Natchez

An extinct indigenous nation whose members inhabited territory near modern-day Natchez, Mississippi, the Natchez Indians had enormous power in the Mississippi

Valley when they first encountered Europeans in the mid-16th century.

The Natchez, like other indigenous nations in the southeast of the modern-day United States, had strong cultural links to the MISSISSIPPIAN peoples. They inhabited a theocracy in which the head chief, known as the great sun, had the responsibility for the rising of the sun each day. Because the Natchez believed that the sun itself was the supreme deity, the link between its daily movements and the human who headed the nation made obvious sense. The Natchez also believed in other minor deities, and they constructed houses to honor the sun and the great sun. On certain occasions, such as the death of the great sun, the Natchez sacrificed humans to propitiate the divine forces that governed their world. In one of the temples the Natchez kept a fire always burning.

In many respects Natchez communities resembled nearby indigenous groups. Corn agriculture, supplemented by beans, pumpkins, peaches, and melons, was the basis of their diet. The Natchez also grew TOBACCO and gathered locally available plants, including wild rice and grapes. Women tended the crops while men had responsibility for hunting deer, buffalo, and other game. They traveled through the region in canoes, some of them up to 40 feet long, and engaged in trade with other Native peoples.

The Natchez first met Europeans when Hernando de SoTO traveled through the region in 1542. The Natives and newcomers did not get along, although there is little evidence of any overt hostility. Nonetheless, contact with Europeans and with Old World diseases that had come to the Western Hemisphere as part of the COLUMBIAN Exchange, devastated the nation. From a population of perhaps 4,500 in 1650, the Natchez declined to only 300 in 1731. Eighteenth-century conflicts with French colonists proved disastrous, especially when the Europeans defeated the Natchez in battle in 1731 and sold the survivors, including their last leader, into SLAVERY. Some Natchez survived the French assault and migrated to nearby indigenous communities of Chickasaw, Cherokee, and Creek.

Perhaps the best written source of evidence for the Natchez is the account written by the French colonist Antoine-Simon Le Page du Pratz, who documented elements of Natchez culture and society during the early 18th century. His account, entitled Histoire de la Louisiane, was published in Paris in 1758, although it contains information du Pratz gathered in the early 1730s. Like other European observers, du Pratz made drawings of some of the things he saw, including the main temple and the house of the great sun.

Over time the surviving Natchez married members of other Native nations. The last speaker of the Natchez language died in 1965, and the last Natchez ceremony took place in 1976, although a group of several hundred claiming some Natchez ancestry maintained a ceremonial site in eastern Oklahoma into the 1980s.

Further reading: Patricia Galloway, Choctaw Genesis, 1500-1700 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995); Barry M. Pritzker, A Native American Encyclopedia (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000); Charles D. Van Tuyl, The Natchez: Annotated Translations from Antoine Simon le Page du Pratz's Histoire de la Louisiane and A Short English-Natchez Dictionary, Oklahoma Historical Society Series in Anthropology, no. 4 (Oklahoma City: Oklahoma Historical Society, 1980).