Many Small Nations: Black, Indigenous, Black/Indigenous Bvlbancha

Abstract

Many Small Nations:Black, Indigenous, Black/Indigenous Bvlbancha Jessica Marie Johnson (bio) I am thrilled and honored to be part of this conversation about Elizabeth N. Ellis's The Great Power of Small Nations: Indigenous Diplomacy in the Gulf South. I come to this conversation as a queer Black-on-both-sides (U.S. South and Puerto Rico) historian of slavery with a focus on Africans and their forced migration throughout the Atlantic world. I also come to this conversation as a scholar with a deep investment in present-day Black life in Louisiana and beyond. From Atakapas to Natchez to Bvlbancha (the Choctaw name for the site of present-day New Orleans and a word that translates to "many tongues"), the sixty-four parishes of present-day Louisiana provide a complex historical milieu that extends beyond mainland North America. It is, I hope, common knowledge at this point that Black life in Louisiana is impossible to understand outside of African history. Thanks to the tremendous and groundbreaking work of scholars such as the late Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, author of Africans in Colonial Louisiana and the founder of the Afro-Louisiana History and Genealogy database, the connections between this region and Senegambia, in particular, and West and West-Central Africa are a matter of historical fact. Scholars including Hall, Ibrahima Seck, Jennifer M. Spear, and Cécile Vidal have tracked Africans and people of African descent as they moved across the African diaspora and Caribbean archipelago. Some of the greatest writers of our time, from Édouard Glissant to Saidiya Hartman, Stephanie E. Smallwood, and Sowande' M. Mustakeem, have labored to describe the tremendous rupture and fierce creativity that enslavement generated in the lives of African women, children, and men who suffered those forced migrations.1 At the [End Page 745] mercy of trading companies, distant investors, absentee owners, and upstart entrepreneurs, Africans battled against would-be capitalists, imperialists, enslavers, and settlers seeking to transform them from people with diverse experiences, histories, and cosmologies into commodities, useful for advancing the fortunes of a select few. This is the world that made the Louisiana we know today. Rampant conquest, acquisition, terror, commodification, and forced dispersal of people of many nations for the gratification and enrichment of others drove the founding of French colonial society on the Gulf Coast. French imperial officials and Louisiana-born French and French-Canadian settlers played major roles in settler colonialism. Their quest for dominance led French settlers to withstand scarcity and a sometimes hardscrabble existence on the outer edge of the French Empire and to forge delicate alliances with Indigenous nations from the Haudenosaunee Confederacy in the north to the Tunicas and Natchez in the south. Although conquest is a term most often used by historians of Latin America and the Caribbean writing about the predations by Spain and Portugal in the South Atlantic and is used less by scholars of French American contexts, it remains the only term that fully encapsulates the making of Louisiana. In an essay written for this journal, Jeffrey Ostler and Nancy Shoemaker note that settler colonialism is "a process, not a structure or an event," an ongoing unfurling of violent enclosure that has ramifications for how we live our lives now.2 To put it another way, "conquest," as Tiffany Lethabo King writes, "as well as resistance to conquest, is a living, quotidian, and ever present moment that actors can interact with and interrupt. It is not an event, not even a structure, but a milieu or active set of relations that we can push on, move around in, and redo from moment to moment."3 The paradigm of conquest reminds historians of Vast Early America that African/Black history and Indigenous histories are intertwined. French incursions among the many Indigenous polities that constituted the Gulf South cannot be understood without accounting for French incursions among the many African polities that constituted the Senegambian coast. French imperial officials stubbornly settling themselves at nearly uninhabitable or barely habitable sites deep in the swamp or along a perennially flooding river [End Page 746] likewise does not make sense outside of their dreams of funneling Africans taken from Saint Louis du Sénégal...