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v. Together as Family A t Mackinaw Mission Metis children and Protestant missionaries brought together the ways of the fur-trade society and the emerging American republic. When William and Amanda Ferry attempted to Americanize their students and to convert them to evangelical Protestant Christianity; they met girls and boys intent upon retaining their own identity. The missionaries assumed the role of parents for boarding children, and together they created a family that met physical, intellectual, and spiritual needs of everyone. The children, their parents , and the missionaries negotiated understandings whereby new ways, brought by Americans, could be incorporated into the lives of Metis children at the mission without destroying the middle ground that upheld the fur-trade society. Although the missionaries failed to recognize that the childrens culture overlapped their own, it was on this middle ground that students and missionaries made changes and adaptations in response to each other. In addition, nearly everyone connected with the mission understood that the children from the Lake Superior country intended to return home to live with or near their parents and to spend their lives working in the fur trade. The children's and their parents' steadfast commitment to the fur trade forced the Ferrys to alter their original objective of transforming Metis and Indian youth into farmers and farmers' wives. The Ferrys, however, never wavered in their efforts to convert Metis and Indian children to evangelical Protestantism.1 Each child who boarded at the mission left his own family to become a member of a new, temporary family composed of himself, the missionaries and their children, and local employees of the mission. Both Metis children and evangelical missionaries came from communities where the nuclear family occupied a central place. This shared value formed a vital part of the middle ground that made the organization of the mission as a family understandable to both the children and the adults, who functioned as their surrogate parents. The Metis children of traders and clerks lived, studied, and worked under the close supervision of William and Amanda Ferry and their evangelical associates. Together they 103 BATTLE FOR THE SOUL formed an important part of Mackinacs population, and, like everyone else there, they lived in a social milieu which was evolving into a society dominated by American values and practices.2 Parents who boarded their children in the mission accepted it as a substitute family until the young men and women returned to their permanent homes. Parents voluntarily sent their daughters and sons and expected William and Amanda Ferry to function as a "stand-in" father and mother who cared for them. While the youngsters lived at the mission, the Ferrys fed, clothed, sheltered, nursed, and disciplined them. John Holiday, William Aitkin, Bazil Beaulieu, and other affluent fathers paid the mission $30 a year per child for board and tuition. Poorer fathers indentured their sons and daughters to the Reverend Ferry, who supported them with funds donated by friends of the mission. (At least fifty-four children were indentured during the mission's operation.) The indenture was a legal process, authorized by the Michigan Territorial Council, whereby the Reverend Ferry became the legal guardian of children bound to him.3 He viewed this as essential to keep students from being removed by "superstitious whim &: caprice of debased Parents."4 Parents generally enrolled their Metis children in the school after their sixth birthday, intending that their youngsters remain at Mackinac for only a few years. Table 7 reveals that over half (56.5 percent) of the children arrived when they were between six and ten years old, while almost another fourth (23.7 percent) were between eleven and fifteen; nearly 60 percent (59.3 percent) of the children were boys. Table 6 shows that about half of all children (48 percent) stayed only one or two years, while another third remained between three and five years. A closer look indicates that almost an equal percentage of boys and girls left after the first year (28.1/29.2 percent), but 26.3 percent of the boys departed after two years compared to only 9.8 percent of the girls. Another 27.78 percent of the boys went home after their third or fourth years, while only 12.2 percent of the girls followed a similar pattern. A greater percentage of girls remained longer than their brothers because their fathers needed their sons to assist them in the trade. Also, fathers probably hoped their daughters might find...

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