An Infinity of Nations: How the Native New World Shaped Early North America

Chapter 5. An Anishinaabe Warrior’s World

Chapter 5 An Anishinaabe Warrior’s World The hybrid murder trial/condolence ritual staged by Du Lhut preserved the French alliance in the heart of the Great Lakes, but it did not extend the alliance into the west. In fact, Oumamens successfully co-opted the trial in order to stifle opposition to the Anishinaabe alliance with the Dakota among the doodemag of Anishinaabewaki. This success provided the peoples from the village La Pointe and the region west of Gichigamiing (Lake Superior) with secure access to the Native New World emerging in the western interior (Figure 5). The Anishinaabe-Dakota alliance also offered some refuge to French traders who carried goods into the Mississippi valley and beyond, but even after the trial they faced fierce opposition among the peoples of Green Bay. When European traders entered the west they entered another New World, one that was filling up with new peoples as the native inhabitants of the interior of North America began to reimagine their social worlds. Voyaging onto the prairie parklands of the northwest from their post at Lake Nipigon , Daniel Du Lhut and his brother Claude caught glimpses of this other Native New World, and of the “undiscovered” infinity of nations emerging on this landscape. Farther south on the northern and central Great Plains Native peoples began to experience a rebirth that was perhaps even more dramatic. In the last decades of the seventeenth century a combination of guns, metals, and horses brought social, cultural, and political changes to this region that were at once dynamic, transformative, and ferociously destructive. In 1684, while Daniel Du Lhut dealt with the deadly consequences of his intrusion into the Native politics of the inland trade, Nicolas Perrot made a similar intervention. La Potherie, the chronicler of New France, incorporated Perrot’s efforts to extend the French fur trade into the west within his Histoire de l’Amérique Septentrionale. In this narrative he described the trader’s attempt to establish a post among the Dakota, and he narrated French ambition Figure 5. Hubert Jaillot, “Le Canada ou Partie de la Nouvelle France dans l’Amérique Septentrionale . . .” Paris, 1696. Courtesy Hudson’s Bay Company Archives, Provincial Archives of Manitoba, G. 5/24 Plate 6 (N15247). The map details the water routes connecting northern Lake Superior with the Hudson’s Bay coast. An Anishinaabe Warrior’s World 225 to claim the peoples and resources of the west as part of New France. “The north was known, and the south gradually revealed,” he wrote, but “it was still necessary to penetrate the west where it was known that many Nations lived.”1 Nicolas Perrot, like Du Lhut, would attempt to “discover” and more importantly open trade with the unknown infinity of nations residing in the heartland of North America. And like Du Lhut, he would discover that the alliance system that served the French so well in the east could become a dangerous political liability in the west. Shortly after Perrot helped to restore a sense of calm to the villages of Green Bay by redeeming an Anishinaabe captive from the Mesquakie, his men began to hear stories about the western interior from their Native allies. According to La Potherie, Perrot and his men became “greatly excited by all the speeches the savages made to them, they only heard talk at the bay of the new nations that were unknown to us.” Some living at Green Bay had traveled to the southern plains where they met men on horseback and traded for turquoise. Others had traveled across the northern plains to the junction of the Red and Assiniboine Rivers where they acquired hatchets from the Upland Indians who traded at Radisson’s Hayes River post in the country of the Penesewichewan Sepee. “All these reports,” La Potherie wrote, “gave birth to an attempt to do something considerable.”2 Encouraged by stories of intercontinental trade, Perrot decided to lead his small party of Frenchmen into the country west of the Mississippi River valley . He moved inland from the French post at Green Bay in the company of a band of Western Abenaki Indians, refugees from the brutal conflict with the English in western New England. This band had a history of raiding in the Dakota country, and had recently returned from raiding with the Illinois along the southeastern edge of the plains. As Perrot traveled west word spread of their journey and a...