Indians' Marital and Intercultural Relationships in Colonial Louisiana

Week 4 p.1 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.

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