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“The Chief Who Is Your Father”: Choctaw and French Views of the Diplomatic Relation
- University of Nebraska Press
- Chapter
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When anthropologists set out to study a culture-contact situation, the first thing they look for is evidence of acculturation. When the object of historical study is the contact of Europeans with Native Americans, this is also the case, but all too seldom do scholars make any effort to treat both sides equally in the analysis: they apply the methods of anthropology to the Native Americans, the methods of history to the Europeans. As a result, the original inhabitants of the continent are seen as victims rather than as active agents in this drama, and the extended European state becomes the fixed formal stage upon which the natives writhe in the throes of their tribal passions.1 For the colonial period, reconstructing the meaning and function of Indian social institutions will always remain more difficult than describing comparable institutions among the Europeans who dealt with the Indians. It is fortunate that at least we can understand the European institutions, for the Indians were certainly acting upon their own view of them, and to understand how Indian institutions responded to contact with Europeans it is indispensable that we discover what the Indians sought to achieve through their response. If the French were clearly attempting to manipulate Choctaw power brokers, the Choctaws were certainly trying to return the favor. I shall propose a thesis that explores both sides of the diplomatic interface in the same way: Indian as seen by European and European as seen by Indian. I shall argue that in the diplomatic relations between the Choctaws and the French in the eighteenth century, the French colonial governors, conditioned by their own patrilineally biased society and ignoring a Choctaw institution that would have offered them more authority, adopted the metaphorical position of “father” to the Choctaws, and the Choctaws then proceeded to treat them as their matrilineal society taught them they should: as kind, indulgent nonrelatives who had no authority over them. The gov- “The Chief Who Is Your Father” Choctaw and French Views of the Diplomatic Relation patricia galloway “the chief who is your father” ernors, well aware that the Choctaws could represent a formidable enemy at their gates, were forced to play this role until the end of their regime. This is a very simple thesis, so simple that at first glance it may seem frivolous. Inevitably, too, less than perfect evidence and a confusion in levels of discourse hamper any effort to document its validity. To make sense of the thesis it will be necessary to reconstruct what each group thought of the other’s institutions and, behind that, the reality of the institutions themselves. Before arguing that the Indians used a certain kinship mechanism for diplomacy , I must show that it is valid to see the external diplomacy of certain ethnic groups having matrilineal descent and tribal social organization as a metaphor for how lineages dealt with one another within that group. Since the example here is a major southern tribe, I shall draw mainly upon what is known of the southeastern Indians to establish this point. Like most of the southeastern tribes, the Choctaws at contact reckoned kinship matrilineally. John R. Swanton established in his 1931 study that matrilineal descent groups and exogamous moieties made up Choctaw social structure.2 Fred Eggan then proposed that the Choctaw system of matrilineal descent had reflected the pure Crow pattern before European contact, and Alexander Spoehr carried out work that demonstrated Eggan’s thesis.3 Within a matriliny the roles of the men must be clearly defined if the group is to maintain stability.4 The brothers of the women of the lineage hold authority over household and lineage activities and children. They are charged with managing the property of the householders, their sisters, and with assuring the continuity of lineage holdings by approving and arranging marriages for its women. They also maintain the traditions and customs of the tribe as a whole by taking charge of the education of their sisters’ sons. And the role of primary authority in the lineage, held by the oldest male, passes regularly to his eldest sister’s eldest son rather than to his own, who belongs to a different lineage. This whole complex of patterns granting certain kinds of authority to the maternal uncles of a matriliny is designated by the anthropological term “avunculate,” and it constitutes one of the distinctive features of matrilineal societies. The in-marrying men in this picture, the husbands of the women of the lineage, cannot develop...