Swamped-Out Borderlands: Indigenous Spatial Power and Constraints on Spanish Louisiana

Spain inherited a quagmire of a colony in from France in the form of Louisiana in 1762. Great Britain had split the eastern half of the expansive territorial claim in the form of West Florida and quickly staked a rival claim to the banks of the Lower Mississippi River. Both empires, however, quickly found themselves bogged down by the physical landscape of the lush but swampy Mississippi River Delta and immediately dependent on its Indigenous residents to make their claims a reality. Though the promise of plantation wealth in the extremely fertile soil led to heavy investment in terrestrial expansion, Spanish colonists quickly found themselves dependent on Indigenous environmental expertise to safely navigate and find stability in a landscape hostile to colonial ideas of space. The Houmas and Bayagoulas continued to leverage this expertise to frustrate an energetic effort to expand into their homeland by making themselves indispensable for surviving the dynamism of deltaic life. Their spatial power preserved their access to critical junctures that allowed them to remain in place even as the limited dry land was monopolized by an expansive plantation regime.