<i>Native American Women and the Burdens of Southern History</i> by Daniel H. Usner

Originating as part of the Walter Lynwood Fleming Lectures in Southern History, this book joins Usner’s other work in redirecting histories of the south away from the Atlantic coast to focus on the lower Mississippi River and the colony of Louisiana. Since his first study of Louisiana’s frontier exchange economy, Usner has insisted that the south’s Indigenous peoples remained central players in the region’s history. Furthermore, his writings demonstrate that the inclusion of Native peoples fundamentally challenges those historical treatments still grounded in a view of the south as primarily shaped by large-scale extractive mono-crop economies and an all-pervasive Black-white racial binary.This book’s focus is the women of Louisiana’s petites nations, small tribal communities such as the Chitimachas, Tunicas, Biloxis, and Houmas, that strategically allied with successive French, Spanish, British, and American regimes. Selecting three different time periods that confronted the petites nations with different predicaments and opportunities, Usner demonstrates how Native women were integral to tribal survival from the initial period of colonial encounter in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to the dispossessions and removals of the nineteenth century plantation south and in the Jim Crow decades of the late nineteenth through mid-twentieth centuries.Usner argues that Native women’s actions, in particular the labor that they performed, underwrote tribal survival in the Lower Mississippi Valley. Acknowledging a number of well-known female leaders of southern tribes, he argues for greater historical recognition of the importance of the usually anonymous women whom sources mention only briefly. Native women’s daily labor, centering on female-gendered activities such as food production and familial caregiving, was pivotal for ensuring the survival of their own societies and also, Usner emphasizes, of the incoming Europeans. Women’s products were among the first goods to be traded and the exchange of food, medicines, and craft items (such as baskets) enabled initial colonial societies to take root, and they remained trade staples throughout the centuries.By facilitating amicable trading relations with Europeans, Native women created an enduring place for themselves in the marketplaces of the nascent Lower Mississippi colonies. Trade brought people together for mutual benefit, and markets were, ideally, places where peaceful exchange prevailed. Native women took care to present themselves in New Orleans and other localities in small numbers so as not to alarm Europeans who were fearful of large gatherings of Native people. Women’s strategy facilitated the petite nations’ long-term efforts to remain in their homelands, while Native market women became, in the minds of colonizers, a colorful yet harmless fixture of colonial urban life.Because written records of Native women’s presence are scarce, Usner employs two methodologies, visual imagery and material objects—which he notes are “less familiar to historians”—to locate Native women and by extension Native communities (3). Although rarely quoted, Native persons were repeatedly documented in sketches, paintings, and later, photographs. Market women were depicted, of course, but scenes of Native families walking along a bayou or a village featuring Indigenous women cooking also exist. Usner carefully pieces together these visual images with written references to flesh out the connections between the Native market women and the petites nations secluded in the bayous. Although colonizers described the market women using clichés such as “the last of her kind,” Usner’s researches offer another view of the petites nations’ strategy of remaining hidden in plain sight.Additionally, Usner makes excellent use of material items, particularly the ubiquitous baskets woven by Native women. Not only receptacles for all manner of trade goods, baskets were items of trade in themselves. As objects made by women, Usner observes, baskets became the method that “foreground[ed] the role that Indigenous women’s work and knowledge has played” (6). In this way, he acknowledges a different but equally vital form of labor. Native women performed the gender-specific but crucial intellectual work of remembering how to construct baskets, the materials to use, the weaving technologies and preparation, and most importantly, the knowledge of what the basket means culturally—and has meant historically—to Native individuals and tribal communities. Usner does not discuss baskets as objects of art, rather focusing on the cultural work of basketry in enabling Native “resilience … and endurance in southern history” (7).In sum, this is a thought-provoking exploration of “new” forms of historical source material, persuasive, and meriting a second read.