The Caddo Chiefdoms: Caddo Economics and Politics, 700-1835 (review)

The Caddo Chiefdoms: Caddo Economics and Politics, 700–1835. By David La Vere. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998. xiv + 198 pp., figure, notes, bibliography, index. $45.00 cloth.)

In The Caddo Chiefdoms, David La Vere employs American, French, and Spanish archival sources, oral historical information, and archeological evidence to examine the development and elaboration of the Caddo chiefdoms in prehistoric times, as well as the rise and decline in power of the Caddo chiefdoms after European contact. In considering the character of Caddoan societies, La Vere situates the introduction of epidemic diseases, the trade of deer hides, horses, and guns, Osage and Chickasaw slave raiding, and the different machinations of Europeans within a detailed account of the political, social, economic, and religious forces that drove the activities and relationships of Caddoan chiefdoms, their important leaders, and their “magnificent history” (9) after the area’s colonization and settlement by the Americans, French, and Spanish.

The book’s consideration of the Caddoan prehistoric archeological record gives a sense of the power and nature of the ancient Caddo chiefdoms and the strength of their traditions as theocratic chiefdoms. These chiefdoms built earthen mounds for the religious and political elite in Caddoan societies, carried out long-distance trade in exotic items, lived in sedentary communities, hamlets, and villages, and depended on the cultivation of maize and other tropical cultigens for their dietary needs. The author’s basic premise that the prehistoric Caddo tradition of powerful chiefdoms contributed to the Caddo’s “sense of unity, destiny, and greatness” (154) in historic times is a sound one. Also compellingly laid out by La Vere is the apparent reliance in prehistoric and historic times of Caddoan communities on powerful chiefs, such as Dehahuit, Jose Maria, and Tinhiouen in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and the strength of reciprocal kinship obligations.

Chapters on “The Horse, Gun, and Deerskin Trades,” “Challenges to the Chiefdoms,” and “Restructuring the Chiefdoms” comprise the core of the book. In them La Vere nicely describes how the political and economic traditions of the Caddo “allowed them to take an active role in shaping European needs to their advantage” (5). The Caddo chiefdoms did this through the development of kinship relationships and reciprocal obligations, including what La Vere calls fictive kin relationships or kin relationships through ritual adoptions. These relationships solidified gift exchange and trade between European leaders and Caddo chiefs and contributed to the power and chiefly authority of the Caddo religious and secular leaders. In these chapters he also discusses the effects of European diseases on Caddoan polities, which decimated Caddo populations, leading to declines in group populations of more than 90 percent over two centuries of contact as well as to the amalgamation of once separate Caddoan polities, the importance of Caddo-European intermarriage, the effects of slave raiding by the Osage and Chickasaw on group movements and the balance of Native American power in the Southern Plains and French-Spanish Louisiana, and the impact of European mercantile capitalism on aboriginal economic strategies.

In the book’s penultimate chapter, “The Chiefdoms Shatter,” La Vere reviews how the Caddo strategy of persuasion rather than force, kinship relationships and gift-giving, and alliance-building with Europeans and other Native American groups fared among American settlers and government agents after the United States purchase of Louisiana in 1803. The principal problem the Caddo chiefdoms faced was the expropriation of their traditional lands by Americans. The Americans were interested in relationships with the Caddo only if they led to ways for the Americans to take the Caddo lands. These “relationships” were empty ones: “The problem for the Caddos was not that they adopted strangers into their families. It was when strangers refused to become family. When family members did not uphold their obligations, things fell apart. And things did fall apart for the Caddos” (152).

The Caddo Chiefdoms is a fine addition to the Indians of the Southeast series published by the University of Nebraska...