Reviews of Books

Recent scholarship on American Indian history has done much to illuminate such neglected topics as indigenous perspectives on events following the arrival of Europeans and native agency in dealing with the consequences of the European (and subsequent American) presence. Daniel Usner extends these themes in American Indians in the Lower Mississippi Valley. He traces the struggles by the peoples of this region to cope with changing social and economic circumstances during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In the process, he offers a valuable view of the interplay between cultural perspective and agency in Native American history.	1
Eight essays, three of which have been previously published, compose the book. The first essay, "The History of American Indians in the Early South," reviews the historiography of American Indians in the early South, connecting the backgrounds and orientations of leading scholars to their writings. "French-Natchez Borderlands in Colonial Louisiana" takes European and Indian interaction to be a "cultural borderland" across which "individuals and groups forge intercultural relationships out of necessity or convenience" (p. 16). This concept directs attention to the strategies and mechanisms that people from different cultural traditions use in their interactions with one another, and it serves effectively in this and several subsequent chapters to highlight the roles of multiple perceptions and different forms of agency in cross-cultural discourse. Usner applies the concept of cultural borderland to re-examine the well-known 1729 Natchez revolt, when the native people living between the Yazoo and Pearl Rivers in the present state of Mississippi rose up against French settlers and killed 237 men, women, and children and captured nearly 300 black slaves and approximately fifty white women and children; they were driven from their villages the following year, when colonial troops used cannons to bombard fortified Natchez towns and captured and sold hundreds into West Indian slavery. To many scholars, the uprising was inevitable, produced by relentless colonial encroachment on native lands. Usner demurs. War was not the first resort of the Natchez. Over the centuries, this agricultural people had developed various strategies for coping with fractious indigenous neighbors, which were modified in negotiating relationships with the French. These strategies worked passably well so long as European-Indian contacts were limited to trade. But they broke down when the French unilaterally changed the basis of the relationship and sought to subject the Natchez to their rule. It was the French, not the natives, who could not abide an ambiguous co-existence. Geopolitical calculations, not economic pressures, precipitated armed conflict.	2
The third essay, "A Population History of American Indians in the Eighteenth-Century Lower Mississippi Valley," deals with eighteenth-century population changes in the Lower Mississippi Valley. In contrast to the usual tribe-by-tribe summaries, Usner takes as his units of analysis larger regions in which resident populations experienced similar pressures. Emphasizing the impacts of disease and mindful of the importance of migration and amalgamation in response to population loss, Usner's reconstruction offers a community-centered perspective on population history. This is a valuable perspective that could be developed further. The next step could be to explore the results of environmental changes, such as the protracted drought conditions in the South throughout much of the sixteenth century, on the population of the lower Mississippi Valley and the role of cultural factors, such as native settlement patterns, in ameliorating the toll of European diseases.	. . .