Casey Price: "'Our Fire Sits Here': The French Cartography of Indigenous Coalescence in the Native South”

Location: Zoom

Time:  7:00 PM ET/ 6:00 PM CT/ 5:00 PM MT/ 4:00 PM PT

Title: “‘Our Fire Sits Here’: The French Cartography of Indigenous Coalescence in the Native South.”

Speaker:  Casey Price, Recent Ph.D. Graduate and Visiting Teaching Professor, University of Tennessee, Knoxville

Summary: A polyglot Indigenous group discovered a party of French led by Louis Jolliet and Jacque Marquette along the Mississippi River in 1673. The Frenchmen recorded Cherokee-sourced geographical information regarding the Southeast’s interior, which found its way onto French maps, including Marquette’s Carte da la nouvelle decouverte and Jean Baptiste Franquelin’s Carte da la Louisiane. The de L’Isles adopted alternate ethnonyms on their 1718 Carte de la Louisiane et du Cours du Mississippi from information gathered at an encounter between a Muklasa man and M. de Sauvole’s group along the Gulf Coast in 1701. Scholars have often attributed the changing toponyms on these maps to updated information available to géographes du cabinet or to developing colonial territorial assertions. However, beyond the colonial façade, the evolution of the Indigenously sourced geographic information on French maps during this era provides enticing clues regarding the active coalescence of Cherokee, Creek, and other Southeastern Indigenous peoples amid increasing colonial pressure.

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