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.
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