Reviewed by Daniel Usner | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 61.4

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Reviewed by Daniel Usner | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 61.4 | The History Cooperative

Reviews of Books

Indian Women and French Men: Rethinking Cultural Encounter in the Western Great Lakes. By Susan Sleeper-Smith . Native Americans of the Northeast: Culture, History, and the Contemporary. (Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 2001. Pp. xviii, 234. $45.00 cloth; $ 18.95 paper.) Reviewed by Daniel Usner , Vanderbilt University
Attention to the agency of Indian people and emphasis on their resistance to colonialism have become standard features of American Indian history. Enthusiastically welcomed and applauded over the last couple of decades, this "new Indian history" now confronts the inevitable reaction from young and old scholars alike who are demanding greater balance. Indian initiatives and responses were not always effective, and colonial objectives and plans were often inexorable. Indian Women and French Men is an invaluable and inspirational contribution to this constructive conversation. Susan Sleeper-Smith writes with a blend of nuance and passion, never losing sight of the Indian people's goals and actions. But she also demonstrates how to integrate social history of indigenous adaptation and change with cultural analysis of imperial policy and representation.	1
"While encounter changed indigenous communities," Sleeper-Smith declares, "it also encouraged the evolution of strategic behaviors that ensured cultural continuity" (p. 2). These behaviors are carefully traced over a long span of time in Indian Women and French Men, as the author examines the western Great Lakes from the beginnings of the fur trade to the end of the removal era. She focuses on the role of women in developing "a well-established repertoire of responses" to European incursions (p. 3). Kinship and Catholicism were creatively joined to shape exchange and secure community, the fur trade was sustained well into the nineteenth century, and Indian communities adapted their own agricultural and migratory traditions to changing circumstances. Showing how Potawatomis and Miamis endured by employing this array of strategies, Sleeper-Smith along the way challenges Richard White's argument that the middle ground disintegrated once the United States imposed its rule over the Great Lakes and Indian diplomatic power waned. "Nineteenth-century U.S. people were, for Indians, another stage in a continuous process of encounter with foreigners," she argues, and "Indian people were still far from powerless" (p. 3).	2
Indian women facilitated traders' entering kinship networks through marriage, and used both the fur trade and Christianity to expand their role in their own society even more. They served as essential intermediaries between French colonialism and native life, created a female sphere of interaction and influence in the Catholic faith, and applied their agricultural production to provisioning the fur trade network—all without conforming to Europeans' sexual division of labor. Through the life of Marie Madeleine Réaume L'archevêque Chevalier, Sleeper-Smith shows how "the fur trade created an arena of cultural experimentation for Native people, rather than precipitating their demise" (p. 45). The daughter of an Ilini woman and a Fort St. Joseph interpreter, Marie Madeleine engaged in all of the day-to-day and ceremonial activities that forged kinship relationships independent of any hierarchy desired by French authorities. Godparenting and marriage connected families and communities into a Métis network. When the western Great Lakes fell under British governance, French-Indian relations and the role of Indian women were disparaged by new colonial officials. Kinship relations still intact, however, now operated "as a strategy of indigenous accommodation, resistance, and persistence" (p. 57). Some English traders even joined this regional network by marrying into Indian or Métis families.	. . .

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