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

Natives, Newcomers, and Nicotiana: Tobacco in the History of the Great Lakes Region

21 Natives, Newcomers, and Nicotiana Tobacco in the History of the Great Lakes Region CHRISTOPHER M. PARSONS Coming ashore in a canoe from the upper Mississippi valley or from the Great Lakes themselves, an exchange of tobacco often mediated the cultural encounters between natives and newcomers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In the travel accounts of Frenchmen and missionaries , tobacco emerged as a central means by which encounters with the diverse aboriginal cultures of French North America were understood. For French travelers, knowing tobacco meant decoding the performative aspects of its consumption and, increasingly, understanding the symbolism of pipes, dances, and sacrifices. While traders, travelers, and missionaries often came to different conclusions about the significance of tobacco in particular encounters, they nonetheless agreed that the plant acquired meaning only in local use and that it lacked any innate or universal significance . At the same time, tobacco was a sacred plant to the aboriginal cultures of the Great Lakes region; Iroquoian, Algonquian, and Siouan peoples smoked and sacrificed tobacco to try to bring Europeans into relations with other-than-human beings and powers unknown to the newcomers.1 Knowing tobacco meant understanding the relationships with other-thanhuman forces that were vital to the survival of indigenous communities. These relationships were reaffirmed each time the sacred and otherworldly plant was consumed, whether it was smoked or sacrificed. Ultimately both natives and newcomers alike used tobacco as a means to make the unfamiliar comprehensible. 22| Christopher M. Parsons Describing an episode in his voyages in the late seventeenth-century Great Lakes, the Baron de Lahontan wrote: “Thus, without stopping at all of the villages, where I would have done nothing but negotiate and waste my time and tobacco, I resolved to go to the principal Village.”2 Lahontan suggests that tobacco had become inseparable from and even synonymous with contact. Yet the precise role of tobacco in the history of the Great Lakes region has remained somewhat elusive. This essay traces the coevolution of understandings of tobacco and conceptions of contact in the seventeenthand eighteenth-century Great Lakes region. Tying the story of how tobacco was understood and consumed to French and aboriginal experiences of contact , this essay analyzes how natives, newcomers, and species of Nicotiana became inseparable in complex encounters that depended upon all but were determined by none. The work of numerous anthropologists, archaeologists, and historians who have researched the material and ideational facets of early American smoking might appear to make these well-tread subjects. Yet scholars have been unable to agree on how best to study both of these aspects of the plant’s North American history. Some, it is clear, assign little merit to the plant itself, and focus instead on the human elements of its history. Studies that have focused on the exchange, burial, and, to some extent, use of pipes, for instance, have emphasized the antiquity of what Alexander von Gernet has named the “Pipe/Tobacco/Smoking complex” and have demonstrated its ubiquity among pre- and early contact populations throughout the Americas .3 Yet many scholars who have written about the material cultures of smoking seem to go to great lengths to avoid writing about tobacco. In the “Pipe/Tobacco/Smoking complex,” tobacco is presented as the simplest and most easily explainable ingredient. Documentary and archaeological records have been used to show the range and distribution of particular pipe styles, but tobacco quickly recedes to the background of narratives that focus instead on the “anthropocentric” dimensions of smoking.4 Its cultural contribution pales next to the vessels in which it was smoked, and, to generalize grossly, tobacco is presented as little more than a target of symbolic projection. Thus tobacco enters the story only as a holder of the meanings applied to it by humans, and the focus is on those areas where tobacco ceases to become a natural object and enters social worlds. As James Warren Springer has written, the story of smoking is too often told as one of “pipes and their associated materials.”5 In these works, tobacco is almost always a victim of ventriloquism, left to speak for race or class or gender, but with little to add of its own. Yet in other studies that focus specifically on the history of tobacco in Tobacco in the Great Lakes Region| 23 colonial North America, the plant is most often presented as a solid and transcendental biological agent. To know...