Dawn of Detroit

by Tiya Miles

  Wide use of the term “Panis” in the eighteenth century resulted in the belief that the Indians called “Panis” represented a single nation.60 While we now know that the people designated as “Panis” came from a range of ethnic and tribal backgrounds, we can see, in the historical use of this flattening term, that those individuals did have something fundamental in common. They had each been reduced to a state of nonpersonhood in the eyes of their captors. Native people from various tribes reclassified as generic “Panis” now shared a key characteristic with people of African descent who were viewed by the French as natural slaves: unlike other Indians, “Panis” could be deprived of their right to freedom. Central to the significance of the catchall term “Panis,” then, was the implicit notion that an Indian slave was no longer a recognized member of a specific tribe or nation. From the perspective of slaveholders, she or he had been stripped of national belonging; she or he had become a no one. The surviving records of early Detroit emphasize this erasure of group connection, as slaves denoted as “Panis” very rarely had a tribal signifier added to records that list them.61 Although many French colonists had close relations with free Native people and even, for a time, sought to acculturate Indians into French identities, they could nonetheless turn certain Indians into possessions with a crude linguistic act of recategorization. “Panis” came to signify a Native person detribalized, a Native person who, due to a lapse of the kind of protection that came with a recognized national status, could be treated like an African slave, the basest category of “person” in the increasingly capitalist, increasingly race-conscious transatlantic and inter-lake modern world. The magic word “Panis” transformed a Native subject into an objectified slave, a mode of linguistic transit akin to captured Africans crossing the Middle Passage.

  All the Panis and Negroes

  On April 13, 1709, New France’s leading civil official, Intendant Jacques Raudot, issued a proclamation defining the status of slaves in that territory. “All the Panis and Negroes,” Raudot announced, “who have been bought, and who shall be bought hereafter, shall be fully owned as property by those who have purchased them as their slaves.” Revealing the underlying reason for this declaration, Raudot further asserted that slaves: “are needed by the inhabitants of this country for agriculture and other enterprises.”62 In making this bare statement that was read aloud to the populations of three major cities—Quebec City, Trois-Rivières, and Montreal—Raudot clarified for all residents of New France that unfree people in that territory, both black and Indian, could be held as slaves. Slaveholders in New France need not be concerned about the legality or the morality of their actions because slaves here were property in the very same way as slaves held by masters on the plantations of the French West Indies.63 As Intendant Raudot stressed to the populace, inducing slaves to run away was a criminal offense in New France; this category of people—people defined as things—had no natural right to liberty.

  As in New York on the British side of Lake Ontario, slavery in New France took hold mostly in urban areas.64 The labor required from these captive people would be domestic, commercial, and, to a certain extent, agricultural, but the scale of large farms and plantations common to the American South, and the constant field work required in that region, would not take root in the cooler climes of the St. Lawrence River, Great Lakes, and strait of Detroit. Here in this northern, water-bound, trade-oriented terrain, slaves would operate boats, package and cart goods across land and water, work at skilled tasks in shops and manufactures, organize and clean homes, make clothing and wash laundry, grow, gather and prepare foodstuffs, cook and serve meals, and tend to the brutally intimate demands of their owners. The gendered breakdown of these labors is both predictable and surprising. Men toted trade goods and worked as ship crewmen. Women worked in domestic and private spheres. And although direct evidence is evasive due to the fragmented nature of slaveholder records in Detroit, it is likely that enslaved Native women were sent to local shop-based factories to process animal skins by scraping, waterproofing, and tanning hides, since transforming furs into useful items was a skill they would have acquired in their communities of birth. Just as likely, enslaved Native women were tasked with turning those finished hides into consumer goods, especially the “frontier” style deerskin moccasins that became fashionable for white residents of Detroit as well as northeastern cities by the mid-1700s. In the Great Lakes, moccasin-making had long been the craft of women, and just as slaveholders in South Carolina took advantage of West Africans’ rice growing knowledge to further elite economic interests, slaveholders in Detroit would have sought to channel indigenous women’s knowledge. Many of the soft leather shoes that became an “imperial fashion” worn by French Canadian voyageurs and well-heeled Boston ladies alike probably passed through the hands of unnamed Native craftswomen held as slaves in Detroit, the center of moccasin manufacture.65 Enslaved men and women were essential to the economic viability of this fur trade town, as well as to the maintenance of free residents’ homes, farms, and families. Escape from bondage was therefore prohibited and punished. If captive residents of greater French Canada tried to run and were unfortunate enough to be apprehended, they could be branded on the shoulder with the image of a fleur de lys, the delicate floral motif that served as the symbol of imperial France.66

  Ships crossing the Atlantic carried African slaves to New France in limited numbers. In this part of the world considered remote to Europeans, overland trails and inland lakes served as major channels for the delivery of unfree people as pillaged indigenous communities became the most regular source of slaves for northerly French colonists through the mid-eighteenth century. These human beings, often described as bits of “flesh” even by the Native Great Lakes and eastern woodlands people who captured and traded them, were exchanged in a number of ways that carried multiple meanings.67 Native groups, who had long histories of taking war captives themselves, gave away captives as gifts to French trading partners or respected political leaders. They also offered slaves to “cover” or appease the deaths of loved ones in the families of valued associates. French colonists could buy slaves in trades with Indians who had acquired them through warfare, previous transactions, or, increasingly, as the European demand for slave labor grew, through slave raids. French as well as mixed-race French-Indian families could and did pass down their slaves as property to the next generation, begetting inherited wealth and advantage.

  Members of numerous Great Lakes Native societies—Ottawas, Ojibwes, Potawatomies, Miamis, Foxes, and Hurons—all engaged in captive-taking practices that bled into forms of slavery. The seizure of members of other groups, the abuse of those captives, and their forced assimilation into the captor community is a documented feature of most indigenous societies on the continent. These actions on the part of Native people are further evidence that slavery was a global force, and that viewing some human beings as less than full persons was a transcultural phenomenon and widely shared human failing. At the same time that Native societies participated in a worldwide, inhumane practice of stealing lives, their captive taking included elements that differed substantially from the form of Atlantic slavery in the Caribbean and North America visited mainly upon Africans. In the eastern and Great Lakes regions, Indian people who seized captives in raids or wars with other tribes usually took one of three courses of action: ending the life of the captive through ritualized torture and murder, adopting the captive into the household of a tribal member that had lost a loved one, or trading that captive to slave-hungry Europeans.

  Becoming a captive within a Native community meant losing one’s life or former subjectivity; it meant murder or forcible incorporation. Being adopted, surely the outcome preferable to death for many captives, was not an easy process, however. Captive people were often forced to do heavier labor than biological family members, facing intense scrutiny and supervision. Captives could be beaten and harshly treated, and women and girls were regularly compelled to serve in the place of
a wife, performing domestic and sexual duties. The captive-taking practices of Dakotas, Anishinaabeg (Ojibwes, Ottawas, Potawatomies), Foxes, Sauks, Miamis, Illinois, Crees, and other groups, in fact, favored foreign indigenous women and girls who could be integrated into families and produce new kin.68 Women captives were thus valued as domestic laborers, sexual consorts, and bearers of children. Since most captives retained in raids were women and children, the trauma of sexual coercion and violence was integral to their experience.

  Captive people in indigenous societies were often themselves from groups that took captives in a similar fashion, and so, while gravely disadvantaged and vulnerable, they knew what was expected of them. The better they fit into their adoptive family, the more bearable things were likely to be and the swifter they would be accepted by their new tribe. Full social inclusion was possible—at a cost. Captives were required to shed previous familial and tribal ties and become members of a different community in order to have renewed lives. In contrast to black or Atlantic slavery in which slaves were kept at a social distance from their owners and intimate relations between masters and slaves, though frequent, were viewed as violations of a strict racial and class order, Native people roped captives into the family circles of captors, “toward full, if forced, assimilation.”69 Surely the psychological adjustments of compulsory assimilation were shadowed by mourning and an abiding sense of loss. Slaves in Native societies were people ripped from their families of origin and forced to fit into foreign families in order to save their own lives.

  The situation was even less certain for Indian people taken captive and then traded to Frenchmen. The French, who had been enmeshed in trade relationships with Native people for more than a century, brought multiple streams of experience together in their approach to owning slaves in New France. They possessed a long history of race-based, exclusionary African slavery in the Caribbean context (where indigenous slaves were held as well, but in significantly reduced numbers due to massive deaths from disease and hard labor); they had observed the foreign practice of incorporative slavery in Native North America, and they had forged a pattern of marrying into Indian families throughout their colonial history on the continent. Each of these strands of experience made an imprint on the layered forms of slavery the French would adopt in the Upper Country. They continued holding black slaves as a racialized group viewed as inferior and unworthy of incorporation into French families and society. They attained Native slaves from Indian allies and, in the manner of those allies, allowed for a degree of social incorporation, especially through religious ritual. And they took unfree indigenous women as sexual consorts and domestic helpmeets. While French colonists owned both black and Native people as slaves, they did so with an implicit, subtle difference. Black slaves in New France were associated with black slaves in the Caribbean, a denigrated, separate class. Native slaves in New France were part of a population that theoretically could be, and in some cases had been, economic partners, political allies, cultural brokers, and people accepted as kin. If black slaves were held at a social distance by French colonists in the North, Indian slaves were held with a dangerous degree of intimacy.

  A European man with an Indian wife was a common sight in fur trade settlements of the colonial period. These couples comprised the roots of the large mixed-race families that played dominant roles in the trade well into the nineteenth century.70 By the mid-1700s, Frenchmen and Indian women in the Great Lakes had set in motion a pattern of forming intimate unions or marriages “in the custom of the country,” as the French termed it. These unions took place in accordance with the rituals and traditions of local indigenous groups and with the consent of Native families. Often marriages formed to further trade occurred at the behest of influential Indian men—political leaders and successful hunters who sought strategic matches for their daughters that would benefit their families and bands. These marriages provided traders with critical kin relationships and links to Native communities that strengthened, and in many cases, made possible, the business of trade. Besides gaining direct lines of access to pelts procured by Indian hunters, European traders benefited greatly from their Indian wives’ varied skills as translators, cultural negotiators, and keepers of homes. The union of Native-white couples also provided indigenous people with greater access to European goods and communication networks.71

  The majority of these mixed, customary marriages took place between Frenchmen and Native women, but British men also adopted the practice as they penetrated the North American interior. Some white men maintained more than one Indian wife and family, mirroring and perhaps taking advantage of indigenous polygamy practices; others had both a “country” wife in a Native village and a white wife, viewed as more appropriate by European officials, in a colonial town or at the post.72 Nevertheless, many of these cross-cultural marriages seem to have been consensual and resulted in close bonds between wives, husbands, children, and extended kinship circles. After a generation of Europeans and Native people traded and intermarried, white men shifted toward marrying mixed-race women, the daughters of those first intermarriages who were viewed as being more acculturated to “civilized” European ways of life. Despite implicit cultural biases, both white settlers and indigenous communities had something to gain from these publicly sanctioned interracial partnerships. Even though some French officials frowned on the practice from afar (and many British officials condemned it), local priests, military commanders, and political leaders supported these marriages as a means of stabilizing French-Indian relationships, of controlling illicit sexual liaisons, and of assimilating Native people into French spiritual and cultural practices.

  At the ground level of cross-cultural colonial encounter, white men in the pays d’en haut continually and openly sought out well-positioned indigenous women as domestic and intimate partners.73 But not all Indian women were destined to be wives in formalized relationships. As slave raiding increased over time and white men gained greater access to indigenous women captives who did not come from local, high-status families, these men sought unfree sex partners outside the bounds of customary trade marriages. The long history of interracial sexual intimacy in colonial New France, the symbolic association of indigenous women’s bodies with the land and its resources, and the force of lust unconstrained by community norms of mutual obligation all contributed to European men’s eroticized objectification of Native women. Just as they had entered a new land and extracted its living bounty, these men began to feel that they possessed an unbridled right to the bodies of Indian women, with or without the consent of Native families or the women themselves.74

  In New Orleans, the younger, southern sister city to Detroit, the desire of Frenchmen for Indian women was so great as to be alarming. One colonist wrote in his memoir that French Canadian men seeking “sex” would troll “among the Indian nations and satisfy their passions with the daughters of these Indians.” As governor of Louisiana in the second decade of the 1700s, Detroit founder Antoine de La Mothe Cadillac raised strong concerns about illicit sexual relations stemming from the presence of enslaved Native women in the homes of Frenchmen. He and the Reverend Henri Roulleaux La Vente worried that these women were being abused in a “scandalous Concubinage,” after which fathers sold away their own children. Cadillac’s recommended but untenable solution was to remove temptation by selling these Indian women to the Caribbean islands or encouraging French owners to marry their Indian slaves.75 The problem of French liaisons with unfree indigenous women continued nonetheless, coming to constitute the majority of interracial sexual relationships.76

  Given their long history of sexual entanglement with Native women, Frenchmen were primed to adopt the indigenous habit of claiming captive women as substitute wives. When French explorers, traders, and colonial officials fused their own cultural practice of slaveholding with local indigenous ones, they continued this pattern of use for female slaves. They also applied the indigenous practice of incorporating slave women as marginal kin, es
pecially through religion. It was not uncommon for French owners, both men and women, to serve as godparents to slaves in the Catholic faith. Frenchmen often accepted the infants of enslaved Panis women—possibly their own sons or daughters—as godchildren.77 In the French context, the Native custom of adopting captives into families had echoes in the religious ritual of masters serving as godparents to their enslaved spiritual kin. However, unlike indigenous processes of adoption that incorporated the children of captive women as actual kin with rights to freedom and full belonging, French slaveholders were willing to hold and sell the children of Native sex partners as slaves.