Natchez people
The Natchez were a Native American people who originally lived in the Natchez Bluffs area in the Lower Mississippi Valley, near the present-day city of Natchez, Mississippi, in the United States. The DeSoto chronicle failed to record their presence when they came down the river in 1543. They spoke a language with no known relatives, although it may be distantly related to the Muskogean languages of the Creek Confederacy.
The somewhat unreliable archivist recorded the identity the Natchez applied to themselves as "the Theloel". An early American geographer noted in his 1797 gazetteer that they were also known as the "Sun Set Indians".
The Natchez are noted for being the only Mississippian culture with complex chiefdom characteristics to have survived long into the period of European colonization. Other Mississippian societies in the Southeast had generally experienced important transformations shortly after contact with the Spanish Empire or other settler colonists from across the ocean. The Natchez are also noted for having had an unusual social system of nobility classes and exogamous marriage practices. It was a strongly matrilineal kinship society, with descent reckoned along female lines. The paramount chief named the Great Sun was always the son of the Female Sun, whose daughter would be the mother of the next Great Sun. This ensured that the chiefdom stayed under the control of the single Sun lineage. Ethnologists have not reached consensus on how the Natchez social system originally functioned.
In 1731, after several wars with the French, the Natchez were defeated. Most of the captured survivors were shipped to Saint-Domingue and sold into slavery. Others took refuge with other tribes, such as the Chickasaw and Muscogee, and the Cherokee. Today, most Natchez descendants are found in [Oklahoma, where Natchez members are enrolled in the federally recognized Cherokee Nation and Muscogee Nation in Oklahoma.
Two state-recognized tribes in South Carolina identify as being of Natchez descent, as well as several other unrecognized organizations.
Precontact history
The historic Natchez were preceded in this area by what archaeologists call the Indigenous Plaquemine culture, part of the larger, precontact Mississippian culture, which extended throughout the lower Mississippi Valley and its tributaries. Its peoples are noted for their hierarchical communities, building complex earthworks and platform mound architecture, and intensively cultivating maize.Archaeological evidence indicates that people of the Plaquemine culture, an elaboration of the Coles Creek culture, had lived in the Natchez Bluffs region since at least as long ago as 700 CE. The Natchez Bluffs are located along the east side of the Mississippi River in present-day Mississippi. During the late precontact era, around 1500, Plaquemine-culture people occupied territory from the Big Black River in the north to about the Homochitto River in the south. The Plaquemine people built many platform mounds, including Emerald Mound, the second-largest pre-Columbian structure in North America north of Mexico. Emerald Mound was an important ceremonial center.
The Natchez used Emerald Mound in their time, but they abandoned the site before 1700. Their center of power shifted to the Grand Village of the Natchez. The Grand Village had between three and five platform mounds.
By 1700, the Natchez occupied a territory that covered only an area roughly between Fairchilds Creek and South Fork Coles Creek in the north to St. Catherine's Creek in the south. This area is approximately that of the northern half of present-day Adams County, Mississippi.
Protohistoric
The earliest European account of the Natchez may be from the journals of the Spanish expedition of Hernando de Soto. In 1542 de Soto's expedition encountered a powerful chiefdom located on the eastern bank of the Mississippi River. Native sources called it "Quigualtam", after the paramount chief's name. Various scholars have debated if this chiefdom was the Emerald Phase of the Natchez chiefdom which was in its ascendancy at the time. The encounter was brief and violent; the natives attacked and chased the Spanish with their canoes. No further European contact with the indigenous people in this area occurred for more than 140 years, but they suffered from epidemics of infectious disease carried indirectly by other Native Americans from European traders. These and other intrusions had severely reduced the native populations. By the historic period local power had shifted to the Grand Village of the Natchez.French contact era
The French explored the lower Mississippi River in the late 17th century. Initial French-Natchez encounters were mixed. In 1682 René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle led an expedition down the Mississippi River. The Natchez received the party well, but when the French returned upriver, they were met by a hostile force of about 1,500 Natchez warriors and hurried away. At the time of the next French visit in the 1690s, the Natchez were welcoming and friendly. When Iberville visited the Natchez in 1700, he was given a three-day-long peace ceremony, which involved the smoking of a ceremonial pipe and a feast.French Catholic missionaries from Canada began to settle among the Natchez in 1698. On the coast of the Gulf of Mexico, French colonists established Biloxi in 1699 and Mobile in 1702. Early French Louisiana was governed by Pierre Le Moyne d'Iberville and his brother Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne, Sieur de Bienville, among others. Both brothers played a major role in French-Natchez relations.
During the early 18th century, according to French sources, the Natchez lived in six to nine village districts with a population estimated at 4,000–6,000 people, and with the ability to muster 1,500 warriors. There were three village districts in the lower St. Catherine's Creek area, called Tioux, Flour, and the Grand Village of the Natchez. Three other village districts were located to the northeast, along upper St. Catherine's Creek and Fairchild's Creek, called White Apple, Grigra, and Jenzenaque. Historian James Barnett, Jr. described this dispersed leadership structure as developing in the post-epidemic years. It enabled the Natchez to maintain friendly diplomatic relations with European settlers of all nations, but eventually resulted in deeper internal divisions in Natchez society.
The Natchez chiefs were called Suns, and the paramount chief was called the Great Sun. When the French arrived, the Natchez were ruled by the Great Sun and his brother, Tattooed Serpent, both hereditary positions. The Great Sun had supreme authority over civil affairs, and the Tattooed Serpent oversaw political issues of war and peace, and diplomacy with other nations. Both lived at the Grand Village of the Natchez. Lesser chiefs, mostly from the Sun royal family, presided at other Natchez villages.
File:Natchez Paramount chief.jpg|thumb|"The Great Sun, Paramount Chief of the Natchez People" in a 1758 drawing by Antoine-Simon Le Page du Pratz
The Natchez performed ritual human sacrifice upon the death of a Sun. When a male Sun died, his wives were expected to accompany him by performing ritual suicide. Great honor was associated with such sacrifice, and sometimes many Natchez chose to follow a Sun into death. For example, at the death of the Tattooed Serpent in 1725, two of his wives, one of his sisters, his first warrior, his doctor, his head servant and the servant's wife, his nurse, and a craftsman of war clubs, all chose to die with him.
Mothers sometimes sacrificed infants in such ceremonies, an act which conferred honor and special status to the mother. Relatives of adults who chose ritual suicide were likewise honored and rose in status. The practice of ritual suicide and infanticide upon the death of a chief existed among other Native Americans living along the lower Mississippi River, such as the Taensa.
During the late 17th and early 18th centuries, French colonists in the American Southeast initiated a power struggle with colonists living in the colony of Carolina. Traders from Carolina had established a large trading network among the indigenous peoples of the American Southeast, and by 1700 it stretched west as far as the Mississippi River. The Chickasaw tribe, who lived north of the Natchez, were frequently visited by Carolinian traders, thus giving them access to a source of firearms and alcohol. One of the most lucrative trades with Carolinian merchants involved trading in Indian slaves. For decades, the Chickasaw conducted slave raids over a wide region in the American Southeast, often being joined by allied Natchez and Yazoo warriors. These raiding parties moved over great distances to capture slaves from hostile tribes. In one instance, a 1713 raiding party of Chickasaw, Natchez, and Yazoo raiders attacked the Chaouachas, an Indian tribe living near the mouth of the Mississippi River. The grand chief of the Chaouachas was killed; his wife and ten others were carried off to Carolina where they were sold into slavery.
Although Carolinian merchants had been operating in the American Southeast for decades, French merchants rapidly established economic networks throughout the region with a few years of their arrival. Most Indian tribes in the region sought to maintain trade links with as many Europeans as possible, encouraging competition and price reductions. By the 1710s, the Natchez had become solidly integrated with the French, trading furs for firearms, blankets, alcohol and other supplies. Despite this, the Natchez kept their markets open for all European merchants. The increasing pace of European colonization caused internal tensions to worsen within Natchez society. Several villages, led by the Grand Village of the Natchez and including the villages of Flour and Tioux, openly supported the French. Others, including White Apple, Jenzenaque, and Grigra, maintained their distance from the French and entertained the possibility of seeking alliances elsewhere. The Great Sun and Tattooed Serpent leaders lived in the Grand Village of the Natchez and were generally friendly toward the French. When violence broke out between the Natchez and the French, the village of White Apple was usually the main source of tensions, as in the Natchez revolt.
The French colonial authorities regularly described the Natchez as being ruled with absolute, despotic authority by the Great Sun and Tattooed Serpent. The existence of two opposing factions was well known and documented. The Great Sun and Tattooed Serpent repeatedly pointed out their difficulty in controlling the hostile Natchez. It is likely that the White Apple faction functioned at least semi-independently. Whatever power the family of the Great Sun and Tattooed Serpent did have over outlying villages was reduced in the late 1720s after both died. They were succeeded by relatively young, inexperienced leaders. While the new Great Sun was technically the paramount chief of the Natchez, the chief of White Apple became the eldest Sun chief and had more political clout than the Great Sun. The French continued to hold the Great Sun responsible for the conduct of all Natchez villages. They insisted on dealing with the Natchez as if the people were a unified nation ruled from its capital, the Grand Village of the Natchez.
During the 1710s and 1720s, French presence and settlement in Natchez territory increased from a handful of traders and missionaries to hundreds of settlers. They cultivated several large tobacco plantations, and maintained a military post at Fort Rosalie. French colonists often intermarried with Natchez women. At first the Natchez welcomed the French settlers and assigned them land grants, although historians have noted it was unlikely they had the same concept of land ownership as the French.