Kathleen DuVal

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Kathleen DuVal | Indian Intermarriage and Métissage in Colonial Louisiana | The William and Mary Quarterly, 65.2 | The History Cooperative

Indian Intermarriage and Métissage in Colonial Louisiana

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. After the Seven Years' War ended in 1763 and the Spanish and British split the colony of French Louisiana along the Mississippi River, the Quapaw continued their good relationships with the French colonists who remained and formed new alliances with the Spanish and British governments.¹	1
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. Abundant scholarship has shown that in the western hinterlands of New France (Canada) many Indian women married European men, either in the Catholic Church or à la façon de pays (in the custom of the country). These marriages and the children born from them helped to foster trading ties between peoples and established and maintained the economic and diplomatic basis of New France. Given the pervasiveness of trade marriages in the Canadian fur trade, scholars have assumed that voyageurs and coureurs de bois (unlicensed traders) in colonial Louisiana, many of whom were French Canadian, established similar unions with Louisiana's Indian women. As one historian put it, bringing the "manner of living" and "attitudes" from the north, Frenchmen in Louisiana "learned the Indian languages, practiced Indian customs, and slept with Indian women." Others have claimed that early French settlers in Louisiana "consolidated their relationships with Indian nations by marrying Indian women" and "became more and more like the Native Americans with whom they resided and married." A history of Marie Louise's people claims that "from the earliest times there must have been a considerable amount of intermarriage and concubinage between the Frenchmen of the Arkansas [Post] and the women of the Quapaw nation."²	2
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.³	3
The idea of Indian women forging ties between French and Indian men is appealing. It allows historians simultaneously to acknowledge Indian women's importance, note the continuation of precolonial economic and diplomatic practices, and demonstrate that Indians often set the conditions of trade with Europeans. Understandably, historians who have tested this model's applicability to Louisiana have concentrated on the place French administrators and priests identified as a hotbed of métissage, the Illinois country and the southern Great Lakes (the pays d'en haut). Indeed their work has uncovered significant rates of métissage between Frenchmen and women of that region's Indian nations, including the Illinois, Miami, and Potawatomi, and has deepened scholarly understanding of certain kinds of French-Indian relationships in trade, settlement, and religion. But it does not follow that traders married Indian women and produced métis children throughout French North America.⁴	. . .

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