Mississippian Indian Quotes

By 1700, English colonies were studded along the Atlantic shore from what would become Maine to what would become South Carolina. Northern colonies coexisted with Algonkian-speaking Indian societies that had few slaves and little interest in buying and selling captives; southern colonies coexisted with former Mississippian societies with many slaves and considerable experience in trading them. Roughly speaking, the boundary between these two types of society was Chesapeake Bay, not far from what would become the boundary between slave and non-slave states in the United States.

Look to the Southeast, where, as Taylor has noted, “colonial societies sustained a slave system more oppressive than anything practiced in Europe” and “the slave-owners relied on Indians to catch runaways.” There, too, the native groups, descended from Mississippian societies, were far more hierarchical and autocratically ruled than the Algonkian- and Iroquoian-speaking groups in the Northeast. As Gallay has documented, indigenous societies cooperated fully with the slave-trading system, sending war captives to colonists for sale overseas. In the Northeast, by contrast, the Wendat (Huron) and Haudenosaunee either killed or, more common, adopted captives; involuntary servitude, though it occurred, was strikingly rarer. On the map, the division line between slave and non-slave societies occurs in Virginia, broadly anticipating the Mason-Dixon line that later split slave states from free. The repeated pattern doubtless has to do with geography—southeastern climate and soil favor plantation crops like tobacco and cotton. And southern colonists’ preference for slavery presumably reflected their different ethnic, class, and religious backgrounds. But

the slave-owners relied on Indians to catch runaways.” There, too, the native groups, descended from Mississippian societies, were far more hierarchical and autocratically ruled than the Algonkian- and Iroquoian-speaking groups in the Northeast. As Gallay has documented, indigenous societies cooperated fully with the slave-trading system, sending war captives to colonists for sale overseas

it is likely that his looting of mortuary temples, his planting of crosses on sacred mounds, and his humiliation of chiefs whose claims to divine status were literally brought to ground when he displaced them from the shoulders of their retainers and made them walk powerlessly through their domains, all dealt severe blows to the religious beliefs that held together Mississippian cultures and chiefdoms.43