French and Indians in the Heart of North America, 1630–1815 ed. by Robert Englebert and Guillaume Teasdale (review)

Robert Englebert and Guillaume Teasdale have drawn together a diverse but interesting collection of essays in their book, French and Indians in the Heart of North America, 1630–1815. They construct the sprawling geographical space across which the French and their trade moved in these nearly two centuries as the “heart of North America”: a useful shorthand for describing the Great Lakes region, the Illinois Country, the Missouri River valley, and Upper and Lower Louisiana. Englebert and Teasdale argue that the historiography of the French-Indian relationship in the heart of North America has struggled with challenges created by adherence to anachronistic national and linguistic borders. They suggest that as a result, French, American, and English- and French-Canadian scholars have been shaped and constrained in their approach for many years. The editors argue the groundbreaking work of Jacqueline Peterson and Richard White into miscegenation and the middle ground, respectively, as well as the subsequent works inspired by them, have helped to revitalize the field. Symptomatic of that reinvigoration was the exciting work presented, by both established scholars and a number of emerging young academics, at the French Colonial Historical Society conference in 2008, which inspired this collection and from which a number of the contributions are drawn. The editors are quick to point out that this is more than a conference proceedings, however, with each paper significantly expanded and reworked, and a number of others added to round out the collection. Taken as a whole, Englebert and Teasdale’s collection is intended to examine the complexity and multiplicity of the French-Indian encounter in ways that move beyond the paradigms of métissage and the middle ground.

This edited book largely succeeds in its purpose because of the generally high quality of the contributions, despite their quite diverse nature. The eight essays range across a broad temporal, geographical, and cultural expanse, organized in loosely chronological order, from Kathryn Magee Labelle’s nuanced exploration of the diplomatic implications of French participation in the Wendat Feast of Souls in 1636 to Nicole St-Onge’s superb micro-historical examination of the social economy of French-Canadian voyageurs in the 1810–12 Astoria Overland expedition to the Columbia River. Christopher M. Parsons’s sophisticated piece on tobacco, the theatricality of smoking, and the understandings/misunderstandings of its cultural significance between French and Indigenous peoples of the seventeenth century stands out for its originality. Fine essays by Robert Michael Morrissey regarding Jesuit and other French missionary agencies’ debates about the acceptable degree of accommodation of Indigenous culture and language in the Illinois Country, together with Gilles Havard’s thoughtful look at French notions of sovereignty and citizenship in relation to Indians, ensures that French intellectual and philosophical perspectives are well covered. Similarly, Richard Weyhing’s essay on the Sieur de Cadillac and the founding of colonial Detroit and John Reda’s excellent examination of two prominent French traders in Illinois Country during the transition from French to Spanish to American rule provide novel understandings of key French figures in the region. Indeed, the weight of the collection leans firmly to the French side of the cultural exchange – a source of both strength and weakness. On the one hand, it opens the book to the critique that it lacks a balance of Indigenous and French perspectives on their relationship that the title and introduction of the book imply. On the other hand, the continuity of focus lends the collection some of the conceptual cohesion that makes it successful. The litmus test of a good edited collection is whether its totality is somehow greater than the sum of its parts, and on balance, the French and Indians in the Heart of North America, 1630–1815, achieves this goal.