UMass Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press

Rethinking Cultural Encounter in the Western Great Lakes

Book Jacket: "Indian Women and French Men" by S. Sleeper-Smith

Susan Sleeper-Smith

An innovative study of cultural resilience and resistance in early America

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.

"This is groundbreaking work—a major contribution to the history of both Native Americans and women in this region. The book will become required reading for any course that focuses on the role of mixed bloods or Native Americans in the western Great Lakes and Mississippi."

R. David Edmunds, coauthor of The Fox Wars:
The Mesquakie Challenge to New France
"This volume dramatically revises standard assumptions about fur trade society. Sleeper-Smith offers a compelling reinterpretation of native women and the fur trade that will no doubt have a major impact on how we view this aspect of American history in the future."

Nancy Shoemaker, University of Connecticut

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.

American History / Native American Studies
256 pp., 8 color illus.
$45.00s library cloth edition, ISBN 1-55849-308-5
$24.95s paper, ISBN 1-55849-310-7
November 2001
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A volume in the series Native Americans of the Northeast: Culture, History, and the Contemporary

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