George Edward Milne's Natchez Country: Indians, Colonists, and the Landscape of Race in French Louisiana tells a fascinating story of colonial encounters, cultural exchanges, and frontier violence. Milne's book argues that the first clear instance of a Native community using the discourse of race was during the Franco-Natchez War. Beginning their attack in late 1729, the Natchez deployed ideas about racial difference between themselves, the French, and African slaves. Milne contends that the Natchez appropriated this discourse from the French colonists living in Louisiana. Reading between and through the lines of colonial sources and early French histories of Louisiana, Milne finds the voices of Natchez Natives who believed themselves to be “Red Men.” This particular understanding of race used by the Natchez in Milne's narrative was based on phenotype and had social and political effects. Seeing the success of the Code Noir (slave laws) and its legal organization of French Louisiana, the Natchez utilized ideas of racial difference and the term “red men” as “a portable source of power when their immobile sources of identity were about to be stolen” (11).

These “immobile sources of identity” prompted Milne to utilize spatial analysis. The early Louisiana frontier was a space of encounter and a complicated colonial scene. Using GIS software and pulling from Michel Foucault's ideas about space and power (“heterotopias”), Milne describes how “both natives and newcomers inscribed their power upon and drew authority from the land” (13). As more French settlers moved into Natchez Country, the Natchez lost their control over the land and the French newcomers. Social, economic, territorial, and religious disputes could become violent and did so often in this tense and volatile frontier. Pulling from spatial analysis and historical thick description, Milne both reconstructs and interprets the timeline leading up to and during the Franco-Natchez War.

Though Christianity is not the main character in Natchez Country, Milne's writing provides a good example of a historian who recognizes how religion is an important element in any story of American history. The role religion plays in this story and analysis is set up and introduced in the first chapter when Milne describes the two cultures that met in Louisiana. Religion was part of the complex, cultural web that surrounded the interchanges between the French and the Natchez. For the French, Catholicism provided “a set of shared experiences and an intelligible cosmology” to settlers of all social classes (29). The Natchez, or the People of the Sun, derived sacred power from the seen and unseen forces permeating their temple mounds. Historian Richard White's ideas about the “middle ground” are central throughout these depictions of Natchez and French culture. Both sides viewed the other's culture through the lens of their own, which meant that each frequently misinterpreted the others' actions, social system, and understanding of diplomacy. Early on the Natchez saw this smaller, weaker community of French settlers as they saw other small bands of Natives: a lesser social polity to incorporate into their chiefdom. However, once the French settlers became more numerous and powerful, this tipped the balance in the other direction and destabilized Natchez Country, which seemed more and more like French Country. Colonial competition plays out in chapters 2 and 3 between French and Native, French and French, and Native and Native. Though the violence remains limited (the so-called “First Natchez War” and “Second Natchez War” possess small casualty counts), the tension heightened and relations were strained. Chapter 4 sees “a modicum of tranquility” and attempts at better diplomacy between French and Natchez, and an almost wedding occurs between powerful people on both sides (120). While ideas about religion prompted the Natchez to see this wedding as beneficial, French assumptions about Native heathenism kept it from taking place.

It is not until chapter 5 that the reader encounters significant fatalities and the Natchez deployment of racial discourse. French concerns regarding slaves and maroon communities intersected with their ambivalent opinions on unions between Native women and French men. It became increasingly clear to the Natchez that the French viewed each racial group as distinctive and created a racial hierarchy that assumed French superiority. Recognizing the power that racial discourse had provided the French, “the People of the Sun began to fashion a ‘red' identity” in order to “unify their disputatious villages” (163). Milne also provides evidence that this new red identity was not brand new to 1729. In his writings historian and ethnographer Le Page de Pratz recounted a 1725 conversation with a friend and Natchez temple guardian in which the friend described an ancient flood that killed many Native Americans, with the exception of a small group atop a mountain. The ancestors of the “red men” were the flood's survivors. Additionally, Milne describes how some other southeastern Native tribes identified themselves as “red” in various contexts. What makes the Natchez unique was that “they were the first to use it [redness] in front of European observers” (214). After the Franco-Natchez War concluded with a French victory, those Natchez who were not captured continued to use their “redness” as a distinctive identity marker. While Gregory Dowd's A Spirited Resistance: The North American Indian Struggle for Unity, 1745–1815 (1993) described how the Delaware, Shawnee, Cherokee, and Creek used this type of racial language in later decades, Gregory Smoak's Ghost Dances and Identity: Prophetic Religion and American Indian Ethnogenesis in the Nineteenth Century (2008) examined racial discourse among Natives out West, and David Silverman's Red Brethren: The Brothertown and Stockbridge Indians and the Problem of Race in Early America (2010) showed how New England Natives used race to unite themselves, Milne brings our attention to the first recorded instance of Native use of racial discourse.