Taensa Erotic

The Taensa were a people of the lower Mississippi Valley who lived in seven or eight villages on the west bank of the river, around the oxbow now called Lake St. Joseph in Tensas Parish, Louisiana, and who ceased to exist as a distinct nation by the middle of the nineteenth century, their survivors absorbed into neighboring peoples farther south. When La Salle's party came down the river in 1682 they found something that had already vanished nearly everywhere else: a working Mississippian chiefdom, still running. A hereditary ruler whose lineage was identified with the sun held real authority over commoners and lesser chiefs. A mud-walled temple stood on a mound at the head of the plaza, roofed with carved wooden birds, watched over by the skulls of enemies set on posts, and kept alive by a fire that priests were charged with never letting go out. Retainers were expected to follow a dead ruler into the grave. Ordinary houses were square, plastered in mud, domed with cane thatch. The Taensa spoke a tongue close enough to Natchez that the two peoples understood each other, and that small family, Natchez with Taensa and Avoyel, has no demonstrated relatives among the Tunica, Chitimacha and Muskogean languages that surrounded it.

In 1700 lightning struck the temple and burned it. The French priest Paul du Ru, on the spot, recorded that mothers threw infants into the flames to quiet the offended spirit before he and others intervened, an account that says as much about the crisis the town was in as about its religion. Slave raiding finished what epidemics had started. Around 1706, pressed by Yazoo and Chickasaw war parties armed by English traders out of Carolina, the Taensa left the homeland for the Houma on Bayou Manchac, then turned on their hosts and took the town. From there they moved to Mobile Bay, where the Tensaw River still carries their name, then back to Louisiana, to the Red River and Bayou Boeuf, selling off the last of their land early in the nineteenth century and thinning out of the record within two generations. What remains is a scatter of place names and a cautionary tale for linguists: in the 1880s a French seminarian published a full grammar and a body of songs in what he claimed was Taensa, and European scholars took it seriously for years before Daniel Brinton and later John Swanton showed he had invented the whole thing. The actual language survives in a short list of words the French happened to write down.