The Great Power of Small Nations: Indigenous Diplomacy in the Gulf South by Elizabeth N. Ellis (review)

Reviewed by: The Great Power of Small Nations: Indigenous Diplomacy in the Gulf South by Elizabeth N. Ellis Juliana Barr (bio) The Great Power of Small Nations: Indigenous Diplomacy in the Gulf South by Elizabeth N. Ellis University of Pennsylvania Press, 2023 THE GREAT POWER OF SMALL NATIONS had its beginnings in 2006 when Elizabeth Ellis (herself a citizen of the Peoria Tribe of Indians of Oklahoma) worked as part of a research team pursuing archival documentation in support of the Pointe-au-Chien Indian Tribe's petition for federal recognition. Such work investigating the Native presence in Louisiana's southern bayous prior to 1800, while simultaneously grounded in the contemporary concerns of Southern Native polities, provides critical enlightenment about "the dis-juncture between the historical evidence and the rigid definitions of community belonging and historical formation that the federal government uses to assess Native nations today" (13). That revelation in turn led Ellis to realize that contemporary questions regarding what constitutes nationhood have blinded us to the diverse political formations of Native nations in early American history. Thus, the book seeks both to redress the misunderstandings that have erased the history of many smaller Native nations from the geopolitical map of the South and to demonstrate the multiple and creative forms of Indigenous community building that bore little resemblance to present-day "Western ideologies of nationhood" but that carried (and continue to carry) the same substantive weight when it comes to sovereign self-governance (13). Indigenous studies scholars will find great value in Ellis's deep explanation of the workings of nationhood across the lower Mississippi Valley for numerous smaller nations—collectively referred to as les petites nations by French colonial officials—as they sought to respond to growing colonial pressures in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Such a collectivity, in French terms, was misleading as these nations encompassed, at minimum, six language groups and had multiple and distinct religious, cultural, and political structures. Simultaneously, however, they shared specific political strategies as they sought to evade not only colonial subordination but also incorporation into larger Native nations. Indeed, they maintained their small sizes with purpose, and smallness was in fact a source of strength. Thus, they chose to migrate, to find and offer refuge, to ally, and to coalesce in multinational settlements where they might defend, protect, and prosper End Page 130 collectively. These strategies explain not only how they survived over three hundred years but also how they held on to portions of their homelands. The expansive tactics of Yazoo, Ofogoula, Avoyelle, Ishak/Atakapa, Tensas, Tunica, Biloxi, Bayagoula, Chitimacha, Tohome, Mobile, and Chakchiuma Nations constantly adapted across an Indigenous borderlands defined here as a space of layered land rights, reciprocal relationships, and plural sovereignty stretching from present-day Alabama to Louisiana. The presence of larger, more powerful Native polities such as Choctaws, Creeks, Chickasaws, Osages, and Natchez proved an equally defining feature of that Indigenous borderlands, and their presence often had more influence on the fortunes of Petites Nations than that of European colonists. Historical scholars will find compelling Ellis's portrait of the infinitely complex Indigenous political geography within which French colonialism appears more clearly in proportion to actual French demographics. Given the "overwhelming Native power" governing the lower Mississippi Valley in the eighteenth century, each French settlement (outside of New Orleans) operated as just another petite nation among many (109). This is nowhere clearer than in fascinating reappraisals of colonial events such as the discussion of Tensa and French responses to the dire crisis of survival during the endless pummeling of English raids that brought devastating levels of disease and depopulation to the region. It was just that the French in Louisiana were as powerless as the Spaniards in Florida, once they became prey to the inexorable slave raids funded and promoted by Englishmen in the Carolinas from the 1670s to the 1710s. French captive-taking and buying bore little resemblance to actions of their colonial peers but looked far more like that of their Tensa neighbors who "forcibly adopted" women and children as everyone, French and Native alike, desperately sought to stabilize ever-diminishing population numbers. Another riveting retelling explains how the Natchez War was...