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Wild Frenchmen and Frenchified Indians: Material Culture and Race in Colonial Louisiana. By Sophie White. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012. Pp. xv, 329, illustrations, notes, index. Cloth, $45.00.)
In 1739, the half-French and half-Indian Jean Saguingouara signed a contract to serve as a voyageur from Illinois to New Orleans and back. The agreement required Saguingouara be paid laundry costs upon his arrival in the Emerald City. Fourteen years earlier when Indian-born Marie Rouensa-8cani8e died in Kaskaskia her substantial estate included French-style clothing, buildings, and household furniture. Saguingouaras and Rouensa-8cani8es adoptions of French cultural practices raise the question of whether they did so from a desire to become French or to maintain native identities notwithstanding French elements in their lifestyles. In Wild Frenchmen and Frenchified Indians, Sophie White unpacks with great precision why natives in French Illinois Country adopted particular cultural practices and when fixed racial classifications developed. In doing so she convincingly demonstrates that unlike other French settlements, where rigid racial classifications were established by the start of the eighteenth century, identity in Illinois Country during the period from 1693 and 1769 was "malleable and mutable" (p. 182).
White connects the changeable racial identities in Illinois Country to Frenchification, the French policy of seeking to transform Indians (but not Africans) into subjects who were religiously, linguistically,...