Mémoires of Michilimackinac and the Pays d'en Haut: Indians and French in the Upper Great Lakes at the Turn of the Eighteenth Century ed. by José António Brandão (review)

Mémoires of Michilimackinac and the Pays d'en Haut contains José António Brandão's English translations of three previously-published documents, all of which describe the importance, to French colonial efforts in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, of Michilimackinac and the various Native American inhabitants of the pays d'en haut. A successor to Brandão's Edge of Empire: Documents of Michilimackinac, 1671–1716, this collection presents new annotated English translations of the following documents: the Relation du sieur De lamotte Cadillac; D'Aigremont's Mémoire of 14 November 1708; and Begon's Mémoire on the Establishment of Michilimackinac from September 1713.

Brandão prefaces the documents with a lengthy introduction, which places the early eighteenth-century texts in their proper historical context, explains the various inadequacies or omissions of previous English translations, and traces the history of the documents themselves. Although at times hard to follow, the story of Cadillac's mémoire is a particularly fascinating bit of manuscript detective work. Brandão details the journey of the only existing copy of the original manuscript from the grounds of the Palace of Versailles in France to its present-day location at the Newberry Library in Chicago. In his introduction, Brandão is critical of the nineteenth-century edition of Cadillac's mémoire, which was published by renowned French historian and archivist Pierre Margry. By examining the original manuscript copy, Brandão discovered that Margry made significant changes to the original manuscript. Margry's various omissions, rewrites, and mistranslations are reflected in the document's original English translation, as those translations were solely based on Margry's flawed version.

The purpose of Brandão's new translation is to make the documents more accessible to professional historians, students, and other researchers; however, his annotations for the English translation are aimed at readers who may have only a casual knowledge of the subject. Throughout the translated text, Brandão's copious footnotes provide appropriate historical and cultural context, explaining the meaning of difficult phrases or noting the present-day name of the geographical locations mentioned in the original French whenever possible. For experienced scholars with a reading knowledge of French, Brandão's work is entirely transparent, as he includes the original French version of the manuscript alongside his English translation. Also, for the sake of further investigation into the topic, an appendix to the three mémoires provides an impressive reference list of other translated early French documents relating to Michilimackinac and the pays d'en haut.

For scholars of colonial North America who wish to foreground the experiences of Indigenous nations, accurate translations of European documents, like Brandão's, are essential. Brandão himself acknowledges this in the introduction, pointing to the recent work of historians Michael McDonald and Michael Witgen as examples of the potential for the reconsideration of familiar sources in terms of breaking new ground in the field of Native American history. As it stands today, the relevant issue is not the accuracy of early French accounts of various Native American nations and their customs, but what those recorded European perceptions say about the relationship between colonial officials, settlers, traders, missionaries, and their Native American neighbours. As recent scholarship has clearly demonstrated, Native American polities were far more central to the history of this period and held distinct political, diplomatic, and military advantages for far longer than once assumed by previous generations of European, American, and Canadian scholars.

Many historians working in the field of early North America have developed a love/hate relationship with the paucity of documents pertaining to this important time period. While many early North American...