Elizabeth Ellis

About Elizabeth's Work

Elizabeth Ellis is a historian investigating Indigenous politics and diplomacy in early North America. Her research sheds light on the different strategies Native nations used to maintain their livelihoods and wield influence among European settlers. Ellis’s portrait of alternative conceptions of nationhood among small Indigenous tribes offers a corrective to colonial histories that emphasize war and subjugation of Native Americans.

Most historical scholarship on Native Americans focuses on Indigenous polities consolidating into large confederations (such as the Haudenosaunee [Iroquois], Muscogee [Creek], and Oceti Sakowin [Sioux]) and their resistance to the Indigenous slave trade and European settlement via armed conflict. In her book The Great Power of Small Nations: Indigenous Diplomacy in the Gulf South (2022), Ellis chronicles how small Indigenous nations of the Lower Mississippi Valley (present-day Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama) adapted longstanding practices of refugee asylum, multinational settlements, and flexible alliances in their interactions with early European settlers. Biloxi, Capinan, and Pointe-au-Chien Peoples, for example, routinely welcomed migrants or refugees to their communities; and if environmental and social pressures shifted, small nations built (or separated from) temporary alliances with other nations. Ellis shows that through these reciprocal migration and settlement practices, the small nations cultivated political, economic, and social relationships with French and British settlers. In this way, they were often able to limit the political power of settlers and exert some control over European settlement patterns through most of the eighteenth century. Even after U.S. government oversight increased in the late eighteenth century, many of them were able to avoid forced removal from the region by migrating to places of safety and building multinational settlements. Although the more flexible relationships among small nations helped them survive, they have complicated many of the nations’ efforts to gain federal recognition. The system for federal recognition largely rests on proof of historical relationships between a nation and the U.S. government via treaties. Ellis’s work refutes the belief that the absence of legal ties with the federal government is proof these nations disappeared long ago. Her work provides important historical evidence for their ongoing efforts to gain federal recognition.

Ellis is also involved in community-engaged projects focused on Indigenous histories prior to Europeans’ arrival. Through the Reclaiming Stories project, Ellis is working with the Peoria and Miami nations and museums to study deer hide paintings that recount historical events and Indigenous knowledge from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This research will inform her current project, a long history of iconography and communication in the early Indigenous Midwest and South. By establishing connections between the colonial past and present-day Indigenous communities, Ellis provides new frameworks for understanding the sovereignty of Indigenous nations.