Back to the Sources. A Collaborative Research Project on the Indigenous Mississippi Valley and Southeast Based on 18th-Century French Maps (Musée du quai Branly-Jacques Chirac and the Choctaw, Miami, Peoria and Quapaw Nations)

This article offers initial insights and reflections on a collaborative research project led by the Musée du quai Branly-Jacques Chirac and the Choctaw, Miami, Peoria and Quapaw Nations (Oklahoma, USA). As part of this project, the partners have been studying a corpus of maps of Louisiana produced by French cartographers under the Ancien Régime and now held by the French National Library, the National Archives and the Service historique de la Défense. Co-authored by French, Choctaw and Quapaw authors, the article presents the empirical and experimental methodology they have implemented to renew their questioning and thus contribute to the writing of these Native American societies’ histories before their removal to Oklahoma, from the 1830s onwards. The article starts by a general presentation of this methodology, followed by two specific examples that illustrate this approach. The first one focuses on the analysis of toponyms on a map of Choctaw country produced by the French officer Régis du Roullet in 1732. The second one centers on a field trip undertaken by the project team in Arkansas, on the homeland of the Quapaw Nation, in March 2024. Through these examples, the authors aim at demonstrating the value of a collaborative approach in exploring cartographic sources with a fresh eye, based on the plurality of points of view.