The Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture

NATCHEZ.

Not an organized or federally recognized tribe, nevertheless the Natchez have been Oklahoma residents since the 1830s. The Natchez people are a North American Indigenous group originating from the Lower Mississippi River. Between at least 7000 B.C. and 1730 A.D. they resided at a series of regional villages, with their Grand Village located on the Natchez Bluffs near present Natchez, Mississippi. These early Natchez were a mound-builder society noted for their complex chiefdom and intricate social hierarchy. The paramount leader was designated as “the Great Sun.”

Along with other Southeastern nations, the Natchez had early encounters with European peoples. They may have had an interaction with the Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto. However, conflicts with French colonists precipitated the Natchez’s most devastating period. Over the eighteenth century French plantations near the Grand Village became the site of several small skirmishes across the early eighteenth century culminating in an outbreak of overwhelming violence in 1729. Commanded to leave their homes by the French, the Natchez responded with a coordinated attack that caused more than 250 French casualties. A retaliatory military expedition of French and Choctaw allies pursued the Natchez and captured many near Natchitoches (Louisiana) in 1730. Some who were sent to plantations on the island of Sainte-Domingue (now Haiti) as slaves were able to flee north to live alongside the Chickasaw. Continued attacks by the French forced these refugees to move yet again to live alongside the Mvskoke (Creek) and the Cherokee.

As the United States expanded into the Southeast region in the 1830s, the Natchez experienced Indian Removal along with the Mvskoke (Creek) and Cherokee nations. In Indian Territory (I.T.) Natchez families enrolled as members of these two polities but have worked to maintain a distinct identity by preserving their linguistic and cultural traditions. Several Natchez, such as Archie Sam, became renowned as dance and spiritual leaders within I.T. In fact, while a minority population within the much larger Cherokee and Mvskoke communities, prominent Natchez citizens played a critical role in the cultural and religious revitalization efforts of the twentieth century in Indian Country.

A smaller segment of Natchez descendants who fled French retaliation in the eighteenth century reside in South Carolina as part of the state-recognized Edisto Natchez-Kusso Tribe. This smaller community and the larger sections of Oklahoma Natchez have pushed for independent recognition by state and federal governments within the twentieth and twenty-first centuries as part of a broader effort to reassert Natchez sovereignty.

Sheldon Yeakley