Natchez people

Common card · No. 260198

The Natchez ( NATCH-iz, Natchez pronunciation: [naːʃt͡seh]) were a Native American people who originally lived in the Natchez Bluffs area in the Lower Mississippi Valley, near the present-day city of Natchez, Mississippi, in the United States. The DeSoto chronicle failed to record their presence when they came down the river in 1543. They spoke a language with no known relatives, although it may be distantly related to the Muskogean languages of the Creek Confederacy. The somewhat unreliable archivist Pierre Margry recorded the identity the Natchez applied to themselves as "the Theloel". An early American geographer noted in his 1797 gazetteer that they were also known as the "Sun Set Indians". The Natchez are noted for being the only Mississippian culture with complex chiefdom characteristics to have survived long into the period of European colonization. Other Mississippian societies in the Southeast had generally experienced important transformations shortly after contact with the Spanish...

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