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Foreshadows
- Michigan State University Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
Foreshadows T he story of the Mackinaw Mission shows how the Metis functioned as a distinct group of people after the War of 1812. Since the Metis embodied characteristics of both Indian and European-American cultures, a close look at their origins and development leads to an analysis of their social structure and the larger society in which they lived. This, in turn, provides a clearer understanding of the historical world in which Christian missionaries met Metis, tribal Indians, and European Americans. By viewing the mission as part of the larger community at Mackinac, the missionaries emerge as persons determined to change the beliefs and ways of everyone there, including the Metis. The experience of Metis children at the Mackinaw Mission exposed the dilemma which confronted them and their parents as they responded to the Americanization of their fur-trade society in the 1820s and 1830s. On the one side, they encountered changes instigated by advancing Americans; on the other side, they remained steadfast in their determination to carry on the fur trade. To continue in the trade meant devoting themselves to a business that endured for only a few decades more, even in northern Wisconsin and Minnesota. If the Metis chose to settle among and seek accommodation with the invading Americans, the prejudices of the Americans prevented them from being accepted as equals. The story of the mission demonstrates that although the Metis and the Americans initially shared a middle ground, it would have been difficult for the Metis to fit into American society even if they had surrendered their identity, which, of course, was not possible. There simply was not enough room to accommodate both groups for very long. After living together for 150 years, the cultures of the Chippewa, the European Americans, and the Metis overlapped. This enabled the Metis and European Americans to negotiate mutually acceptable ways of interacting economically and SOCially. A dynamic resulted where individuals reacted to both known and new stimuli; the introduction of new technology, ideas, beliefs, and objects into their personal environments transformed both their world views and behaviors. xxi BATTLE FOR THE SOUL In the fur-trade society, the Metis responded to the Americans from a position of familiarity. The Americans who entered the fur-trade society after the War of 1812 were, culturally, not total strangers. When Americans introduced new ways, the Metis found some of them not only acceptable, but desirable as well. For a time American traders perpetuated the middle ground, but they also served as forerunners for American agents of greater change. The traders lived and worked among the Native people of northern Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota in order to gain entry into the extensive Metis and Indian kinship networks , just as the French and British had done before them. The Americans employed French-Canadian clerks to manage important posts throughout the western Great Lakes; these men had previously worked for British merchants and who were married to Chippewa or Metis women. Some of the American traders themselves married Native women and lived the rest of their lives in the hinterland. Children in this new generation of Metis families grew up in a society shaped, in part, by the beliefs and practices of Americans in addition to the ways of their Chippewa, Odawa, British, French-Canadian, and Metis relatives and friends. As long as American entrepreneurs sought their riches in the fur trade rather than in agriculture, mining, or lumbering, the fur-trade society and the forested environment necessary to it persisted. In 1823, the Native people offered no resistance when William and Amanda Ferry organized a mission family at Mackinac, a center of American influence. The Ferrys established a familial order that was recognizable to the Metis children , enabling them to take their place in the school. Girls and boys accepted instruction in intellectual and practical skills from their mission parents that both resembled the experience of their own families and reinforced traditional gender roles as homemakers and providers respectively. Nor was the larger community initially unresponsive to the missions educational program, even though it promoted the Americanization of the fur-trade society. Many people at Mackinac welcomed the school; like many others in the northern United States, they endorsed formal, institutional education as worthwhile . The support for the mission by traders and clerks working for the American Fur Company reaffirmed the long-standing desire that European-American men working in the fur trade had to educate their Metis children in non-Indian ways. When...