A Gendered Frontier: Métissage and Indigenous Enslavement in Eighteenth-Century Basse-Louisiane.

French colonialism in North America has often been typified by the histories of New France and the Great Lakes region, characterized as a middle ground that, while violent, still provided opportunity for alliance and left Indigenous cultural practices largely intact. Yet, in contrast, the founding of Lower Louisiana was explicitly settler colonial, and the Gulf Coast region was uniquely shaped by both the Trans-Atlantic and Indian slave trades. While the enslavement of Indigenous women and girls was an important component of diplomacy and trade across French North America, varying slaveries played a more crucial role in the successful colonization of the Lower Mississippi Valley through gendered and racialized forms of genocidal violence. Therefore, it is only at the intersection of Black and Native studies—and through centering the perspectives of descendant communities and tribal nations—that the history of the U.S. South can be properly recontextualized in interpretive and relational frameworks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]