What is the art of alliance? The collaborative Collections royales d’amérique du nord (CRoyAN) project, launched in 2019, mobilizes this question to frame its third exhibition of newly researched and restored Native American works from the Musée du quai Branly – Jacques Chirac at the Château de Versailles.[1] Entitled 1725. Native American Allies at the Court of Louis XV (1725. Des alliés amérindiens à la cour de Louis XV), the exhibition makes a visual case for an eighteenth-century Franco-Indigenous alliance forged through mutual economic and performative diplomatic exchanges across two political theaters on either side of the Atlantic: in the Mississippi Basin, where Indigenous support was indispensable for French settler survival, and at Versailles in 1725, where Louis XV received with great pomp a delegation of Otoe, Osage, Missouria, and Illinois chiefs from this region, known by the French as “Louisiana.”[2]
In this exhibition, on view at Versailles from November 25, 2025, to May 3, 2026, French maps, gold coins bearing the royal image, and a cavalcade of Indigenous-inspired weaponry, visual media, and theatrical works jostle alongside Indigenous headdresses, wampum belts, painted hides, and calumet or “peace pipes” (Fig. 1). Through such juxtapositions, the exhibition pursues a comparative restaging of both cultures’ protocols of diplomacy, foregrounding objects used to ceremonially formalize alliance or reap its material benefits. Shaped by the perspective of “New Indian History” that emerged at the end of the twentieth century, the wall text announces its mission to deliberately restore Native Americans as active participants in the colonial history of the Mississippi River Valley.[3] Indigenous objects are thus read as evidence of entrenched and unextinguished Indigenous sovereignty, which, according to CRoyAN collaborators Elizabeth Ellis (Princeton, Peoria Tribe of Indians of Oklahoma), Jonas Musco (l’EHESS), and Ryan Spring (Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma), was expressed in the power to welcome, regulate, or refuse outsiders such as the French on their lands, and in alliance-driven sharing of natural resources through sustainable land stewardship.[4]
Given the exhibition’s professed emphasis on Indigenous sovereignty, its staging at Versailles invites scrutiny. The palace epitomizes a wholly antithetical type of governance to the Indigenous one in the Mississippi Basin. It was, indeed, the site of a Native American diplomatic mission, a fascinating moment that attests to robust Indigenous autonomy amidst escalating colonial pressures. Yet the exhibition’s concluding wall text undermines this narrative, as we learn that Louis XV ultimately denied the visiting chiefs’ singular request of military support to defend their lands from rival Nations. The Indigenous alliance so essential to French survival in North America was clearly jettisoned once decisions returned to the metropole, where the logic of absolutist rule foreclosed meaningful reciprocity. This deflates the sense of appreciation for the French artistic and theatrical productions inspired by this encounter once one realizes that they do not reflect an honored intercultural alliance. Instead, these works refract the image of the Company of the Indies, which orchestrated the Versailles visit of the Native American delegation, relying on living, breathing spectacle to rehabilitate the Louisiana colony in the wake of the Mississippi Bubble.
The exhibition’s location in Versailles is also likely responsible for its white-glove treatment of the French colonial presence in the Mississippi Basin that makes belief in the authenticity of the intercultural alliance possible. Visitors are led to think that this French presence was no more than a smattering of struggling, self-contained settlements, with Indigenous alliance their only option for survival. In reality, the Louisiana project was meant to be a territorial continuation of the one initiated in Canada, both of which aimed to extend French control over the greatest possible extent of North America but lacked the financial and military investment from the crown to do so. The French investment in the Louisiana colony initially unfolded through the replication of the Saint-Domingue plantation system in Louisiana, including the importation of enslaved Africans from Caribbean estates and the reciprocal export of captured Natchez people to Saint-Domingue throughout the 1720s and 30s. Despite CRoyAN’s mission statement that their project’s “success is based on the complementarity of the points of view adopted,” the perspective of the Natchez, who were entirely displaced by the French and allied Indigenous groups by the end of the 1730s, is disturbingly absent from the exhibition.[5]
The French objects on display speak plainly of the underlying colonial ambition. The fundamental inevitability of colonial territorial expansion is blatantly visualized from the moment the visitor enters the exhibition, wherein one is confronted by large-scale hand-drawn and printed maps of North America charted by French cartographers under the employ of Louis XIV. Why commence an exhibition that attempts to visualize what already seems a tenuous interracial alliance with objects that, in the words of John Brian Harley, functioned as “handmaidens to imperialism” in their enablement of bureaucratic administration abroad and the global mobility of settlers, armies, and commodities?[6] To read these maps’ cadastral outlining of various Indigenous-governed land tracts as representations of the settlers’ respect for their sovereignty would be a wishful interpretation; a more portentous one derives from taking heed of the largest words present in Guillaume Delisle’s map—LA LOUISIANE (“Land of Louis”)—that are emblazoned across the eastern half of North America irrespective of any interim delineations of Indigenous territory.
The exhibition is beset by many such imbalances between the curatorial narrative that seeks to reframe colonial history and the stories told by the objects themselves. This tension is particularly felt regarding the displayed works’ representation of the racial other. The wall text conveys the great variety of Indigenous Nations occupying the Mississippi Basin and how Versailles courtiers would have experienced this diversity with the 1725 visit, and yet the corresponding courtly depiction of these peoples is disappointingly generic. The renderings of Native figures that appear in the maps’ decorative vignettes, Pierre Ladoyreau’s gilded bronze sculpture created for the Versailles gardens, and Charles Le Brun’s cartoon for the palace’s Ambassadors Staircase completely eschew inter-National specificity of Indigenous dress and adornment. These works instead maintain the iconography of a bare-chested figure standing in a stoic, hand-on-hip contrapposto sporting a feathered headdress and skirt, which had been allegorizing the American corner of the world in European visual culture since the 1500s (Fig. 2). On the other side of this alliance, it should be noted that none of the Indigenous objects on view bear any discernable depiction of French figures, nor do they demonstrate a French stylistic influence. Rifles, poised in the arms of Quapaw warriors painted upon an animal skin, are the only sign that the French colonial world has entered the Indigenous visual field (Fig. 3). Taken together, these objects’ hackneyed representation of Native Americans, or lack thereof, suggests an absence of eighteenth-century intercultural sensitivity and symbiotic aesthetic exchange that a more authentic and equitable alliance might have fostered.
The flattened colonial image of Indigeneity is in many ways accentuated by the curatorial team’s limited capacity to provide historical and provenance information about the Indigenous objects themselves beyond their object type or putative cultural origin. Each object is dated to the eighteenth century, yet accession numbers indicate their entry into the Musée du quai Branly only in the late 1870s, with some as late as the 1930s (Fig. 4).[7] On what basis, then, is this dating established? More pressingly, are the headdresses on display those laid at the feet of Louis XV by members of the 1725 delegation? Were they traded along the Mississippi? Or were they simply seized? To what extent do such attributions rely on the often incomplete, or economically motivated, records of private collectors, and with what ethical stakes? These are precisely the questions that the exhibition and its catalog needed to confront to align Versailles with even the most basic postcolonial standards of contemporary world cultures museums. And yet doing so would have further exposed the lopsided, extractive reality of the French-Indigenous American relations that leave the latter cultures’ objects suspended in a present-day colonial matrix of informational lacunae, lost origins, and foreign institutional estrangement.
If there is a single positive offset of staging this exhibition at Versailles, it is that it undeniably affords the Indigenous American works a level of public visibility they were unlikely to have received at their home institutions. In 2025, more than eight million visitors passed through the palace halls expecting to see the pinnacle of European monarchic power manifested in gilded and marbled opulence of incomparable scale. Many visitors to the exhibition were likely struck by the presence of artworks so radically distinct from those dominating Versailles in their materiality, ornamental vocabularies, and modes of figuration. For those tourists visiting from countries other than the United States, this may have even been their first exposure to the Indigenous American perspectives and material culture, and the exhibition invites all to reckon with the historical fact that such objects were integral to the accumulation of wealth and power that Versailles represents. These are objects that enacted ceremonies of intercultural diplomacy without which the French colonial project in Louisiana would have failed immediately.
But that, of course, would have been the ideal historical scenario, and the exhibition needed to communicate this far more explicitly through an unequivocal condemnation of France’s colonial violence that has lasted half a millennium. Instead, the decision to film a statement by contemporary Indigenous community members that endorses a current Franco—Indigenous alliance—footage that plays on loop in a tucked away, easily missed room—comes off as a strained gesture of permission-seeking, vacuous in its failure to offer either financial reparation nor material repatriation of the very objects whose presence summons such gestures.
In this respect, the Versailles exhibition underscores the continued need to be far more considerate of the historical moments, sites, and object juxtapositions we employ to frame the contemporary reception of Native American works and history. Without such care, the result is not a productive return to 1725 but a regression to the 1990s, when a wave of blockbuster films (Dances with Wolves, Last of the Mohicans, Pocahontas) propounded a revisionist historical narrative in which Native Americans were indeed shown as unjustly under attack by European settlers. These films, though, recast colonial violence as a tragic misunderstanding, one that could be solved peacefully though the white male intermediary’s immersion into Indigenous society. They sought to demonstrate Indigenous and European value systems to be commensurable and culminated in a reconciliatory vision of intercultural alliance at the story’s end. By the end of the 1990s, this narrative had worn thin, and twenty-five years of rigorous postcolonial critique later, it is hard to imagine that anyone was yearning to see Versailles nostalgically assume the role of heroic intermediary in a landscape marked by one of history’s largest genocides.[8] The work of le projet CRoyAN grows in value, but when it comes to translating that research into public display, a little less royalist self-aggrandizement and a little more institutional self-scrutiny would have been preferred.
Sophia Bevacqua is a PhD candidate in art history at New York University
[1] Information about The Royal Collections from North America can be found at their website: https://croyan.quaibranly.fr/en/. The first two exhibitions were “An Inquisitive Prince: The Destiny of the Count of Artois’ Cabinet of Curiosities” held at the Versailles Library in 2021, and “Wampum / Otgoä” held at the Musée du quai Branly – Jacques Chirac, the McCord Stewart Museum in Montreal, and the Seneca Art and Culture Center in New York in 2023.
[2] The exhibition’s French title employs the term “amérindien,” which is common in Francophone scholarship but now largely outdated in English-language discourse. This review instead uses “Indigenous American” and “Native American,” in keeping with contemporary usage in Native studies and early American history.
[3] Foundational texts of New Indian History include Daniel H. Usner’s Indians, Settlers, and Slaves in a Frontier Exchange Economy: The Lower Mississippi Valley Before 1783 (The University of North Carolina Press, 1992), and Richard White’s The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815 (Cambridge University Press, 1991). See also Nicolas G. Rosenthal, “Beyond the New Indian History: Recent Trends in the Historiography on the Native Peoples of North America,” History Compass 4, no. 5 (2006): 962–74, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1478-0542.2006.00340.x (all weblinks accessed April 27, 2026).
[4] Jonas Musco, Elizabeth Ellis, and Ryan Spring, “Sovereignty, Nations, and Diplomacy: The French and Native American Alliances in Louisiana,” Gradhiva 40 (2025), https://journals.openedition.org/gradhiva/9785?lang=en.
[5] For more on the displacement, dispossession, and European enslavement of the Natchez people and their struggle against these forces, see Noel E. Smyth, “The Obfuscation of Native American Presence in the French Atlantic: Natchez Indians in Saint Domingue, 1731-1791,” Ethnohistory 69, no. 3 (2022): 265-85; George Edward Milne, Natchez Country: Indians, Colonists, and the Landscapes of Race in French Louisiana (University of Georgia Press, 2015); and James F. Barnett, The Natchez Indians: A History to 1735 (University Press of Mississippi, 2007).
[6] John Brian Harley, “Power and Legitimation in the English Geographical Atlases of the Eighteenth Century,” in Images of the World: The Atlas through History, ed. John A. Wolter and Ronald E. Grim (McGraw-Hill, 1996), 182.
[7] The painted Quapaw hide (Fig. 4) is the only exhibited object with a far more specified date of circa 1740. In the exhibition catalog, archival support is provided for only one Indigenous object, this being the wampum belt gifted to Louis XV by Chief Mamantouensa of Kaskaskia, a nation within the Illinois Confederacy (cat. 65).
[8] Jeffrey Ostler, Surviving Genocide: Native Nations and the United States from the American Revolution to Bleeding Kansas (Yale University Press, 2019).
Cite this note as: Sophia Bevacqua, “1725. Native American Allies at the Court of Louis XV: An Exhibition Review” Journal18 (April 2026), https://www.journal18.org/8278.
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