adoption failed to create a fully integrated society.
As a social strategy, the Grand Village was based on certain assumptions and ideas. Most important, it was premised on a borderlands faith in the flexibility of identity and in the potential for assimilation of outsiders. Illinois-speakers at the Grand Village welcomed outsiders as they had always done throughout their protohistoric migration into the Illinois prairies: by adopting and assimilating them into patrilineal kinship lines. This is what it meant when Oumahouha adopted Father Membré or La Salle “became” Ouabicolcata. Behind this practice was an ideal: fictive kinship and adoption would allow for complete identification and assimilation of newcomers and captives within Illinois familles. But if this was an old strategy, in the 1680s and 1690s, the Illinois-speakers did it on a much greater scale.
Gravier and other second-generation Frenchmen in Illinois understood the logic of assimilating outsiders. Gravier’s dictionary contained many terms that express these ideals of assimilation. “Relatives who I hardly remember are not my real relatives” was the sentiment expressed by a word for “relative” in the Illinois language.44 Liette described how the expansive Illinois kinship system was designed for solidarity and inclusion: “It should be stated that they almost all call each other relatives.”45 All of the Illinois were supposed to feel connected to powerful men, identifying as “sons and relatives of chiefs.”46 Adoption was meant to incorporate newcomers and strangers fully as kin.
But if the Illinois hoped to make strangers into kin in the mixed-up world at Grand Village, there were people in this society who were not so well integrated. As words in Gravier’s dictionary make clear, not everybody felt assimilated. Examples include words that meant “I don’t love him like a real brother” or “I don’t regard him as a relative.” There were kinsmen who were totally powerless: “They don’t notice me. I am not the master of it being a stranger.” Another Illinois term could express alienation from a family lineage: “I am regarded in my family like a stranger. The others are more beloved.” Gravier’s list of such expressions was extensive: “Here I am like a stranger. I am not the master of anything.”47 And finally: “I am out of my country, of my village.” “You don’t treat me as a relative.”48 As these “definitions” suggest, in the mixed-up, slavery-dominated world at the Grand Village, there were many divisions. Although adoption and shapeshifting were supposed to turn strangers into family, some kinsmen continued to feel as “strangers” or simply as second-class kinsmen. Furthermore, fictive kin lines, and even real kin lines, did not always produce such strong bonds. As Liette said, “I have got men to agree a hundred times that their fathers, their brothers, and their children were worse than dogs.”49
As Gravier and other Frenchmen learned, some men felt alienated from their kin lines. But if this produced a level of anomie for certain men of the Illinois society, it was nothing compared to the alienation experienced by many women. By the 1690s, Frenchmen like Gravier had a fuller understanding of how slavery affected women in Illinois society, especially through the polygamous and violent relationships that were part of the slave system.
Polygamous households among the Illinois seem frequently to have contained great tension. For instance, according to terms in Gravier’s dictionary, one wife in a polygamous household was “the best loved wife” and one was “the wife who is the master of all the others.”50 One word in the dictionary, “onsam8eta,” referred to “jealousy” and alluded to conflict, such as “she prevents him from going to her rival, to his second wife.”51 It seems clear that some Illinois women resisted marriage to a man already married, suggesting that the practice had clearly recognized downsides. Later in the contact period, a Frenchman noted that “The husband has full power and authority over his wives, whom he looks upon as his slaves, and with whom he does not eat.”52
In addition to polygamy, Frenchmen understood that some Illinois women endured oppression and even violence in their relationships in the 1690s. Whether slaves or free, many women in Illinois had very little control over their own bodies.53 According to Liette, brothers at the Grand Village made marriage arrangements on their sisters’ behalf, forcing them to marry into families that they did not want.54 Father Julien Binneteau put it this way: “According to their customs, [Illinois women] are the slaves of their brothers, who compel them to marry whomsoever they choose, even men already married to another wife.”55 Perhaps worse, as Hennepin noted, parents frequently pressured their daughters (possibly slaves) to use their sexuality for material gain.56 Brothers even used their sisters to cover wagers “after having lost all they had of personal property.”57 Liette also noted how Illinois women were seduced and abused by powerful medicine men, “who they dare not refuse.”58 This produced strong alienation on the part of Illinois women.
If women could not choose their mates or avoid unfavorable polygamous marriages, these were not the only downsides of the Illinois gender order in the Grand Village. For women also endured a double standard when it came to fidelity. Several French eyewitnesses by the 1690s noted that Illinois husbands were free to have sex with other women but that women were expected to remain faithful and chaste. Some Illinois husbands abandoned their wives, and several terms in Jesuit dictionaries reflect the pain of a scorned wife.59 For instance, Gravier listed words to express “I believe that he loves another; [said by] a wife who suspects him of loving a woman other than his wife.” Another term meant “I believe that he wants to leave me. I believe that he loves another woman.”60 To be sure, these descriptions and terms contain the biases of Europeans for whom monogamy was the norm. However, while we cannot be sure philandering husbands were such an oppression for Illinois wives, violence is a different story.
In the 1690s, Frenchmen witnessed how women in Illinois experienced violence at the hands of their husbands and in their relationships. Frenchmen in this period took note of mutilation, including the cutting off of noses and ears, inflicted by “jealous” husbands on their wives.61 In the most dramatic account, Liette described a gang rape of an Illinois woman who was caught in an extramarital relationship.62 This was clearly a bad situation for many women. Living in Illinois households, whether as the direct subject of violence or even as the “best loved wife,” was likely unpleasant. And while much of the harsh treatment was probably directed most importantly toward slave women, there is evidence that even some native Illinois women experienced a degraded status.63 This may explain why, as Liette said more than once, it “rarely” happened that there was true affection in an Illinois marriage.64 As another French observer wrote in this period, these patterns of violence and oppression made the Illinois distinctive: “Perhaps no nation in the world scorns women as much as these savages usually do.”65 Almost all of this was likely a consequence of the slave mode of reproduction in Illinois, which led to female oppression.
Meanwhile, in addition to violence, women in Illinois simply had hard lives. In traditional Algonquian communities, a division of labor separated the female agricultural and domestic labor and the male hunting and military work. But the bison economy in Illinois had skewed this balance in the 1600s. By the 1690s, according to Sébastien Rasles, the Illinois were killing two thousand bison each year.66 Since hide processing and meat preservation were both gendered female, women had tremendous work burdens in the bisonbased culture.67 And while it was fairly standard for contact-era Europeans to remark on the disparity of work between genders in Native cultures, the Jesuits understood that the bison economy in Illinois actually did create an exceptional burden for Illinois women, adding to their agricultural duties.68 As one Jesuit remarked, the women in Illinois were “humbled by work.”69
The upshot was that Illinois culture was defined by great tension in its gender relations. Women looked for an escape, a way to resist. Gravier could perceive this. He began to work with them, in particular, building a Christianity catered to their needs. The initial goal of the Jesuits, as Gravier said, had been to convert the “whole nation” in Illinois. But if the divisions he now perceived made
