Wild Frenchmen and Frenchified Indians: Material Culture and Race in Colonial Louisiana, by Sophie White

Abstract

Wild Frenchmen and Frenchified Indians: Material Culture and Race Colonial Louisiana, by Sophie White. Early American Studies Series. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012. x. 325pp. $45.00 US (cloth). In the North American empire of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, colonial officials hoped to Frenchify Native Americans, and convert them to ways of living. At the same time, they worried that Frenchmen might lose their own civilized identity, particularly on the margins of empire where colonists lived among more numerous Native American peoples and alongside African slaves. One such margin of empire was Illinois Country where, throughout the eighteenth century, Natives Americans, Africans, and people interacted and converted, forming close relations and living integrated lives. Clothing and material culture were important components of these interactions and conversions. Amid disagreements among administrators and colonists over the meanings of differences, and against the backdrop of emerging notions of racial identity, people Illinois and Louisiana used material culture--particularly dress--to claim, assert, change, and maintain identities. This is an impressively original book, with fascinating insights throughout. Deeply researched, the book makes creative use of numerous difficult sources, particularly notarial archives, the Louisiana Superior Council Records, and extensive administrative documents. Sophie White combs these mostly textual sources for the material stuff of the past. In so doing, she recreates the look and feel of Illinois Country and colonial Louisiana, revealing how important the visual symbols of dress, the built environment, geography, and the physical body were to the way that people experienced their world, and expressed their identities. White shows that the colonial dream of Frenchification was largely achieved the villages of Illinois as numerous Native American women married fur traders and farmers the frontier villages. The first three chapters reveal how these wives embraced a world, living houses, wearing clothing, and living in the manner. While Chapter Two explains the indigenous traditions through which this conversion may have been experienced, White concludes that Native American women mostly inhabited, and were accepted into, a world. The most important way they embraced identity was their sartorial performance--the way that they dressed (p. 31). Going against accepted understandings of intermarriages between Native American women and Frenchmen, White demonstrates that the women thoroughly adopted a French identity Illinois Country villages. In the second part of the book, White examines cultural cross-dressing Lower Louisiana, where identity was not so flexible. Marie Turpin, a daughter bom to a mixed-race couple Kaskaskia, was accepted as a nun among the Ursulines 1751. …