River-cane baskets woven by the Chitimachas of south Louisiana are universally admired for their beauty and workmanship. Recounting friendships that Chitimacha weaver Christine Paul (1874-1946) sustained with two non-Native women at different parts of her life, this book offers a rare vantage point into the lives of American Indians in the segregated South. Mary Bradford (1869-1954) and Caroline Dormon (1888-1971) were not only friends of Christine Paul; they were also patrons who helped connect Paul and other Chitimacha weavers with buyers for their work. Daniel H. Usner uses Paul's letters to Bradford and Dormon to reveal how Indian women, as mediators between their own communities and surrounding outsiders, often drew on accumulated authority and experience in multicultural negotiation to forge new relationships with non-Indian women. Bradford's initial interest in Paul was philanthropic, while Dormon's was anthropological. Both certainly admired the artistry of Chitimacha baskets. For her part, Paul saw in Bradford and Dormon opportunities to promote her basketry tradition and expand a network of outsiders sympathetic to her tribe's vulnerability on many fronts. As Usner explores these friendships, he touches on a range of factors that may have shaped them, including class differences, racial attitudes, and shared ideals of womanhood. The result is an engaging story of American Indian livelihood, identity, and self-determination.

Representations of Indian economic life have played an integral role in discourses about poverty, social policy, and cultural difference but have received surprisingly little attention. Daniel Usner dismantles ideological characterizations of Indian livelihood to reveal the intricacy of economic adaptations in American Indian history.

Officials, reformers, anthropologists, and artists produced images that exacerbated Indians economic uncertainty and vulnerability. From Jeffersonian agrarianism to Jazz Age primitivism, European American ideologies not only obscured Indian struggles for survival but also operated as obstacles to their success. Diversification and itinerancy became economic strategies for many Indians, but were generally maligned in the early United States. Indians repeatedly found themselves working in spaces that reinforced misrepresentation and exploitation. Taking advantage of narrow economic opportunities often meant risking cultural integrity and personal dignity: while sales of baskets made by Louisiana Indian women contributed to their identity and community, it encouraged white perceptions of passivity and dependence. When non-Indian consumption of Indian culture emerged in the early twentieth century, even this friendlier market posed challenges to Indian labor and enterprise. The consequences of this dilemma persist today.

Usner reveals that Indian engagement with commerce has consistently defied the narrow choices that observers insisted upon seeing.

During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Native peoples inhabiting the Lower Mississippi Valley confronted increasing domination by colonial powers, disastrous reductions in population, and the threat of being marginalized by a new cotton economy. Their strategies of resistance and adaptation to these changes are brought to light in this perceptive study.

An introductory overview of the historiography of Native peoples in the early Southeast examines how the study of Native-colonial relations has changed over the last century. Daniel H. Usner Jr. reevaluates the Natchez Indians' ill-fated relations with the French and the cultural effects of Native population losses from disease and warfare during the eighteenth century. Usner next examines in detail the social and economic relations the Native peoples forged in the face of colonial domination and demographic decline, and he reveals how Natives adapted to the cotton economy, which displaced their familiar social and economic networks of interaction with outsiders. Finally, Usner offers an intriguing excursion into cultural criticism, assessing the effects of popular images of Natives from this region.

In this pioneering book Daniel Usner examines the economic and cultural interactions among the Indians, Europeans, and African slaves of colonial Louisiana, including the province of West Florida. Rather than focusing on a single cultural group or on a particular economic activity, this study traces the complex social linkages among Indian villages, colonial plantations, hunting camps, military outposts, and port towns across a large region of pre-cotton South.
Usner begins by providing a chronological overview of events from French settlement of the area in 1699 to Spanish acquisition of West Florida after the Revolution. He then shows how early confrontations and transactions shaped the formation of Louisiana into a distinct colonial region with a social system based on mutual needs of subsistence. Usner's focus on commerce allows him to illuminate the motives in the contest for empire among the French, English, and Spanish, as well as to trace the personal networks of communication and exchange that existed among the territory's inhabitants. By revealing the economic and social world of early Louisianians, he lays the groundwork for a better understanding of later Southern society.

Though long neglected, the history and experiences of Indigenous women offer a deeper, more complex understanding of southern history and culture. In Native American Women and the Burdens of Southern History, Daniel H. Usner explores the dynamic role of Native American women in the South as they confronted waves of colonization, European imperial invasion, plantation encroachment, and post–Civil War racialization. In the process, he reveals the distinct form their means of adaptation and resistance took. While drawing attention to existing scholarship on Native American women, Usner also uses original research and diverse sources, including visual images and material culture, to advance a new line of inquiry. Focusing on women's responses and initiatives across centuries, he shows how their agency shaped and reshaped their communities' relations with non-Native southerners. Exploring basketry in the Lower Mississippi Valley and Gulf Coastal South, Usner emphasizes the essential role women played in ongoing efforts at resistance and survival, even in the face of epidemics, violence, and enslavement unleashed by early colonizers. Foods and medicines that Native women gathered, carried, stored, and peddled in baskets proved integral in forming the region's frontier exchange economy. Later, as the plantation economy threatened to envelop their communities, Indigenous women adapted to change and resisted disappearance by perpetuating exchange with non-Native neighbors and preserving a deep attachment to the land. By the start of the twentieth century, facing a new round of lethal attacks on Indigenous territory, identity, and sovereignty in the Jim Crow South, Native women's resilient and resourceful skill as makers of basketry became a crucial instrument in their nations' political diplomacy. Overall, Usner's work underscores how central Indigenous women have been in struggles for Native American territory and sovereignty throughout southern history.