Biloxi people

Together they were federally recognized in 1981; today they are called the Tunica-Biloxi Indian Tribe and share a small reservation in Avoyelles Parish, Louisiana.

D'Iberville was told that the Biloxi nation was formerly quite numerous, but that their people were severely decimated by an epidemic of smallpox, which left an entire village abandoned and in ruins.

The village contained remnants of cabins made of mud, with roofs covered in tree bark (in Dorsey & Swanton 1912: 6).

Although historically of Siouan-language origin, ancestors of the Biloxi shared similar cultural features with other peoples in the Southeast, what anthropologists call the Southeastern Ceremonial Complex (SECC).

The American ethnologist James Owen Dorsey, a specialist in Siouan peoples, visited the Biloxi in Louisiana in 1892 and 1893.

According to the data he compiled, which was published in the 1912 dictionary, in traditional Biloxi culture prior to the arrival of Europeans, men wore breechcloth or breechclout, usually made of deerskin which was "passed between the legs and tucked up under a belt before and behind, with considerable to spare at either end" (Swanton 1985: 681).

The lower portions of leggings were tucked under the rims of moccasins and the upper ends were usually fastened to the belt by means of straps (ibid.

The Biloxi made tools and utensils from bison and deer horn, and wore ornaments of cut and polished seashells.

Although much of tribal structure had disappeared by the time ethnologist James Owen Dorsey visited them in Louisiana in 1892 and 1893, they still traced descent in the maternal line, in a matrilineal kinship system.

Dorsey described their elaborate social system, with more than 53 terms for kinship relations and a dozen which had been forgotten, more than any other Siouan people he had visited and studied.