French and Indians in the Heart of North America, 1630-1815 ed. by Robert Englebert and Guillaume Teasdale (review)

This book unites new and established scholars in an interrogation of the nature and meanings of French and indigenous encounters in the heart of the North American continent. French and Indians in the Heart of North America, 1630–1815, seeks to understand and examine exchanges, or “bridge-building processes” (p. xxi) that took place between a vast array of people, places, and circumstances. The edited collection, published conjointly by the University of Manitoba Press and the Michigan State University Press, is grounded in vast geography: a heart of North America that assembles the Great Lakes, the Illinois Country, the Missouri River Valley, and Louisiana into a conceptual territory. Fruit of the ideas exchanged at an annual meeting of the French Colonial Historical Society, this collection expresses a desire to produce and engage in a conversation often divided by national, ideological, and methodological frontiers.

The co-editors of this collection, Robert Englebert and Guillaume Teasdale, new scholars themselves, bring together voices from France, the United States, and Canada in an attempt to homogenize isolated discourses into a clear reflection of plurality. The editors weave together an intellectual discussion loosely framed around rethinking tenets of Richard White’s middle ground concept “and at the same time, demonstrate the rich variety of French-Indian encounters that defined French and Indians in the heart of North America” (p. xxiii). The contributors featured in this edited work are engaged in diverse branches of historical inquiry such as ethnohistory, diplomatic and legal history, political history, social and economic history. Together, they offer a cursory look at the vast realities present in French-Indian encounters from the seventeenth to the early nineteenth centuries. In so doing, this book emphasizes the notion that the French presence in the heart of the North American continent is a topic still in the infancy of its research potential, since collaboration between scholars across the Atlantic and the forty-ninth parallel is only just beginning. As such, scholars of New France, Early America, and Colonial France may form the readership for this edited collection.

The essays found in this collection are divided thematically, which is an inevitable consequence of the wide temporal scope and vast geographies at the centre of the objective brought forth by the editors. By heavily focusing on the early days of the French presence in North America, the book makes a point to avoid engaging with the St. Lawrence valley and with the question of métissage, citing voluminous past historical scholarship in the French and English languages as their reason to do so. In so doing, it fills a gap in a line of questioning that has often been limited by national and cultural boundaries. The first six chapters of the book delve into the New France era, while only the last two go beyond its temporal reaches to look at the French presence after the British Conquest. Chapters one and two, by Kathryn Magee Labelle and Christopher M. Parsons respectively, are grounded in the theme of creative misunderstandings or the diverse and plural meanings present in the history of French-Indian encounters. Magee Labelle’s examination of the Wendat Feast of Souls and the attempt by the Wendat to incorporate the French into this key cultural, political, and religious celebration offers a particularly innovative look at how religious rites and cultures clashed at a moment of important political alliance-making in the Great Lakes region. Parson’s study of the indigenous importance of tobacco and the rite of smoking, as well as the inability of the French to conceptualize it outside of the bounds of their own cultural framework, reveals the importance of an ethnohistorical framework to conceptualize the plurality of realities present between settler and indigenous populations. Magee Labelle and Parsons demonstrate how misunderstandings came to be and explore their impact among various groups. By removing emphasis from the French...