Reviewed by: Bonds of Alliance: Indigenous and Atlantic Slaveries in New France Jarett Henderson Rushforth, Brett – Bonds of Alliance: Indigenous and Atlantic Slaveries in New France. Chapel Hill, N.C: University of North Carolina Press, 2012. Pp. 406. This sharp and superb study begins with an indigenous woman weaving the fine fibers of dogbane, porcupine quills, and moose hair into an intricate Indian slave halter. Although few of these works of “fine art” and “human cruelty” have been preserved, Brett Rushforth reminds us that in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries such tools of enslavement were used in every quarter of North America (p. 3). But this halter and the bondage it symbolized were apart of a wider history. Across the Atlantic and far from the region known as the Pays d’en Haut, French manufacturers were mass-producing straight-bar shackles for the French Empire’s expansive and expanding Atlantic slave trade. Bonds of Alliance seeks to understand how Up Country, a territory sufficiently removed from French settlements along the St. Lawrence River, operated as the destination from where free Indians were legitimately captured, then traded by allied nations, and sold into slavery in French settlements throughout New France and the Caribbean. In Bonds of Alliance Brett Rushforth charts the “dynamic interplay” between indigenous and Atlantic slaveries by tracing the cultural, legal, and social practices in a particular corner of the French Empire: New France. Rushforth counters a historiographical tradition that has tended to characterize Canadian slavery as a failed version of French Caribbean slavery. In contrast, Rushforth contends that slavery in New France was “a thing of its own” (p. 300) locating its dynamism in the similarities and differences between indigenous and French understandings of enslavement; the various ways that free native peoples in the Pays d’en Haut used the slave trade to meet the challenges of colonialism; the central role that the slave trade played in maintaining and eroding French–Indian alliances; and how slaves themselves lived, loved, and labored across the colony. After nearly 400 pages of Rushforth’s elegant yet dense prose, New France emerges as a colonial society structured by slavery: it was a place where individuals like Pierre Chesne dit Labutte of Detroit or Pierre Gaultier de Varennes et de La Verendrye – whose “trail” is commemorated on highway signs in rural Manitoba – were able to ascend the colonial order of things through their involvement in the Indian slave trade. This book challenges us to seriously re-think slavery’s role, and the history of race, in French colonial projects in early Canada. Like many before him, Rushforth draws upon Jesuit dictionaries and published recollections, notarial registers and state correspondence, travelogues and archeological evidence – all impeccability acknowledged in impressive footnotes – illustrating that how we frame historical sources is as important as the sources we use to craft our histories. Rushforth’s focus on slavery enables him to revisit these documents to shed light on how French settlers, missionaries, traders, and colonial officials as well as allied and enemy, free and enslaved Indians used, understood, and experienced enslavement in New France. Chapter one examines the “general custom of the country” that located honour in the Ottawa, Iroquois, Fox, Cree, Sioux, and Illinois warriors’ practice of taking captives. Rushforth found that “Indians of the Pays d’en Haut expressed their relationship to slaves through metaphors of domestication and mastery, comparing captives to dogs and other domesticated animals” (p. 35). Jesuit priest Jacques Gravier recorded this social and cultural process as nitaïe – which he defined as “my domesticated animal, my dog, [End Page 454] my cat, also, my slave” (p. 37). In chapter two, Rushforth takes readers from indigenous North America to the trans-Atlantic world of French imperial slavery. By interrogating how French society understood slavery and justified its existence in their Christian nation, Rushforth argues that Nigritie functioned in the French geographic imagination as a space “uniquely suitable as the presumptive source of slaves” (p. 104). Chapter three explores French efforts like Jacques Raudot’s 1709 Ordinance that made Indian slaves in New France “like the Negros of the Islands” (p. 137). The second half of the book hones in on the various ways...
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Jul 1, 2023
P Le-Huy + 1
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