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Sustained contacts between natives and Europeans in the eighteenth century brought about change for all and gave added meaning to the phrase new world.1 In the course of this change, a diplomatic culture emerged that re®ected many of these changes and no doubt encouraged them. While it incorporated elements of what the new people brought, perhaps most important the written word, it sustained and even expanded native traditions. The treaty became a written document; indeed, it assumed the characteristics of a distinctive literary form, but it also retained the connotation and the importance of a meeting or council.2 At such meetings, the spoken word (often very metaphoric as in the case of Piomingo’s response to the invitation to Nogales), symbolic objects such as wampum to represent, for example, ways to maintain contact, and elaborate protocol long characteristic of Indian diplomacy remained more important than any piece of paper produced at the conclusion. With varying degrees of success Europeans—especially those like Gayoso, who had been a member of a diplomatic family—could understand and appreciate many of these traditions, for they accorded with their own understanding of what diplomacy required. They too had developed a special language of diplomacy and protocols to be followed in formal diplomatic exchanges, and they could appreciate the role of peace chiefs like Taboca, who undertook missions to resolve problems—to sustain open and white paths.3 The discussion that follows will endeavor to provide further insight into the characteristics of this diplomacy as it came to de¤ne a dimension of European and Indian interactions in the course of the eighteenth century, important for the resolution of the Nogales controversy and further initiatives in the early 1790s. Diplomatic practices among Native Americans re®ected larger political and social realities, which, it should be kept in mind, could and did change over time.4 As noted, the government and social organization of all the major Indian groups—Choctaws, Chickasaws, Creeks, and Cherokees—helped shape the di3 Forging Diplomatic Paths Emergence of a Culture of Diplomacy plomacy of the period and thereby create the paths of communication with similar characteristics. Decentralization, localism, individualism, and egalitarianism characterized what might be regarded as the political culture of the region, as they did, according to foreign observers, the newly independent United States in the 1780s and 1790s, where political power was minimal and largely local.5 Where there were no states, individuals and small groups reigned supreme, but perhaps without the kinds of power present in the so-called stateless preliterate societies discussed by Pierre Clastres for Indian South America.6 Village groups were autonomous and were led by chiefs who had to earn their status.7 Each village had one or two chiefs corresponding to the division of tribes into moieties representing war and peace. While these chiefs were subordinate to a great chief, they could for the most part govern independently. The arrival of Europeans in the region added another ingredient to this mix, but Indians proved remarkably adept at employing diplomacy to deal with them, and Europeans proved equally able to adjust to native expectations.8 Historical evidence from the eighteenth century records attempts by Europeans to instill more hierarchy and order and thereby create a system more akin to theirs and hence easier to in®uence; through their practice of awarding medals and patents to chiefs in an effort to simplify their political relations, however , they probably ended up reinforcing a dispersal of chie®y power. Even though government operated on the level of the village, clan, and tribe and through multiple chiefs or headmen, a great chief nominally headed the tribe or “nation,” as Europeans wanted to see the larger units and as they talked about them in their documents. Gayoso reported that during the Nogales assembly of 1793 he announced he would regard Franchimastabé as both principal chief of the “Large Party”of the Choctaws and principal chief for the entire nation. Choctaws apparently played to European preferences, at least in a verbal sense, by using the term king. Regardless of title, chiefs often found their power limited and challenged, as evidence for this particular diplomatic episode amply demonstrates. Needless to say, throughout the eighteenth century this political structure proved often frustrating to European and American of¤cials, who continued to see Choctaw polity consisting of what Vaudreuil described in the 1740s as “so many little republics.” Like their French and British predecessors, Spanish of¤cials tried to make...

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