Wild Frenchmen and Frenchified Indians: material culture and race in colonial Louisiana

Abstract

Wild Frenchmen and Frenchified Indians: Material Culture and Race in Colonial Louisiana. By Sophie White. Early American Studies. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012. Pp. [x], 329. $45.00, ISBN 978-08122-4437-3.) The historiography of French colonial America has tended to divide the Louisiana Territory into two distinct regions: Upper Louisiana, consisting of the Illinois Country and beyond, and Lower Louisiana, focusing primarily on New Orleans. Sophie White's study not only brings together the whole of colonial Louisiana but also places it in a larger geographical context--at the intersection of New France and the Caribbean (p. 15). French colonial Louisiana was, according to White, caught between two competing models of ethnicity; one, represented by the fur trading societies to the north, held ethnicity to be mutable, while the other, represented by the slave societies of the French Caribbean, held it to be fixed (p. 19). Within this framework, White argues, the interactions of French and Indian cultures in the Louisianas, especially in the form of intermarriage, had broad implications outside the region for how the French understood race and ethnicity. Moreover, she adds, the material artifacts of Illinois wives of French men and their mixed-race children did more than reflect understandings of difference: they helped to produce them (p. 20). Wild Frenchmen and Frenchified Indians: Material Culture and Race in Colonial Louisiana is divided into two parts. The three chapters in Part 1 demonstrate how conversion, intermarriage, and material culture in the Illinois Country shaped the discussion among French colonial authorities about whether race was mutable. Chapters 1 and 2 show, first, the unusual degree to which Illinois women and their children became frenchified and, then, that such frenchification was consistent with the gendered Illinois custom of adopting the culture of a trading partner. The third chapter addresses the importance of successful Frenchification in allaying fears that intermarriage could lead to Frenchmen becoming wild (pp. 18, 6). Part 2, which consists of three more chapters and an epilogue, expands the geographical scope of the study to include the lower Mississippi River Valley. It shows how people of mixed French and Indian descent engaged in [cjultural cross-dressing to negotiate the different racial systems of Upper and Lower Louisiana, thereby contributing to lingering beliefs in Lower Louisiana that racial identity was mutable (p. …