Wild Frenchmen and Frenchified Indians: Material Culture and Race in Colonial Louisiana by Sophie White (review)

In this study Sophie White focuses on the importance of the clothed body as a site of ethnic and identity negotiations. White suggests that the Illinois Country, with its relative tolerance of intermarriage between Frenchmen and Native women, provided a vision of identity that was more ‘flexible and mutable’ (p. 232) than the proto-racial discourses emerging in the French Caribbean and in Lower Louisiana during the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In the first part of her study White’s analysis of probate and succession records shows clearly that Indian women married to Frenchmen according to Catholic customs appropriated French dress and cultural materialism. Rather than a form of French acculturation, White views this appropriation as the wielding of ‘symbolic capital’ (p. 98) and as a continuation of Native traditions of cultural borrowings. This borrowing is meant to be one of the ‘less obvious ways of using objects to retain aspects of tribal culture’ (p. 101). While provocative, this claim is somewhat belied by White’s own evidence. The Indian convert Marie Rouensa’s use of her will to coax her eldest son back to the French and Catholic fold, for example, seems to suggest cultural assimilation rather than negotiation. The second part of White’s study turns to Lower Louisiana and the limits of identity flexibility. White highlights the story of Marie Turpin, a convert of Indian and French heritage who was allowed to join the Ursuline religious order in New Orleans, but only at the lower rank of converse nun. Similarly, White sees confirmation of identity anxiety in the example of Jean Saguingouara, a mixed heritage voyageur whose 1739 contract included the only known laundry clause. Contextualizing this preoccupation with cleanliness within the framework of European conceptions of identity, White draws the link between clean clothing, as opposed to clean bodies, and Frenchness. In contrast, White argues that body grease and Native attire, worn by the French in a purely functional manner in the colonial hinterland, were merely a ‘temporary yielding to a cross-cultural identity’ (p. 227) that was easily reversible. Despite this final chapter on French sartorial choices in Louisiana, the ‘Frenchified’ Indians are the true focus of this work. Yet White does not succinctly define the term ‘Frenchified’. Indeed, her attention to the heterogeneity of the Native Americans is not extended to the French, flattening the differences between Canadians, metropolitan Frenchmen, and French colonists in Louisiana. Moreover, while White’s attempt to draw larger conclusions from these case studies is admirable, at times her rhetorical analysis proves more persuasive than the underlying evidence. The laundry clause in Jean Saguingouara’s cancelled contract, for example, does not convincingly demonstrate (at least for this reviewer) that the cleanliness of clothes was of widespread concern to mixed ancestry individuals in Louisiana. Nonetheless, White’s approach is innovative and her conclusions are intriguing. This study represents an important contribution to identity studies in the context of French colonial Louisiana and is certain to provoke lively discussions and responses.