I do not want to buy the trade.
                                        Edmond Atkin,
                                        Southern Superintendent of Indian Affairs for the English,
                                        October 27, 1759 (cited in White 1983, 57)
 

The second point is that the satisfaction of the first need (the act of satisfying, and the instrument of satisfaction which has been acquired) leads to new needs; and this production of new needs is the production of the first historical act. Here we recognize immediately the spiritual ancestry of the great historical wisdom of the Germans, who when they run out of positive material and when the serve up neither theological nor political nor literary rubbish assert that this is not history at all, but the ‘prehistoric era.’  They do not however enlighten us as to how to proceed from this nonsensical ‘prehistory’ to history proper; although, on the other hand, in their historical speculation they seize upon this ‘prehistory’ with especial eagerness because they imagine themselves safe there from interference on the part of ‘crude facts,’ and, at the same time, because there they can give full rein to their speculative impulse and set up and knock down hypotheses by the thousand.
                                        Karl Marx and Frederick Engels,
                                        The German Ideology (in Tucker 1978, 156 emphasis added)

    The goal of this paper is to outline a new way to locate Indians in New Orleans (slide Louisiana Indian).  The focus is not as much on Indians as persons, that is, particular human bodies born and reared in particular locations.  More so, the focus is on Indians in a discursive sense (slide Mardi Gras Indian): Indian as a way of life that any ‘body’ from any ‘where’ could be or become.  I believe this dual Indian-ness allows us to escape a very basic and problematic foundation that many treatments of Indian history and archaeology rely on.  In a nutshell, in the historic period ‘we’ imagine that there is something essential to Indians.  We still treat them as different because they are natives, because they were here first, because this is their land, essentially because they are ‘them.’  Yet, whatever particular sensibility we use to define ‘them,’ in every case that we do, we also serve to isolate ‘them,’ push them out of history, and thus make ‘them’ Indians (slide - I am ancient).   I focus here on Indians not to the exclusion of other ‘bodies,’ but recognize that those others, specifically Europeans, Whites, Africans, Blacks, etc. have emerged in recent years from a generalizing obscurity to a historically revealing complexity that has proven to increasingly sever their discursive existence from their historic bodies.  In particular, we are getting to a point in these studies where we can see the person in the body, discovering that the person was making the body, and that they did so not because they had to but because it was useful given their conditions.
    This means that if we are to study Indians we must define at some point in our work what we mean by saying that someone was being Indian.  (slide –me, the Indian)  In addition, in every case we must also embrace the multiple significations that such a practice involves and seek to draw attention to the threads and fragments of these many ways of living in the records we have recovered.  One constructive means to do this, I believe, is to follow an approach that considers such significations not as free floating but as grounded in particular social relations of production.  Thus, in this paper I attempt to make the case that being Indian in New Orleans has served as a key signifier for a multitude of individuals as each has struggled to make a way of life emerge that works from their strengths given the particular conditions of the local political economy.  What we will see is that being Indian does not mean that we need to look only for, or at, Native Americans but also at those of other heritages who employed the ways of being Indian for one purpose or another.  I consider both the 18th-century origins of New Orleans and its early 19th century maturation to examine how Indians made New Orleans possible and were then materially removed from, yet discursively maintained in, the culture in a process that my title encapsulates by saying that we can locate Indians in New Orleans up until the point when they become discursively prehistoric and thus marginal to, and outside of, the history of the city itself.

The historic Indian
    (slide – Abo sherds) This discussion was initiated upon discovering a distinct pattern in the ceramic assemblages from colonial archaeological sites in New Orleans.  (slide – same) In every case Native American ceramics have been recovered alongside collections of imported European wares at sites deemed European by virtue of the heritage of their heads of household.  At first glance this finding was not surprising since in most North American colonial settings the interaction between Indians and settlers is well documented and in fact is shown to have produced clear and obvious archaeological correlates recognized by the presence of each other’s material culture at each other’s sites (slide -- Tunica treasure).   One of the best recognized analyses of this process of intercultural exchange has been the work of Deagan (1983, 1995) and others at St. Augustine and other Spanish sites in Florida and the Caribbean.  Their research shows that the Spanish strategy of colonization involved the establishment of military and missionary sites within Native territories that allowed an official state presence to be articulated on the landscape (slide - plan of Spanish site) as well as allowing for the creation of a mestizo population to grow at these sites through the intermarriage of Spanish men and Native women.  (slide – Spanish ceramics Table 1) At these mixed households the archaeological record is marked by a pronounced difference in the quantity of European and Native American ceramics recovered.  The vastly greater numbers of Native ceramics are interpreted to be the result of Native women’s work associated with household labor that was made possible in part by the access that Native women had to local ceramics as potters themselves, or through relations, via their Native heritage, to Indian potters ‘back home’. (slide – NOLA ceramic Table 2)
    In contrast, colonial sites at New Orleans have a radically different distribution in which Native ceramics make up a very small percentage of the assemblages.  Because the New Orleans pattern is so different I sought some means to explain why.  First, I reviewed the census records and found no evidence of Indians living at these sites suggesting that the pots were not directly associated (in terms of their use and discard) with people from their culture of origin.  Lacking an Indian residential presence, I reasoned that the pots must have come to the sites through some sort of exchange.  This explains the paucity of sherds when compared to a site with resident Indians, but further investigation has suggested that we must also question the cause and nature of the exchange in order to develop a satisfactory explanation for their presence.  It was first believed that the native pots may have served a particular function that was not being met by European ceramics, thus creating a market for Indian pots.  Since the majority of European vessels at Spanish sites were high-status serving wares while most storage and food preparation vessels were native wares, it seems that the native pots there served a function unmet by European ceramics.  (Slide MVC Table/Chart, Table 3) The relationship of serving to storage/preparation vessels given European or Indian manufacture at the Treme site in New Orleans, however, shows that native vessels, which were almost entirely open bowls, were actually redundant forms since the European ceramics included both table vessels and large coarse earthenware storage and preparation bowls (slide – Abo – Saintonge sherds).
    The question is: why would a European household acquire Indian vessels that it apparently did not need?  To answer I have shifted the focus from the pots to consider instead the exchange by adopting the idea that the significance of the Native ceramics was not their use- but their exchange-value in a particular sense.  This leap makes sense especially considering the significance of intercultural exchange in the New Orleans region.  On this topic, the information from historic sources is both abundant and clear: intercultural exchange in the colonial era was a foundation of social life in the greater Southeast and must lie at the root of any attempt to reconstruct past social action that relates Indians and Europeans (see especially Usner 1993).  However, the particular characteristics of these relations need to be carefully conceived since exchange occurred at a time of heightened political tension and in spaces of frequent cultural misunderstanding that created a diverse array of social factions and relations as well as political economic opportunities across the historic landscape.
    To situate and understand Indians in this history of exchange I believe we need to make two basic points.  First, the meaning of given instances of exchange was not necessarily obvious to, nor even the same for, the parties directly involved.  In fact, a potent arena of misunderstanding was created in the intersection of European commercial exchange with Indian gift exchange, a politicized distinction that made objects into sites of intercultural negotiation.  Exactly what skins, blankets, food, wax, oil, trinkets, guns, ammunition, and pots meant to each group as these items crossed cultural borders was not something that was necessarily clear nor something that remained consistent through time.  Discourse over the meanings of these goods, in fact, permitted the exigencies of culture contact, most especially the positions of power claimed by the participants, to be aired and materialized as circumstances changed.  Through the exchange of goods, that is, Indians and Europeans defined not only their relationships but what they intended to do to improve their positions as these relationships evolved.
    Second, a particular rationale for placing an emphasis on traded goods was a pattern of warfare originating in Native culture at the very beginning of what we consider the historic period.  As Galloway (1994, 1995), White (1983) and others  have made clear, the historic Native nations of the southeast encountered by Europeans in the 17th and 18th century were reorganized polities that formed after the collapse of Mississippian chiefdoms spurred on by the decimation of native populations by European disease.  New Indian polities formed in the proto and early historic periods as populations stabilized and reclaimed productive horticultural-hunting territories which they defended through relatively consistent warfare.  White (1981: 9-13) describes how the Choctaw landscape was marked by extensive borderland regions reserved for hunting but which were also sites of ambush and raiding and thus considered highly dangerous, even though for the Choctaw this meant foregoing the agricultural use of the nation’s most fertile river valley land.  In this context of ethnogenesis, marked as it was by conflict, raiding, and revenge killings, I believe we have to assume that all aspects of everyday life were highly politicized, and we need to recognize that the emphasis on tactical gifting and alliance formation, which Indians claimed intercultural exchange with Europeans embodied, was not an Indian tradition but a particular historical strategy crafted in a landscape of fear that European settlers encountered, exacerbated, and unavoidably participated in.
    As such, this landscape was not confined to Native territory but included all settlements in the region.  In fact, European settlements were considered by Native nations, as the murdered inhabitants of White Apple Village would come to all-too-clearly know in 1729, to be built on lands that were not ‘purchased’ but granted.   Any settlement in this landscape was thus a social relationship that was kept in tact through the exchange of goods that materialized a political alliance: “Like brothers, the two allied nations should meet each other’s needs—the Choctaw providing the French with the land and deerskins they required, the French allowing the Choctaws the manufactured goods they needed” (White 1983:43).  One inherent meaning here is that without exchange there was only war and/or theft.  The other inherent meaning is that the exchange was not commercial, but fully immersed in the politicized and tactical applications of the gift.
    Given this understanding of exchange I think what is being unearthed in excavations in New Orleans is the materialization of this politicized and dangerous landscape of fear.  In this sense, New Orleans was not an outpost of Europe in an Indian world, but a settlement made possible by the networks of alliance that formed the contours of a cultural landscape marked by hostility, distrust, and the opportunities these gave for personal and social advantage.  In this sense we need not find a single Native American in New Orleans to locate Indians there.  Rather, every Native ceramic sherd that comes to light identifies that these early settlers had adopted the key discursive component of being Indian: i.e., using things to create alliances and opportunities for social gain.   It is this same landscape, however, that supported the subsequent prehistoricization of Indians in New Orleans beginning in the late 18th century.

The prehistoric Indian
    The prehistoricizing transformation of Indians is obvious in the historical record, even in broad strokes.  After the American Revolution much of the ability of southeastern Indians to play European empires off one another to their advantage through the use the tactical gift exchange waned.  Beginning in the 1790s a new European mentality emerged as the regions occupied by the Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek, and others were no longer objects of imperial vision and control best manipulated through the instigation and negotiation of Indian war and peace, but lands prized, especially by Americans, for their potential agricultural productivity.   In the first decades of the 19th century, therefore, what had been essentially an international borderland around New Orleans became the territory of a single and youthful nation eager to establish its own commercial order.  Eventually, this order ruled the day making Indian ways of life outmoded and leading to the elimination of most Indian land claims and the removal of most Indians to west of the Mississippi River by the 1830s.
    The prehistoricization of the Indians around New Orleans is also obvious archaeologically.  Just as the colonial deposits of the city consistently contain Indian ceramics, the assemblages of the 19th century are conspicuously characterized by their absence.  At the Tremé Plantation site, deposits containing Native American pottery date up to the 1820s.   Even given the possibility for the reuse and curation of Native pots, it seems that Indian exchange was still common here well past 1800, even as this particular site was occupied by new owners and incorporated by an expanding neighborhood which started developing around it in the 1790s.  After 1820, however, the presence of Native pottery disappears at this site as well as from the others, and it has never been found in the excavation of sites that date only to the 19th century.
    Given the removal of the Indians, the loss of their ceramics should not come as a surprise, however, the pottery disappears before many of the Indians leave, and, more significant, while the removal of the nations was official, the process did not carry every Indian away.  In fact, in the very era when their ceramics stopped being a part of New Orleans households, many Indians adopted a new way of life in direct relation to the city.  As Usner (1998: 114) writes: “New Orleans actually became more important than ever before to Indians who were … devising new means of coping with the loss of political autonomy and … socioeconomic displacement … Peddling and casual labor by Indians in the burgeoning commercial center became part of a wider seasonal round of itinerant economic activities” (emphasis added).  This conclusion is drawn from multiple first hand observations of Native Americans in Louisiana in the early 19th century that consistently identify Indians with exchange and peddling, the most evocative of which are a set of drawings and photographs of Native women at New Orleans market houses [slides].  Here we can see, however, that the focus has shifted from gift to commercial exchange.  The point is that Native Americans never left New Orleans and may actually have been present in new and more significant ways than before, but at the moment they lost the ability to operate outside of American commercial domination, they also disappeared from the archaeological record of the city.  This is prehistoricization.
    To explain I return to White’s discussion of the historic Choctaw as an example.  In the late 18th century as the order of exchange was being tilted more and more in favor of European commerce, the Choctaw did not all of sudden reach a point where they just gave in and left.  White explains that a series of particular historical processes occurred that led eventually not to Choctaw acquiescence but to Choctaw dependence and an inability to resist incorporation and eventual removal.  It is notable that this process occurred through a dialectical social factioning in relation to foreign exchange.
White highlights one main theme: market debt.  In the words of Thomas Jefferson: Americans should encourage “especially their leading men to run in debt . . . beyond their individual means of paying; and whenever in that situation, they will always cede lands to rid themselves of debt” (cited in Usner 1998: 77).  Clearly, while Indians had strategically employed the gift to guide intercultural relations in their favor, Americans, once empowered to do so, did not just adopt or mildly introduce their ‘natural’ mode of commercial exchange, but employed credit and debt as a strategy of cultural domination for the stated purpose of eliminating Indians, both politically and discursively, from the landscape.
    White is clear to illustrate, however, that it was not just raw American power, but the subtleties of exchange and culture being used against itself that discursively destroyed the historic Indian around New Orleans.  In the years after the creation of the American Mississippi Territory, many Choctaw adopted livestock herding.  Especially for those in the northern settlements this was necessary since the deerskin trade had depleted much of the game in the nation’s borderlands.  The cultural impact of herding was materialized in complaints made by some Choctaw to the Indian agent that hunters were killing their cattle.  Even though the cattle were grazing on the nation’s hunting grounds, they convincingly argued that cattle were not the same as game, which was indeed available to any man, because, cattle were private property (see White 1983: 107-10).  Interestingly, though they were more engaged with the commercial economy, it was not the herders that struggled with the problem of debt.  Rather, it was the traditionalist hunters who had been co-opted into a cycle of debt in which they owed traders for goods that they had purchased with skins they had yet to even hunt.   Because these two groups, no matter their divergent relationships with the commercial market, were nevertheless Choctaw, they were forced to act in concert in relations with the Americans guiding local commercial exchange.  It was the tensions that the resulted from what was rapidly becoming an imposed singular Choctaw identity on what were quite distinct individual lives that led the Choctaw as a whole to succumb to being prehistoric.
    In 1818, a mixblood herder, David Folsom, declared that the old hunt was dead (White 1983:118).  From his perspective, the survival of the Choctaw required their self-sufficiency within the market.  The old ways of the traditional hunt, because they were now based in debt and dependence, had to be eliminated.  In the new world, notably with the help of Protestant missionaries, the Choctaw would become modern through education, thrift, property, and sobriety.  But to do so, the cattle herders, the new Choctaw elite, (who even though they were not Chiefs, still held sway because of their wealth) declared what being Indian now meant: it meant getting over the gift which meant staying even and out of debt.  To do otherwise was to drag the whole nation down to the discursive status where whites already thought they were: “pitiful remnants” or “fragments of an erratic race” (cited in Usner 1998: 118-19).   Thus the Indians at the New Orleans market, those who still lived by the trade rather than ‘settling’ the land, represented to the new Choctaw elite the real problem because they were living up to the racial stereotype of their prehistory.
    To conclude, we must see that the tragedy of removal was in part caused by this rift in Indian identity.  While itinerant Indian traders faced the prejudice of not only whites, but also members of their own culture, their role in the removal was largely symbolic.  To the bane of the settled cattle herding elite, they were a symbol of the essential inferiority of the Indian race.  But the removal was not about moving the traders out the Mississippi Territory, rather, it was about removing those who were pretending they could be like the whites by settling down, becoming literate, and adopting Christianity.  These Indians were the real threats, because they showed that being Indian did not mean, necessarily, anything at all, which was also saying that being American or white did not either, and thus undermining the discursively formed sense of superiority that whites relied on to steal the southeast from its Native inhabitants.
Tables

Table 1. Summary ceramic counts for two major Spanish colonial sites

SITE Non-European ceramics European ceramics Total Aboriginal ceramics as percentage of total ceramics
St. Augustine, Florida(Hoffman 1997: Table 2) 13,302 9,390 22,692 58.7%
Puerto Real, Haiti(Deagan 1995: Table 13.3) 25,303 27,975 52,278 48.4%
 
 

Table 2. Summary ceramic counts for Colonial New Orleans sites
SITE Aboriginal ceramics European ceramics Total Aboriginal ceramics as percentage of total ceramics
Cabildo(Yakubik and Franks 1997: Appendix 1) 20 509 529 3.8%
Madame John’s Legacy(Dawdy 1998:Appendix C) 36 479 515 7.0%
Tremé Plantation (Matthews 1999) 234 1,434 1,668 14.0%
 
 
 

Table 3. Minimum Vessel Counts for the Tremé Plantation Site, New Orleans

Vessel Type ABO CEW REW Other
Plate/Flatware 0 1 26 3
Table Bowl 0 3 37 0
Cup/Teacup 0 1 18 4
Prep/Storage Bowl 14 14 4 3
Hollow vessel unknown 23 13 7 7

ABO: Aboriginal; CEW: Coarse Earthenware; REW: Refined Earthenware; Other: Stonewares, Porcelain, and Slipwares
 
 

Chart for Table 3
 

Deagan, Kathleen (ed), 1983, Spanish St. Augustine: The Archaeology of a Colonial Creole Community. Academic Press, New York.

Deagan, Kathleen (ed), 1995, Puerto Real: The Archaeology of a Sixteenth-Century Spanish Town in Hispaniola. University Press of Florida, Gainesville.

Dombrowski, Kirk, 2001, Against Culture, Development, Politics, and Religion in Indian Alaska. University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln.

Galloway, Patricia, 1994, Confederacy as a Solution to Chiefdom Dissolution: Historical Evidence in the Choctaw Case. In The Forgotten Centuries: Indians and Europeans in the American South, 1521-1704, pp. 393-420, Charles Hudson and Carmen Chaves Tesser, eds. University of Georgia Press, Athens

Galloway, Patricia, 1995, Choctaw Genesis, 1500-1700. University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln.

Hoffman, Kathleen, 1997, Cultural Development in La Florida.  In ‘Diversity and Social Identity in Colonial Spanish America: Native American, African, and Hispanic Communities During the Middle Period,’ edited by Donna L. Ruhl and Kathleen
Hoffman, Historical Archaeology 31(1):24-35.

Matthews, Christopher N., 1999, Management Report of Excavations at the St. Augustine Site (16OR148), 1999.  Submitted to the Louisiana Division of Archaeology.  On file, The Greater New Orleans Archaeology Program.

Matthews, Christopher N., n.d., Black, White, Light, and Bright: A Narrative of Creole Color. The Stanford Archaeology Journal. In press.

Merrell, James, 1989, The Indians’ New World: Catawbas and their Neighbors from European Contact through the Era of Removal. W.W. Norton, New York.

Sider, G. M., 1987, When Parrots Learn to Talk and Why They Can’t. Comparative Studies in Society and History 29:3-23.

Sider, G. M., 1994, Identity as History: Ethnohistory, Ethnogenesis, and Etnocide in the Southeastern United States. Identities 1(1):109-122.

Tucker, Robert C., (ed), 1978, The Marx-Engels Reader, 2nd Edition. Norton, New York.

Usner, Daniel H., Jr., 1992, Indians, Settlers, and Slaves in an Frontier Exchange Economy: The Lower Mississippi Valley before 1783.  University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill.

Usner, Daniel H., Jr., 1998, American Indians in the Lower Mississippi Valley: Social and Economic Histories.  University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln.

White, Richard, 1983, The Roots of Dependency: Subsistence, Environment, and Social Change among the Choctaws, Pawnees, and Navajos. University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln.

Yakubik, Jill-Karen and Herschel Franks, 1997, Archaeological Investigations at the Site of the Cabildo, New Orleans, Louisiana. Prepared by Earth Search, Inc.  Submitted to the Louisiana State Museum, New Orleans.