About
My work in the field of early North American Indigenous history focuses on the Lower Mississippi River Valley, though I also examine eastern North America in the 17th and 18th centuries more broadly. I tend to focus on Indigenous politics, especially those political exchanges occuring between Indigenous polities. My research seeks to complicate the Indigenous/colonist dyad by examining how communities placed by scholars within these groupings understood their positions relative to each other. My current project pursues this goal through examining land, water, and space.
My current book project examine place and the environment in the Mississippi River Delta which its Indigenous inhabitants called "Bvlbancha," or "the place of many languages." The muddy, flooded, storm-prone landscape of the delta led its Native peoples to develop malleable yet durable ways of existing in place and caliming territory. These flexible spatial practices allowed these Indigenous communities to incorporate French, Spanish, and British colonial land regimes into the spatial fabric of Bvlbancha and to control access to its intractable terrain.
My next project examines the story of Moncacht-Apé, a linguist and voyager of the Yazoo people in the Lower Mississippi Valley. Moncacht-Apé narrated a story in the 18th century wherein he successfully journeyed to first the Atlantic then the Pacific coasts over a century before the Lewis and Clark expedition. Rather than focus on verifying his story as most scholars examining the voyager have, I seek to unpack the themes and goals of the story itself.
