From "Marrying-In" to "Marrying-Out": Changing Patterns of Aboriginal/Non-Aboriginal Marriage in Colonial Canada

Although considerable work has been done on the nature of intermarriage in fur trade society there has been little attempt to fit these patterns into the larger colonial context or to examine their legacy for settler/Aboriginal relations. This article offers a broader analytical framework and raises some of the fundamental questions that need to be asked. It argues that over the course of the colonial period, from the early seventeenth to the late nineteenth centuries, the practice of Aboriginal/non-Aboriginal marriage shifts from "marrying-in" to "marrying-out."¹ I deliberately use the term "marrying-in" to focus on the host Aboriginal societies whose homelands at the time of European contact later became Canadian territory. Especially in the fur trade context, a major impetus for such unions came from Aboriginal groups themselves. The idea was to create a socioeconomic bond that would draw the Euro-Canadian male into Native kinship networks. However, by the end of the colonial period, intermarriage had been transformed by settler society into "marrying-out." Aboriginal women lost their Indian status if they married nonstatus males. Aboriginal groups were deprived of any say in the matter and their kinship structures were ignored.

Charting the course of how this happened over several centuries raises challenging questions and demonstrates how such a study must be nuanced in terms of the intersection of race and gender. Historically much concern was expressed by colonizers over such unions because of their cultural and racial implications. The marital union of European and Aboriginal was perceived as problematic because it symbolized the mixing of irreconcilable dichotomies: civilized versus primitive and Christian versus heathen. It must be remembered that even though such notions are discredited today, Europeans in the past were quite apprehensive about mixing with those they categorized as being of a different and lesser race and whose "degenerate" qualities they thought could be transmitted by blood. ² In the context of colonial Canada it also becomes apparent that the phenomenon of intermarriage was not gender neutral. In the majority of cases the union was between a Euro-Canadian man and an Aboriginal woman. This pattern has been accepted as a given while the racial and gender hierarchies that are embedded in this dynamic have not been subject to much analysis. This is starkly revealed in the rarity of the reverse union (that is, Aboriginal man married to a Euro-Canadian woman) and the negative reaction to such an occurrence.

Given the complexities of cross-cultural sexual and marital practices it is necessary to explain how I am defining "marriage" throughout this study. European commentators, especially religious ones,were quite certain that only their marital practices had legitimacy and were adamant that Aboriginal people adopt them. ³ Aboriginal people, of course, thought otherwise; for them, polygamy and divorce were widely accepted concepts. In the Canadian fur trade one finds European men willing to accept or tolerate Aboriginal marital practices to an unusual extent. This becomes quite a complicated social and legal context, but it is significant that a fascinating Canadian court case in 1867 highlighted the essential components of a marital union that were adhered to in both Aboriginal and Euro-Canadian societies: a marriage was defined as being openly recognized and characterized by mutual consent, cohabitation, and public repute as husband and wife. ⁴

In Canada the widespread and long-lasting phenomenon of the fur trade assumes great importance in accounting for the frequency of Aboriginal/non-Aboriginal marriage. This is in contrast to contexts where a settler agenda is more explicit, such as in New England for example. In Acadia and New France, fur trade and military concerns were intertwined with small-scale settlement projects, which contributes to the perception that intermarriage was more commonplace than it actually was. There is a general impression that...