himself, running, discovering the foe, raising the cry, slaying the enemy, removing his scalp, and returning home with a song of victory.” Marquette noted how the whole setting for the dance was decorated with war paraphernalia, “the weapons used by the warriors of those Nations … namely: clubs, war-hatchets, bows, quivers, and arrows.”97 The dancers reenacted a battlefield victory, with the one dancer, near defeat, turning around in defiance and “caus[ing] his adversary to flee.” The climax of the dance was a speech about conquest. As Marquette said, the dance ended with “a lofty Discourse, delivered by him who holds the Calumet … he recounts the battles at which he has been present, the victories that he has won, the names of the Nations, the places, and the Captives whom he has made.”98
One way to read the calumet among the Illinois, then, is that it was an accommodation to the language of their new territory. But within this ostensible accommodation was actually a declaration of Illinois power. Through kinship and alliance, rather than Cahokia’s territorialism and hierarchy, the Illinois had expanded. The Illinois at contact were probably close to fifteen thousand people.99 They had repopulated the prairies with close to the same number of people who had once inhabited the city at Cahokia. The Illinois Country was no longer a vacant quarter but was home to an aggressive, opportunistic group of newcomers. At midcentury, their world began to feel the effects of a different colonialism in the East.
In the 1650s, powerful and unified Iroquois warriors, supplied by their Dutch allies at Albany, began to attack people of the Great Lakes in an effort to subject Algonquians, gain captives, and control fur resources in the region.100 For several groups—the Wendats most especially—the result was near devastation.101 Refugees fled through the Great Lakes, pushing west. Meanwhile, the French at Quebec adopted a policy of supporting the Algonquian allies of the Great Lakes against the Iroquois violence, hoping to prevent them from making peace with the Iroquois and their Dutch and English allies. With French support, the Algonquians counterattacked against the Iroquois. The previously “limited-indecisive” warfare characteristic of pre-contact Native American societies turned much more violent, now producing thousands of casualties, prisoners, and deaths.102
The Illinois felt some early effects of this violence, on a relatively small scale. In 1653, a “small village” of the Illinois was attacked by the Iroquois.103 They suffered another attack a few years later.104 But Illinois warriors bounced back from these episodes. In fact, in the 1650s at least, they counterattacked against the Iroquois and may have got the better of them.105 More important, far from simply defensive, the Illinois became aggressive. It was as if the Iroquois violence and resulting disorder in the region combined with the Illinois’s colonizing trajectory to trigger their own ambitious bid for supremacy. In the 1650s, Illinois warriors attacked the Winnebago and routed them.106 Later they attacked an Iroquois party and took forty Iroquois “who were on their way to hunt beaver in the Illinois Country.”107 The Illinois were not militarily defeated. In the 1660s, they attacked the Sauk and Fox.108 They attacked enemies to the south and west.109 Soon they were at war with “seven or eight” different nations.110 Illinois-speakers were not defensive or desperate; they were belligerent.
Moreover, if we look closely at the Illinois engagements, one important pattern emerges. Not only were the Illinois routing their enemies, they were also usually taking huge numbers of captives. Against the Winnebago, they took an entire village captive. As one French account put it, “So vigorous was their attack that they killed, wounded, or made prisoners all the Puans, except a few who escaped.”111 Describing the Winnebago after the same event, another account told how “All the people of this Nation were killed or taken captive by the Iliniouek.”112 Far from defeated, the Illinois were on a concerted campaign to capture slaves.
Like so many other things in Algonquian life, the central logic of slavery among peoples of the Great Lakes was based on kinship. Since kinship networks were fundamentally how people gained their status, identity, and power in the world, a person’s lineage and family were absolutely central to his or her life. Maintaining and extending a kinship network was fundamental to a person’s success in trade, warfare, political diplomacy, and marriage. Kinship was the bedrock of life.113
This context helps explain the phenomenon of slave raids among Algonquians like the Illinois. As war and disease impacted Native societies during the Beaver Wars, people died by the thousands. This created great disorder among Great Lakes Indians in the seventeenth century, as many kin went missing. The fundamental logic of Indian warfare was that the deceased needed to be replaced. Captives could fill the spaces left vacant by deceased relatives in the kinship order. Adopted into the family, they could literally replace the dead.114
It is no accident that many of our best informants on Indian slavery were eyewitnesses to the Illinois, where captivity became such an important part of life during the contact period. As one Jesuit visitor to the Illinois Country in the seventeenth century wrote, expressing the logic of Indian captivity and slavery, “When there is any dead man to be resuscitated, that is to say, if any one of their warriors has been killed, and they think it a duty to replace him in his cabin,—they give to this cabin one of their prisoners, who takes the place of the deceased; and this is what they call ‘resuscitating the dead.’”115 Another priest in the Illinois Country, Jacques Gravier, lived with the Illinois in the 1690s. His dictionary of the Illinois language contains a virtual primer for understanding the subtleties of Indian slavery in this period. One telling term for slavery in the five-hundred-page dictionary expressed the essence of the phenomenon: nirapakerima: “I adopt him in place of the dead.”116
This was the basic principle of Native warfare throughout the Algonquian world in this period. In the wake of disease and violence, the dead needed to be replaced. But this was a complicated business, and certain requirements governed the taking of slaves. Most important, a captive could not be kin or the kin of allies.117 As the French would learn as they began buying and receiving slaves from Indian allies, owning a slave immediately antagonized the culture and lineage to which that person belonged.118 In the Algonquian-speaking world in the midst of the Beaver Wars, many groups had consolidated, uniting kin lines in an effort to reestablish their networks. For instance, the Anishenaabeg created a new collective identity out of previously disparate local identities.119 In this context, Algonquian-speaking captives were often useless, for attempting to enslave or adopt them into a lineage would only upset neighbors in the mixed-up world of the pays d’en haut. Only true “strangers” would do, those who were not only not kin but also did not share kin with an ally. For this purpose, in the Algonquian Great Lakes, Siouan-speaking groups from the West made the best slaves. They had no kin—they were complete strangers. And so they could become a8enti8aki—relatives.120
Given the preference for “strangers” in the business of captive adoption, the Illinois-speakers had a hugely important strategic advantage in slaving. They lived in, and increasingly controlled, the borderlands. They could raid among the Siouan-speakers of the West, very few of whom had kinsmen among the Algonquian-speakers of the Great Lakes. The Illinois took advantage of this as they raided in the 1660s.121 When they attacked the Winnebago, taking the whole village captive, they were enslaving a group of Siouanspeaking people who would not make them enemies among the other Algonquian-speakers in the North. The same goes for their reported raids to the south and west in the 1660s.122 When the Jesuit Claude Allouez reported that the Illinois were engaged in wars with the Iroquois on one side and Siouans on the other, he thought it was a lamentable situation for them. It was actually the heart of the Illinois advantage.123
It is important to note that when they went on slave raids in the precontact era, the Illinois probably mostly captured women. Not only was this typical of most Algonquian slave systems, and certainly typical of the Illinois’s practices in the
