Bonds of Alliance: Indigenous and Atlantic Slaveries in New France

Epilogue: Of the Indian Race

369 epilogue of the IndIAn rAce The alliances that allowed French expansion into the Pays d’en Haut in the 1660s brought indigenous and Atlantic slaveries into a dialogue that would shape Native and French colonial societies for a century. French losses in the Seven Years’ War drew them apart. Forced to cede Quebec in 1759 and Montreal and the western posts in 1760, France yielded all of its North American colonies to Britain and Spain in 1763. Although French population , culture, and language remain important in Canada and the Pays d’en Haut to this day, French colonial realignment so thoroughly severed connections between Canada and the French Caribbean that the historical memory of their earlier ties all but disappeared. If silently, the legacies of the previous century continued to influence the way Native and French communities thought about and practiced slavery. In North America, the complexities of alliance politics that drove the slave trade throughout the French period faltered temporarily with the assumption of British control but continued to guide colonial-Native relations in the territories formerly claimed by France. As British traders and colonial leaders arrived at Detroit and Michilimackinac in the 1760s, the Indians of the Pays d’en Haut greeted them with caution, unsure of how the newcomers would behave. Both sides seemed prepared to make new accommodations and create new norms, but negotiating the terms of the relationship —from material questions like the price of goods to cultural questions like what language to speak—proved difficult. As it did with the French, slavery became both a source of tension and a site of creative adaptation in British-Indian relations. Over the previous hundred years, Native responses to French colonialism, especially strategic slave raids targeting potential French allies, had only deepened the connections between indigenous slavery and alliance. These raids also served to reinforce ethnic distinctions among the Indians of the Pays d’en Haut, countering early French efforts 370 Epilogue to cluster all of the region’s Indians into a single category. The significance of Natives’ regional and linguistic divisions, as well as the ways that slavery both revealed and reinforced them, was lost on most British officials, who carried to the Pays d’en Haut a set of ideas about Indians that emphasized their supposed racial similarities over their cultural and historical particularities . By misreading this essential aspect of slavery’s history in French North America, British officers blundered their way into a conflict that grew to terrifying proportions in 1763, when an Ottawa warrior named Pontiac struck back after the execution of an enslaved Indian woman at Detroit. Although the violence of Pontiac’s War intensified anti-Indian racial thinking in Britain’s eastern colonies, a grudging accommodation returned to the former French settlements, restoring the Indian slave trade to Detroit and Michilimackinac. Following patterns of kin making and forced assimilation that emerged in French, Native, and métis households during the first half of the eighteenth century, Indian slavery continued in the Pays d’en Haut well into the 1790s.1 A very different dynamic emerged in the Caribbean. During the final three decades before New France fell to the British, the Indian slave trade from Canada to Martinique created commercial interests that countered the persistent pressure to ban Indian slavery in the Caribbean. Because there was money to be made from Canadian slaves—in the slave trade and by the labor they provided—Caribbean planters resorted to elaborate arguments to make legal and moral space for Indian slavery. New France supplied the narratives of justification that allowed Caribbean officials to declare Panis Indians legitimate slaves, injecting just-war rhetoric into discussions of Caribbean slavery long after the islands had shifted toward more racially charged rationales. The end of New France’s slave trade in the 1760s thus silenced a counternarrative to the resurgent story of natural slavery, which equated African ancestry with an unfitness for freedom and civic equality. Inverting this racial logic, Caribbean colonists and royal officials crafted a new set of laws guaranteeing freedom to members of the “Indian race,” suggesting that they had never been meant for slavery. They also reimagined the history of Indian slavery in the French Atlantic in ways that simultaneously denied its importance and explained its failures in racial terms. Far from a straightforward description of the colonial past, the idea that 1. Gregory Evans Dowd, War under Heaven: Pontiac, the Indian Nations, and the British Empire (Baltimore, 2002); Peter Silver, Our Savage...