In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, French colonists and their
Native allies participated in a slave trade that spanned half of North
America, carrying thousands of Native Americans into bondage in the
Great Lakes, Canada, and the Caribbean. In Bonds of Alliance, Brett
Rushforth reveals the dynamics of this system from its origins to the
end of French colonial rule. Balancing a vast geographic and
chronological scope with careful attention to the lives of enslaved
individuals, this book gives voice to those who lived through the ordeal
of slavery and, along the way, shaped French and Native societies.
Rather than telling a simple story of colonial domination and Native
victimization, Rushforth argues that Indian slavery in New France
emerged at the nexus of two very different forms of slavery: one
indigenous to North America and the other rooted in the Atlantic world.
The alliances that bound French and Natives together forced a
century-long negotiation over the nature of slavery and its place in
early American society. Neither fully Indian nor entirely French,
slavery in New France drew upon and transformed indigenous and Atlantic
cultures in complex and surprising ways.
Based on thousands of French and Algonquian-language manuscripts
archived in Canada, France, the United States and the Caribbean, Bonds
of Alliance bridges the divide between continental and Atlantic
approaches to early American history. By discovering unexpected
connections between distant peoples and places, Rushforth sheds new
light on a wide range of subjects, including intercultural diplomacy,
colonial law, gender and sexuality, and the history of race.
