Women, Kin, and Catholicism: New Perspectives on the Fur Trade

This article focuses on four Native women who were Christian converts and married French fur traders. As “cultural mediators” and “negotiators of change” they mediated the face-to-face exchange of goods for peltry in the western Great Lakes through Catholic kin networks that paralleled and extended those of indigenous society. Their reliance on kinship and Catholicism suggests new ways to study women’s involvement in the trade and to reassess how trade and religion affected Indian communities.