Tales of Esnesv : Indigenous Oral Traditions about Trader‐Diplomats in Ancient Southeastern North America

Material assemblages excavated from sites across eastern North America indicate the existence of ancient exchange networks that once spanned from the Gulf Coast to the Great Lakes and from the Atlantic to the Ozarks. Yet identifying specific mechanisms of trade is more difficult. This article investigates oral traditions about esnesv —persons who acted as travelers, traders, diplomats, and acolytes—told in a Native American community in the US South whose members identify as of Muskogee (Creek) ancestry. Esnesv traveled great distances, enjoyed impunity in enemy territories, facilitated exchanges of knowledge and materials with important celestial qualities, and mediated peacemaking between peoples. Esnesv stories provide Indigenous perspectives on ancient exchange and diplomacy practices as a historically particular and archaeologically viable alternative to elite‐controlled trade models. These stories describe trade goods that are simultaneously of earth and sky, furthering archaeological understandings of landscape and cosmology by rethinking difference, distance, and materiality. Esnesv threaded earthly fragments of the sky and Milky Way through peoples’ relationships with foreign others, making exchange and peace within a world of roads connecting diverse, place‐based lifeways. In doing so, they rebalanced the world, facilitating circulations of mobile landscapes and cosmic substances that generated new connectivities and ways of being. [ oral traditions, exchange, decolonizing methodologies, Native American and Indigenous peoples, North America ]