French and Indians in the Heart of North America, 1630-1815

Introduction by Robert Englebert and Guillaume Teasdale

xi Introduction ROBERT ENGLEBERT AND GUILLAUME TEASDALE Scholarship concerning French-Indian relations in the heart of North America has seen a remarkable transformation over the past thirty years. From beyond the pale of historical inquiry, this area of study has gradually emerged as an important field for examining the complex relationships that defined a vast geographical area that for the purposes of this collection has been termed the heart of North America—the Great Lakes region, the Illinois Country, the Missouri River valley, and Upper and Lower Louisiana.1 The history of French-Indian relations has perhaps most obviously been defined by the historiographical intersection of French colonial history and Indian history. Yet these two historical disciplines have often made for awkward bedfellows, complicated not only by differences between their respective historiographies but also by differences drawn along national historiographical lines. FROM NATIONAL NARRATIVES TO FRENCHINDIAN HISTORY Initially tied to early national grand narratives, French-Indian relations in North America played out quite differently in the United States, Canada, and France. In the United States, French and Indians largely vanished from the historical narrative, masked by notions of Anglo-American exceptionalism and an expanding American frontier.2 Conversely, in Canada, French-Indian relations became an undeniable aspect of a national grand narrative that grew out of a focus on the westward expansion of the fur trade.3 And yet while French and Indians were seen as indispensable for understanding the fur trade, they were nonetheless depicted as remarkably predictable and essentialized characters , with little adaptability or motivation beyond subsistence. Constrained by xii| Introduction the economic and geographical determinism of an expanding fur trade and the creation of the Canadian nation-state, any discussion of French-Indian relations in the heart of North America has been limited.4 In France, the history of French-Indian relations was truly beyond the pale—at best a footnote, and at worst left out entirely in a fit of collective imperial amnesia following the traumatic loss of France’s colonies in Africa and Southeast Asia. Of course it is too simplistic to draw solid lines of distinction between different national treatments of French-Indian history. The division was never that stark, even if national grand narratives were, and continue to be, immensely influential.5 While scholars may not have been able to entirely escape the trappings of national grand narratives, this did not mean that scholars operated in a state of complete isolation from one another. Looking back on his seminal piece of scholarship regarding French-Indian relations in New France, Cornelius Jaenen paid tribute to his early influences, which included American, Canadian, and European scholars. Moreover, he noted that “historical research and writing thrives on intellectual cross-fertilization, i.e., on conversations and exchanges between scholars in cognate fields.”6 Ethnohistorical investigations of aboriginal societies brought historians, anthropologists, geographers, and archaeologists together in the 1950s and 1960s.7 This new Indian history dovetailed with the efforts of historians working on French colonial history in the 1970s.8 The American Society for Ethnohistory (1954), the North American Fur Trade Conference (1965), and the French Colonial Historical Society (1974) were but a few of the organizations and conferences that brought together scholars focusing on French-Indian relations from a number of different disciplines and nationalities.9 Ultimately, the study of French-Indian relations in the heart of North America owes its early beginnings to this cross-fertilization, characterized by the free flow of scholarship across national borders as well as early attempts at interdisciplinarity. BORDERS IN HISTORY Despite the transmission of ideas across national borders, the treatment of French and Indians in North America continued to be hampered by anachronistic adherence to national and regional boundaries in historical research. In a recent essay that examined fur trade historiography, Bethel Saler and Carolyn Podruchny likened the situation to that of a “glass curtain,” where academics saw to the other side, but did not cross over.10 This is a nuanced Introduction| xiii and salient interpretation precisely because it speaks to the mutual influence of scholars from different nations, even if their studies remained geographically constrained by national borders. Joseph Zitomersky, an American working as a French colonial historian in France, has expressed amazement at the ubiquitous nature of contemporary geopolitics in history and the persistence of national borders in French colonial history.11 This has been particularly visible in Canada. Allan Greer recently observed...