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Indians’ Marital and Intercultural Relationships in Colonial Louisiana Kathleen DuVal Excerpted from: “Indian Intermarriage and Métissage in Colonial Louisiana,” William and Mary Quarterly 65:2 (April 2008), 267-304

In the 1790s a Quapaw Indian woman called Marie Louise had two children with a voyageur (independent trader) named Michel Bonne. Records reveal little else about this woman. Her Quapaw parents must have lived in one of their nation’s towns along the Arkansas River, just west of the Mississippi. By the time of Marie Louise’s birth, the Quapaw had suffered devastating population losses due to European diseases. They had also established strong ties of trade and alliance with the French who founded the Arkansas Post on Quapaw lands. . . . Despite the fuzzy details, Marie Louise’s story seems familiar: an Indian woman married and had children with a Frenchman who supplied goods to her people. . . . But Marie Louise did not typify relationships between her people and the French. In reality she and her children are the only clear examples of Quapaw-French marriage or childbearing in the 130 years from the arrival of the French in 1673 through the Louisiana Purchase of 1803. Parish registers show many Indian women who bore children with Frenchmen of the Arkansas Post, yet nearly all came from distant nations, mostly seized in raids and brought there as slaves. Bonne’s own mother, Marie Louise’s mother-in-law, was one of these women, a Plains Apache. . . . In colonial Louisiana Indian circumstances, needs, and customs had more influence over whether cross-cultural sexual and marital relationships occurred and how children born from such unions fitted into their complex world. Indians in Louisiana had varying ideas about how to interact with foreigners, and Frenchmen could not simply apply the lessons of New France to Louisiana. Beyond the borders of New Orleans, the French did not do much of anything in Louisiana without Indian assistance. The hundreds of Indian nations living in the region that the French called Louisiana had diverse practices of marriage, lineage, trade, and diplomacy. They varied in what they wanted from the French and how much they wanted it. Some nations were powerful enough to bend the French to their will, whereas others struggled to survive. But in all cases, the French alone did not determine Louisiana’s sexual and marital landscape. . . . Week 4 p.2

. . . Marriages for the purposes of trade and diplomacy could be carried out according to Christian or Indian customs, or both, but they were possible only with women who lived among their own people with whom the French traded and formed alliances. “Métis” is a term that comes from western Canada and implies a particular kind of identity formation and community development, a new ethnic identity as the descendants of Frenchmen and Indian women. In colonial Louisiana marriage was not a common method of establishing trade or diplomacy, and métis communities were few and short lived. Most French-Indian marriages involved slave women, and their descendants gradually merged into the French colonial population. There was no single or predominant type of Indian-French relationship. Comparing several Indian groups can reveal the different ways that leaders established connections with the French. Examining slave women and then four intact societies—the Illinois (particularly Kaskaskia), Apalachee, Quapaw, and Choctaw— . . . demonstrates the central role that Indians played in structuring European colonies. Though the entire colony of Louisiana was no more under the control of any particular Indians than of any particular Europeans, Indian practices and decisions shaped the development of local colonial societies. The most common sexual unions between Frenchmen and Indian women involved Indian slaves and their daughters and granddaughters. Like black slave women, they could supply Frenchmen with sex, companionship, household and other labor, and children. Stolen from their communities, these women did not offer the kin-based opportunities of trade marriages, and most of their children either remained enslaved or became part of the diverse French community in the colony...... Indian women who had not been torn from their societies were subject to moral codes and societal expectations every bit as culturally constrained as women in European societies. It was slavery that made some Indian women sexually available...... [T]hese people were ripped from their communities and forced to work for strangers. Most female Indian and African slaves cooked meals, kept the colony’s houses clean and orderly, worked as laundresses and nursemaids, contributed to the food supply by raising chickens and vegetables, or worked as field hands in staple farming. Many were also sexually exploited by their masters. . . . Sexual relationships with enslaved Indian and African women were widespread enough that one moneylender at the Arkansas Post collected by barging into the debtors’ houses to “take their concubines away.” . . . Week 4 p.3

In an irony that enslaved women have endured throughout history, sex with masters sometimes offered freedom, security, and community. In Louisiana many Indian slaves formed marriagelike unions with Frenchmen. In Saint Louis on September 16, 1776, Joseph Tibault married and freed his slave Marianne in the presence of their five-month-old daughter, . . . Some former slaves and their children amassed substantial property and prestige through their connections to Frenchmen. In the early 1700s, a Chitimacha slave christened Marie Tihérèse de La Grande Terre married Jacques Guedon of Nantes and raised children who became prominent members of French colonial Natchitoches. Her daughter Louise Marguerite Guedon married French soldier Alexis Grappe, and together they established a lively trade with the Kadohadacho, a Caddoan people who lived near Natchitoches. In 1796 Louise Guedon’s son François Grappe used part of the business’s earnings to buy his longtime mistress, a forty-five- year-old woman of African descent called Marie Louise, and their twenty children and grandchildren from multiple owners including his own mother, by that time a substantial slaveholder. . . . As in much of early America, owning other human beings was a path to economic security, which helps explain why Louise, the daughter of an Indian slave, did not resist becoming a slaveholder herself. Because most Indian slaves came from societies where enslaved women and children could assimilate, they may have assumed that they and their descendants were entitled to full membership in the communities in which they had been enslaved. Through new kin connections, Catholic baptism, language acquisition, and involvement in the colonial community, many children and grandchildren of enslaved Indian women and Frenchmen became culturally French. . . . French colonial identity separated their families both from neighboring Indian nations and from the lower-status gens de couleur (free people of color). Because French culture was patrilineal, tracing descent through the male line, these nationless Indian women and their children could be rapidly incorporated into French lineages. By the third generation, parish records ceased to identify descendants of women such as Kebed’s wife, Marguerite, and Guedon’s wife, Marie Thérèse, as Indian at all. Many became prominent members of their communities. Their identity was not métis: they identified themselves and their communities identified them as French. Week 4 p.4

This avenue was not open to most women of African descent. Whereas French-Indian marriage was officially discouraged yet rarely punished, prohibitions on French-African marriage were clear and enforced. François Grappe bought and freed Marie Louise but could not marry her. Similarly, a black slave named Marie Thérèse Cioincoin, who was about sixteen in 1768, went on to have several children with Claude Thomas Pierre Metoyer, a Natchitoches landowner from La Rochelle. In 1778 he bought her from her owner, freed her, and moved her into his house. If Coincoin had been Indian, they might have lived the rest of their lives together, and their children might have integrated into the French community. But they could not marry, and their children were labeled mulatto. Ten years later Metoyer married a French widow, whose property added to his holdings in land and slaves. At the time of his marriage, he apparently set up Coincoin in her own household. By the 1790s she owned land and five slaves. Enslaved Indian women had more in common with their African counterparts than with free Indian women living among their own people. Yet, because French and Indian Louisianans agreed on the potential of Indian women to assimilate, the children of Indian slave women and Frenchmen were more able than those of African descent to become French colonials. Of all Indians who lived in colonial Louisiana, those in the Illinois country best fit the model of . . . métis communities. The Illinois Indians were Algonquian speakers who shared many cultural aspects and diplomatic policies but were divided into several nations, including the Kaskaskia, Cahokia, Michigamea, and Peoria. Clustered in towns south of Lake Michigan and north of the Ohio River, Illinois women grew corn, squash, fruit, and other crops and the men hunted bison, bear, deer, and game birds. Long before the French arrived, Illinois women married into families of allies, creating kinship links between foreign peoples and their own. . . . With the arrival of French missionaries, the sacraments of Christian marriage and baptism added new mutually recognized rituals to older practices of forging kinship ties through marriage and adoption. By the early decades of the 1700s, Illinois diplomats were declaring to French officials that their people were “almost all ‘of the prayer’” (that is, Christians). A French missionary recorded that they were “inviolably attached to the French, through alliances that several of their Nation contracted with them, by marrying their daughters.” . . . The Illinois country’s early-eighteenth-century parish records are full of marriages between European men and Indian women who were either Illinois or from one of the communities that had fled the Iroquois. . . . Week 4 p.5

Compared with other parts of Louisiana, the Illinois country Indian women formed the basis for more of the colonial population. In the early decades of the Jesuit mission to the Kaskaskia, for example, nearly all the children baptized had a French father and an Illinois mother. . . . In the early 1690s, a Kaskaskia chief and his wife pressured their daughter, Marie Rouensa, into marrying trader Michel Accault. . . . Living with their husbands and children in the same town as their Illinois kin, these women brought the two groups closer together and increased their families’ economic well- being. They and their children were prominent in the increasingly mixed community. . . . Illinois women may have had familial or personal reasons for marrying Frenchmen. Women were central to Illinois diplomacy and trade. As wives, mothers, and workers in the fur trade, they facilitated foreign relationships. . . . Priests and officials who supported French-Indian marriage pointed to the Illinois country as an example of how intermarriage could make Indian women and their Indian-French children good Catholics who in turn would convert the rest of their people. . . . French opponents of such marriages objected, with some justification, that French husbands in the Illinois country became “almost Indians” rather than their wives becoming French. . . . As the agricultural economy expanded, French and slave populations grew. Tensions began to erupt. In 1719 most of the community’s Kaskaskia Indians decided to leave or were forced out by the French. They established their own town a few miles away. Illinois women married to Frenchmen stayed behind. During the ensuing years, the two towns continued to interact peacefully but grew further apart culturally. Because Illinois and French societies practiced patrilineal descent, the children of these cross-cultural marriages joined their fathers’ communities. Those in “French” Kaskaskia lived in a French colonial pattern, clustering their wood- frame houses and farming long, narrow fields that stretched from their settlement to the Mississippi River. African and Indian slaves cultivated the fields, Frenchmen became landowners and merchants rather than fur traders, and their wives tended kitchen gardens and worked within the home rather than farming. Adjoining the town was the Jesuit mission; Catholicism united residents in the rituals of baptism, marriage, and Mass. The town was remarkably diverse, bringing together people with Abenaki, African, Fox, Huron, Miami, Ottawa, Plains, Potawatomi, and Sauk parentage as well as French and Illinois origins. It may Week 4 p.6

still be labeled métis, since Indian women and their descendants remained a majority of the population, but, as in other colonial towns across Louisiana, the French language, religion, and economy increasingly became what this diverse community had in common. Most Kaskaskia Indians, on the other hand, resided among, married, and had children with people of their own nation. The several hundred residents of “Indian Kaskaskia” practiced their own religion and lived in rounded houses covered with rush mats. Kaskaskia women farmed corn and men hunted. Like most Indians in Louisiana, they lived with their own and raised their children to do the same. As in the rest of Louisiana, Indian decisions shaped the human geography of the Illinois country. The Indian slave trade, supplemented in the 1720s by even larger numbers of African slaves, supplied labor for the staple crops that distinguished the Illinois country’s economy and landscape from the rest of Louisiana. Illinois war parties brought in Pawnee and other slaves, and Illinois women decided whether these captives would be killed, adopted, or sold. Illinois Indians’ willingness to forge marital as well as economic and diplomatic ties to the French helped colonial communities grow and prosper. In theory the Apalachee Indians should have forged similar marriages and métis communities with the French. Like the Illinois and their neighbors, the Apalachee had a history of fleeing war, founding new settlements, and using Europeans to increase their security. By the mid-1700s the Apalachee in Louisiana had become exactly the kind of Indians that French advocates of Indian cultural conversion through marriage imagined. They were Catholics who spoke a creolized Spanish, lived in a town near European settlements, wore mostly European- style clothes, and owned African slaves. If Apalachee women had married Frenchmen, the two communities might have eventually fulfilled the hope of Louis XIV’s minister Jean Baptiste Colbert that Indians “in the vicinity of our settlements who have embraced Christianity” may become so like the French that the two groups would eventually be “one people and one blood.” . . . Because they were matrilineal and matrilocal, Apalachee women could give Frenchmen Apalachee homes and incorporate their children into their own lines. The husbands would also have been free to spend as much time as they wanted in French communities or trading with other Indians, since husbands were not expected to live permanently with their wives, whose brothers usually remained in their households. Because the Apalachee had abandoned polygamy by the time of Week 4 p.7

their contact with the French, that practice would not have posed an obstacle. But culture is not destiny. Despite the theoretical appeal, Apalachee women did not marry Europeans. Apalachee history is a tale of exile and adaptation. In the sixteenth century, Apalachee was a prominent chiefdom in what is now the Florida Panhandle. It included several large towns and outlying agricultural fields and orchards. . . . By the end of the seventeenth century, Apalachee dominance had ended. In 1704 English forces destroyed the Apalachee towns, in part because they had welcomed Spanish missionaries. The English enslaved thousands of the Apalachee who survived the attack, driving the rest into exile. Several hundred of the exiles made their way west to Mobile. When the British took over the eastern Mississippi Valley in 1763, these Apalachee moved again, this time settling . . . in what is now Rapides Parish. Although they may have retained some older religious beliefs and practices, the Apalachee clearly were devout Catholics. They had begun to convert in the early 1600s when their chiefs invited Spanish Franciscan missionaries to settle with them. Apalachee chiefs were powerful political and religious leaders, but the epidemics of the late sixteenth century had probably endangered their authority. Access to the perceived power of a new religion, of literacy taught to elite Apalachee by the priests, and of Spanish armaments and other goods assisted the chiefs’ prestige. Within a few decades, almost all Apalachee had been baptized. They carried Catholicism with them into exile. After only a short time in Mobile, they built their own church and graveyard. . . . They encouraged their African slaves to be baptized and may have proselytized to other Indians. Many European observers claimed that the Apalachee were more devout than most of Louisiana’s Europeans. . . . Despite all the factors that might have promoted French marriage, by the 1700s Apalachee women all but exclusively married Apalachee men. . . . All who fled to Mobile married one another. Although an occasional Apalachee woman there bore a child whose father was non-Apalachee or unidentified in the baptismal record, almost every Apalachee was married to another Apalachee, almost every child had two Apalachee parents, and even most godparents were married Apalachee couples. This pattern became more strict once they settled west of the Mississippi. The Natchitoches records include not a single identifiable European, African, or Louisiana Indian who married an Apalachee. . . . The evidence in this case is clear: Apalachee women did not marry Frenchmen, though the religion and lineality of the Apalachee would have promoted this practice. Why did the Apalachee not pursue these unions? Week 4 p.8

The Apalachee did not need to marry Frenchmen. In some parts of New France, Indians needed to persuade French traders to make the journey from Quebec to their towns year after year. The Apalachee, by comparison, were not a fur-trading people far from centers of colonial commerce. They purposefully built their towns amid European settlements. They raised cattle and agricultural products, which European settlers needed daily and appreciated getting from neighboring Indians. There was no need to use marriage to forge diplomatic and trade ties. French marriage was not just unnecessary but probably unappealing for the very reason that it threatened to fulfill Colbert’s hope of making the Apalachee and the French “one people and one blood.” The qualities that made them an ideal people for the French to subsume may have made the Apalachee fear that marriage with alien peoples would destroy Apalachee identity. Certainly, many a Frenchman argued against Indian-French marriage for fear of losing French identity, and the Apalachee had even more reason to fear. They had drastically changed their religion and economy. They had moved first three hundred miles from their homes to Mobile, then another four hundred miles, losing most of their population along the way. After all these changes, they remained a community, and they remained Apalachee. Apalachee men seem to have identified protecting women as part of defending their society against foreign incursions. In 1706 Apalachee representatives told a French official at Mobile that, not having been “masters of their wives among the Spaniards” in Florida, one of the reasons they wanted to settle near the French was because they trusted the French not to ‘trouble them. Indeed problems with the soldiers of Spanish Saint Augustine had started more than a century earlier. In the late sixteenth century, as a pledge of peace Apalachee chiefs had sent several of their sons and daughters to live at Saint Augustine. Some of these young women, against their families’ and perhaps their own wishes, became involved in sexual relationships with officers and soldiers stationed there. The Franciscan missionaries put an end to this practice, which may have been one reason that the chiefs welcomed them. During the following decades, chiefs periodically complained that soldiers or ranchers were raping Apalachee women. . . . By the time the Apalachee got to Louisiana, rape, capture, violent death, and flight had come far too often for them to be casual about cross-cultural relationships. Separation and death had decreased the size of their community from more than ten thousand in precolonial Florida to fewer than one hundred in Louisiana. They needed safety and time to rebuild. Ideally, their matrilineal structure would have ensured that any children of Apalachee women and foreign men Week 4 p.9

would remain Apalachee. But the French and most Indians west of the Mississippi were patrilineal, and their customs might have prevailed over those of the weakened Apalachee. Having changed so much, perhaps they could not take the risk. And there was great risk: no other group of Apalachee refugees successfully maintained its identity as Apalachee. . . . For reasons different from those of the Apalachee, the Quapaw Indians also seem likely participants in French métissage. . . . From the late seventeenth through the eighteenth centuries, the Quapaw successfully established strong ties to French traders and officials and used French alliance and munitions to defend their lands near the juncture of the Arkansas and Mississippi rivers. Both sides came to agree that the Quapaw were “on easy terms with the French” and, as a Quapaw delegation put it, had “never reddened our hands with the blood of the French.” It does not appear that marriage or métissage played an important role in Quapaw-French relations. Compared with Indians in the Illinois country, there is no evidence that the Quapaw used marriage to establish good relationships with foreigners. When Henri de Tonti established the first trading post near the Quapaw town of Osotouy in 1686, the townspeople gave land for the post, food to maintain the six traders that Tonti assigned there, and furs to exchange. Yet none of the accounts of that post indicates that the women of Osotouy felt any need to have sex with or marry the men who came to trade. In an account from the 1680s, Henri Joutel recorded that the “shapely” Quapaw women served smoked meat, cornbread, melons, pumpkins, and tobacco to his men, traded them supplies for their journey in return for beads and other goods, and performed the calumet dance but did not offer themselves sexually. . . . [T]hese ceremonies surely were developed to incorporate foreign traders and diplomats long before Europeans arrived. . . . Quapaw women offered the hospitality that surrounded the establishment and maintenance of trading and diplomacy, but supplying sex or joining in trade marriages was not expected of them. Although the . . . records include many slave women and their descendants who married and had children with Frenchmen, Marie Louise, mentioned at the beginning of this article, was the only identifiably Quapaw woman who married or had children with a Frenchman. Of the hundreds of records in which French and Spanish officials, travelers, and priests discussed the Quapaw, almost none address Quapaw-French sex or marriage, a striking absence given Europeans’ obsession with such matters. . . . Nineteenth-century American observers noted Indian descendants among the French population, yet the existing materials indicate only Marie Week 4 p.10

Louise and her children as of Quapaw lineage. Of the other women whom historians have cited as evidence of Quapaw-French marriage, all those with identifiable ancestry were the descendants of Indian slave women. . . . There were reasons for Quapaw women to avoid Marie Louise’s path. A traveler’s journal from the early 1720s claims that Quapaw women believed they would die if they had sex with a Frenchman. European diseases new to the region had caused a series of epidemics among the Quapaw, and Quapaw women would have been wise to avoid Frenchmen. Few Quapaw women seem to have wanted to leave their secure and relatively prosperous community for the impermanent and poorly provisioned French settlement, and they did not feel the pull of Catholicism that some Illinois did. . . . Unlike Illinois and Catholic Apalachee women, Quapaw women had the right to divorce Quapaw men and remarry without societal stigma. A Quapaw woman who married a Frenchman and lived in his community would have had less freedom to end the marriage without social and economic consequences. Additionally, Quapaw families did not pressure young women to marry foreigners as Illinois families did. . . . Whereas the Apalachee and Quapaw consistently rejected trade marriages, the Choctaw Indians adapted their cross-cultural marriage practices to changing circumstances. Descendants of Mississippian chiefdoms, the colonial-era Choctaw were one of the largest nations in the Mississippi Valley, with lands stretching across most of present-day Mississippi. Because the Choctaw were matrilineal, they could have incorporated foreign men and their children through marriage, and their relatively large population had less reason to worry than the struggling Apalachee if a few children became culturally European. Like the Quapaw and Illinois, they wanted to establish a fur trade with Europeans. As a result some trade marriages existed between the Choctaw and Europeans, but they do not seem to have been widespread in the first half of the eighteenth century. The Choctaw apparently shared the Quapaw viewpoint that marriage to foreign traders was neither necessary nor appealing. Some of the French boys sent to live with the Choctaw to learn their language and customs may have married Choctaw women, although even they appear in the Mobile records as marrying women of at least some French descent. When the Choctaw began trading with the French at the beginning of the eighteenth century, they adopted the traders. Because matrilineal social structure gave Choctaw women power over who belonged to Week 4 p.11

their families, women played an essential role in the ceremonies making traders into fictive kin, yet sexual or marital liaisons with these traders were not obligatory. . . . A 1751 speech by Alibamon Mingo reveals the ties that bound the Choctaw to their French trader . . . Alibamon Mingo identified . . . trade, military alliance, and the French governor’s fictive adoption of the Choctaw, but he did not list marriages between Choctaw women and Frenchmen. The end of the Seven Years’ War and France’s cession of the eastern half of the Mississippi Valley to Great Britain forced Choctaw chiefs to alter trade policy. With less competition British traders were more willing to go around the chiefs and trade directly with other Choctaw. The chiefs’ solution was to marry their female relatives to European traders to keep foreign trade within their households. Although Britons continued to trade sporadically in Choctaw country without chiefs’ consent, those who wanted to establish permanent relationships with Choctaw towns complied with the new practices. Traders Turner Brashears and Nathaniel Folsom married prominent Choctaw women in the 1770s and 1780s. When Folsom’s wife died, he married her sister to retain his place in Choctaw society. . . . Starting in the 1760s, the records are full of marriages between elite Choctaw women and European (and later American) traders. In what was probably an exaggeration but nonetheless reflected a real change, a Spanish official heard in 1785 that more than five hundred American men were “living with Indian women” in the Choctaw and Chickasaw nations. As Choctaw chiefs became more willing to marry their female relatives to traders, British American men became eager to marry Choctaw women to establish claims to Choctaw land. Previously, trade had been the goal, yet as speculators and settlers moved beyond the Appalachians, land was what they wanted. Because according to Choctaw tradition women owned the land, only by marrying a Choctaw woman could a foreign man seize Choctaw land for himself and his descendants. . . . Because of the Choctaw’s matrilineal tradition, the children of these late-eighteenth- century unions were fully Choctaw, inheriting their clan lineages through their mothers. They had no need to acknowledge their European parentage, and most probably did not. But for a few, their fathers’ status in patrilineal British society gave them access to careers as traders, interpreters, or negotiators. Because they inherited their mothers’ and maternal uncles’ lineages, some of the daughters of these unions married foreign traders, forming the same kinds of links that their mothers had. . . . Week 4 p.12

Beginning in the 1760s, as opportunities narrowed, the frequency of Choctaw-European marriage increased, as did the number of children able to bridge their parents’ worlds. Still, until the nineteenth century that number was small, and such children fitted within the chiefs’ lineages and, to some extent, oversight. The Choctaw nation largely retained control over its own lands and people, and when Louisianans, Floridians, and Georgians set foot on Choctaw lands, those without kin connections were still foreigners. During the past few decades, historians have stopped trying to characterize European empires as either empires of trade or of settlement. . . . Scholars have also begun to grapple with the dizzying diversity of native peoples and the various types of slavery as well as to recognize that Indians and Africans sometimes had power over Europeans. Teasing out cross-cultural sex, marriage, and child rearing from old assumptions should be part of this enterprise...... The French held most of the power in some interactions, most obviously dominating Africans and Indians whom they held in bondage. But French access to those slaves was determined in part by Indian trading partners who sold them into French communities. The French had little power over Indian women who lived among their own people. In Louisiana Indians outnumbered the French in most areas, and the French religious and political institutions that traditionally governed marriage were weaker than Indians’ parallel structures. Under these circumstances Indian men and women had more power to control what sorts of relationships the women established with Frenchmen and how any children were defined. Europeans’ gradually developing belief that identity lay in the blood had little effect on Indians in colonial Louisiana. Marriage was not a common method of establishing trade or alliance in Louisiana, and no permanent métis communities developed in the colonial period. Louisiana’s enslaved women were more likely than free Indian women to marry Frenchmen, and the children of the former gradually became part of Louisiana’s French colonial communities. Particular Indian communities dealt with foreign men and their children in their own ways. No single factor determined decisions regarding intermarriage. They were enmeshed with other decisions as people responded to the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century crises of disease and war. A variety of patterns resulted. Matrilineal societies found it easier to incorporate the children of Frenchmen, whereas Illinois patrilineal societies encouraged the development of a non-Indian identity for children with no paternal Illinois lineage. The Illinois acceptance of Christianity made French marriages more likely, yet the Apalachee show that sharing a religion did not Week 4 p.13

necessarily lead to marriage. The Quapaw did not need sex or marriage to develop a close relationship with the French. If they married or had sex with Frenchmen at all, they did so according to Quapaw customs and raised their children as Quapaw. Choctaw chiefs increased elite intermarriage over time to compensate for the loss of other options. . . . The Choctaw wives of foreign men remained within their matrilineal households and gave their children full Choctaw membership. . . . Disease and immigrants from Europe and Africa brought changes to the Americas, altering how people defined themselves and their communities. Being a member of one community or another could mean life or death, and being without community was a dangerous if common state. Each community defined its own. A person without a Quapaw clan did not have a complete Quapaw identity. Europeans did not identify a child of European and African parents as European. People without community identities did their best to be adopted or married into existing communities. Some individuals and families employed multiple identities. . . . Some invented identities. . . . For people living between cultures or in the new French and gens de couleur communities that developed, identity was fluid, hybridization was possible, and women sometimes served as negotiators of change on gender frontiers. But in Illinois, Apalachee, Quapaw, Choctaw, Caddo, and Osage towns, long-established marriage customs continued to govern most women’s and men’s lives. For all the diversity in marriage and sexuality customs, one striking commonality is the power that men held over women’s choices. Masters certainly overrode enslaved women’s consent, but Indian communities also forced individual women to marry or not marry. Louisiana’s Indian societies varied in how patriarchal and coercive they were, yet all had mostly male leaders and gave young women little say. In European and Indian societies, families pressured women to marry certain men and live proper lives. . . . Women were regulated by their communities yet also helped to form and sustain them. And for many women, marriage affected their everyday lives less than other kinship ties, such as clan or sisterhood. One benefit of putting Indians at the center of the story of colonial Indian-European relationships is that distinctions in Indian women’s status become clearer. The Indian slave woman who belonged to Louis Turpin had a different place in colonial society from that of his Illinois wife, Dorothée Mechiperouata. Older women had power over younger women’s choices. Though elite Choctaw women may have had better material conditions and more prestige than Week 4 p.14

nonelite women, in the late eighteenth century they were also more likely to be forced into unwanted marriages. There remains much to be learned about distinctions within as well as among Indian societies. Indian women and men alike worried about how best to maintain their societies in the face of disease, war, and other agents of change, and they weighed the advantages and disadvantages of marriage with foreigners. Slaves and settlers also struggled to make the best choices for themselves and their children. Louisiana’s people reached a variety of conclusions. No one rule governed marriage practices in French America. . . . French America was not built according to a pattern set by the French or by the Indians of one region. Local Indians largely set the terms by which economic, social, and sexual interactions with Europeans took place.

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About the Duties of Husbands and Wives From Benjamin Wadsworth, A Well-Ordered Family(Boston,1712). Concerning the duties of this relation we may assert a few things. It is their duty to dwell together with one another. Surely they should dwell together; if one house cannot hold them, surely they are not affected to each other as they should be. They should have a very great and tender love and affection to one another. This is plainly commanded by God. This duty of love is mutual; it should be performed by each, to each of them. When, therefore, they quarrel or disagree, then they do the Devil's work; he is pleased at it, glad of it. But such contention provokes God; it dishonors Him; it is a vile example before inferiors in the family; it tends to prevent family prayer. As to outward things. If the one is sick, troubled, or distressed, the other should manifest care, tenderness, pity, and compassion, and afford all possible relief and succor. They should likewise unite their prudent counsels and endeavors, comfortably to maintain themselves and the family under their joint care. Husband and wife should be patient one toward another. If both are Truly pious, yet neither of them is perfectly holy, in such cases a patient, forgiving, forbearing spirit is very needful… The husband's government ought to be gentle and easy, and the wife's obedience ready and cheerful. The husband is called the head of the woman. It belongs to the head to rule and govern. Wives are part of the house and family, and ought to be under the husband's government. Yet his government should not be with rigor, haughtiness, harshness, severity, but with the greatest love, gentleness, kindness, tenderness that may be. Though he governs her, he must not treat her as a servant, but as his own flesh; he must love her as himself. Those husbands are much to blame who do not carry it lovingly and kindly to their wives. O man, if your wife is not so young, beautiful, healthy, well-tempered, and qualified as you would wish; if she did not bring a large estate to you, or cannot do so much for you, as some other women have done for their husbands; yet she is your wife, and the great God commands you to love her, not be bitter, but kind to her. What can be more plain and expressive than that? Those wives are much to blame who do not carry it lovingly and obediently to their own husbands. O woman, if your husband is not as young, beautiful, healthy, so well-tempered, and qualified as you could wish; if he has not such abilities, riches, honors, as some others have; yet he is your husband, and the great God commands you to love, honor, and obey him. Yea, though possibly you have greater abilities of mind than he has, was of some high birth, and he of a more common birth, or did bring more estate, yet since he is your husband, God has made him your head, and set him above you, and made it your duty to love and revere him. Parents should act wisely and prudently in the matching of their children. They should endeavor that they may marry someone who is most proper for them, most likely to bring blessings to them. Week 4 p.16 Week 4 p.17 of North-Carolina ( 183 ) dawb'd over with Light-wood Soot, (which is the same as Lamp-- black) and Bears Oil. This renders them as black as it is possible to make themselves, so that theirs very much resemble the Faces of Executed Men boil'd in Tar. If the dead Person was a Grandee, to carry on the Funeral Ceremonies, they hire People to cry and lament over the dead Man. Of this sort there are several, that practice it for a Livelihood, and are very expert at Shedding abundance of Tears, and howling like Wolves, and so discharging their Office with abundance of Hypocrisy and Art. The Women are never accom- panied with these Ceremonies after Death; and to what World they allot that Sex, I never understood, unless, to wait on their dead Husbands; but they have more Wit, than some of the other Eastern Nations, who sacrifice themselves to accompany their Husbands into the next World. It is the dead Man's Relations, by Blood, as his Uncles, Brothers, Sisters, Cousins, Sons and Daughters, that mourn in good earnest, the Wives thinking their Duty is discharg'd, and that they are become free, when their Husband is dead; so, as fast as they can, look out for another, to supply his Place. As for the Indian Women, which now happen in my Way; when young, and at Maturity, they are as fine-shap'd Creatures (take them generally) as any in the Universe. They are of a tawny Com- plexion; their Eyes very brisk and amorous; their Smiles afford the finest Composure a Face can possess, their Hands are of the finest Make, with small long Fingers, and as soft as their Cheeks, and their whole Bodies of a smooth Nature. They are not so uncouth or unlikely, as we suppose them; nor are they Strangers or not Pro- ficients in the soft Passion. They are most of them mercenary, ex- cept the married Women, who sometimes bestow their Favours also to some or other, in their Husbands Absence. For which they never ask any Reward. As for the Report, that they are never found un- constant, like the Europeans, it is wholly false; for were the old World and the new one put into a Pair of Scales (in point of Con- stancy) it would be a hard Matter to discern which was the heavier. As for the Trading Girls, which are those design'd to get Money by their Natural Parts, these are discernable, by the Cut of their Hair; their Tonsure differing from all others, of that Nati- Week 4 p.18 ( 184 ) An Account of the Indians on, who are not of their Profession; which Method is intended to prevent Mistakes; for the Savages of America are desirous (if possible) to keep their Wives to themselves, as well as those in other Parts of the World. When any Addresses are made to one of these Girls, she immediately acquaints her Parents therewith, and they tell the King of it, (provided he that courts her be a Stranger) his Majesty commonly being the principal Bawd of the Nation he rules over, and there seldom being any of these Winchester-Weddings agreed on, without his Royal Consent. He likewise advises her what Bargain to make, and if it happens to be an Indian Trader that wants a Bed-fellow, and has got Rum to sell, be sure, the King must have a large Dram for a Fee, to confirm the Match. These Indians, that are of the elder sort, when any such Question is put to them, will debate the Matter amongst themselves with all the Sobriety and Seriousness imaginable, every one of the Girl's Relations arguing the Advantage or Detriment that may ensue such a Night's Encounter; all which is done with as much Steadiness and Reality, as if it was the greatest Concern in the World, and not so much as one Person shall be seen to smile, so long as the Debate holds, making no Difference betwixt an Agreement of this Nature, and a Bargain of any other. If they comply with the Men's Desire, then a particular Bed is provided for them, either in a Cabin by themselves, or else all the young people turn out, to another Lodging, that they may not spoil Sport; and if the old People are in the same Cabin along with them all Night, they lie as unconcern'd, as if they were so many Logs of Wood. If it be an Indian of their own Town or Neighbourhood, that wants a Mistress, he comes to none but the Girl, who receives what she thinks fit to ask him, and so lies all Night with him, without the Consent of her Parents. The Indian Traders are those which travel and abide amongst the Indians for a long space of time; sometimes for a Year, two, or three. These Men have commonly their Indian Wives, whereby they soon learn the Indian Tongue, keep a Friendship with the Savages; and, besides the Satisfaction of a She-Bed-Fellow, they find these Indian Girls very serviceable to them, on Account of dressing their Victuals, and instructing 'em in the Affairs and Customs of the Country. Week 4 p.19 of North-Carolina ( 185 )

Moreover, such a Man gets a great Trade with the Savages; for when a Person that lives amongst them, is reserv'd from the Conversation of their Women, 'tis impossible for him ever to accomplish his Designs amongst that People. But one great Misfortune which oftentimes attends those that converse with these Savage Women, is, that they get Children by them, which are seldom educated any otherwise than in a State of Infidelity; for it is a certain Rule and Custom, amongst all the Savages of America, that I was ever acquainted withal, to let the Children always fall to the Woman's Lot; for it often happens, that two Indians that have liv'd together, as Man and Wife, in which Time they have had several Children; if they part, and another Man possesses her, all the Children go along with the Mother, and none with the Father. And therefore, on this Score, it ever seems impossible for the Christians to get their Children (which they have by these Indian Women) away from them; whereby they might bring them up in the Knowledge of the Christian Principles. Nevertheless, we often find, that English Men, and other Europeans that have been accustom'd to the Conversation of these savage Women, and their Way of Living, have been so allur'd with that careless sort of Life, as to be constant to their Indian Wife, and her Relations, so long as they liv'd, without ever desiring to return again amongst the English, although they had very fair Opportunities of Advantages amongst their Countrymen; of which sort I have known several. As for the Indian Marriages, I have read and heard of a great deal of Form and Ceremony used, which I never saw, nor yet could learn in the Time I have been amongst them, any otherwise than I shall here give you an Account of; which is as follows. When any young Indian has a Mind for such a Girl to his Wife, he, or some one for him, goes to the young Woman's Parents, if living; if not, to her nearest Relations; where they make Offers of the Match betwixt the Couple. The Relations reply, they will con- sider of it, which serves for a sufficient Answer, till there be a second Meeting about the Marriage, which is generally brought into Debate before all the Relations (that are old People) on both Sides; and sometimes the King, with all his great Men, give their Opinions Week 4 p.20 ( 186 ) An Account of the Indians therein. If it be agreed on, and the young Woman approve thereof, (for these Savages never give their Children in Marriage, without their own Consent) the Man pays so much for his Wife; and the handsomer she is, the greater Price she bears. Now, it often happens, that the Man has not so much of their Money ready, as he is to pay for his Wife; but if they know him to be a good Hunter, and that he can raise the Sum agreed for, in some few Moons, or any little time, they agree, she shall go along with him, as betroth'd, but he is not to have any Knowledge of her, till the utmost Payment is discharg'd; all which is punctually observ'd. Thus, they lie together under one Covering for several Months, and the Woman remains the same as she was when she first came to him. I doubt, our Europeans would be apt to break this Custom, but the Indian Men are not so vigorous and impatient in their Love as we are. Yet the Women are quite contrary, and those Indian Girls that have convers'd with the English and other Europeans, never care for the Conversation of their own Countrymen afterwards. They never marry so near as a first Cousin; and although there is nothing more coveted amongst them, than to marry a Woman of their own Nation, yet when the Nation consists of a very few People (as now adays it often happens) so that they are all of them related to one another, then they look out for Husbands and Wives amongst Strangers. For if an Indian lies with his Sister, or any very near Relation, his Body is burnt, and his Ashes thrown into the River, as unworthy to remain on Earth; yet an Indian is allow'd to marry two Sisters, or his Brothers Wife. Although these People are call'd Savages, yet Sodomy is never heard of amongst them, and they are so far from the Practice of that beastly and loathsome Sin, that they have no Name for it in all their Language. The Marriages of these Indians are no farther binding, than the Man and Woman agree together. Either of them has Liberty to leave the other, upon any frivolous Excuse they can make; yet whosoever takes the Woman that was another Man's before, and bought by him, as they all are, must certainly pay to her former Husband, whatsoever he gave for her. Nay, if she be a Widow, and her Husband died in Debt, whosoever takes her to Wife, pays all her Husband's Obliga- Week 4 p.21 of North-Carolina ( 187 ) tions, though never so many; yet the Woman is not required to pay any thing (unless she is willing) that was owing from her Husband, so long as she keeps Single. But if a Man courts her for a Nights Lodging, and obtains it, the Creditors will make him pay her Husband's Debts, and he may, if he will, take her for his Money, or sell her to another for his Wife. I have seen several of these Bargains driven in a day; for you may see Men selling their Wives as Men do Horses in a Fair, a Man being allow'd not only to change as often as he pleases, but likewise to have as many Wives as he is able to maintain. I have often seen, that very old Indian Men (that have been Grandees in their own Nation) have had three or four very likely young Indian Wives, which I have much wondered at, because to me they seem'd incapacitated to make good Use of one of them. The young Men will go in the Night from one House to another, to visit the young Women, in which sort of Rambles they will spend the whole Night. In their Addresses they find no Delays, for if she is willing to entertain the Man, she gives him Encouragement and grants him Admittance; otherwise she withdraws her Face from him, and says, I cannot see you, either you or I must leave this Cabin, and sleep somewhere else this Night. They are never to boast of their Intrigues with the Women. If they do, none of the Girls value them ever after, or admit of their Company in their Beds. This proceeds not on the score of Reputation, for there is no such thing (on that account) known amongst them; and although we may reckon them the greatest Libertines and most extravagant in their Embraces, yet they retain and possess a Modesty that requires those Passions never to be divulged. The Trading Girls, after they have led that Course of Life, for several Years, in which time they scarce ever have a Child; (for they have an Art to destroy the Conception, and she that brings a Child in this Station, is accounted a Fool, and her Reputation is lessen'd thereby) at last they grow weary of so many, and betake themselves to a married State, or to the Company of one Man; neither does their having been common to so many any wise lessen their Fortunes, but rather augment them. Week 4 p.22

On Buying Wives for Slaves from Richard Ligon, A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbadoes, Illustrated with a Map of the Island Etc. ‐ London, Parker 1673 (Parker, 1673), 46‐ 47.

And we buy them [enslaved African people] so the sexes may be equal; for, if they have more Men than Women, the men who are unmarried will come to their Masters, and complain, that they cannot live without Wives, and desire him, they may have Wives. And he tells them, that the next ship that comes, he will buy them Wives, which satisfied them for the present… the bravest fellow is to choose first, and so in order, as they are in place, and every one of them knows his better, and gives him the precedence, as Cows do one another, in passing through a narrow gate, for the most of them are as near beasts as may be…