Reconstructing the History of Native American Items from French Colonial Louisiana in French Collections (18th to 21st centuries)

The Musée du quai Branly-Jacques Chirac holds an important collection of Native American artifacts from the 18th-century colonization of the Mississippi Valley whose provenance is poorly documented. This article revisits a corpus attributable to the Lower Mississippi region, particularly to the Choctaw culture, identified through research combining historical sources, inventories established at the time of the French Revolution, and traditional knowledge. Our research focuses in particular on the cabinet of curiosities collected by Antoine-Denis Raudot (1679–1737), the co-intendant of New France from 1705 to 1710. It was later acquired by the Prince of Condé and transferred to the Château de Chantilly where it was seized during the Revolution. Our study makes no claim to being exhaustive, but rather proposes a collaborative and evolving approach which aims at restituting the voices of objects from colonial Louisiana.