Wild Frenchmen and Frenchified Indians: Material Culture and Race in Colonial Louisiana by Sophie White (review)

Exposing the roots of racism in French colonial North America is a formidable challenge. Sophie White boldly argues for the centrality of material culture in that effort, examining colonial Louisiana during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Mapping identity analysis onto the evidence of material culture, White asserts that clothing, especially “cultural cross-dressing,” fundamentally mediated French-Indian encounters in the French villages of the Illinois Country, the urban center of New Orleans, and the wild hinterlands of Louisiana. In Upper Louisiana (the Illinois Country), the belief in mutable identity lingered at a time when “racialized” thinking began to penetrate Lower Louisiana (New Orleans), under influence from the Caribbean.

White elaborates on material culture and identity with a nuanced discussion of Frenchified Indian women in the Illinois Country. Frenchification, the policy of religious conversion and cultural assimilation of Indians, was the critical means by which the French intended to control the vast swath of North America they claimed. White demonstrates that this improbable policy met with some success in the Illinois Country, where Indian women became sincere converts to Roman Catholicism, married Frenchmen in sacramental ceremonies, and assimilated into a French manner of living. Marie Rouensa-8canic8e, daughter of a Kaskaskia chief, was the model for Frenchified Indian wives to follow, and White adduces her case to good effect. Using categories of gender and the body, White lends new interpretations to Father Jacques Gravier’s well-known narrative of Marie’s conversion and eventual marriage to a French trader in 1694. The material possessions of a freed Plains Indian slave who successively married three Frenchmen, and those of the illegitimate daughter of a French-Indian union, show that the belief in mutability was not limited by origin or status.

These Indian women and their métis children were full-fledged members of their communities in religion, legal status, and material goods. However, in New Orleans this did not apply. When the métis daughter of a French-Indian couple moved from Kaskaskia to New Orleans in order to join the Ursuline convent, she ran up against limits set by more fixed categories for non-whites. A young métis voyageur from Kaskaskia bound for New Orleans planned to traverse the wilderness maintaining standards of cleanliness (laundered clothes) he had learned from his French aristocratic guardian. A young French officer risked losing his French identity by adopting Indian dress during a journey across the hinterlands of Lower Louisiana; dressing, undressing, and reclothing are threads throughout the book.

The Illinois Country emerges in this study as a region of relative tolerance within French North America. Connections that White has made between Upper and Lower Louisiana reveal the breadth and depth of her research. Her expertise in textiles and articles of apparel is effectively supported by the color plates and figures. Less satisfactorily addressed in her argument are the African and Indian slaves in the households of Frenchified Indians. Some thoughtful speculation about them would have been welcomed, but this and a few errors in identification of persons are slight detractions in an otherwise absorbing study.