In a memorandum written at Dauphine Island in Lower Louisiana in 1715, the highest-ranking administrator in the colony took up the question of intermarriage between Indian women and Frenchmen. The report produced by Commissaire-Ordonnateur Jean-Baptiste du Bois Duclos was in response to a renewed proposal by seminarian Father Henri Roulleaux de La Vente to populate Louisiana by promoting marriages between French men and Catholic Indian women.¹ Though the commissaire-ordonnateur staunchly opposed La Vente’s proposal, like him, Duclos honed in on the Illinois Country, in the Upper Mississippi Valley, to make one of his key points. Citing existing intermarriage practices there,...

On June 25, 1725, Dame Philippe, the legitimate wife of an agriculturalist and militia lieutenant, died shortly after composing a will and codicil before the local notary, priest, and witnesses. Following her burial within the church that faced her house in Kaskaskia (the largest colonial settlement in the Upper Mississippi Valley), and in conformity with French legal practice, a postmortem inventory was taken of her substantial assets. The valuation of her property, which was held in community with her husband, came to more than 45,000 livres. One of the wealthiest successions in the Illinois Country, the estate was only marginally...

Shifts, mantelet jackets, skirts, and coifs, all made of imported cloth: once they began producing inventories in the 1720s, this was the ubiquitous garb notaries recorded as worn by the Indian wives and daughters of Frenchmen who lived in French villages in the Illinois Country, in colonial houses equipped with French-style furniture and household goods. These women who projected an image of Frenchness had been encouraged in this direction by religious missionaries and local officials. But it was the women themselves who first promoted legitimate, sanctified unions between Frenchmen and Indian converts. And this material culture response could only have...

In 1627, as the French began in earnest to colonize and evangelize North America, they established a charter for the Company of New France. Among the preoccupations expressed by the document was the question of the Indian inhabitants of the land claimed by France and the plans for converting and Frenchifying them. One clause of that charter touched directly on those Indians who would convert, declaring that they

will be considered natural Frenchmen, and like them, will be able to come and live in France when they wish to, and there acquire property, with rights of inheritance and bequest, just...

In February 1762 in the Illinois Country, one of Marie Rouensa’s granddaughters, Elisabeth de Celle Duclos, signed a contract to marry a Swedish nobleman. Her father, who was also an officer, was present, as was her brother, who served as a gentleman cadet in the troops of the marine.¹ The previous year, in New Orleans, another ritual had taken place, centered on a burial this time, as the Ursuline nuns made note of the passing of one of their own, “our very dear sister Marie Turpin known as Sister St. Marthe.”² Thirty-two at her death from tuberculosis, and a nun...

In 1751, the Ursuline nuns of New Orleans initiated a new member into their fold. After cutting off her hair, they stripped the girl of her clothing. Then they helped her to don the order’s black habit, guimpe and bandeau of white linen, cincture of black leather, and novice’s white veil. The components of her dress (habit, guimpe, bandeau, cincture, and veil) served to crystallize the transformation of Marie Turpin, born in the Illinois Country to a French father and an Illinois convert mother, into Sister Ste. Marthe. But the cut and construction of her habit and her veil and...

For the duration of the trip that had brought Marie Turpin, future Ursuline sister Ste. Marthe, down from the Illinois Country to New Orleans in 1747 on her quest to be consecrated an Ursuline nun, the girl had been placed in the care of a female acquaintance. The woman was charged with chaperoning the young girl from the French soldiers and voyageurs in the convoy, for this was a predominantly male space. But it was the French soldiers and voyageurs who spoke with authority, upon arrival in New Orleans, not of the Indian or mixed-heritage girl who had accompanied them,...

In 1739, the same year the French-Indian voyageur Saguingouara negotiated for his linens to be laundered, a nineteen-year-old youth of European descent set off on a trip from New Orleans to the military Fort de l’Assomption four hundred miles away in the hinterlands of Louisiana. As part of the preparations for his journey, he acquired two garments of Indian origin: a pair of mitasses (leggings) and a breechclout. Contrary to our assumptions about the identity of this nineteen-year-old, he was not a fur trader. Had he been a voyageur, we might have expected him to adopt indigenous dress to smooth...