A Gendered Frontier: Métissage and Indigenous Enslavement in Eighteenth-Century Basse-Louisiane

French colonialism in North America has often been typified by the histories of New France and the Great Lakes region, characterized as a middle ground that, while violent, still provided opportunity for alliance and left Indigenous cultural practices largely intact.¹ Yet Basse-Louisiane was explicitly settler colonial and founded as a for-profit plantation colony. The enslavement of both Black and Indigenous peoples was integral to the colonial project, and the social dynamics and legal regimes that emerged in the colony differed from those in les Pays d'en Haut.² Indian slavery was an important component of diplomacy and trade across French North America, but it also played a crucial role in settlement plans in Basse-Louisiane and the Gulf Coast region. There, Native women and girls were enslaved as cultural intermediaries, domestic servants, and non-consenting wives, and métissage was used as a vehicle of deliberate dispossession and forcible assimilation. However, the traditional focus by scholars of the Upper and Lower Mississippi Valleys on commerce, prosperity, and generative adaptation in a frontier exchange economy, as well as the conflation of sexual slavery with consensual trade relationships throughout the region, has obscured the degree to which French colonization in Basse-Louisiane was dependent upon particularly gendered and racialized forms of violence.

Native American and Indigenous Studies scholars have called for "strategic collaboration" between peoples and disciplines and "structural and substantive engagement" with Indigenous knowledges, materials, and methods to unsettle imperial-colonial versions of the past, which perpetuate myriad violences across time and place.³ Likewise, Black feminist scholars of slavery and the African diaspora have successfully rearticulated the relationship between race, sex, and power in Louisiana and the Atlantic World, providing transformative methodologies and perspectives to challenge and, indeed, begin to correct "mutilated historicity."⁴ While historians now mostly accept these interventions, I further argue that it is only at the intersection of Black and Native studies—and through centering the perspectives of descendant communities and tribal nations—that the history of the U.S. South can be properly recontextualized in interpretive and relational frameworks.⁵ In this article, I draw upon this perspective to reorient our understanding of the relationship between slavery, genocide, and settler colonialism in the Gulf South.

Alan Gallay estimates that as many as 51,000 enslaved Native people...