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

by Susan Sleeper-Smith

A center of the lucrative fur trade throughout the colonial period, the Great Lakes region was an important site of cultural as well as economic exchange between native and European peoples. In this well-researched study, Susan Sleeper-Smith focuses on an often overlooked aspect of these interactions—the role played by Indian women who married French traders.Drawing on a broad range of primary and secondary sources, she shows how these women used a variety of means to negotiate a middle ground between two disparate cultures. Many were converts to Catholicism who constructed elaborate mixed-blood kinship networks that paralleled those of native society, thus facilitating the integration of Indian and French values. By the mid-eighteenth century, native women had extended these kin linkages to fur trade communities throughout the Great Lakes, not only enhancing access to the region's highly prized pelts but also ensuring safe transport for other goods. Indian Women and French Men depicts the encounter of Old World and New as an extended process of indigenous adaptation and change rather than one of conflict and inevitable demise. By serving as brokers between those two worlds, Indian women who married French men helped connect the Great Lakes to a larger, expanding transatlantic economy while securing the survival of their own native culture. As such, Sleeper-Smith points out, their experiences illuminate those of other traditional cultures forced to adapt to market-motivated Europeans.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Native American, Grad School

256 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2001

About the author

Susan Sleeper-Smith is associate professor of history at Michigan State University and coeditor of New Faces of the Fur Trade: Selected Papers of the Seventh North American Fur Trade Conference.

Reviews

[Ronald J Schulz · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great book! We hear about the so-called five civilized tribes of the South and their Trail of Tears, but too little about the Native Americans of the Great Lakes and their Trail of Death during Jacksonian Indian Removal. The later were usually portrayed as primitive nomads, however careful research, especially in French and Catholic sources shows how prosperous they were, with extensive crops and orchards, when the Americans demanded their land. Another topic drowned in our jingoistic history is how some bands and individuals remained in their country, despite ongoing attempts to ship them west. At the same time slave catchers were hunting runaway slaves from the deep south, “Conductors” and State militias were combing the Midwest for Indians to tear away from hearth and home for the Great American Desert. One reason there is so little of a paper trail is they had to keep a low profile, hide in plain sight or back in less accessible marshes, even avoiding the 1840 and 1850 census, which I’ve already discovered to be the case with some of my ‘missing’ ancestors. Racism was rife, people tried to ‘pass’ into white society just as lighter skinned blacks did, hiding links to their origins, which makes their descendants root search difficult or impossible, even with DNA.

[Matthew Russell · Rating 5 out of 5]

Incredible historical monograph on the Great Lakes region in a period of time in which it is often ignored or glossed-over.

[Kent · Rating 4 out of 5]

A bit repetitive at times
Strongly argued and fascinating evidence

[Eric · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book takes a deep dive into the complex history of the Midwest, particularly the Great Lakes, and how pivotal these interactions between indigenous and colonial peoples were in the shaping of the political organization of the continent. For more information, check out this episode of the podcast "From the Archives" https://soundcloud.com/anthropologyar....

[Justin P · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a scholarly book meant for readers who are familiar with Native and American history. In a way, the monograph is an update and extension to Richard White's classic concept of the "middle ground". Readers who are aware of such concepts will find Sleeper-Smith's interpretation refreshing for it's unique take on the fur trade's effects on Great Lakes culture.

Historian Susan Sleeper-Smith challenges long-held narratives about the encounter between Native and European people in America from early European contact to Indian Removal Era. Sleeper-Smith argues that people who lived in the western Great Lakes during the early colonial era of American history crossed cultural boundaries in support of mutually beneficial lives, particularly via the fur trade.

Evidence analyzed in this book include: family and business sources, including imports; local archives, parish records, etc. Unique evidence are included, like watercolors painted in the early 1800s found in archives. Sleeper-Smith argues that the Indian Fur trade in America enabled some Native people to thrive and Indigenous culture to survive. This interpretation is at odds with the typical socio-economic theory that the fur trade crippled Native people into dependency and European assimilation.

Sleeper-Smith's book ends her analysis during the emerging Indian Removal Era when British and American approaches to Native people shifted from intercultural accommodation and mutually beneficial trade to settler colonialism and cultural assimilation. The book has an abrupt ending.

I would give the book 5/5 if Sleeper-Smith's ending had provided a general conclusion or resolution, but it was abrupt and unresolved.