Indigenous Continent, page 15
The Jesuits labeled the Sioux “the Iroquois of this country, beyond la Pointe.” In the 1650s and 1660s, Iroquois war parties had functioned as a hammer that pinned the westward-fleeing refugees against the Sioux anvil, but in the 1670s the positions were reversed: the Sioux became the hammer, while the Iroquois presence in the East kept the refugees in place. The Sioux themselves were soon in an untenable position, for each strike only created more enemies. The Jesuits depicted the Seven Council Fires as “a nation exceedingly numerous and warlike,” and “the common enemies of all the savages Included under the name outacoac, or upper algonquines.” Their soldiers “even pushed forward their arms vigorously toward to the north; and, making war on Kilistinons [Crees] who dwell there, rendered themselves everywhere terrible by their daring, their numbers, and their skill in Battle.” In 1674 the Anishinaabeg surprised the overstretched Sioux in their own country and took eighty prisoners. The Sioux dispatched “ten of the most daring among them” to Sault Sainte Marie to negotiate for the captives’ release. But the Crees and Anishinaabeg Mississaugas moved to derail the conciliation and resolved to “massacre the ten ambassadors.” They managed to kill only one before the Sioux, “stirred up to vengeance[,] . . . struck their Knives at all the assembled savages, without making any distinction between Kilistinons and Sauteurs, believing that they had all equally Conspired in the design to assassinate them.”8
Indigenous ambitions, rivalries, murders, wars, and hatreds—all magnified by colonial rivalries—were stretching the interior nations to their limits. But the colonists could also be valuable. Because there were not many colonists in the West, they had to adhere to Indigenous practices. They were too weak to exercise control and dictate terms. On the contrary, to justify their presence in the Indigenous West, they would have to help the Indians restore order to the world. Then they might have a place in it too.
NICHOLAS PERROT WAS SOMEONE who could help. He seems to have come to New France as a lay Jesuit missionary, and he had met with several Native nations and learned their languages. He soon left the order to become a trader, visiting the refugee Indians in La Baye des Puants—Green Bay—and earning their trust. In 1670, Jean Talon, the intendant of New France, asked Perrot and Simon-François Daumont de Saint-Lusson, a military officer, to search for copper mines and explore the West toward Lake Superior and all the way to a “Freshwater Sea”—the Pacific. They were to “take possession, in the name of the king, of all the country” of the Odawas. Perrot invited several Lakes nations to La Baye des Puants. There he distributed gifts and asked the assembled Indians “if they would acknowledge, as his subjects, the great Onontio of the French, our sovereign and our king, who offered them his protection.” The envoys embraced the offer, and Perrot pledged that Onontio would protect them “as his own children”: “If any enemies rise up against them, he will destroy them; if his children have any disputes among themselves, he desires to be the judge in these.” In return, Onontio expected loyalty.9
More concretely, Onontio was also the head of an empire, and in that role he was tasked with arbitrating grievances among France’s Indian allies. Governor La Barre dispatched Perrot into the interior to manage the fur trade and preserve peace as a go-between. French traders were already pushing west of Lake Superior and into Sioux country, which was now known as “a nursery for beaver”—an upshot of the Seven Council Fires’ isolation from the French fur markets. The Lakes Indians were appalled; Onontio seemed to have turned his back on them. The Sioux and their Sauteur allies attacked the powerful Meskwakis, hoping to marginalize them and lure in French traders. The Meskwakis—“Foxes” to the French—killed Sioux in retaliation. The disorder did not deter the French traders who now trekked eagerly into the West, bringing guns into Sioux country. The interior exploded into violence.10
Paradoxically, that violence drew the Great Lakes Indians and the French closer together. The French in the region were isolated from the core of their empire in the Saint Lawrence Valley, and the Indians were reeling from Iroquois violence and internal discord. Unable to dominate each other, the French and the Lakes Indians both had to make concessions that could become mutually beneficial. Gradually, one encounter at a time, they forged an extraordinary common world, a middle ground, where they could coexist as allies and equals. Born of weakness, the middle ground was a social space where people accepted their mutual dependency. Too weak to dictate, they had to accommodate one another. Much of the accommodation required appealing to the cultural norms and customs of the other—customs that often seemed absurd and outright repulsive. It could be more useful to be creatively misunderstood than to be perfectly understood: from those misunderstandings arose new meanings and practices, the sinews of the middle ground. The apogee of the French-Indian accommodation was the Feast of the Dead, an ancient ceremony in which a host nation sponsored a mass reburial of the bones of the departed and distributed massive amounts of gifts to ease the pain and create new relatives and allies.11
Perrot was at the center of this emerging world. In 1683, during a conference at a Meskwaki village west of La Baye des Puants, he assumed Onontio’s role, reprimanding his hosts for their attacks. Now fluent in Indigenous idioms, Perrot challenged them: “Listen, Outagamis [Meskwakis], to what I am going to tell you. I have learned that you are very desirous to eat the flesh of Frenchmen. I have come, with these young men whom you see, to satisfy you; put us into your kettles, and gorge yourselves with the meat you have been wanting.” The “foremost” Meskwaki war leader promptly objected: “What child is there who would eat his father, from whom he has received life?” Perrot understood this as an acknowledgment of the debt the man owed to the French, who brought guns and iron to his people and mediated their conflicts. Speaking once more on behalf of Onontio, Perrot demanded, “Vomit up your prey; give me back my body, which you wish to put into your kettles . . . if you cook it, [it] will stir up vapors that will form stormy clouds which will extend over your village—which will be in a moment consumed by the flames and lightnings that will issue from them.” Perrot exhorted the Meskwakis to “believe your father, who will not abandon you until you compel him to do so.”12
The middle ground
That summit at the Meskwaki village was the French-Indian middle ground in microcosm. It was a shattered world made up of exiled Native villages, mixed refugee settlements, and a few French forts at the margins. The French had entered this atomistic and seemingly disjointed realm with trepidation, struggling to understand the Native efforts to restore order through good words and gifts. The French saw only chaos, recoiled at it, and dismissed the pays d’en haut as defunct. To that point it had been a typical early-American story. Different people came together, saw one another as alien, and were overcome by frustration and contempt. In the pays d’en haut, however, a different kind of trajectory took root. The Indians, Perrot reported, insisted on the “arrogant notion that the French cannot get along without them and that we could not maintain ourselves in the colony without the assistance that they give us.” Crucially, Perrot did not protest. He acknowledged that the French were weak and needed the Indians to survive. It was telling that Perrot was building an alliance alone, without colonial infrastructure; France and the other colonial powers had reached their logistical capacity in the distant Great Lakes.13
In the middle ground, Perrot and other French officials arbitrated quarrels and sponsored Indigenous rituals that kept the world in balance, and soon new ways of coexisting emerged. Rather than imposing their own norms and values, they had to find something in an alien culture that could be used, appropriated, and repurposed, however odd or abhorrent it might be. One concession and one expedient misreading at a time, Native Americans and newcomers began shading into one another—a prime manifestation of Indigenous pragmatism.14
The Illinis and Mascoutens wanted the French to join them against their enemies and mobilize French spiritual and military power on their behalf. These Indians nudged the Jesuits, and by extension the French Empire, to join them against the Nadouessi—the French name for the Sioux—and offered the priests “free access to the cabins.” But Claude-Jean Allouez, the leading Jesuit in North America, and his fellow friars had other priorities. “We availed ourselves of this advantage to instruct the people everywhere, and to seek out sick persons in all the cabins”; deathbed conversions had become a standard Jesuit practice. The entire episode was a series of misunderstandings, both accidental and intentional, but it yielded tangible results. People came together, ideas percolated, bonds emerged, and both sides could claim success, and even supremacy. The Illinis and Mascoutens had been able to appeal to Onontio himself through the Jesuits and ask for his pity and support. The Jesuits had managed to instruct Native Americans about the mysteries of the Christian god, planting seeds that might someday yield souls.15
The most delicate maneuvering and the hardest compromises involved cross-cultural murders. Murder posed a grave danger to the social order, but if properly atoned for, it could strengthen the shared world. In 1683 a joint Ojibwe-Menominee expedition ambushed and killed two French voyageurs on the Keweenaw Peninsula off the southern shore of Lake Michigan, possibly to stop them from trading with the Sioux, who were rivals of the Ojibwes and Menominees. Achiganaga, an Ojibwe ogimaag—leader—at Keweenaw, had recently launched an attack on the Sioux and was planning to organize more. Not long after, Achiganaga’s two sons joined with at least one Menominee to attack the French again. The western Great Lakes had been a tinderbox for years, and the murders of the Frenchmen threatened to throw the region into turmoil. Daniel Greysolon Dulhut, a former coureur de bois and now one of Governor La Barre’s most trusted officers, took over. He arrested the Menominee man at the Jesuit mission Sault Sainte Marie and sent out Jean Péré, an experienced coureur de bois, to detain Achiganaga and his two sons and bring them to the mission for a trial. Péré came back with four of Achiganaga’s sons.
The trial started as a distinctly French affair. With several Chippewa, Odawa, Ojibwe, and Wyandot-Petun elders in the audience, Dulhut interrogated Achiganaga’s sons and the Menominee man, who “made accusations without denying the murder.” Achiganaga, however, denied any wrongdoing. “This confrontation, which the savages did not expect, surprised them,” Dulhut observed. “Seeing that they were convicted of the murder,” the elders in the audience intervened: “It is enough; you accuse one another. The Frenchman is now master of your bodies.” From the Indigenous perspective, the matter was now resolved. Dulhut was to act like a benevolent father and pardon the killers, thereby repairing the familial bond between the French and the Chippewas. Instead, he assembled a few fellow Frenchmen at the fort to review the case. They called for blood revenge and decided “to put them all three to death.”
By clinging to European legal conventions, Dulhut had pushed the trial into a dangerous deadlock. More experienced local Frenchmen sent Dulhut a message, pleading with him “to treat this affair with all the mildness possible—because the savages murmured that, if all the accused were put to death, they would revenge themselves upon the French.” Dulhut pulled back. He later reported, “I believed it was expedient, for the safety of all their companions who were wintering at Lake Superior, to put to death only two”: a Menominee and one of Achiganaga’s sons. Dulhut had conformed to an alien cultural practice that he understood only vaguely, and it made him uneasy. He explained to his superior, “If I were not relaxing the rigor of our laws, I would put to death all six of them as being guilty of participating in the robbery.”16
Fearing a last-minute Native attack to stop the executions, Dulhut moved quickly. He asked the Jesuits to “baptize those two wretched men, which they did. An hour afterward, I put myself in sight of more than 400 men, and 200 steps from their fort, I had their heads broken.” Achiganaga had overestimated the French capacity for forgiveness and underestimated their capacity for violence, and he had lost a son for it. Yet only two days later, three Odawa ambassadors gave Achiganaga “six collars” to “cover” the killed Frenchmen and “efface their blood, in order that the earth might be clean in the future.” They did so because they needed French goods and guns to survive. Dulhut covered the dead with guns, powder, lead, blankets, axes, and knives, easing the Odawas’ pain and restoring the alliance. Dulhut craved authority over the Indians, but he had accepted that he would need to meet the Indians halfway. Reluctantly, unknowingly, he was entering a middle ground.17
The middle ground was, in the first and last instance, a diplomatic innovation, a perpetually shifting set of alliances that revolved around patriarchal metaphors and specific mutual obligations. In Quebec, the French governor commanded an empire with an iron grip, but on the middle ground he was Onontio—generous, forgiving, and loving. He was expected to care for his Native allies—his symbolic children—and give gifts, not orders. The most elemental human desires—sex, procreation, and the need for companionship—gave the middle ground depth and staying power. Those needs were dramatically intensified in the pays d’en haut by the fact that very few Frenchwomen accompanied their husbands into what the French thought was a wilderness. Apart from the Jesuits, most Frenchmen sought sexual relations and marriages with Native women, who had their own reasons to favorably respond to being courted by the French: marriages with traders opened access to crucial goods and could dramatically enhance the standing of the women’s families. Native women who married fur traders often became mediators between the French and Indians and built extensive kinship networks through the Catholic institution of godparenting, expanding and solidifying the middle ground. Some women who married traders assumed important roles in their communities as religious educators. Marie Rouensa-8cate8a, who was from a prominent Illini family, married a French fur trader, converted to Catholicism, and moved into the grand village of Kaskaskia, where she translated a Jesuit tract into the Kaskaskia language, becoming a leader in her community.18
Underneath all the artful accommodations, however, the Great Lakes region remained a distinctly Indigenous space: French priests, French traders, and French forts thrived there because Indians wanted them to thrive. The middle ground was a negation of colonialism in the vast North American interior. The Anishinaabeg people brought the sacred power of manidoo in the middle ground, which enabled strangers to become kin, trade, hunt, and travel together. The French were allowed to stay because they respected Native rituals and because they were useful and sufficiently meek. When they were not, the Indians found ways to make them pliable. When the Sauteurs moved, after several false starts, to bring the French traders among them and their Sioux allies, a Sauteur leader named Oumamens reached out to Dulhut. The Frenchman saw an opportunity to elevate his own reputation and followed Oumamens to the western end of Lake Superior, where the Sauteurs and Sioux had made peace. Dulhut’s role was to report back to Quebec and extend French gun trade among the Sauteurs and Sioux and expand the Indigenous peace process. A year later, Dulhut brought Crees and Assiniboines to a meeting near the western tip of Lake Superior to “make peace with the Nadouesioux, their common enemy.” Dulhut imagined himself as a New World adventurer who had single-handedly directed the interior fur trade in the French orbit. But his endeavors did not bring a single Sioux to Quebec. The Sioux expected the French traders to come to them.19
Unlike most of the Lakes Indians, the Sioux were neither refugees nor weak. They lived in their ancestral lands and possessed a strong communal ethos as the Očhéthi Šakówiŋ, the alliance of Seven Council Fires. Their population may have reached thirty thousand, which meant that they outnumbered any of their enemies many times over. They also dwarfed New France and its population of ten thousand. The Sioux did not want to travel east to get guns and iron; they expected French traders to bring weapons and goods to them. Realizing where the real power lay, Dulhut did just that. He began sending traders among the Seven Council Fires and built a fort for them near Mde Wakan, the heart of Sioux country. In a world where a single trading fort could launch an Indigenous empire, the Seven Council Fires were now a domineering power.
The Lakes Indians were terrified and aghast. The Sioux were their archenemies, and Dulhut had abandoned Onontio’s loyal children for them. The Lakes Indians appealed to Nicholas Perrot, who had once offered to give his body away to save the French-Indian alliance. They handed the calumet to Perrot in the transitional zone where the Great Lakes give way to grasslands and carried him on a bison robe to the cabin of the sachem, who wept over Perrot’s head, “bathing it with his tears,” and placed a piece of boiled bison tongue in Perrot’s mouth. Just as the sachem now fed Perrot, keeping him alive, Perrot should keep Onontio’s children alive with iron and guns. But Perrot’s efforts were to no avail. The Sioux were too powerful to be denied. Perrot offered Onontio’s children the calumet and told them that “this was his breast which he had always presented to them to give them nourishment.” Now, however, he had to “give suck to the Nadoüaissioux,” offering Onontio’s “milk”—the iron, guns, and other trade goods that kept them safe and alive. Perrot sent a few of his men to alert the Sioux of his visit. “They found on the ice twenty-four canoes of Nadoüaissioux, delighted to see these Frenchmen.” The French had turned their back on their oldest allies and brought their traders and their empire into Sioux country simply because the Sioux willed it so.20
The Očhéthi Šakówiŋ wanted more than goods. The Sioux wanted the French to limit all their commercial operations to within their domain. When a Miami sachem approached Perrot, hoping to “settle near the Frenchman’s fire”—a scene that had been acted out in the pays d’en haut a thousand times—Perrot turned him down. The Očhéthi Šakówiŋ would not allow the French-Indian alliance to expand among their rivals. Perrot sent the dejected sachem away. “He was going to establish himself on the upper Mississippi, this side of the Nadouaissious.”21
