Press, 2015).
His current book-length project is a study of the Chitimacha Indians of south Louisiana from the Civil War to the New Deal. Recent articles derived from this research are “An Ethnohistory of Things: Or, How to Treat California’s Canastromania,” Ethnohistory 59(Summer 2012), 441-63; “From Bayou Teche to Fifth Avenue: Crafting a New Market for Chitimacha Indian Baskets,” Journal of Southern History 79(May 2013), 339-74; and "Weaving Material Objects and Political Alliances: The Chitimacha Indian Pursuit of Federal Recogniton," Native American and Indigenous Studies 1 (Spring 2014), 25-48. His latest works on early America are “Colonial Projects and Frontier Practices: The First Century of New Orleans History,” published in Frontier Cities: Recovering Encounters at the North American Crossroads of Empires, eds. Adam Arenson et al. (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), 27-45; "'A Savage Feast They Made of It': John Adams and the Paradoxial Origins of Federal Indian Policy," Journal of the Early Republic 33 (Winter 2013), 607-41; “Rescuing Early America from Nationalist Narratives: An Intra-Imperial Approach to Colonial Canada and Louisiana, ”Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques 40 (Winter 2014), 1-19.
Usner has received fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Cornell University Society for the Humanities, the Council for International Exchange of Scholars, the Huntington Library, the Newberry Library, the School for Advanced Research in Santa Fe, Vanderbilt University's Robert Penn Warren Center, and Vanderbilt University's Office of the Vice Provost for Research. He directed Cornell University's American Indian Program from 1999-2002 and chaired Vanderbilt's history department from 2004 to 2007. Usner has served on the councils of the American Society for Ethnohistory and the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture. He was president of the American Society for Ethnohistory in 2010-11. Usner holds the Newberry Library Consortium Fellowship in American Indian Studies for 2014-15.
Daniel Usner teaches graduate and undergraduate courses on American Indians since 1500, comparative imperial borderlands, North American colonies, the U.S. early republic, and the history and culture of New Orleans.
Specializations
American Indian history; early American history; race and class in the American South; U.S. social, cultural, and economic history
Daniel H. Usner is the Holland N. McTyeire Professor of History at Vanderbilt University. He is the author of Indian Work: Language and Livelihood in Native American History; Indians, Settlers, and Slaves in a Frontier Exchange Economy: The Lower Mississippi Valley before 1783; and American Indians in the Lower Mississippi Valley: Social and Economic Histories
QUOTED: "The book is most interesting in its discussion of how Indians, Africans, and Europeans all contributed knowledge and skills to a common
economic community."
"Usner's research is an important addition to the literature on colonial economic development and will no doubt lead to further research
into this region's history."
Indians, Settlers, and Slaves in a Frontier Exchange
Economy: The Lower Mississippi Valley Before 1783
Nancy Shoemaker
Journal of Social History.
27.1 (Fall 1993): p159.
COPYRIGHT 1993 Oxford University Press
https://academic.oup.com/journals
Full Text:
Usner's book effectively translates the complex history of the Lower Mississippi Valley in the first century of European settlement into a coherent
story. He is one of the few historians to tackle this particular region, and after reading his book, one knows why so few historians have ventured
there. The region was not an important colony from the perspective of the colonizers. It produced little wealth at great pains. Instead of being
ignored for its economic marginality, the region was so easy to give up that it became a political ping-pong ball among the major European
players. The constantly shifting political identity of the region makes for a complicated history. The "Indians, Settlers, and Slaves" of the book's
title only captures some of the region's diversity. The Indians were from many different political and ethnic groups. "Settlers" refers to the French
mostly, but applies to the Spanish and British claims to the area as well as German farmers and Swiss soldiers. Slaves included Africans and
Indians. Usner's aim is to show how the people of the Lower Mississippi Valley interacted in a common local economy, which developed from a
confluence of Indian, African, and European traditions.
The organization of the book reflects Usner's efforts to understand how this regional economy worked in the midst of changing political
allegiances and diverse cultural backgrounds. The first four chapters give a history of the region from the initial French settlement at Biloxi Bay
in 1699 to 1783, when the Treaty of Paris led to one of the many political realignments affecting the region. Usner argues that the "frontier
exchange economy" continued to function despite changes in the colony's political identity. The last four chapters develop different aspects of this
frontier exchange economy: economic activities that provided subsistence and produced export crops like tobacco and indigo; food exchanges
and the emergence of a regional cuisine; the soldiers and boatmen whose labor connected the colony in terms of defense and transportation; and
the deerskin trade, the major economic activity of the area.
The book is most interesting in its discussion of how Indians, Africans, and Europeans all contributed knowledge and skills to a common
economic community. To survive in their new environment, European settlers relied on Indian expertise in agriculture and hunting. Slaves
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imported from Africa brought new foods - okra, for instance - as well as specialized skills in agriculture and herding. In turn, Indians borrowed
from Europeans. Indians traded deerskins for livestock. The deerskins went overseas to be sold in European markets, while European cattle,
horses, and pigs were incorporated in Indian villages.
My only criticisms of the book have to do with wanting to know more. For instance, Usner suggests that food exchange was a factor in African
and Indian marginalization within the regional economy. Because European settlers had aspirations for more easily attained wealth, they
depended on others for food. While this gave slaves and Indians some economic advantage, food production was ultimately not very profitable.
Usner hints at this, but the process of marginalization and changing power relations within the regional economy remain intriguing, yet
undeveloped, issues. I also wanted to know more about the regional economy before European settlement. By beginning with the French arrival,
Usner implies that the "frontier exchange economy" was the outcome of European settlement. He points to many ways in which Indian trading
patterns shaped the evolving regional economy, but limits his discussion to cultural practices. He shows, for example, that Europeans and
Africans adopted a native trading language and ceremonial gift-giving that accompanied trade. But were there also established trade routes, trade
items, and trading relationships in the regional economy before European settlement that influenced Indian, European, and African interaction?
Overall, Usner's research is an important addition to the literature on colonial economic development and will no doubt lead to further research
into this region's history. Throughout the book, he draws on the experience of colonial British America, especially the south, and French Canada
for insight into the nature of economic activity in the Lower Mississippi Valley. As in other regions, the colonial economy emerged from a myriad
of cultural exchanges, but unlike other regions, the Lower Mississippi Valley's comparative lack of a rich staple export led to a more diverse
regional economy.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Shoemaker, Nancy. "Indians, Settlers, and Slaves in a Frontier Exchange Economy: The Lower Mississippi Valley Before 1783." Journal of
Social History, vol. 27, no. 1, 1993, p. 159+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA14446833&it=r&asid=f2d287ca646f33793fd104d2f89bb313. Accessed 9 July 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A14446833
---
QUOTED: "The value of the book as social history is unquestioned, and it will doubtless fulfill Usner's goal of bringing Louisiana into the mainstream of American colonial history. As economic history, however, it leaves aside some of the knotty questions of what is meant by a 'frontier exchange economy.'"
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Indians, Settlers, and Slaves in a Frontier Exchange
Economy: The Lower Mississippi Valley before 1783
Patricia Galloway
The Journal of Interdisciplinary History.
24.3 (Winter 1994): p554.
COPYRIGHT 1994 Massachusetts Institute of Technology
http://www.mitpressjournals.org/
Full Text:
Anyone who expects Usner's new book to be a revision of his Duke University dissertation (1981) will be pleasantly surprised. Usner has
substantially reworked and rethought much of his earlier work and has produced an unprecedented history of the formation of the multicultural
colonial society of the lower Mississippi Valley.
The book is divided in two parts. The first, "The Evolution of a Colonial Region, 1699-1783," is a social and political history of the region. The
chapters in this section focus on the initial dependency of the French Louisiana colony on its Indian neighbors and on support and supply from
France; the interracial and intercultural tensions during the 1720s that resulted in the Natchez war; European-Indian relations through the 1730s
as a key to understanding the Indian wars of the period; and the population shifts that followed the cession of Louisiana to Spain and Britain in
1763. Readers who have been looking for a useful exposition of the social history of colonial Louisiana will find these chapters particularly
helpful.
The second part of the book, "The Frontier Exchange Economy," focuses in more detail on four aspects of the regional economy: the actual
means of production for Indians, colonists, and African slaves; the role of foodstuffs in the regional trade network and the development of a
regional culture; the nonmilitary roles of soldiers and sailors in the economy; and the complex marketing system that supported the deerskin
trade. Each of these four chapters can stand on its own as an independent essay, and each addresses an aspect of the economy of colonial
Louisiana that has not yet been addressed in such detail. The chapter on food is interesting for its attention to the social meaning of food and its
exchange. Primary sources are exploited to provide new pictures of the economic activities and interactions of people who are usually seen as the
"bit-players" in the colonial drama, but without whom the show would not have gone on at all (3). Usner concludes that the fluidity of the
regional economy of colonial Louisiana provided, for all of its participants, a degree of autonomy that would be curtailed as the colonial period
ended and a plantation economy was established.
Usner draws upon a wide range of sources, using ethnographic and archaeological evidence as well as written documents in three languages. The
value of the book as social history is unquestioned, and it will doubtless fulfill Usner's goal of bringing Louisiana into the mainstream of
American colonial history. As economic history, however, it leaves aside some of the knotty questions of what is meant by a "frontier exchange
economy." Except for a brief nod there is no explicit mention of the substantivist-formalist debate that has so occupied anthropologists dealing
with nonstate societies (n. 41, 213). Except for a discussion of the ritual value of food gifts in Indian-French diplomacy, there is an implicit
acceptance of the formalist position, although the deerskin trade begs for analysis as part of a prestige-goods exchange system on the Indian side.
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Usner does not address the relevance or irrelevance of dependency theory to the region and period in question, even though its application has
been suggested by White.(1) Although the majority of the people of the region, including Indians and most Africans, were in various stages of
understanding, adopting, rebelling against, and even modifying this market economy that Europeans brought with them and attempted to impose,
Usner's "network of cross-cultural interaction" is described rather than explained (6). It is to be hoped that having ably laid the groundwork here,
Usner will take up these questions in the future.
The book is thankfully free of errors of fact and typesetting, although the Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Alabama languages were mutually
intelligible, not the other way around (258). I have never seen the diet of the region described as "fluorescent" before, although it is certainly
colorful (204).
(1) Richard White, The Roots of Dependency (Lincoln, 1983).
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Galloway, Patricia. "Indians, Settlers, and Slaves in a Frontier Exchange Economy: The Lower Mississippi Valley before 1783." The Journal of
Interdisciplinary History, vol. 24, no. 3, 1994, p. 554+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA14973531&it=r&asid=cedd8a42ec615982fcbf4c247ebf137b. Accessed 9 July 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A14973531
---
QUOTED: "Usner is able to provide fresh insights into topics as varied as the formation of the seventeenth-century Natchez chiefdom and the presence of native women in New Orleans markets in the early twentieth century."
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American Indians in the Lower Mississippi Valley: Social
and Economic Histories
James Taylor Carson
The Journal of Interdisciplinary History.
31.1 (Summer 2000): p120.
COPYRIGHT 2000 Massachusetts Institute of Technology
http://www.mitpressjournals.org/
Full Text:
American Indians in the Lower Mississippi Valley: Social and Economic Histories. By Daniel H. Usner, Jr. (Lincoln, University of Nebraska
Press, 1998) 189 pp. $45.00
American Indians in the Lower Mississippi Valley is a collection of essays that expands upon themes developed in the author's first book, Indians,
Settlers, & Slaves in a Frontier Exchange Economy: The Lower Mississippi Valley before 1783 (Chapel Hill, 1992), which examined how
economic exchange brought the inhabitants of colonial Louisiana together in spite of cultural, racial, and class differences. The eight essays in
this volume, three of which were published previously and appear here in revised form, carry the author's analysis forward in time and broaden
his earlier conclusions.
Usner's analysis hinges on Rosaldo's anthropological notion of "borderlands." [1] By constructing the frontier as a permeable membrane across
which cultural, economic, and other influences traveled, Usner is able to provide fresh insights into topics as varied as the formation of the
seventeenth-century Natchez chiefdom and the presence of native women in New Orleans markets in the early twentieth century. The essay about
economic strategies adopted by Indians in nineteenth-century Louisiana, for example, illustrates just how the borderlands worked. From herding
cattle to vending provisions in cities, Indians were fully integrated into regional and national patterns of production and exchange.
Another fascinating example of how borderlands drew people together can be seen in the game raquettes that was played in late nineteenth- and
early twentieth-century New Orleans. Based on the Choctaw ballgame, or lacrosse, the popular competitions pitted teams of African-Americans
and Creoles against one another. The impact of Native American cultures on the broader American culture is a field that is still too neglected, and
in raquettes, Usner has identified a perfect example of just how useful the idea of borderlands can be.
Throughout the text, Usner identifies instances of cultural exchange and accommodation, but he does not carry the idea of borderlands too far
because his scholarship has always emphasized points of contact between distinct cultures. Still, a reliance on the borderland as an interpretive
device begs the question of what lies at the center. If the adoption of raquettes marked the successful operation of the borderland, at what point
did either Choctaw or African-American culture contract and cease to adapt?
Scholars who write ethnohistory constantly juggle change and persistence. Although the borderland offers an interesting way to account for
changes, how do we begin to assess instances of cultural persistence, and how do we reconcile the two?
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(1.) Renato Rosaldo, Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis (Boston, 1989).
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Carson, James Taylor. "American Indians in the Lower Mississippi Valley: Social and Economic Histories." The Journal of Interdisciplinary
History, vol. 31, no. 1, 2000, p. 120. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA63771500&it=r&asid=84004310301b04e1bb5474b69bbaca7b. Accessed 9 July
2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A63771500
---
QUOTED: "The structure of the American Indians in the Lower Mississippi Valley as a set of essays, rather than as a seamless narrative, produces a pattern in which nearly every chapter begins with an overview of historiography and in which generalizations sometimes crowd out individual stories. Nonetheless, the collection provides a productive, coherent framework for understanding Indian experiences in a too-long-neglected region of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century North America."
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American Indians in the Lower Mississippi Valley: Social
and Economic Histories
Daniel K. Richter
The American Indian Quarterly.
24.2 (Spring 2000): p312.
COPYRIGHT 2000 University of Nebraska Press
http://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/
Full Text:
Daniel H. Usner Jr. American Indians in the Lower Mississippi Valley: Social and Economic Histories. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press,
1998. xvi + 189 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, index. Cloth, $45.00.
This collection of eight essays--three of them previously published in slightly different form--is a successor to Usner's highly regarded Indians,
Settlers, and Slaves in a Frontier Exchange Economy: The Lower Mississippi Valley Before 1783 (1992). The opening chapter presents a useful
survey of anthropological and historical scholarship on Native peoples of the early Southeast while outlining themes that dominate the
chronologically organized essays that comprise the rest of the volume. Paradoxically, the very events that gave Southeastern Indians such a
prominent place in even the most traditional Eurocentric narratives of U.S. history--the removals of the Jackson era--ensured that early twentiethcentury
anthropologists in search of supposedly pristine cultural patterns would virtually ignore them. The one exception was ethnologist John
Swanton, whose indefatigable research into historical sources, Usner says, almost literally "constituted all of southeastern Indian studies" during
the first half of the twentieth century (p. 2). Yet the same factors that led most of Swanton's contemporaries to ignore southeastern Indians--
centuries of interaction with people and cultures from Europe and Africa; polities, social forms, and identities constantly in flux; in short, the very
fact that these peoples lived in history rather than at a static ethnographic present--place them at the forefront of recent scholarship.
Illustratively, Usner's second chapter, "French-Natchez Borderlands in Colonial Louisiana," focuses on the Native community that dominated
Swanton's 1911 study of Indian Tribes of the Lower Mississippi Valley. For Swanton and his contemporaries the Natchez were notable primarily
for their unusually hierarchical social organization, their fulsomely described funeral rituals, and their catastrophically destructive defeat in a
1729 war with the French. For Usner, by contrast, "instead of treating the Natchez chiefdom like some static or prototypical political organization,
it is more informative to consider its dynamic borderlands with other Indian nations as well as with the French colony" (p. 16). From this
perspective the war of 1729 becomes less an inevitable conflict of cultures than a product of complicated and relatively short-term historical
circumstances. Usner thus convincingly places the French-Natchez conflict in the same kind of analytical framework recent historians have
fruitfully used to reinterpret King Philip's War, the Iroquois-French wars, the Yamasee War, the Pueblo Revolt, and other events. Similarly,
methodologies and interpretations familiar to students of other regions in North America are applied in his third chapter, "A Population History of
American Indians in the Eighteenth-Century Lower Mississippi Valley." Far from a simple unilineal tale of depopulation, Usher's is a story of
great local complexity, of shifting community boundaries, and of subregions that might at any given time actually be gaining Native population
while others became virtually empty.
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The next two essays--"American Indians in a Frontier Exchange Economy" and "American Indians and the Early Cotton Economy," published
previously in the William and Mary Quarterly and the Journal of American History, respectively--will be familiar to many readers. Nonetheless,
their presence in this collection is crucial, not only for fleshing out the chronology but for clarifying what Usner sees as the engine driving the
dynamic process of community formation and reformation in the region. Adaptive economic strategies, he argues, both embedded Indians in
complicated relationships with their Indian and non-Indian neighbors and also allowed Native communities to maintain distinctive identities.
Thus Usner's subtitle. For him these essays are Social and Economic Histories, fundamentally grounded in material rather than ideological
realms.
Such causal links between the economic and the social dominate the three final essays in the collection, which provide its freshest contributions.
Chapters on "Economic Strategies of American Indians in Louisiana during the Territorial and Early Statehood Era" and "American Indians in
Nineteenth-Century New Orleans" show how Native people exploited interstices of the dominant cotton economy, both to resist encapsulation
within it and to preserve distinct social and cultural identities as seasonal hunters, suppliers of specialized food products, basketmakers, peddlers,
and casual laborers. "By finding a social niche compatible with their own customs and needs," Usner concludes, "Louisiana Indians participated
in the larger nineteenth-century society without losing their separateness" (p. 117). A final essay on "Images of Lower Mississippi Valley Indians
in the Nineteenth Century" reveals a paradoxical implication of these strategies, however. The same marginal roles through which Native people
maintained their identities and creatively earned a livelihood only reinforced white stereotypes of Indians as pathetic remnants of the once-noble
tribes who inhabited the region before Removal.
The structure of the American Indians in the Lower Mississippi Valley as a set of essays, rather than as a seamless narrative, produces a pattern in
which nearly every chapter begins with an overview of historiography and in which generalizations sometimes crowd out individual stories.
Nonetheless, the collection provides a productive, coherent framework for understanding Indian experiences in a too-long-neglected region of
eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century North America.
Daniel K. Richter, University of Pennsylvania
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Richter, Daniel K. "American Indians in the Lower Mississippi Valley: Social and Economic Histories." The American Indian Quarterly, vol. 24,
no. 2, 2000, p. 312. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA69067540&it=r&asid=1860eda227bca665a95a0f8858718ad2. Accessed 9 July 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A69067540
---
QUOTED: "Daniel Usner follows a first book on the frontier exchange economy of the 'colonial' Lower Mississippi Valley with a more far-reaching analysis of the function of Indian agency and informal interracial exchanges of microbes, goods, labor, language, and games in the same region from the beginning of European contact through the early twentieth century. His emphasis on Indian agency, and on the frontier as a zone of cultural interaction rather than a racial border, places this work, self-consciously and successfully, at the center of the 'newest' Indian history."
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American Indians in the Lower Mississippi Valley: Social
and Economic Histories
Mary Young
Journal of Social History.
34.1 (Fall 2000): p231.
COPYRIGHT 2000 Oxford University Press
https://academic.oup.com/journals
Full Text:
American Indians in the Lower Mississippi Valley: Social and Economic Histories. By Daniel H. Usner, Jr. (Lincoln and London: University of
Nebraska Press, 1998. xiv plus 189pp.).
Daniel Usner follows a first book on the frontier exchange economy of the "colonial" Lower Mississippi Valley with a more far-reaching analysis
of the function of Indian agency and informal interracial exchanges of microbes, goods, labor, language, and games in the same region from the
beginning of European contact through the early twentieth century. His emphasis on Indian agency, and on the frontier as a zone of cultural
interaction rather than a racial border, places this work, self-consciously and successfully, at the center of the "newest" Indian history.
Usner begins with a detailed account of the uneven course of French-Natchez relations. Carolinians had familiarized the Natchez with the slave
and deerskin trade and the European manufactures it attracted. The French competitively offered them the political partisanship, ceremonial
respect, and trade opportunities they had learned to cherish. But the French wanted more than the Carolinians. By 1708, eighty French
backwoodsmen lived in the Natchez villages, enjoying ample food supplies and local customs that enjoined premarital sex for profit on young
women building their trousseaus. The results mainly discomfited missionaries, who also had little influence in mitigating customs of human
sacrifice in this still Mississippian kingdom. The Natchez helped the French build Fort Rosalie (1715) and their head warrior compromised two
cases of interracial murder. But when the French proposed that a Natchez village move out so they could move in yet another tobacco plantation,
the Natchez plotted rebellion. The 300 sl aves they captured in its course helped them continue attacks on the French and the French-allied
Tunicas, but by the early 173 Os, thanks to the Frenchmen's Choctaw allies, surviving Natchez were either slaves in the West Indies or inhabitants
of their own towns in the Chickasaw, Creek, or Cherokee nations. Their language and their resistance to exploitation outlasted the nineteenth
century.
Usner devotes a chapter to the demographic history of the Lower Mississippi Valley, identifying five main areas and more than two dozen tribes.
Epidemics, wars, and enslavement reduced their numbers from 67,000 in 1700 to 22,000 in 1750, but immigration from other tribes, notably the
Wichitas in the Red River region, the end of the Chickasaw-Choctaw wars, and growing immunities raised the total to 32,200 in 1775. Even
smallpox brought by European soldiers fighting American rebels failed to keep the population of 1800 below 30,000. When the U.S. organized
Mississippi Territory in 1798, over 100 Indian towns owned most of the land between the Chattahoochee and the Mississippi and their
populations outnumbered those of whites, slaves, and free blacks together. Meanwhile the people experienced some amalgamation of small tribes
decimated by disease and war, and more migration, usually for trade advantages, into, within, and outside the area. Most of the movement
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reflected Indian "agency"--not until the United Sta tes government got into buying millions of acres for thousands of dollars and using most of
them to pay off trade debts to Forbes and Company or government "factories," did the notion of involuntary removal arise and arouse opposition.
But only the largest tribes--most Creeks, most Choctaws, and the pragmatic Chickasaws, actively opposed and actually removed.
"Disappearance" was the successful strategy of choice among the smaller peoples.
The relative slowness with which the French augmented their population and their tobacco and indigo plantations helped make tribesmen major
players on this frontier longer than in New England or the Chesapeake. Only with the coming of the Acadians to Louisiana and the English to
Natchez after 1763 did the black and white populations grow significantly; only after the invention of the cotton gin, combined with reduction in
the market for deerskins, did the numbers become irresistible. During the first two decades of the 19th century, Louisiana, Mississippi, and
Alabama became states, and their combined black and white populations overwhelmingly larger than the Indian populations. From the Natchez
rebellion forward, the French had tried (mostly unsuccessfully) to prevent military, marital, and market alliances between slaves and Indians; but
when slaves states got to legislating they greatly restricted the ability of slaves to trade at all and Indians to sell liquor or brand cattle. Both could
suffer death for poisoning a white person or destroying property.
Yet Usner's analysis of both eighteenth and nineteenth century Indian survivals indicates that strategies of using social and economic exchanges
between tribes and the larger societies to maintain, symbolically and practically, the separate cultural identities of the tribesmen, succeeded from
colonial times through the twentieth century. Even as the deerskin trade declined, Choctaws continued to camp outside Natchez to sell vegetables,
baskets, mats, and meat. They and several other tribes moved seasonally to city markets; some men hunted meat for planters while wives picked
cotton. The smallscale community exchanges of goods and labor Usner elaborated in his study of the colonial south lived on.
As in 17th century New York and 18th century Charleston, Indians participated in urban development. 19th century New Orleans featured
Choctaw women in its public markets. Its principal spectator sport, raquette, resembled Choctaw lacrosse, with a short stick in each hand. The
famous teams were African-American, with a few Indian players. Only baseball finally took away their Sunday afternoon spectators.
As the United States belatedly got around to surveying and selling the land it acquired in Lower Mississippi, smaller bands and "tribes" formed
seasonal enclaves along rivers, or on the outskirts of cities, or simply "disappeared" into the backcountry. No publicity attended their removals,
and 5,000 persons belonging to several tribes remain in Louisiana today. Romantics among the novelists, poets, and painters of the 19th and early
20th centuries treated urban or even neighborly Indians as corrupted by interracial contacts. Usner concludes with a beautiful chapter illustrating
that master painters such as Karl Bodmer matter-of-factly documented what they saw--Indians in camp and market, distinctively costumed,
solemn but hardly degenerate.
Usner's demographic emphasis makes one wish that he and his editors had been more careful with figures. At various points he gives inconsistent
counts of numbers of Natchez, Quapaw, and Caddo warriors. His 35,000 slaves for 1800 not only disputes his assertion of Indian numerical
predominance, but greatly exceeds his estimates of slaves for succeeding decades. A bit more attention to the details of the national land system
would have dated the $1.25 minimum price to 1820, not 1804, attended to the consistent willingness of Congress to forgive its speculator-debtors,
and above all dealt with the question of private land claims in Louisiana. Perhaps Indians could squat so freely for so long in the back country and
around major cities because the resolution of those debts and claims took many decades during which no one was sure who owned what--even in
New Orleans. There were a lot of squatters in Louisiana.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
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Young, Mary. "American Indians in the Lower Mississippi Valley: Social and Economic Histories." Journal of Social History, vol. 34, no. 1,
2000, p. 231. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA65576698&it=r&asid=8eb41b5cc8df4171c8b9cd387c46337e. Accessed 9 July 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A65576698
---
QUOTED: "The contribution that historian Usner offers us is very important for our understanding of the history of Indians in the southern states before the intensification by Andrew Jackson's administration of the federal policy of exclusion."
"American Indians in the Lower Mississippi Valley is a book that is at once indispensable to the specialist and filled with research and reflection for the student and the non-initiate."
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American Indians in the Lower Mississippi Valley: Social
and Economic Histories
Nelson Ouellet
Canadian Journal of History.
35.1 (Apr. 2000): p177.
COPYRIGHT 2000 University of Toronto Press
http://www.usask.ca/history/cjh/
Full Text:
American Indians in the Lower Mississippi Valley: Social and Economic Histories, par Daniel H. Usner, Jr. Lincoln, Nebraska, University of
Nebraska Press, 1998. xvi, 189 pp. $45.00 U.S. (cloth).
Dans une etude qui vise a exposer les dimensions sociales et economiques dans le recit des Indiens vivant dans la partie meridionale de la vallee
du Mississippi, Daniel H. Usner Jr. utilise les transformations et les defis qui ont marque l'histoire des peuples autochtones depuis la colonisation
europeenne jusqu'a l'avenement du Cotton South au dix-neuvieme siecle pour justifier l'emphase placee sur les strategies d'adaptation et de
resistance des principaux protagonistes. Utilisant des journaux de voyageurs et de missionnaires, des documents tires du Mississippi Provincial
Archives (French Dominion), et de societes de commerce, des recensements, et autres archives d'Etat, en plus des sources iconographiques,
l'auteur explique comment les Indiens ont influence l'histoire du Sud et presente les moyens par lesquels ils ont faconne leur experience au sein de
la region avant les bouleversements engendres par les cessions de terres au gouvernement americain dans les annees 1820 et 1830.
Reprenant d'abord le cas des Indiens Natchez et leurs relations avec les Francais, Usner montre en quoi l'etude dynamique des frontieres avec les
autres nations indiennes et la colonie francaise elargit un focus historique longtemps concentre sur la guerre de 1729. Cherchant a s'eloigner d'une
histoire statique qui laisse peu de place aux acteurs et a leurs influences, Usner explique comment l'histoire demographique du dix-huitieme siecle
passe autant par les effets perturbateurs de maladies epidemiologiques et de l'alcool que par la migration. Son choix de privilegier la vie
quotidienne donne l'occasion de decouvrir que les Indiens etaient beaucoup plus souvent en contact avec les Europeens et les Noirs d'origine
africaine que la trame politique et militaire de l'histoire l'a laisse supposer. C'est ici que son concept de Frontier Exchange Economy trouve son
sens. L'idee est en fait une expresssion de la forme et du contenu des interactions economiques et du reseau inter-culturel qui ont ete tisses par les
Indiens dans la partie meridionale de la vallee du Mississippi. Les echanges informels, mais durables, a travers lesquels les Indiens, les colons et
les esclaves transigeaient de petites quantites de biens pour assurer leur bien-etre mutuel etaient a la base des spheres d'interaction et des moyens
d'echange qui ont contribue a la formation de cette economie multi-culturelle.
En meme temps ou les revenus de la traite des fourrures etaient a la baisse, le coton accroissait son importance comme source de commerce et
d'echange au sein de l'economie americaine, sudiste plus particulierement. Apres la creation en 1798 du Territoire du Mississippi, les
representants de l'Etat accelererent ce processus de transformations economiques en manipulant les dettes que les Indiens avaient contractees pour
les contraindre a ceder leurs terres. Apres ces transactions a sens unique, les Indiens ne sont pas devenus des victimes incapables d'agir et de
s'adapter face au changement engendre par l'expansion du capitalisme. En migrant vers d'autres regions du Territoire du Mississippi, en
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diversifisiant leur commerce, en devenant des travailleurs et des vendeurs itinerants et en intensifiant leur production horticole, les Indiens ont
profondement modifie les relations qu'ils avaient entretenues jusqu'alors avec les colons et les esclaves. En adaptant leurs strategies de
subsistance et leurs activites de commerce aux nouvelles conditions produites par l'expansion du coton, les Indiens ont, en plus, redefini leur
autonomie culturelle et resiste aux pressions des acteurs politiques de la Louisiane pour les isoler et les refouler plus a l'ouest.
L'auteur utilise le contexte urbain de la Nouvelle-Orleans pour completer sa presentation des strategies elaborees par les Indiens face aux
transformations engendrees par l'economie cotonniere. Apres l'achat de la Louisiane, les Indiens ont continue a s'y rendre pour leurs echanges,
mais leur presence alors etait devenue beaucoup plus marginale qu'au dix-huitieme siecle, epoque ou les Indiens fournissaient des services a
caractere commercial et militaire. Leur influence sur la culture et le panorama de la Nouvelle-Orleans a tout de meme dure, en particulier parce
que le marche urbain est reste une partie de leur cycle annuel d'activites sociales et economiques. Cette realite est confirmee par l'etude critique
que l'auteur fait au chapitre huit de sources iconographiques.
La contribution que l'historien Usner nous offre est tres importante pour notre comprehension de l'histoire des Indiens dans les Etats du Sud avant
l'intensification par l'administration d'Andrew Jackson de la politique federale d'exclusion. En sortant du cadre traditionnel de la politique et des
conflits militaires dans les regions du nord-est, en placant les principaux acteurs au centre du changement et des interactions sociales et
economiques qui ont marque plusieurs siecles et regions du sud-est des Etats-Unis, en rattachant l'histoire des Indiens a l'expansion de l'economie
cotonniere dans les Etats du Sud au debut du dix-neuvieme siecle, l'auteur fournit une preuve eclatante du besoin d'elargir les horizons d'une
histoire sociale trop souvent tenue a distance de phenomenes d'envergure. American Indians in the Lower Mississippi Valley est un ouvrage a la
fois incontournable pour le specialiste et rempli de pistes de recherche et de reflexion pour l'etudiant et le non-initie. Ce dernier regrettera
toutefois que le livre ne contienne pas de bibliographie, en particulier pour les sources.
Nelson Ouellet Universite de Moncton
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Ouellet, Nelson. "American Indians in the Lower Mississippi Valley: Social and Economic Histories." Canadian Journal of History, vol. 35, no.
1, 2000, p. 177. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA63583909&it=r&asid=7c63dec71ed370d61dfafc99cb8c577d. Accessed 9 July 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A63583909
---
QUOTED: "Although slim, Usner's volume is packed with rich details and thoughtful analysis. His section on Chitimacha land loss is particularly revealing; it illustrates that indigenous dispossession in the South did not end with the removals of the 1830s and 1840s. This book is ideal for classroom use and will appeal to scholars of Native America, women's history, material culture, and the New South."
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Weaving Alliances with Other Women: Chitimacha Indian
Work in the New South
Mikaela M. Adams
Journal of Southern History.
82.4 (Nov. 2016): p954.
COPYRIGHT 2016 Southern Historical Association
http://www.uga.edu/~sha
Full Text:
Weaving Alliances with Other Women: Chitimacha Indian Work in the New South. By Daniel H. Usner. Mercer University Lamar Memorial
Lectures. (Athens, Ga., and London: University of Georgia Press, 2015. Pp. xviii, 110. Paper, $24.95, ISBN 978-0-8203-4849-0; cloth, $69.95,
ISBN 978-0 8203-4848-3.)
In 2008 Daniel H. Usner received a historian's dream come true: a box of letters discovered in an abandoned building on Avery Island, Louisiana.
The correspondence, dating from the turn of the twentieth century, documented an unlikely friendship between Mary McIlhenny Bradford, a
wealthy white woman, and Christine Paul, an impoverished Chitimacha basket weaver. These letters, combined with others written between Paul
and anthropologist Caroline Dormon, allow Usner to weave together a tale about three very different southern women whose lives "intersected
largely through a flow of material objects" (p. xi). Usner's work reveals how "Indian women innovatively deployed ... networking strategies to
help mitigate disruptive and destructive effects of white domination," and it provides "an all too scarce vantage point from which to explore the
condition of American Indians in the Jim Crow South" (pp. ix, x).
The book consists of three biographical essays. The first follows Mary McIlhenny Bradford, the daughter of the inventor of Tabasco sauce, who
became interested in Chitimacha baskets in 1899. At the time, the Chitimachas "had been reduced to a tiny possession of land and now went
unrecognized by the federal government" (p. 3). The rise of store-bought housewares threatened the group's rich basket-weaving tradition, but
Bradford helped revive the art by opening up new markets through her connections with "consumers, collectors, curators, and anthropologists" (p.
7). Usner ties Bradford's patronage of the Chitimachas to the Progressive era's growing arts and crafts movement, women's organizations, and
philanthropic work. As he points out, white women "found a rare opportunity through ... the collection of folk materials to participate
professionally in a new sphere of intellectual and intercultural exchange" (p. 22).
The Chitimachas had their own reasons for participating in this exchange. The second essay focuses on Christine Navarro Paul, one of the few
literate women in the group, who became Bradford's principal contact with the Chitimachas. For the Chitimachas, selling baskets provided
"income at a time of great need" but also "involved deliberate political goals and strategies" (p. 28). During these years, the Chitimachas faced
serious threats to their land, identity, and lives. A posse headed by a white sheriff shot three of Paul's family members with impunity, for example,
while unscrupulous schemers litigated the tribe out of nearly half its remaining acreage. Without federal protection, the Chitimachas had few
ways to defend themselves. Fortunately, the relationship that Paul forged with Bradford gave the tribe access to powerful white allies who
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pressured the Office of Indian Affairs to help. Anthropologists, moreover, supported the tribe's claim to an Indian identity largely because of their
interest in Chitimacha baskets. Ultimately, the Chitimachas gained federal trust over their land in 1916.
The final essay introduces Caroline Coroneos Dormon, "a teacher, conservationist, naturalist, illustrator, and even archaeologist," who picked up
where the aging Bradford left off in the 1930s (p. 52). With Dormon's help, the Chitimachas "established ties with a new generation of
ethnographers and collectors, started a tribal school where basketry instruction would occur, and navigated through economic and political trials"
(p. 55). Dormon pushed federal officials to take greater responsibility for the Chitimachas. By this time, there was a "[g]rowing appreciation for
the aesthetic and economic value of American Indian traditions," which was reflected in the passage of the 1935 Indian Arts and Crafts Act (p.
70). Dormon, like other American women in the 1930s and 1940s, "contributed significantly to conjoining applied anthropology with government
service" (p. 74). In the process, she helped shape the New Deal and guarantee Chitimachas' survival in the South.
Although slim, Usner's volume is packed with rich details and thoughtful analysis. His section on Chitimacha land loss is particularly revealing; it
illustrates that indigenous dispossession in the South did not end with the removals of the 1830s and 1840s. This book is ideal for classroom use
and will appeal to scholars of Native America, women's history, material culture, and the New South.
MIKAELA M. ADAMS
University of Mississippi
Adams, Mikaela M.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Adams, Mikaela M. "Weaving Alliances with Other Women: Chitimacha Indian Work in the New South." Journal of Southern History, vol. 82,
no. 4, 2016, p. 954+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA470867706&it=r&asid=9eb3297ef615b5839bc63fde4f803090. Accessed 9 July
2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A470867706
QUOTED: "Scholars are taking new looks, armed with tools and methods from ethnohistory and cultural studies, at how Indian nations in the southeast came to be and how they resisted and adapted to the changes brought about by European colonialism in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.[1] Dan Usner's American Indians in the Lower Mississippi Valley, the latest book in the University of Nebraska Press series on Indians of the Southeast, is a welcome contribution to this vibrant field."
"Usner's detailed analysis of the demographic and economic changes in the Lower Mississippi Valley has given us a great place from which to build."
Spear on Usner, 'American Indians in the Lower Mississippi Valley: Social and Economic Histories'
Author:
Daniel H. Usner, Jr.
Reviewer:
Jennifer M. Spear
Daniel H. Usner, Jr. American Indians in the Lower Mississippi Valley: Social and Economic Histories. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1998. xiv + 256 pp. $45.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8032-4556-3.
Reviewed by Jennifer M. Spear (Department of History, Dickinson College)
Published on H-AmIndian (March, 2000)
Judging by the past few conferences I've attended and by the seemingly endless book catalogs that cross my desk, some of the most vital and interesting work on the history of American Indians before the civil war is being done in the south. From Patricia Galloway's Choctaw Genesis to Claudio Saunt's A New Order of Things, scholars are taking new looks, armed with tools and methods from ethnohistory and cultural studies, at how Indian nations in the southeast came to be and how they resisted and adapted to the changes brought about by European colonialism in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.[1] Dan Usner's American Indians in the Lower Mississippi Valley, the latest book in the University of Nebraska Press series on Indians of the Southeast, is a welcome contribution to this vibrant field.
After an introductory historiographic chapter that highlights the advances of the field as well as pointing out those arenas still in need of further attention, each chapter in American Indians in the Lower Mississippi Valley focuses on a particular aspect of their "Social and Economic Histories," emphasizing throughout "Indian strategies of adaptation and resistance" (p. xi) to European colonization and its attendant changes (three of the eight chapters have been previously published). Usner begins with a detailed examination of interactions along the Natchez-French borderlands, interactions that began fruitfully enough for both Indians and colonists but that resulted, by the mid-1730s, in the end of the Natchez chiefdom (although, as Usner is right to emphasize, not in the extermination of the Natchez people themselves, who migrated mostly eastward, becoming members of the Creek and Catawba nations among others).
This outmigration of remaining Natchez illustrates a primary theme of the next chapter, "A Population History" of the Lower Mississippi Valley during the eighteenth century. Precisely because he takes a regional rather than group approach to population history, Usner shows how some southeastern Indians adapted to population declines through migration and merger with other groups. In line with his call for a southeastern project along the lines of Helen Tanner's Atlas of Great Lakes Indian History, maps showing relative sizes and locations of the different groups mentioned in this chapter would have been very useful, especially in illustrating their migrations into, around, and out of the Lower Mississippi Valley.
The following three chapters investigate the changing economies of the Lower Mississippi Valley, from the mid-eighteenth century's "Frontier Exchange Economy," which Usner has explored more fully in his Indians, Settlers, and Slaves in a Frontier Exchange Economy,[2] to the antebellum cotton economy that had less use for Indians as economic actors and more use for their lands. This transformation of the socioeconomic order had dramatic implications for region's Indians, as their subsistence patterns were undermined and Euro-Americans began dispossessing them of their lands. Yet, as Usner admirably details, Creeks, Choctaws, Chickasaws, and others drew upon a wide range of adaptive strategies from transforming themselves into slave- and plantation-owning agriculturists to finding spaces "on the margins of a plantation economy" (p. 96), providing goods and services to their Euro- and African-American neighbors. This latter strategy demonstrates that at least some aspects of the frontier exchange economy, especially "Small-scale, face-to-face" (p. 57) transactions, remained even after the meanings of these exchanges changed. While this section of the book was well evidenced and argued, two chapters focusing on adaptations to the cotton frontier in Mississippi and Louisiana, respectively, suffered somewhat from their tendency to repeat each other and perhaps would have been better as a single chapter.
Focusing on New Orleans in the nineteenth century, chapter seven contributes to another area of important recent scholarship examining Indians "behind the frontier" that, so far, has mostly concentrated on the northeast.[3] Usner's findings that "city streets were as useful as backcountry forests or remote swamplands in the day-to-day struggle for survival" (p. 127) demonstrate that despite some very serious differences in their nineteenth-century histories, Native Americans in New England and in the Southeast utilized similar strategies in their goals to remain culturally distinct and in familiar territories. This chapter works especially well as a companion piece to Usner's earlier examination of "American Indians in Colonial New Orleans."[4]
Usner concludes with an examination of nineteenth-century images of Lower Mississippi Valley Indians, illustrating the cultural side of the socioeconomic changes the other chapters have examined. Images of Native Americans in the eighteenth century demonstrated a complexity that reflected the multiple and varied Euro-American interactions with the region's native peoples. But as both the number of Indians in the area and the variety of Euro-American interactions with them declined (both consequences of the transition from a frontier exchange economy to one based on plantation agriculture), an increasingly racialized, one-dimensional image of Indians emerged.
One benefit of Usner's regional approach is that is, in James H. Merrell's words, "transcend[s] narrow (and still poorly understood) ethnic or 'tribal' boundaries"[5], especially in examining the multiple ways in which different groups responded and adapted to European colonization. A disadvantage to this approach, however, and one that Usner acknowledges, is that it de-emphasizes the "cultural dimensions of change and continuity" among particular groups and lessens our ability to understand "what this all meant to the participants themselves" (p. 12). Usner's detailed analysis of the demographic and economic changes in the Lower Mississippi Valley has given us a great place from which to build.
Notes
[1]. Patricia Galloway, Choctaw Genesis, 1500-1700 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995); and Claudio Saunt, A New Order of Things: Property, Power, and the Transformation of the Creek Indians, 1733-1816 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
[2]. Indians, Settlers, and Slaves in a Frontier Exchange Economy (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992).
[3]. See, for instance, Colin G. Calloway, ed., After King Philip's War: Presence and Persistence in Indian New England (Hanover, New Hampshire: Dartmouth College, published by University Press of New England, 1997), especially the essays by Ruth Wallis Herndon and Ella Wilcox Sekatau, and Thomas L. Doughton; Daniel Mandell, Behind the Frontier: Indians in Eighteenth-Century Eastern Massachusetts (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996); and Jean M. O'Brien, Dispossession by Degrees: Indian Land and Identity in Natick, Massachusetts, 1650-1790 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
[4]. Daniel H. Usner, Jr., "American Indians in Colonial New Orleans," in Powhatan's Mantle: Indians in the Colonial Southeast, eds.Peter H. Wood, Gregory A. Waselkov and M. Thomas Hatley (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989), 104-27.
[5]. James H. Merrell, "The Indians' New World: The Catawba Experience," William and Mary Quarterly 3d Ser., 41 (1984): 538.
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