Rethinking Cultural Encounter in the Western Great Lakes
The Great Lakes region was an important site of cultural as well as economic exchange between native and European peoples in the colonial period. This study focuses on an often overlooked aspect of these interactions - the role played by Indian women who married French traders.
Focusing on the prolonged interaction between Native Americans and Europeans in the Western Great Lakes fur trade, Sleeper-Smith (history, Michigan State U.) argues that, contrary to stereotype, Indians have existed as a viable and distinct people from the earliest times to the present and that, while encounter changed indigenous communities, it also encouraged the evolution of strategic behavior that ensured cultural continuity. In particular she explores the often misunderstood role played by Native women in establishing the fur trade as an avenue of sociocultural change.