Taensa
The Taensa were an Indigenous people of the Southeastern Woodlands, whose settlements at the time of European contact in the late 17th century were located in present-day Tensas Parish, Louisiana. The meaning of the name, which has the further spelling variants of Taenso, Tinsas, Tenza or Tinza, Tahensa or Takensa, and Tenisaw, is unknown. It is believed to be an autonym. The Taensa should not be confused with the Avoyel, known by the French as the petits Taensas, who were mentioned in writings by explorer Pierre Le Moyne d'Iberville in 1699. The Taensa are more closely related to the Natchez people and both are considered descendants of the late precontact Plaquemine culture.
The Taensa migrated as a result of Chickasaw and Yazoo hostilities, first lower down the Mississippi River. In 1715, protected by the French, they migrated to lands near the now eponymously named Tensaw River near Mobile, Alabama. When the French ceded Mobile and their other territory east of the Mississippi River to the British in 1763, following their defeat in the Seven Years' War, the Taensa and other small tribes returned to Louisiana, settling near the Red River. They numbered about 100 persons in 1805. They later moved south to Bayou Boeuf and later still to Grand Lake, "after which the remnant disappear from history."
Name
The Taensa were also called Taënsas, Tensas, Tensaw, and Grands Taensas in French.The meaning of the name Taensa is unknown, although some anthropologists and linguists believe it is an autonym. The Chitimacha, the group with which they eventually merged, referred to them by the exonym Chō´sha.
History
Precontact
The Taensa and the closely related Natchez are descendants of the late precontact Plaquemine culture. The Plaquemine culture was a Mississippian culture variant centered on the Lower Mississippi River valley. They had complex political and religious institutions and lived in large villages centered on ceremonial platform mounds. They were primarily agriculturists who grew maize, pumpkins, squash, beans and tobacco. They had a deep history in the area stretching back through the earlier Coles Creek and Troyville cultures to the Marksville culture, which was contemporaneous with the Hopewell cultures of present-day Ohio and Illinois.The Tensas Basin region where their villages were found has several Coles Creek and Plaquemine era ceremonial sites with platform mounds located very nearby, including the Coles Creek era Balmoral Mounds, and the Plaquemine era Routh Mounds and Flowery Mound sites.
Protohistory
The post-Hernando de Soto entrada Transylvania Phase of the Tensas Basin saw the increasing spread of Mississippian influences diffusing southward from Arkansas and northwestern Mississippi. The Jordan Mounds site on a relict channel of the Arkansas River in northeastern Louisianas Morehouse Parish was constructed during the protohistoric period between 1540 and 1685. The builders were an intrusive group in the area, Mississippianized peoples who were possibly refugees from the Mississippi River area to the east and were escaping the collapse of their society brought about by the aftereffects of European contact. By the late 1600s the site was abandoned.Historians and archaeologists such as Marvin Jeter have theorized that the Plaquemine "Northern Natchezan" ancestors of the Taensa were in part some of the peoples documented in the early 1540s by the de Soto expedition in southeastern Arkansas and northwestern Mississippi. After the disastrous encounter and subsequent population crash due to the introduction of European diseases and political upheaval left in de Soto's wake, remnant populations of Northern Natchezans migrated down the Mississippi toward their Southern Natchezan cousins.
European contact
The first securely documented European contact with the Taensa was by the French La Salle expedition of 1682. They were described as having a village on Lake St. Joseph, a narrow crescent shaped oxbow lake located west of the Mississippi, between the Yazoo River and Saint Catherine Creek. On March 22, 1682, a recollect chaplain who accompanied LaSalle, Father Zenobius, preached to the tribe at this location. La Salles associate Henri de Tonti visited the Taensa again in 1686 and 1690. They numbered approximately 1,200 people scattered throughout seven or eight villages on the western end of the lake and another on the Tensas River near present-day Clayton in Concordia Parish.In 1698 French Catholic missionary priests Antoine Davion and François de Montigny and J. B. La Source visited the Taensa; de Montigny founded a short-lived mission among them. De Montigny at that time records their population as being 700 people. In 1699 French explorer Pierre Le Moyne d'Iberville recorded the Taensa as having 300 warriors and living in seven villages named as Taensas, Chaoucoula, Conchayon, Couthaougoula, Nyhougoula, Ohytoucoulas, and Talaspa. The majority of these names are in the Muskogean Mobilian Jargon and not the Natchezan Taensa language.
During his time with the Taensa, de Montigny prevented them from performing acts of ritual human sacrifice as part of the funeral rites for a deceased chief. Because of this, the Taensa later blamed de Montigny when lightning struck their wattle and daub temple and burned it down. He left to join the Natchez in 1790, and his mission to the Taensa was taken over by Jean-François Buisson de Saint-Cosme. Along with other native peoples of the lower Mississippi River, the Taensa were subject to slave raids and epidemics of European diseases such as smallpox during this time period. As the population of the Taensa steadily decreased, de Saint-Cosme in 1700 endeavored in vain to have them join with the much larger Natchez and consolidate the two missions. De Saint-Cosme settled among the Taensa and the Natchez for less than a year before leaving.
Later history
During the late 17th and early 18th centuries, French colonists in the American Southeast initiated a power struggle with those 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 Taensa, 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, such as the Taensa. In 1706, fearing a slaver raid by a combined force of Chickasaw and Yazoo raiders, the Taensa abandoned their village on Lake St. Joseph. They headed south to seek shelter with the Bayogoula at their village on the western bank of the Mississippi, roughly south of present-day Baton Rouge. Conflicts soon developed, and the Taensa attacked and nearly exterminated the Bayogoula peoples and burned their village down—an act described as treacherous by later historians.Though their initial relations with the Europeans had been friendly, the rivalry of the European powers strained native populations throughout the region. The Taensa ultimately migrated in 1715, under the protection of the French, to lands near modern Mobile on an eastern branch of the Mobile River north of Mobile Bay that was subsequently named for them as the Tensaw River. In 1763 the French ceded the eastern half of French Louisiana to the British following their defeat in the Seven Years' War. The Taensa, along with the Apalachee and Pakana, relocated again, this time west of the Mississippi to French territory on the Red River. There they eventually merged with the Chitimacha. According to historian James Mooney, they numbered about 100 persons in 1805.
Early in the nineteenth century, the Taensa petitioned the Spanish colonial authorities for land on which to settle in southeastern Texas; they were given permission to settle land lying between the Trinity and the Sabine rivers, but ultimately did not migrate. This was the last appearance of the tribe in historical records. They later moved south to Bayou Boeuf and later still to Grand Lake, "after which the remnant disappear from history."
Culture
The Taensa were a Natchezan people who separated from the main body of the Natchez sometime prior to European contact with the Lower Mississippi Valley region. As such their languages, political, religious, and material cultures were very similar to the Natchez. When they first enter the historical record they are found just to the northwest of the Natchez and on the western bank of the Mississippi as opposed to its eastern bank.Like some other inhabitants of the area, such as the Natchez, Tunica, and Houma, Taensa society was matrilineal. Taensa society was also very hierarchical and showed marked class differences between commoners and elites, hallmarks of being a simple chiefdom. Chiefs exercised absolute power and were treated with great respect; unlike more egalitarian customs among the northern tribes the early chroniclers were used to. An example of this respect was recorded during a ceremonial visit by a chief to visit the explorer René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, when attendants came several hours in advance of the chief and with their hands swept the road clean.