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‪The aim of this article is to show Native Americans’ relationships to birds in the Mississippi Valley, during the 18th century. While the data on this subject are fragmentary and appear anecdotal in the vast corpus of French colonial sources, the aim is to put these data in order by linking their reading to the work of Americanist ethnographers and to a historical anthropology inspired by structuralist theory. This approach makes possible to identify a relational configuration widely shared by the societies inhabiting this region: Native Americans conferred on certain birds a distinctive agency and, more precisely, a remarkable capacity to influence the human world. Because this influence could be harmful or beneficial, Native Americans tried to control the risks or to take advantage of this influence by adopting a deferential attitude towards these birds and by following specific precautions when interacting with them particularly in ritual contexts. After examining the foundations of this basic relational configuration, the article explores the way in which it takes three different forms: the search for protection from “guardian-spirit” birds; the prescriptions and prohibition surrounding the death of certain birds ; and the role of birds and avian attributes in several adoption rituals. The article thus invites us to consider the ambivalence of the relationships with other-than-human “persons” in North America, and their place in Native American social stratification.‪