“The Indians Who Possess Land Shall Not Be Disturbed”: Conflict over Land and Law in Colonial Louisiana, 1750–1820

The eighteenth-century Mississippi River Valley was a contested borderland region in the heart of early North America, where Osage, Quapaw, French, Spanish, Cherokee, British, U.S.-American, and many smaller Indigenous Nations staked their claims to lands and resources. My paper engages historiographies on borderlands, legal history, and settler colonialism to analyze how conflicts about land possession between these different groups played out on the ground in lawsuits, neighborhood fights, and altercations with colonial officials. During the Spanish colonial period (1763-1803), Louisiana’s government introduced Spanish laws and regulations. Smaller, migratory Indigenous nations like the Pekowi and Kispoko Shawnee, the Avoyelles-Tunica-Biloxi, and the Chickamauga Cherokee used these legal frameworks to acquire Spanish land grants. White settlers however, especially immigrants from the U.S. who arrived in Louisiana after 1788, regularly squatted on Indigenous lands and tried to displace the Native residents. Complaints about white settlers infringing on Shawnee, Cherokee, and Avoyelles-Tunica-Biloxi land survive in the Spanish judicial archives and reveal that these conflicts arose because the opposing parties drew on different legal traditions to justify their actions: Spanish, Anglo-American, and/or Indigenous ideas about property. I argue that conflicts over land occupation between these groups broke out over more than the question of where to draw property boundaries. In their everyday actions, Indigenous peoples, Spanish officials, and Anglo-American immigrants engaged in a fundamental discussion about the nature of property, possession, and use rights.