Taensa

The Taensa were a Natchez-speaking people of the lower Mississippi valley, descendants with the Natchez of the mound-building Plaquemine culture. They grew maize, beans, squash and tobacco in villages around ceremonial platform mounds. In the 1680s La Salle and Henri de Tonti found seven or eight villages of perhaps twelve hundred people around Lake St. Joseph, west of the Mississippi near the Yazoo mouth.

Pressure from the Chickasaw and Yazoo pushed them downriver, and in 1715 they resettled under French protection on the Tensaw River near Mobile. After France ceded its lands east of the Mississippi to Britain in 1763, they returned to Louisiana, a remnant of about a hundred.

They moved south to Grand Lake, where the last families merged with the Chitimacha and vanished as a separate people; their language remained in early French word lists.