Indian Women and French Men: Rethinking Cultural Encounter in the Western Great Lakes

Abstract

Indian Women and French Men: Rethinking Cultural Encounter in Western Great Lakes. By Susan Sleeper-Smith. (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001. Pp. xv, 234. Illustrations. Cloth, $45.00.)Indian Women and French Men: Rethinking Cultural Encounter in Western Great Lakes builds on pioneering work of Sylvia Van Kirk, Jennifer S. H. Brown, and Jacqueline Peterson to explore agency of women in Indian-French kinship networks that eventually controlled a large share of southern Great Lakes fur trade. Susan Sleeper-Smith's focus is on role of these networks in enabling Indian persistence in face of American encroachment and removal policies. Indeed her goal is as much to counter the facile stereotype of uniformity of Indian demise (117) that she sees distorting American midwestern history as it is to explore intermarriage per se.Sleeper-Smith argues that indigenous women used their intermediary role between French traders and their own relatives to increase their own authority and that of their households. Not only did they have privileged access to trade goods, but they also sold agricultural produce to traders and made other products for trade. Their households were matrifocal; fur trader usually joined his wife's household and complied with indigenous behavioral standards. Making excellent use of local fur trade receipts, parish records, and other documents in local archives, Sleeper-Smith reconstructs lives of a number of these women, some of them remarkable for their independence, ingenuity, and business sense.As progeny of intermarriage moved to new communities, familial trading networks extended over much of southern Great Lakes territory, and kinship obligations, including those created fictively through naming of godparents, controlled access into trade. In fact, Sleeper-Smith argues, women, kinship, and shaped dynamics of exchange process in southern Great Lakes region from French period to mid-nineteenth century. Extending Richard White's concept of middle to include women and Christianity, Sleeper-Smith documents role of indigenous women as cultural intermediaries between Europeans and Native peoples.Sleeper-Smith follows Carol Devens and Nancy Shoemaker in a gendered analysis of Native Christianity but describes a pattern of women's empowerment in contrast to worsening status described by Devens in her 1992 study, Countering Colonization. Native women converts created a frontier Catholicism sympathetic to indigenous beliefs and took on roles, such as leading prayers, that were more typically played by Native or French men (5). Among Ilini women like Marie Rouensa, offered an alternative to abusive, polygamous marriages. Often a means of accommodation rather than transformation, also aided persistence: some French-Indian communities were allowed to stay in region because Chicago Treaty of 1832-1833 exempted Catholics from removal.Sleeper-Smith's nuanced depiction of various forms of resistance in face of American encroachment is one of highlights of book. Her thesis is that American intrusion in nineteenth century, so often portrayed as resulting in inevitable indigenous demise, was but another stage in a continuous process of encounter with strangers that triggered indigenous adaptation and change. Interracial unions were a key element in that process.The longevity of fur trade also assisted Indian persistence, and Sleeper-Smith breaks new ground in demonstrating that fur trade was viable in region until late nineteenth century, with local black raccoon replacing extirpated beaver as chief species of peltry. …