Intimacy and Violence in New France: French and Indigenous Relations In
Claiborne A. Skinner. The Upper Country: French Enterprise in the Colonial Great Lakes. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008. xiv + 202 pp. $25.00, paper, ISBN 978-0-8018-8838-0. Reviewed by Bryan Rindfleisch Published on H-Canada (November, 2011) Commissioned by Stephanie Bangarth (King's University College, UWO) Claiborne A. Skinner offers a concise synthe‐ and downturns that rendered any imperial plan‐ sis for the history of the “French Middle West,” or ning utterly useless and forced the French in New France, during the seventeenth and eigh‐ North America to rely on the everyday interac‐ teenth centuries. Largely aimed at diffusing the tions and relations forged with their Native Amer‐ “popular myths” surrounding French colonization ican neighbors as a means for stability in the ab‐ in the Great Lakes region that revolves around sence of support from the imperial metropolis.[1] the benevolent Jesuit missionary and heroic fur In fact, Skinner suggests that this intimacy be‐ trade trapper carving out a French empire in tween the French and Great Lakes Indians (the North America while enjoying harmonious rela‐ Huron, Ojibwe, Illiniwek, Ottawa, Potawatomi, tions with indigenous peoples, Skinner instead Fox, Saux, Menominee, etc.) proved to be the only posits the imperial designs of the French in Cana‐ sustainable feature of the French North American da and the Illinois country as violent and factious, empire, and that when this coalition disintegrated and a site of constant negotiation and conflict during the eighteenth century, so too did New with other Europeans, native populaces, and even France, largely as a product of intertribal Indian the varying factions of the French themselves.
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