The Captors' Narrative: Catholic Women and Their Puritan Men on the Early American Frontier (review)

The Captors' Narrative is a revelation. Through an intricate, sophisticated, and informed reading of archival material from French Canada and New England from 1690 to 1760, as well as through an ingenious "reading between the lines" of published Indian captivity narratives, William Henry Foster has opened a new window onto the colonial period. For the first time, the meaning and significance of captivity for the captors (in this case, French Catholics in Canada) has been revealed, even as Foster reconstructs the experience of both captives and captors, especially as this was shaped by cultural constructions of gender and class.

In the double-entendre in the title of a study, Captured by Texts: Puritan to Post-modern Images of Indian Captivity (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1996), I sought to suggest that, on the one hand, important pieces of historical and ethnographic information had been captured in the hundreds of published captivity narratives. On the other hand, these texts are not transparent windows onto the past, since every generation's writers and narrators of these tales were themselves caught in cultural webs of signification that constrained the ways in which they could tell their stories. In his brilliant study, Foster affirms this point, extends it in important ways, and discloses the motives for capturing prisoners of war and engaging in the extensive trade in captives.

Perhaps the most important contribution of The Captors' Narrative is the disclosure of the important structuring role that gender played in both the experience of captivity and in the retrospective narration of captivity. New England Puritans regularly held collective days of humiliation, in which the community confessed its shortcomings and sins before God and asked for forgiveness. Foster, though, demonstrates that male captives suffered a different form of humiliation, both among the Indians and French Catholics, provoked by the captives' forced assumption of female forms of labor. In different, but not dissimilar, ways, Indians and French Canadian women stripped male captives of their sense of manhood. Indians frequently cut off captives' index fingers, making it impossible for them to engage in the male act of bow hunting. Instead, the male captives, who were not adopted to replace a deceased male relative, were relegated to doing women's work—grinding and cooking corn, gardening, hauling firewood, and so on. In both Indian and French Catholic communities, male captives were largely under the direct control of women, a situation that inverted the expected "normal" gendered power relationships. Foster convincingly argues that the conspicuous silences in male-authored captivity narratives about the captives' lives under the thumb of women are the direct result of the humiliation these men experienced. As a result, the power and agency of women in the colonial world has been largely effaced from the historical record.

Foster masterfully reconstructs the important roles that French Catholic women played in the colonial period. With husbands frequently away from home, engaging in the fur trade or military service, women managed farms, businesses, and estates. Catholic sisters also exercised important social and economic power. Most readers will be surprised to learn that Catholic nuns and secular women both participated in the slave and captive trade networks in the New World. Just as Katherine Burns has disclosed the critical social, political, and economic power cloistered women exercised in colonial Peru (Colonial Habits: Convents and the Spiritual Economy of Cuzco, Peru [Durham: Duke University Press, 1999]), Foster demonstrates the ways female agency was enabled and exercised in the North American context. The Captors' Narrative is a ground-breaking contribution to our understanding of the importance of gender and class in the colonial period.