Bonds of Alliance: Indigenous and Atlantic Slaveries in New France by Brett Rushforth (review)

The standard view of the French settlement of North America has it that farmers, traders, government officials, and missionaries sought alliances with Native Americans to help them hold French territory against the aggressive and more numerous inhabitants of the British colonies. This view also shows the French as more accepting of native culture than the English, more willing to live on terms of near equality with the Indians and even form family relations with them. In this view, the bonds of kinship joined natives and French people. But Brett Rushforth reveals a darker side of the story. On the last page of his book, he claims that “the bonds of alliance that brought French and native societies together in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were inseparable from the bonds of slavery” (382).

Rushforth means the enslavement of Indians by both the French and their native allies. In fact, in an admirable piece of ethnohistory, the author reveals that in the Pays d’en Haut, that region of French-claimed territory “loosely bordered by Lake Huron on the east, the Minnesota River on the west, and the confluence of the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers on the south” (20), Indians had, long before the coming of the French, raided one another as well as native groups outside the area for captives. The raiders then enslaved these captives for various purposes but most notably as objects of power over their enemies. Furthermore, the natives sealed their alliances with groups they wished to befriend by exchanging slaves in a ceremony that not only bound two tribes together as one but signified to the world that the enemies of one would be the enemies of the other. Then when the French entered the Pays d’en Haut seeking to make trade and military allies of the tribes there, they had to accept gifts of slaves along with the obligations that such acceptance meant. Thus the French entangled themselves in an indigenous system of slavery that demanded they could only ally themselves to some native groups by participating in the enslavement of others.

Rushforth’s provocative conclusion gives the Indians real agency in starting and keeping alive a native slave trade in New France. Previous studies, while admitting natives kept slaves before the coming of the Europeans, credit the growth of the traffic in native slaves in North America to the labor needs of the whites’ economic system. And indeed, as French numbers increased and the economy of New France expanded, the capture and enslavement of Indians did become more of a colonial business enterprise. The French needed farm workers, domestic servants, and laborers to service the far-flung fur trade. Enslaved natives performed all these tasks and more, and Rushforth does a good job, using local sources such as church records, of showing how native slaves actually lived and worked in Montreal. He also shows that the tribes of the Pays d’en Haut proved quite willing to increase their slave raids so as to trade their new captives for French merchandise. However, the slave-trading tribes continued to engage in the human traffic for their own purposes. Indeed, they used their slave raids to check the spread of French power and influence. Because they were allies of the French, the slave raiders made the tribes living in the West resentful and afraid of the French, thus assuring that the French could not make new friends and trading partners of those tribes. But all this only increased the cycle of violence among the Indians and drew the French into costly conflicts. In the early 1700s, for example, the French fought engagements against the Fox Indians largely because their staunch allies—Ottawas, Ojibways, Hurons, Illinois, and others—wanted it done. Not surprisingly, numerous enslaved Foxes ended up in service to French families in Montreal and Quebec.

This much of Rushforth’s account would have been...