Detroit's Hidden Channels

Reviewed by: Detroit's Hidden Channels: The Power of French-Indigenous Families in the Eighteenth Century by Karen L. Marrero Kyle T. Mays (bio) Detroit's Hidden Channels: The Power of French-Indigenous Families in the Eighteenth Century by Karen L. Marrero University of Manitoba Press, 2020 IN THE SEVENTEENTH AND EIGHTEENTH CENTURIES, Detroit was the center of Indigenous and European relationships. Located in the heart of Anishinaabe land, Karen L. Marrero's Detroit's Hidden Channels: The Power of French-Indigenous Families in the Eighteenth Century reveals the importance of kinship and family as key sites for understanding empire, gender, mobility, and Indigenous-settler relations in the eighteenth century. Marrero tells the story of Detroit in its founding years through family history. Using French and English archives, Indigenous and tribal histories, contemporary folk songs, and oral histories, Marrero argues that French-Indigenous families, especially women, were key figures in the shaping of eighteenth-century Detroit's trade and creation of place. She takes well-known historical events such as Pontiac's Rebellion and astutely analyzes the importance and meaning of Indigenous women within the conflict. Through careful research she resurrects the disregarded history of French and Indigenous women's importance in the creation of Detroit and the empires and Indigenous nations who struggled for it. The mobility of the French-Indigenous families contributed to their significance within Detroit. French-Indigenous families traveled throughout the Great Lakes region, and also traveled to Boston, Louisiana, Montreal, New York, the Hudson Bay, and even through Britain and France (xx). Through their travels, they encountered a variety of Indigenous nations and helped broker trade relationships between empires. In seven chapters, Marrero carefully builds her argument. In chapter 1, Marrero demonstrates how French imperial agents used the concept of family in order to manage issues central to settlement and to foster relationships with Indigenous peoples. Furthermore, these French agents uses kinship metaphors to "express important issues at Detroit" (3). Understanding how family and kinship operated at the "founding" of Detroit helps explain how French-Indigenous families came [End Page 147] into importance later on in the eighteenth century. In chapter 2, Marrero illustrates how the presence of Indigenous women from Haudenosaunee, Wendat, Anishinaabe Myaamia, Wabanaki nations, and from France were significant to a gendered understanding of relationships between France and Indigenous nations. It was through these women that negotiation occurred. Thus, they were able to continue Indigenous conceptions of land and fold French agents into it. In chapter 3, Marrero begins with a folksong, "Les Mascouten," as a segue into understanding the Meskwaki (Fox) and Mascouten attack on Fort Detroit in 1712. She uses this song to reveal how French-Indigenous families further bolstered their power in Detroit. In chapter 4, Marrero explores mobility and trade networks through the stories of the Bizaillon and Cuillerier dit Beaubien families. Through their connection to Detroit and Illinois Country, "the families . . . strengthened their economic and political presence" (89). Chapter 5 reveals the significance of women to commerce. While French imperial agents tried to limit the political power of Indigenous and French women, women bolstered their significance in trade using a "hybrid gendered identity" (92). They used marriage, acted on behalf of their husbands, and conducted trade by themselves working outside of the imperial agents' gendered expectations. Chapter 6 reconsiders the importance of the Anishinaabe woman Catherine, whom historians have solely understood as someone who told Major Gladwin about Pontiac's plan to take over Fort Detroit in 1763. Marrero explains how Catherine's entering of British quarters to relay information "would also have been in keeping with the pivotal role that Anishinaabe women played in communicating issues of importance to the community" (126). In the eighteenth century, women like Catherine had the ability to beckon men to war and to participate in diplomatic negotiations. In chapter 7, Marrero explains the importance of gendered rhetoric in councils and negotiations between Indigenous nations and the British Empire. French-Indigenous families used "gendered language to express their wishes and concerns," which was important because "widely utilized gendered kinship metaphors had been intertwined with the notion of British patriarchal authority under siege" beginning with the Seven Years' War (143–144). Indigenous

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