by Tiya Miles
26. John Mack Faragher, “‘More Motley than Mackinaw’: From Ethnic Mixing to Ethnic Cleansing on the Frontier of the Lower Missouri, 1783–1833,” in Andrew R. L. Cayton and Fredrika Teute, eds., Contact Points: American Frontiers from the Mohawk Valley to the Mississippi, 1750–1830 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 304–326, 305.
27. Middleton, Pontiac’s War, 65, 68; Dowd, Spirited, 35.
28. Middleton, Pontiac’s War, 65; Sturtevant, Jealous, 254.
29. Middleton, Pontiac’s War, 83.
30. Middleton, Pontiac’s War, 70.
31. Middleton, Pontiac’s War, 70, 72.
32. John Porteous Diary, Volume 2: Journal Pontiac’s Siege of Detroit, May 7–13, 1763, 17 (Wednesday, May 11, 1763), Burton Historical Collection, DPL. Middleton, Pontiac’s War, 72.
33. Carl J. Eckberg, Stealing Indian Women: Native Slavery in Illinois Country (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010), 14; Trudel, Canada’s Forgotten, 97.
34. Milo Milton Quaife, ed. The Siege of Detroit in 1763: The Journal of Pontiac’s Conspiracy, and John Rutherford’s Narrative of Captivity (Chicago: R. R. Donnelley, 1958), 43–44, 139.
35. Middleton, Pontiac’s War, 77.
36. Middleton, Pontiac’s War, 71; Parmenter, “Pontiac’s War,” 630.
37. James Sterling to Duncan & Co., July 24, 1763, Sterling Letter Book.
38. Parmenter, “Pontiac’s War,” 628.
39. James Sterling to John Sterling, October 6, 1763, Sterling Letter Book.
40. Quoted from Parmenter, “Pontiac’s War,” 628.
41. Dowd, Spirited, 35.
42. Parmenter, “Pontiac’s War, 630, 631.
43. Andrew J. Blackbird, History of the Ottawa and Chippewa of Michigan; A Grammar of Their Language, And Personal and Family History of the Author (Ypsilanti, MI: Ypsilantian Job Printing House, 1887), 7.
44. Parmenter, “Pontiac’s War,” 636–37; Quoted in Parmenter, “Pontiac’s War,” 635. After hearing a report about the peace conference that took place at Johnson Hall, the headquarters of Sir William Johnson in New York, Pontiac promised George Croghan, chief deputy to William Johnson, that he would not wage war again. Jon Parmenter argues that even as Pontiac agreed to peace, he did not admit guilt and used the opportunity to skillfully request gunpowder on credit from the British. Decades later, in 1769, Pontiac was killed by an Indian man near Cahokia, Illinois, in an incident unrelated to the war.
45. Katz, “Black Slavery,” 60.
46. Emily Macgillivray and Tiya Miles, “‘She Has Lived in Fashion’: A Native Woman Trader’s Household in the Detroit River Region,” accepted for Karen Marrero and Andrew Sturtevant, eds., A Place in Common: Telling Histories of Early Detroit (Lansing: Michigan State University Press, in progress).
47. Afua Cooper, The Hanging of Angélique: The Untold Story of Canadian Slavery and the Burning of Old Montréal (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2007), 81.
48. The foundational work of carefully recovering the history of slavery in New France was done by French Canadian historian Marcel Trudel in the 1960s, and by Afro-Canadian historian Afua Cooper (focusing on black slavery) and American historian Brett Rushforth (focusing on Indian slavery) in the early 2000s.
49. Trudel, Canada’s Forgotten, 15; Cooper, Hanging, 70.
50. Trudel, Canada’s Forgotten, 65–70; Brett Rushforth, Bonds of Alliance: Indigenous and Atlantic Slaveries in New France (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012), 169.
51. White, Wild Frenchmen, 7, 12.
52. Trudel, Canada’s Forgotten, 48.
53. Trudel, Canada’s Forgotten, 37; Cooper, Hanging, 72; Quoted in Cooper, Hanging, 75.
54. Marcel Trudel and his co-investigator, Micheline D’Allaire, conducted this count as part of a survey of French records. See Trudel, Canada’s Forgotten, 31, 34, 36, 41, 73, 61, 76, 83; for the research methods that resulted in these numbers, see 58–59.
55. Spear, Race, 59–63; While the Code Noir served as a guide for New France residents, it was not legally binding there according to Marcel Trudel, who argues that a new code would have had to be enacted to be legal, as in the case of Louisiana, Trudel, Canada’s Forgotten, 122; see 119–22 for a full summary of the provisions of the Code Noir.
56. For detailed summaries of the provisions of the two Codes Noir, see Spear, Race, 59–68; Rushforth, Bonds, 123–31.
57. Spear, Race, 72; Ekberg, Stealing, 89.
58. Ekberg, Stealing, 46.
59. Ekberg, Stealing, 13, 21. I am grateful to John Petoskey, the student who introduced me to Blackbird’s diary as part of our work on his honors thesis. Petoskey’s interpretation of the “Underground” people as Pawnees and as Ottawa captives spurred my use of this example; John Minode’e Petoskey, “Blood Quantum and Twenty-First Century Sovereignty in the Grand Traverse Band of Ottawa and Chippewa Indians,” undergraduate honors thesis, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 2016, 47–48; Andrew J. Blackbird, History of the Ottawa and Chippewa of Michigan; A Grammar of Their Language, And Personal and Family History of the Author (Ypsilanti, MI: Ypsilantian Job Printing House, 1887), 25–26; Martha Royce Blaine, “Pawnee,” Encyclopedia of North American Indians, Frederick E. Hoxie, ed. (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1996), 472. Rushforth, Bonds, 397.
60. This confusion held sway in the colonial period and in modern-day scholarship until Brett Rushforth offered a close examination and detailed explanation in Bonds, 169–73. For example, Marcel Trudel wrote in the first history of slavery in New France: “The Panis are the only Amerindian nation to appear each year in slave documents with such astounding regularity. There was a true Panis slave market, just as there was an ebony slave market.” Trudel, Canada’s Forgotten, 65. For another example of “Panis” interpreted as the single nation “Pawnee,” see Jorge Castellanos, “Black Slavery in Detroit,” in Wilma Wood Henrickson, ed., Detroit Perspectives: Crossroads and Turning Points (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1991), 85–93, 86.
61. New France records in Canada that mention slaves do sometimes list the captive person’s tribe of origin. This difference raises the question of whether French record keepers in the satellite post at Detroit, mainly priests, felt there was a greater need to suppress this information. Trudel, Canada’s Forgotten, 63–64.
62. Quoted in Rushforth, Bonds, 136, 393–95; Cooper, Hanging, 76; Trudel, Canada’s Forgotten, 45–54).
63. Trudel, Canada’s Forgotten, 46; Rushforth, Bonds, 137.
64. Cooper, Hanging, 76, 137.
65. Women dressing skins for trade: Karen L. Anderson, Chain Her by One Foot: The Subjugation of Women in Seventeenth-Century New France (London: Routledge, 1991), 159. Moccasins: Catherine Cangany, “Fashioning Moccasins: Detroit, the Manufacturing Frontier, and the Empire of Consumption, 1701–1835,” The William and Mary Quarterly 69:2 (April 2012): 265–302, 266, 268, 286.
66. Trudel, Canada’s Forgotten, 121; Jennifer M. Spear, Race, Sex, and Sexual Order in Early New Orleans (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009), 67.
67. Dowd, Spirited, 12; Brett Rushforth, “‘A Little Flesh We Offer You’: The Origins of Indian Slavery in New France,” in Alan Gallay, ed., Indian Slavery in Colonial America (Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 2009), 353–89, 366.
68. Rushforth, Bonds, 68.
69. Rushforth, Bonds, 66.
70. For detailed histories and analyses of French-Indian marriages, European-Indian marriages, and metís families, see: Susan Sleeper-Smith, Indian Women and French Men: Rethinking Cultural Encounter in the Western Great Lakes (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001); Kathleen DuVal, “Indian Intermarriage and Métissage in Colonial Louisiana,” The William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series, 65:2 (April 2008): 267–304; Anne F. Hyde, Empires, Nations, and Families: A New History of the North American West, 1800–1860 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2011); Lucy Eldersveld Murphy, Great Lakes Creoles: A French-Indian Community on the Northern Borderlands, Prairie Du Chien, 1750�
��1860 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014); Karen Marrero, “Founding Families: Power and Authority of Mixed French and Native Lineages in Eighteenth Century Detroit” (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 2011).
71. The French phrase à la façon du pays meant “in the custom of the country”; Duval, “Indian Intermarriage,” 267. Although many of these relationships are viewed by historians to have been consensual, there were risks involved for indigenous women who entered these cross-cultural marriages. They might gain access to trade goods and improve the status of their families through the creation of ties with influential traders, but they also became subject over time to French-Catholic understandings of hierarchical gender roles that emphasized men’s dominance over women and the expectation that a proper woman should serve and obey her husband; Anderson, Chain Her by One Foot, 55, 57, 226–27.
72. Catherine J. Denial, Making Marriage: Husbands, Wives, and the American State in Dakota & Dakota and Ojibwe Country (St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2013), 99–100; Sylvia Van Kirk, Many Tender Ties: Women in Fur-Trade Society, 1670–1870 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1980) 37–38.
73. Spear, Race, 18, 26, 37.
74. For the association of Native women and land, as well as the notion of Native women’s “rapeability,” see Audra Simpson, “The State Is a Man: Theresa Spence, Loretta Saunders and the Gendered Costs of Settler Sovereignty,” Theory & Event (forthcoming: spring 2017). Also see Sherene H. Razack, “Gendered Racial Violence and Spacialized Justice: The Murder of Pamela George,” Canadian Journal of Law and Society 15:2 (2000): 91–130. The historian Margaret Newell has shown through her reading of indirect sources that in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century New England, indigenous women (and girl) captives were also victims of sexual assault. She notes that women from high-status Native families sometimes received better treatment from their New England owners. Margaret Ellen Newell, Brethren by Nature: New England Indians, Colonists, and the Origins of American Slavery (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015), 82, 83, 126, 230, 63.
75. French New Orleans colonist Tivas de Gourville quoted in Spear, Race, 29; La Vente quoted in Spear, Race 24; Cadillac and La Vente’s views described in Spear, Race, 23–4.
76. DuVal, “Indian Intermarriage,” 269, 271.
77. Trudel, Canada’s Forgotten, 153; Rushforth, Bonds, 265; E. A. S. Demers, “John Askin and Indian Slaves at Michilimackinac,” in Alan Gallay, ed., Indian Slavery in Colonial America (Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 2009), 392–416, 401. An examination of Ste. Anne’s Church records from Detroit between 1760–1815 indicate that one slaveholder, Jean Baptiste, served as godparent to the infant of his Panis slave, Madelaine, and “an unknown father” in 1798. While this fact is not evidence of paternity, it does raise the question of whether a French father might use this religious kinship system to informally claim or create a link with an enslaved child. Ste. Anne Church Records, Bentley Historical Library, 86966mf 534c, 535c, 536c, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI. Used by permission of the Detroit Catholic Diocese.
78. DuVal, “Indian Intermarriage,” 279.
79. DuVal, “Indian Intermarriage,” 279.
80. Rev. David Bacon, a Protestant missionary from the Congregational Church Association of Connecticut, came to Detroit in 1800. Methodist minister Rev. Nathaniel Bangs came to Detroit in 1804. Poremba, Detroit, 71, 89.
81. Burton, City, 704; Edward J. Hickey, Ste. Anne’s Parish: One Hundred Years of Detroit History, ed., Joe L. Norris (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1951), 18; Detroit Places Ste. Anne’s Church, History, http://historydetroit.com/places/ste_annes.php. Accessed December 9, 2013.
82. This list of tribes comes from a review of the Ste. Anne’s Records, BHL, through 1819.
83. The term “Sauteuse” here indicates Ojibwe. For more on the various names and subgroups of Anishinaabe people in the Great Lakes, see Michael Witgen, An Infinity of Nations: How the Native New World Shaped Early North America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), 13.
84. Trudel states that the Campeaus (sometimes spelled Campaus) in Montreal were a tight-knit family with fifty-seven slaves among them although they were only “small-scale fur traders” and not among the ultra-rich; Trudel, Canada’s Forgotten, 259.
85. Judy Jacobson, Detroit River Connections: Historiographical and Biographical Sketches of the Eastern Great Lakes Border Region (Baltimore: Clearfield Company, 1994); Russell, Michigan Censuses, 1762 Census, 20. Campau family wealth in the 1800s: Gitlin, Bourgeois Frontier, 141–143. The Campau family papers in Detroit do not reveal many details of their slave transactions. Only one document describes the transfer of an enslaved “Negro” woman named Nancy from Jean B. Romain to his daughters on September 4, 1790. A transnational study of this slaveholding family that closely examined records on both sides of the border would be a revealing approach for further research. Campau Family Papers, Burton Historical Collection, Detroit Public Library, Detroit, MI.
86. Russell, Michigan Censuses, 1762 Census, 21–25. There are nine head-of-household Campaus listed in the 1762 census. Louis Campau had no accompanying details beside his name in the census and is therefore not listed in my summary. Michel or Alex Campau (first name is uncertain in the record) had no notations for the latter part of the census categories by his name, suggesting either that the information was incomplete or that he had no girls, boys, slaves, or paid workers in his household; he is not listed in my summary.
87. Ste. Anne’s Church Records, Reel 1, VII, 1744–1780.
88. James Sterling to Ensign J. S. Schlosser, June 12, 1762, Sterling Letter Book. I am grateful to Jonathan Quint for pointing out the reference to Native women in this letter.
89. Dowry: Crouch, “Black City,” 25; James Sterling to [?], February 26, 1765, Sterling Letter Book; quoted in Marrero, “Founding Families,” 281; Marrero, “Founding,” 282–83.
90. Independent trade routes: Crouch, “Black City,” 25.
91. Crouch, “Black City,” 1, 4; James Sterling to [?], Sept 29, 1765, Sterling Letter Book. Christian Crouch was the first to analyze Sterling’s preference for black male laborers. In her paper, “The Black City,” she carefully considers and leaves open the question of why Sterling preferred black male laborers, speculating that black men had a greater facility in travel because of a learned ability to get along with native people lacking in white men like Morrison.
92. Marrero, “Founding Families,” 276; quoted in Marrero, 282; quoted in Crouch, “Black City,” 25. Karen Marrero first makes this argument that a black slave was a status symbol for Angelique Sterling in “Founding Families,” 282.
93. James Sterling to [?], November 12, 1764, Sterling Letter Book.
94. To John Porteous, June 6, 1771, Letterbooks of Phyn and Ellice, merchants, at Schenectady, New York, 1767–1776 (Buffalo Historical Society-BHS Microfilm Publication No. 1), Vol. 1. For several other letters involving slave orders for Detroit, see Farmer, History of Detroit, 344.
95. For examples of freedom suits won on the basis of Native American ancestry (especially maternity), see: Lea VanderVelde, Redemption Songs: Suing for Freedom before Dred Scott (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 7, 39–56; Ariela Julie Gross, What Blood Won’t Tell: A History of Race on Trial in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 22–27; Ariela Gross and Alejandro De La Fuente, “Slaves, Free Blacks, and Race in the Legal Regimes of Cuba, Louisiana, and Virginia: A Comparison,” North Carolina Law Review 91:5 (June 2013): 1699–1756, 1733; Tiya Miles, “The Narrative of Nancy, A Cherokee Woman,” Frontiers, A Journal of Women Studies, Special Issue: Intermarriage and North American Indians 29:2, 3 (Spring 2008): 59–80; Ekberg, Stealing, 91, 93. In Spanish-influenced areas of the Caribbean, Florida, and Southwest, indigenous slavery persisted into the nineteenth century; see Andrés Reséndez, The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2016).
96. Marrero, “Founding Families,
” 272.
97. Marrero, “Founding Families,” 272, 287, 310; Quaife, Siege, 187.
98. Ekberg, Stealing, 68; Ste. Anne’s Records, May 30, 1764.
99. In his historical study of colonial French Illinois, Carl Ekberg describes this tendency by saying that Indian women were “reserved for white men”; Stealing, 76.
100. James Sterling to [?], January 10, 1762, Sterling Letter Book.
101. Ste. Anne’s Records, BHL. Our figure does not include enslaved babies listed as “mulatto” or with undesignated racial information, although some of these infants might well have been of indigenous descent. Carl Ekberg gives the number 167 for babies born to enslaved Indian mothers and white fathers in Detroit, citing Marcel Trudel; Ekberg, Stealing, 28. Trudel states that 177 “illegitimate children” were born to Indian slaves in Detroit; Trudel, Canada’s Forgotten, 204. Trudel notes here, too, that Native enslaved women outnumbered men, and he implies that white men’s attraction influenced this demographic imbalance.
102. Ekberg, Stealing, 75.
103. Jacobson, Detroit, 29. Cangany, “Fashioning Moccasins,” 285–86.
104. Demers, “John Askin,” 397–98. Re: Mannette, Detroit Notorial Register, Vol. A, June 11, 1768, Burton Historical Collection, Detroit Public Library, pp. 68–69.
105. Detroit Notorial Register, Vol. A, June 11, 1768, Burton Historical Collection, Detroit Public Library, pp. 68–69.
106. Armour and Widder, Crossroads, 36, 71. Jacobson, Detroit River, 36.
107. Detroit can be characterized as a “society with slaves” rather than as a “slave society” because the core feature of the economy (the fur trade) was not produced solely or mainly by slave labor, and other labor systems persisted alongside slavery here. Nevertheless, slavery was important to the stability and economy of the settlement. For a description of this distinction in places where slavery was practiced, see Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 8–9.
