Etiologies of Anthropocenic Emergence between the Natchez Trace, the Grand Village, and the Mississippi River in Natchez: A Dialogue Between Anthropologist Jim Barnett and Anthropocene Scholar and Curator Maya Kóvskaya

Natchez Indian and Mississippi Indian specialist and anthropologist, Jim Barnett, will be in dialogue with Natchez Field Station curator and Anthropocene scholar, Maya Kóvskaya, about empirical and historical questions pertaining to the research of the Natchez Field Station, focused on the emergence of the Anthropocene in this region, which is a microcosm of what happened in the Americas more generally.

The dialogue will begin with an acknowledgment of the 10,000-year-old Holocene origins of the Natchez Trace, the Mississippi River, and the myriad forms of natural agency in these multispecies terrestrial and riverine landscapes of the pre-colonial era in the region. Barnett will also briefly introduce elements of pre-colonial indigenous ways of life and relationships to the natural world in the area.

We will then discuss etiologies of an emergent Anthropocene, as white European settler-colonialist began to systematically colonize the Americas in the 15^th century. Colonization set in motion the processes characterized as the Anthropocene in many ways, radically transforming the continent, altering its landscapes, its ecosystems, and setting in motion arguably the largest scale genocide in human history—millions upon millions of indigenous peoples across the continent, with up to 90% of the indigenous population dying within the first centuries of colonization—destroying their civilizations, cultures, relationships with the natural world, and ways of life, spreading catastrophic diseases, as well as setting off the Little Ice Age with the Orbis Spike, and initiating massive changes in the global biosphere through the Columbian Exchange.

These widespread colonial processes and outcomes are mirrored in the Natchez context, so Natchez offers a micro-case for a deep dive into the complex causally entangled processes leading out of the Holocene with what is most likely a geological boundary event being problematically dubbed the Anthropocene, or “Age of Man.”

The Natchez case—which in many ways mirrors the experiences of the colonized world in the Americas, Africa, India, Oceania, and parts of Asia, over the subsequent 500 hundred plus years—reaffirms the many critiques of the over-generalized assumptions implicit in the evocation of  “anthropos” in Anthropocene, which identifies an artificially universalized, flattened human as the global, primary causal force disrupting the life-support systems of the planet, and leaving a geological scar that will last into deep geological time beyond our species’ own extinction.

While it is, indeed, humans and not other species that have set in motion these processes, like other colonial cases, Kóvskaya argues that the Natchez case, demonstrates conclusively that the clearly identifiable causal perpetrators of the violence that is the Anthropocene here are a very specific subset of humans, with a very specific model of civilization, informed and rationalized by very specific sets of beliefs. These are the Human Exceptionalist (Human Supremacist) ideologies assuming “man’s dominion over nature,” and White Supremacist ideologies claiming a “white man’s burden” and a “manifest destiny,” which putatively entitles white European colonizers to treat radically Othered beings and more-than-human natural entities and agents as mere “Things”—instruments and/or material—over which these white men have dominion; “Things” that are there for the taking; “Things” that exist for the sole purpose of extraction and exploitation. With the same radical ontological negation of non-extractive, non-instrumental or intrinsic value, these ideologies rationalize both ecocidal destruction of ecosystems and planetary life support systems, and also the genocidal denial of the humanity of non-white peoples, making possible and palatable (for perpetrators) institutions of industrial-scale chattel slavery, and slave-powered industrial scale monocrop plantations, and practices of casual and intentional indigenous genocide.

This colonizing “whiteness,” Kóvskaya argues, is constituted as a “residual category” based on a foundational invidious negation of these designated Others, and White Supremacism entails an assumption of concomitant entitlement to use the Othered even to death, depletion, and extinction. This radical Othering at the core of the social construction and cultural constitution of “whiteness” causally connects genocide with ecocide, and forms the ideational and cultural underpinnings for the specific human activities that set in motion exclusion, exploitation, eradication, extinction, and extraction at an industrial scale, driving the massive planetary-systems disruptions attendant to the “Anthropocene.”

Jim Barnett will share his rich knowledge of the history of the Theloel nation, later known as the Natchez Indians, in the context of how the colonial encounter destroyed their civilization, their political structures, and their intra-tribal relationships, ultimately leading to their enslavement and eradication as a nation and a people.

As we discuss how the first colonial encounters with the Spanish, French, and English unfolded, in the context of the Anthropocene discourse and the claims made in Maya Kóvskaya’s research, Jim Barnett will share his rich, well-researched knowledge about the local context and history of Natchez, its unruly natural systems, millennium plus of stable indigenous civilization, and subsequent, rapid, colonial decimation.

The changing nature of the colonial slave trade will also be a major focus of the conversation. We will look at how the colonizers destroyed the local economy, and how they used the slave trade to destroy intra-nation and intra-tribal relations and internal political structures, and how the introduction of enslaved people trafficked from Africa changed Natchez dramatically, once again. We will also look at relations between indigenous peoples and enslaved or escaped, trafficked Africans—some of whom expressed solidarity and even joined the failed resistance to colonial genocide.

We will continue by examining what happened following the demise of the Theloel (or Thecloel) nation—or Natchez Indians—with Barnett sharing his later research on the nascent United States’ relations with remaining Indigenous people in Mississippi region up through Andrew Jackson’s brutal policy of Indian Removal and the Trail of Tears.

Finally, we will return to a discussion of the agency of nature manifested in the Mississippi river itself, the role it has played shaping the histories of the region, flooding, climate change, and Barnett’s latest book on ill-fated human attempts to control it.