Elizabeth Ellis

“Power on the Margins” is a history of the small Native American nations of the Lower Mississippi Valley during the eighteenth century. Using archival, linguistic, archaeological, ethnographic, and oral histories and both Native American and Indigenous studies and historical methodologies, this book examines how Indigenous peoples navigated the pressures of French, Spanish, English, and American colonization. By examining Indigenous political and social systems, this work illustrates the ways that these small Native nations were able to use their extensive alliance networks to exercise power and to thereby fundamentally shape the development of both Indigenous and European societies in the region. As this history weaves together past and present, it also sheds light on the processes of Indigenous nation-building that have allowed many of the decedents of these small nations to remain in their homelands and maintain their communities through present day.