Neither the government nor people on the ground could dominate.21 Perhaps imperialists in other places had fantasies of control, but in Illinois they could not achieve them—in many cases they could not even begin to implement them.
The would-be imperialists in Illinois admitted this basic fact and embraced it. Even at the very founding of the official colony in Illinois, when imperial officials were faced with a group of colonists and wayward former Indian allies living in the middle of the continent with no government and no laws, they wrote that they were powerless to oppose it. They could never arrest these people or stop them from pursuing their self-interests. So, contrary to stereotypes we have of absolutist French governors, they decided to make the colony an official part of the empire. “Seeing no possibility of preventing it,” officials wrote, they decided to collaborate.22
And if they collaborated at the foundation of the colony, they continued to let the colonists shape their own colonial culture. A good example of this can be seen in the issue of intermarriage and race. In the early 1700s, Louisiana officials complained about how intermarriage tainted the “whiteness and purity of blood” of the French colonial population.23 But in Illinois, interracial families were a vital part of the local culture. Beginning in 1694, marriages between Frenchmen and Indian women formed the bedrock of the community, allowing the colonists and local Indians to form a strong bond through kinship. These intermarriages permitted an interracial order that rested on both integration and segregation, as Indian brides lived with French husbands, but Indian villages and the French stayed geographically separate. Serving the interests of many parties, perhaps especially the Illinois wives, this was a functional social order. As a result, arriving in Illinois, each new imperial commandant sent by Louisiana seemed to recognize the value of intermarriage and its usefulness to the colony. Time and again, officials on the ground actually condoned it and even participated, joining the interracial kinship networks that were at the heart of the colonial culture. They did this not because they “went native” but because they could see that on the ground, the system worked. It was a functional collaboration.
And if the government followed the lead of the colonists, the colonists and Indians looked to the government officials, calculating that they were better off with imperial assistance than without. For instance, take Illinois Native peoples’ approach to French imperialism. Rather than resisting French colonization in their region, the Illinois collaborated, professing “French hearts.” This was not because they were dependent. Rather, it was because they used the French opportunistically to pursue their goals as a powerful, almost imperialistic people in their own right.24 Rather than resisting, they convinced local officials in Illinois to adopt their diplomatic priorities, to accept their enemies as enemies of the French. Climaxing in the near destruction of the Foxes, the Illinois-French alliance based at Fort de Chartres pursued a policy which, far from a French imperial design, was authored by the Illinois themselves.
Importantly, the French, Indians, and government officials collaborated purposefully in Illinois. A major contention of this book is that the collaboration that took place in Illinois between Indians and the French was more than simple “accommodation.” As Richard White has written, Native people and Europeans on early American frontiers often got along by appealing to their faulty understandings of one another’s interests and values. Rather than truly mediating their differences, they related to each other through “creative misunderstandings”—joining in diplomacy, religious ceremonies, legal traditions, and even marriages without actually knowing what each other meant by their agreements. Their accommodations solved expedient problems but were necessarily temporary and in many ways naïve.25
But in Illinois it was different. Interacting in permanent settlements that differed from most transient frontier environments, the diverse inhabitants of Illinois lived together, spoke the same languages, and intermarried. By the 1690s, the intercultural community in Illinois had moved far beyond the naïve accommodations of the encounter phase and had begun to understand each other and produce much more durable agreements. Far from misunderstanding each other, they got along (and sometimes did not) because they truly saw eye to eye. Indeed, the most important collaboration in Illinois took place at the level of community, where different people created a cooperative and flexible system of integration and segregation that benefited most of its participants. But nobody was naïve. This was not just accommodation; it was informed, purposeful collaboration.26
And if Indians and colonists formed solid collaboration, so too did imperial officials and colonists. The Illinois experienced little of the stereotypical drama of the French empire, where hardheaded imperialists tried to foster absolutism in the wilderness. Time and again, the colonists resisted imperial officials, establishing an idiosyncratic legal system, economy, and social patterns. But when colonists subordinated imperial regulations to their own priorities, imperialists came to accept it. At the same time, as they showed in their constant petitioning, as well as in many requests for government intervention, the Illinois colonists were not anarchists bent on autonomy and independence. They welcomed empire into their lives and did so willingly, not submissively. When the French empire lost control of the middle of the continent in 1763, the inhabitants even tried to partner with the British government, continuing their tradition of pragmatic collaboration.
Which brings us back to the Invitation sérieuse, the opportunistic call for collaboration written by the anonymous Kaskaskian in 1772. While other colonists in North America were calling for independence in the 1770s, the inhabitants of Illinois wanted collaboration. Their reasons for doing so were rooted in an alternative political tradition in colonial America: a practical, pragmatic way of life at the heart of a distinctive kind of colonialism. The Invitation gives us a window into this lost world and, as the title suggests, is an “earnest invitation” for us to learn more.
Chapter 1
Opportunists in the Borderlands
In 1673, the French explorers Jacques Marquette and Louis Jolliet arrived at a village of the Peoria near the Des Moines River, the first Europeans to record a visit to the Illinois Country in the Mississippi Valley. Beaching their canoes at the edge of town, they shouted and made their presence known to the Indians, thereby opening the encounter between the French and these Algonquians at the margins of the Great Lakes world.1
The Indians gathered in the center of their village to give the Frenchmen an extraordinary and distinctive welcome. As Marquette later recounted, chief men made speeches, and villagers performed a dance featuring a calumet pipe, only the second calumet that Marquette had ever seen. After the performance and speeches, the Illinois prepared a feast including the “fattest morsels” of what to Marquette was a new delicacy, bison meat. Dressed in bison skins themselves, they then presented him with several belts, garters, and other artifacts made from the skin of bison, caribou, and elk, and they may have given him the famous hide robes that now survive in the Musée du Quai Branly. Some of these were elaborately adorned with decorative motifs, notably a bison and a large hawk or thunderbird. After singing to him, they presented him finally with a “little slave.”2
Perhaps because it contained so many new and unfamiliar objects and symbols, Marquette considered the calumet ceremony baffling—“altogether mysterious.” Read carefully from an Illinois perspective, however, the calumet and the Illinois’s welcome ceremony are windows into the recent history of this place and the powerful people who lived here at the time of contact. Although Marquette did not realize it, the Illinois were newcomers, invaders who had moved to the Illinois Valley over the previous few generations and were now making one of the most significant bids for power in seventeenthcentury North America. Their history had diverged from that of the larger Algonquian world with which Marquette was familiar. In their welcome ceremony, the Illinois were showing Marquette—and us—who they were: an adaptable and ambitious people
