Reputations for Violence: The Politics of Publicizing Native Violence in the Lower Mississippi Valley 1680–1765

In March of 1730 a group of Tunica warriors dragged fifteen Natchez scalps and five Natchez prisoners into New Orleans. The French settlers of the Louisiana colony and the Tunicas were in the midst of a bloody war with the Natchez Indians and the Tunicas were coming to share the news of their recent battle successes with their French allies. French officials shot four of these Natchez captives and then returned the most prominent of these prisoners of war, the wife of the Natchez chief of the Flour village, to the Tunicas. The Tunicas erected a frame in the public square outside of the government buildings and burned the woman alive before an audience of cheering French observers. 

During the first half of the eighteenth century, the Lower Mississippi Valley was wracked by waves of brutal violence. This lush region was the home of at least forty different Native polities in 1700, and had long been a center of cross-cultural exchange. Yet the escalation of the southeastern Indian slave trade, geo-political reorganization, and the expansion of colonial networks into the gulf south all destabilized the region and exacerbated conflicts among the region’s diverse inhabitants. 

This paper investigates the ways in which Native peoples, like the Tunicas and Natchez, used their military reputations to protect their peoples and homelands. Native peoples publicized their military records through a combination of public executions, oral stories, iconographic tattoos, and engraved wooden posts and relied on these communications to affirm their political power and social status both within their communities and to other nations throughout the region. My analysis emphasizes the incorporation of French and English settlers into these systems of violence, communication, and diplomacy, and illustrates the ways that gender and politics shaped the evolution of Native performances of violence between 1680 and 1765.