The rituals of possession: Native identity and the invention of empire in seventeenth-century western North America

Ethnohistory

Volumn 54, Issue 4, 2007, Pages 639-668

  Witgen, Michael ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN   (United States)

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EID: 35548967646     PISSN: 00141801     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/00141801-2007-025     Document Type: Article

References (67)

1. For Dablon, see The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents, 73 vols., ed. Reuben Gold Thwaites (Cleveland, 1896-1901) (hereafter JR), 55:107. In the original French version of this text it is said of Saint Lusson, "Il fit d'abord convoquer les peuples d'alentour," which I have translated as "he summoned the surrounding peoples." Thwaites's English translation of the Jesuit Relations has this same sentence as "he summoned the surrounding tribes." The difference is significant in that the word tribe as used here imposes a nineteenth-century racialized spatial category onto seventeenth-century native peoples.
2. For the significance of the region northwest of Lake Superior to New France, see "Extrait d'une lettre de Jean Talon au Roy," 10 October 1670, in Pierre Margry, Découvertes et établissements des Français de l'Amérique septentrionale, 6 vols. (New York, 1974 [1879]), 1:82-83.
3. For the northwestern interior and search for the Northwest Passage, see "Second extrait de l'addition au Mémoire de Jean Talon au Roy," 10 November 1670, in Margry, Découvertes, 1:87-89.
4. For Intendant Jean Talon's belief in the significance of discovering the Northwest Passage, see Bacqueville de La Potherie, "History of the Savage Peoples Who Are Allies of New France," in Emma H. Blair, The Indian Tribes of the Upper Mississippi Valley and Region of the Great Lakes (Lincoln, NE, 1996), 1:348.
5. For Talon on the French dependence on Indian allies for access and control of region northwest of Lake Superior, see "Premier extrait d'une lettre de Jean Talon à Colbert," 10 November 1670, in Margry, Découvertes, 1:83-84;
6. and "Extrait d'une lettre de Jean Talon au Roy," 2 November 1671, in Margry, Découvertes, 1:92-93.
7. The geographer David Harvey has argued that "the discursive practice of 'mapping space' is a fundamental prerequisite to the structuring of any kind of knowledge." In other words, mapping as a discursive practice actually creates power. "The power to map the world in one way rather than another," he writes, "is a crucial tool in political struggles." What I am trying to suggest here is that mapping, ceremonies, and other rhetorical strategies employed by the French fashioned simultaneously a cartographic text and a context for their empire in North America. This context, in turn, invented and legitimated the extension of their empire in the West. For quote, see Harvey, Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference (Maiden, MA, 1996), 111-12.
8. For a more extensive discussion of mapping and colonization, see also J. Brian Harley, "Rereading the Maps of the Columbian Encounter," Annals of the Association of American Geographers 98 (1992): 522-44;
9. William Boelhower, "Inventing America: A Model of Cartographic Semiosis," Word and Image 4 (1988): 475-97;
10. and José Rabasa, "Allegories of the Atlas," in Europe and Its Others, vol. 2, ed. Francis Barker, Peter Hulme, Margret Iverson, and Diana Loxely (Colchester, UK, 1985).
11. Charles II granted the newly formed Hudson's Bay Company title to "the lands and territoryes" of all the "streights, bayes, lakes, creeks and soundes" that drained into the bay. The company's charter, in effect, claimed possession of the interior of North America from Hudson Bay to the Rocky Mountains; The Royal Charter for Incorporating The Hudson's Bay Company (London, 1670). The French disputed this claim. They called Hudson Bay simply the Bay du Nord because of its location north of the French settlements in the Saint Law-rence River valley. The French argued that this bay was, irrefutably, a part of New France because "the English have always stopped at the Seaside making their commerce with the savages who came to find them there. " In contrast, they argued, "the French have not ceased to travel through all the land and the rivers that lead to the Bay, taking possession of all these places." For the French, discovery and possession in North America could not be separated from social relationships. To claim a particular landscape meant, in some way, to claim the people who inhabited it. The above quote is excerpted from a memoir submitted by the French to a claims commission established jointly by England and France to determine possession of the interior West. See Archives Nationales (hereafter AN) C 11E 2, Mémoire général sur les limites de la Baye d'Hudson. The French pursued a similar strategy in South America, linking possession to the idea of a consensual alliance; see Patricia Seed, Ceremonies of Possession in Europe's Conquest of the New World, 1492-1640 (Cambridge, UK, 1995); quote on 65.
12. The term Algonquian describes an extensive language family. Algonquian languages were spoken throughout North America, from the eastern seaboard to the Great Plains. This term has also been widely used, historically and by scholars, as a name or social designation for the speakers of Algonquian dialects. The French generally applied this name to the native residents of the pays d'en haut, even though not all peoples of this region were Algonquian speakers. The French commonly identified Algonquians from the upper country engaged in the fur trade as Ottawas, and they often used the two terms interchangeably. A Jesuit missionary, for example, wrote that "all who go to trade with the French, although of widely different nations, bear the name of Outaouacs [Ottawas], under whose auspices they make the journey." For Jesuit description of the Ottawa, see JR, 51:21. For a description of Algonquian identity in the context of the French alliance system, see Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815 (Cambridge, UK, 1991), xi.
13. Onontio was the name given to the first titular governor of New France, Charles Huault de Montmagny, by his Huron allies. Because the governor's name signified a mountain the Huron called him "Onontio," which meant mountain in their language. For description of the evolution of this identity, see ibid., 40. The alliance created a hybrid social world described by White as the Middle Ground. This was a "mutually comprehensible world" constructed by the French father and his children, that is, by the governor of New France and the Indian nations allied to the colony. The linguistic and ceremonial adaptation of an Iroquois word by Algonquian peoples illustrates how the alliance worked. Anthony Pagden argues that Europeans, similarly, understood executive power in their societies according to Roman law concepts which constructed the royal persona as a distinct political identity, a category separate from personhood. Political authority derived from this persona and rights in the empire were determined by the royal subject's relation to the king. This system, Pagden argues, was embedded in a model of the Roman family that gave parents absolute power over their children and created a language of personalized dependency. Although the governor never exercised absolute power over his allies, this model would have easily fit in the father-child relationship imagined by Onontio and his children. See Anthony Pagden, Lords of All the World: Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain, and France, c. 1500-c. 1800 (New Haven, CT, 1995), 140-46.
14. JR, 55:111
15. Ibid., 112-13.
16. For Dablon, see ibid., 110-11. For manidoo and the appeal to spirit beings as grandfathers, see A. Irving Hallowell, "Ojibwa Ontology, Behavior, and World View," in Teachings from the American Earth, ed. Dennis Tedlock and Barbara Tedlock (Toronto, 1975), 22;
17. and Bruce M. White, "Encounters with Spirits: Ojibwa and Dakota Theories about the French and Their Merchandise," Ethnohistory 41 (1994): 380.
18. By the eighteenth century this marriage of map and travel narrative became a convention of European exploration. Most analysis of this practice has focused on maritime exploration, notably by Cook and Vancouver. See, e.g., Daniel W. Clayton, Islands of Truth: The Imperial Fashioning of Vancouver Island (Vancouver, 2000). Clayton argued that by fashioning Vancouver Island as a "cartographic shell" represented as a space emptied of any social meaning outside of its discovery by Europe, "Vancouver contributed to an imaginative geography that recontextualized the Northwest Coast [of North America] from imperial vantage points." The Jesuits in North America, in a sense, operated as inland explorers. Their intimate association with native peoples, however, resulted in maps and cartographic texts with a unique emphasis on the outcome of colonial discovery and encounter - savage communities opened to proselytism, land opened to travel and trade, etc. - that provided a contextual understanding of the North American interior as a colonial possession of Europe.
19. For quote, see Clayton, Islands of Truth, 203.
20. See also Paul Carter, The Road to Botany Bay: An Essay in Spatial History (London, 1987);
21. Marshall Sahlins, "Captain Cook at Hawaii," Journal of Polynesian History 98 (1989): 371-425;
22. Sahlins, How "Natives" Think - About Captain Cook, for Example (Chicago, 1995);
23. and Gananath Obeyesekere, '"British Cannibals': Contemplation of an Event in the Death and Reconstruction of James Cook, Explorer," Critical Inquiry 18 (1992): 630-54.
24. JR, 55:95, 97.
25. Ibid., 95.
26. Ibid., 97.
27. Ibid., 100, 101.
28. Ibid., 103.
29. Anishinaabeg can be translated as "human beings" or "original people"; Anishinaabe is the singular form of this word. This term is significant as a self-referent used by multiple groups of Algonquian peoples that were identified by Europeans in the seventeenth century as distinct Indian nations. As my focus here is on Ojibwe-speaking peoples inhabiting the western Great Lakes and northwestern interior I am using a western Ojibwe orthography. "Anishinaabemowin," the linguists John Nichols and Earl Nyholm argue, "is not spoken in a single standard form but varies from place to place in sounds, vocabulary, and grammar"; Nichols and Nyholm, A Concise Dictionary of Minnesota Ojibwe (Minneapolis, 1995), vii.
30. See also Richard A. Rhodes, Eastern Ojibwa-Chippewa-Ottawa Dictionary (New York, 1985);
31. and William Warren, History of the Ojibway People (St. Paul, MN, 1984), 56-57.
32. Timothy Mitchell has described this European desire to inscribe social meaning onto the interior life of a subject population as an attempt to impose structure onto people and space that would otherwise appear as unreadable, or unknowable, to a European audience. See Mitchell, Colonizing Egypt (Berkeley, CA, 1988), 56-59.
33. Here I am conceptualizing kinship following Eric Wolf, who argued that kinship "is a particular way of establishing rights in people and thus laying claim to shares of social labor." Wolf argued that kinship "can then be understood as a way of committing social labor to the transformation of nature through appeals to filiation and marriage, and to consanguinity and affinity." This labor, he concludes, "can be mobilized only through access to people, such access being defined symbolically." See Wolf, Europe and the People without History, rev. ed. (Berkeley, CA, 1997), 91.
34. For the significance of Anishinaabe kinship networks to the development of the western Great Lakes as a colonial region, see Lucy Eldersveld Murphy, "To Live among Us: Accommodation, Gender, and Conflict in the Western Great Lakes Region, 1760-1832," in Contact Points: American Frontiers from the Mohawk Valley to the Mississippi, 1750-1830, ed. Andrew R. L. Cayton and Fredrika J. Teute (Chapel Hill, NC, 1996);
35. Susan Sleeper-Smith, Indian Women and French Men: Rethinking Cultural Encounter in the Western Great Lakes (Amherst, MA, 2001);
36. and Jacqueline Peterson, "Prelude to Red River: A Social Portrait of the Great Lakes Métis," Ethnohistory 25 (1978): 41-67-
37. For the Sauteur, metamorphosis and social transformation was a fact of life. For spiritually animate persons such as human beings, and for other-than-human persons such as spirit beings or animals, the body represented only shape and form. The ability to change form was not a physical impossibility but a question of control-power, or manidoo. This type of metamorphosis or shape-shifting exemplified the capacity to alter the natural world by changing identity to one or more of the other types of being that inhabited the universe. Sauteur shape-shifting suggested the continuity between the natural and supernatural, and between the natural and the social. For the Sauteur, shape-shifting was more than a metaphor; it was a fact of life that was as much a social reality as it was a spiritual reality. If some individuals had the power or manidoo to take the shape of animals, for example, it made sense that a Sauteur could also be an Ottawa, or an Amikwas, or any other social being. For the metaphysics of shape-shifting and analysis of the relationship between the natural and supernatural in the Ojibwe worldview, see Christopher Vecsey, Traditional Ojibwa Religion and Its Historical Changes (Philadelphia, 1983), 59-63; see also A. Irving Hallowell's statement that for the Ojibwe and their Sauteur antecedents "a natural-supernatural dichotomy has no place"; Hallowell, "Ojibwa Ontology," 30.
38. Adolph Greenberg and James Morrison have demonstrated quite effectively that the northern Ojibweg, descendents of the people that the French called the Sauteur, have at various times been known as Cree, Monsoni, Muskego, Gens des Terres, and several other ethnic designations; see Greenberg and Morrison, "Group Identities in the Boreal Forest: The Origin of the Northern Ojibwa," Ethnohistory 29 (1982): 75-102.
39. See, e.g., M. Du Chesneau's "Memoir on the Western Indians," in John R. Brodhead, Documents Relative to the Colonial History of the State of New York: Procured in Holland, England, and France, ed. E. B. O'Callaghan (Albany, NY, 1853-87) (hereafter NYCD), 9:160-61.
40. For Dablon, see JR, 54:133. For discussion of the totemic organization of the Sauteur, see Harold Hickerson, "The Feast of the Dead among the Seventeenth-Century Algonkians of the Upper Great Lakes," American Anthropologist 62 (1960): 84;
41. and Hickerson, The Chippewa and Their Neighbors (New York, 1970), 42-50;
42. and Charles A. Bishop, "The Emergence of the Northern Ojibwa: Social and Economic Consequences," American Ethnologist 3 (1976): 39-54.
43. Warren, History of the Ojibway, 87.
44. Greenberg and Morrison note that awasse was a synonym of marameg, both meaning catfish. They place the Awasse and Outchibou in the Chequamegnon area and detail references to these people from French and English sources that describe them interchangeably as Sauteur. This identity distinguished them from other Ojibwe-speaking people who lived, hunted, and traded in the western interior, and also connected both groups to Warren's western Sauteur bands the Catfish and Loon; see Greenberg and Morrison, "Group Identities," 87-90. See also Edward S. Rogers and Mary Black Rogers, "Who Were the Cranes? Groups and Group Identity Names in Northern Ontario," in Approaches to Archaeology, ed. Margaret Hanna and Brian Kooyman (Calgary, 1982);
45. Rogers, "Cultural Adaptations: The Northern Ojibwa of the Boreal Forest, 1670-1980," in Boreal Forest Adaptations: The Northern Algonkins, ed. A. Theodore Steegmann Jr. (New York, 1983);
46. and A. Irving Hallowell, "Notes on the Material Culture of the Island Lake Saulteaux," Journal de la Société des Américanistes 30 (1938): 129-40.
47. Nicolas Perrot, Mémoire sur les moeurs, coustumes, et religion des sauvages de l'Amérique septentrionale (Paris, 1864), 92.
48. Ibid.
49. Nicolas Perrot, "Memoir on the Manners, Customs, and Religion of the Savages of North America," in The Indian Tribes of the Upper Mississippi Valley and Region of the Great Lakes, ed. Emma Helen Blair (Lincoln, NE, 1996), 221.
50. For La Potherie's discussion of the Dakota raid against the Mascouten at Green Bay, and for the tensions between the refugees at Green Bay and the French, see La Potherie, "History of the Savage People," 343-45. For Dakota trading at La Pointe, see JR, 51:56; and ibid., 54:167, 191-93.
51. Perrot, "Memoir on the Manners," 222-24.
52. La Potherie, "History of the Savage People," 346.
53. The anthropologist Patricia Albers has described the social nexus of exchange relations in native North America as "a chain of social connections through which an interdependence was realized in the production and exchange of specialized goods." Albers argues that each of the categories of exchange described by the anthropologist Marshall Sahlins - generalized, balanced, and negative reciprocity - "emerged under relationships based on war (competition), merger (cooperation), and symbiosis (complementarity)." Warfare, she argues, could take place even between interdependent native peoples, or between native peoples and European traders. The diplomacy of exchange relationships therefore became deeply intertwined with the creation and negotiation of kinship boundaries and obligations. Talon recognized that the English provided interior bands with an alternate source of trade goods, and that this access would allow these peoples to keep their social distance from the French. This would, in turn, fragment the alliance and make the French fur trade more prone to violence. See Albers, "Symbiosis, Merger, and War: Contrasting Forms of Intertribal Relationship among Historic Plains Indians," in The Political Economy of North American Indians, ed. John Moore (Lincoln, NE, 1993), 99.
54. For the history of the rivalry between the French and English and their attempts to control trade relations in this region, see W. J. Eccles, The Canadian Frontier, 1534-1760, rev. ed. (Albuquerque, NM, 1999);
55. Harold A. Innis, The Fur Trade in Canada (Toronto, 1999 [1970]);
56. E. E. Rich, The Fur Trade and the Northwest to 1857 (Toronto, 1967).
57. For quote and French claims of prior discovery, see AN C11 E1 F186, Mémoire sur la domination des François en Canada, July 1687.
58. For a cogent analysis of the relationship between different types of exchange and kinship, see Bruce M. White, "The Fur Trade Assortment: The Meanings of Merchandise in the Ojibwa Fur Trade," in Habitants et Marchands, Twenty Years Later: Reading the History of Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Canada, ed. Sylvie Dépatie (Montreal, 1988), 115-37. White argues that the exchange of particular categories of merchandise, like food and alcohol, created and were a necessary condition of generalized exchange. That is, kinship demanded that these types of goods be given as gifts. Such gift giving, in turn, made possible the sort of complex direct exchanges-such as those that approximated credit - that were required in order for the fur trade to work.
59. The alliance that created Onontio and his children was a multiethnic exchange network. It provided a concrete means for different social groups to reinvent themselves as kin. Sahlins described "generalized reciprocity" as the social condition whereby people and goods flowed between groups out of a sense of obligation or social debt. Gift giving, like the ritual exchange of people or goods, created a connection or kinship between parties to the exchange. This kinship, whether literal or fictive, made long-term relationships possible between different social and ethnic groups. Kinship connections, in turn, created a social climate characterized by what Sahlins described as "balanced reciprocity" - the direct exchange of goods between partners of equivalent social status. The fur trade hinged on direct exchange between European traders and native hunters; that is, arrangements to hunt and trap specific furs in exchange for specified trade goods, often provided in advance by the trader. This interdependence, however, could also function as part of a symbiotic relationship where theft and raiding occurred in addition to intermittent periods of peaceful exchange. Such negative reciprocity could, in effect, create the same conditions of unbalance created by gift giving. In order to keep their alliance from continually fragmenting, the French struggled to maintain conditions of generalized reciprocity among their allies. The French fur trade, therefore, became completely intertwined with diplomacy and the rituals of alliance. For exchange and reciprocity, see Marshall Sahlins, Stone Age Economics (Chicago, 1972), esp. 168 and 193-95. For symbiosis and exchange relations, see Albers, "Symbiosis, Merger, and War," 100-112.
60. For the significance of negative reciprocity in the construction of multiethnic exchange networks, see James F. Brooks, Captives and Cousins: Slavery, Kinship, and Community in the Southwest Borderlands (Chapel Hill, NC, 2002).
61. For the activation of kinship ties as a means of mobilizing natural resources, see Wolf, Europe and the People without History, 91-92.
62. The military officer and fur trader Daniel Du Lhut, for example, conducted ceremonies intended to create a ritual kinship among the Sauteur, Dakota, Assiniboine, and western Anishinaabeg in 1679; see "Mémoire du Sieur Greysolon Du Lhut adressé à M. le Maquis de Seignelay," in Margry, Découvertes, 6:22. Perhaps more significant, he met with the "Cree, Assiniboine, Gens de la Sapinière, the Opemens d'Acheliny, the Outoulbys, and the Tabitis," at Lake Nipigon north of Lake Superior. He informed the governor that these bands promised to abandon the English at Hudson Bay and trade with the French. Many of these bands had participated in Saint Lusson's ceremony. "Opemens d'Acheliny" is a phonetic approximation of the Ojibwe phrase Nopiming daje inini, which meant "inland people" and which the French generally translated as Gens des Terres. The Outoulby and Tahiti were also bands that the French usually identified as Gens des Terres, and the Gens de la Sapinière, who later became known as the Bois Forts, had been identified as Cree who traded with the English during the 1670s. See "Extrait d'une lettre de Greysolon Du Lhut à M. de la Barre, Escrite au-dessus du Portage de Teiagon, le 10 Septembre 1684," in Margry, Dé couvertes, 6:51. Du Lhut's brother traded with over 1,500 native people above Lake Nipigon in 1685 and reported that "they did not have sufficient goods to satisfy them. " He reported that these people, the same who had promised to trade with the French in 1684, were accustomed to trading at Hudson Bay and would return to the English unless New France brought more goods and traders into the interior, see "Extrait d'une lettre du marquis de Denonville au marquis de Seignelay," 25 August 1687, in Margry, Découvertes, 6:52.
63. M. Du Chesneau to M. de Seignelay, 14 November 1679, in NYCD, 9:138.
64. M. Du Chesneau's Memoir on the Western Indians, and, 13 September 1681, in NYCD, 9: 162.
65. Ibid., 166.
66. Memoir of M. de Denonville on the State of Canada, 12 November 1685, in NYCD, 9: 286.
67. Ibid.