Transcript
One of Her People
1652–1653
His Mohawk mother · reconstructed exchange Asserony?
Young Radisson · reconstructed exchange Panugaga.
In 1652, in a Mohawk town in what is now upstate New York, a woman asked a captured French teenager if he was French. He said no, he was one of her people.
His name was Pierre-Esprit Radisson, and weeks earlier Mohawk warriors had captured him near Trois-Rivières, a French settlement on the St. Lawrence River. Each side he joined wanted something different from North America, and each one needed Native people to get it.
The Shot and the Peace
1609–1652
Forty-three years earlier, in July 1609, Samuel de Champlain, who had founded Quebec in 1608, fought beside his Native allies at Lake Champlain.
Champlain · his account With this shot two fell to the ground.
His allies were the Innu, the Algonquin and the Wendat, whom the French called the Huron, and all three traded furs with France. Their enemies were the Haudenosaunee, or Iroquois, five nations that included the Mohawk.
In 1609, Europe's footholds in eastern North America were still small: Spain's St. Augustine in Florida, England's Jamestown in Virginia, and France's Quebec. That September, Henry Hudson, an English captain sailing for the Dutch, explored the river that now bears his name. Native nations already lived on that land and governed it.
For its first thirty years, New France had only a few hundred colonists, and almost all its beaver pelts came from Native hunters.
In 1633, the aging Champlain made his Innu allies an offer.
Champlain · through Le Jeune's account When that great house shall be built, then our young men will marry your daughters, and we shall be one people.
Many French traders did marry Native women, who served as their guides and interpreters and tied them into Native families and trade.
That winter, the Jesuit priest Paul Le Jeune lived in an Innu hunting camp and wrote down his host's jokes about the beaver.
Le Jeune's Innu host · as he recorded him The Beaver does everything perfectly well, it makes kettles, hatchets, swords, knives, bread; and, in short, it makes everything.
Le Jeune's Innu host · another remembered joke The English have no sense; they give us twenty knives like this for one Beaver skin.
French and English traders were competing for his furs, and he knew which of them paid more.
By the 1640s, Dutch traders on the Hudson sold guns to the Mohawk for beaver pelts. With Dutch guns, the Haudenosaunee fought the French and their Native allies for furs, trade routes and captives, in the Beaver Wars.
In July 1645, a Mohawk envoy named Kiotsaeton came to Trois-Rivières to make peace with the French and their allies.
Kiotsaeton · tenth collar, as recorded Here is the knot that binds us inseparably; nothing can part us.
In private, the Mohawk offered peace to the French and the Wendat alone, if the French would abandon their Algonquin allies.
Decide how the French governor, Montmagny, should answer the Mohawk, then see what he did.
Montmagny refused the gift and would not make peace without the Christian Algonquins, but he called the others masters of their own actions.
The peace lasted about a year, and by 1649 Haudenosaunee attacks had scattered the Wendat, France's most important trading partners. After that, Mohawk war parties raided along the St. Lawrence, right up to the French settlements.
Panugaga
1652–1653
In 1652, one of those war parties captured Radisson outside Trois-Rivières. The warriors killed his two friends and carried him south to their towns.
There, a Mohawk woman tied her own belt around him and took him into her family.
She named him Orinha, after a son she had lost. Disease and war had killed many Haudenosaunee, and grieving families often replaced their dead by adopting captives. Adopted captives took the names and places of the dead, though none of them had chosen to come.
Radisson wrote this story down around 1669, for English investors he hoped would pay for his next voyage. He was selling them what he knew about Native nations and their trade.
As Long As We Have Beavers
1653–1659
In the autumn of 1653, Radisson went with a Mohawk trading party to Fort Orange, a Dutch fur post on the upper Hudson River.
Radisson · recalling Fort Orange Where we were very well received, or rather our castors, every one courting us.
By castors he meant beaver pelts, the furs the Dutch had come for.
Fort Orange and New Amsterdam, at the river's mouth, belonged to New Netherland, a colony run for profit by the Dutch West India Company. Like the French, the Dutch sent few colonists and relied on Native trading partners, but fewer Dutch traders married Native women.
Radisson turned down a Dutch offer to free him, went back with the Mohawk, and later escaped to Fort Orange. The Dutch hid him in the fort and then shipped him down the river to New Amsterdam.
In New Amsterdam, the Company also owned enslaved Africans, who built its fort, cleared its land and worked its farms.
Nine years earlier, in 1644, eleven enslaved Company men petitioned for their freedom, and the Company freed them and their wives, on conditions. Each man still owed the Company a yearly payment of grain and a hog, and if he missed it, he lost his freedom.
1644 grant · English translation Their children at present born or yet to be born, shall be bound and obligated to serve the Honorable West India Company as Slaves.
In 1659, Mohawk envoys came to Fort Orange with a complaint about their Dutch allies.
Mohawk proposition · through the Dutch record The Dutch, indeed, say we are brothers, and are joined together with chains. But that lasts only as long as we have beavers. After that, we are no longer thought of.
The Dutch treated the alliance as a fur trade, and the Mohawk wanted a bond that outlasted the beaver.
The King's Share
New France 1659–1673 · New Spain 1600–1660
In 1659, Radisson and his brother-in-law, the trader Groseilliers, paddled west to the Great Lakes without the governor's permission.
Radisson, recalling Discoverers before governors.
Radisson, recalling We were Caesars, being nobody to contradict us.
In fact, their Anishinaabe hosts, Native peoples of the upper Great Lakes, guided them, fed them and carried their baggage.
In August 1660, they came back down to Montreal with a fleet of Native canoes loaded with furs.
The governor fined them, took part of their furs and jailed Groseilliers, because they had traded without a license.
The governor was enforcing mercantilism, the idea that colonies existed to make the home country rich. Traders shipped beaver to France, brought French goods back, and needed a royal license to do it.
In 1663, King Louis XIV took direct control of New France. Over the next ten years, he sent about eight hundred young French women to marry its settlers. Even so, New France stayed small, and its fur trade still depended on Native partners.
Far to the southwest, Spain had ruled Mexico, which it called New Spain, since the 1520s. In 1598, Spanish colonists pushed north to the Rio Grande, into the farming towns of the Pueblo peoples, and called the region New Mexico. In 1600, a free woman named Isabel de Olvera prepared to follow them from Querétaro, a town in New Spain.
Before setting out, she asked a Spanish official for a sworn record of her freedom.
Isabel de Olvera I have reason to fear that I may be annoyed by some individual, since I am a mulatto.
Isabel de Olvera I demand justice.
Her father was African and her mother Native, and she was free, but in New Spain she still needed paper to prove it. Spanish colonial society included Native people and free and enslaved Africans, and gave them unequal standing by ancestry, legal status and wealth.
Sixty years later, New Mexico still had no silver, so its Spanish colonists lived off Pueblo farms and Pueblo workers. Under the encomienda, a colonist collected tribute from Pueblo households, paid in corn and cotton blankets. Under the repartimiento, officials drafted Pueblo men and women for weeks of work, often unpaid.
Franciscan friars ran Catholic missions in the Pueblo towns to convert the Pueblo and stamp out their religion, and they demanded Pueblo labor too.
In this mission yard, look at what the colonist, the official and the friar each took from the Pueblo.
Fences
1607–1665
In the early 1660s, Radisson and Groseilliers took their fur-trade plan to the English in Boston, because their own governor had punished them.
The English colonies grew quickly because England's population was growing faster than its economy. In 1629, many English families had no land or work, and John Winthrop, a Puritan lawyer, wrote this in England:
John Winthrop This land grows weary of her inhabitants.
English migrants came for land, a better living or the freedom to worship their own way, and in time Scots, Irish and Germans joined them.
Most English migrants to the mainland went to the Chesapeake colonies, Virginia and Maryland, where planters grew tobacco to sell in England.
Planters paid the passage of young English indentured servants, who worked four to seven years and hoped for land of their own. By the late 1600s, planters were buying more and more enslaved Africans, whom traders carried across the Atlantic by force.
Farther north, about twenty thousand Puritans sailed to New England in the 1630s, most of them in families.
They wanted towns where their faith shaped daily life and the law. Spanish Catholic missionaries set out to convert Native people, while New England Puritans mostly built churches for themselves. Both linked religion to government, and both punished people who challenged their religious authority.
Both Virginia and Massachusetts Bay began as joint-stock companies, which pooled many investors' money and shared the risk.
In that same 1629 paper, Winthrop used English ideas about property to claim a right to Native land:
John Winthrop They enclose no land.
John Winthrop So as if we leave them sufficient for their use, we may lawfully take the rest.
In fact, Native families already farmed that land, growing corn, beans and squash. English settlers fenced the land they took, let their cattle and hogs roam, and built their own towns apart from Native communities.
In 1642, Miantonomi, a leader of the Narragansett people of southern New England, came to Long Island to warn the Montaukett people there:
Miantonomi These English having gotten our land, they with scythes cut down the grass, and with axes fell the trees; their cows and horses eat the grass, and their hogs spoil our clam banks, and we shall all be starved.
Miantonomi So must we be one as they are, otherwise we shall be all gone shortly.
English families and servants kept coming: by 1680, the English mainland colonies had about 150,000 colonists, free and enslaved. New France's census the next year found fewer than 10,000, and neither count included the Native nations around them.
Back in 1664, an English fleet seized New Netherland from the Dutch without a fight, and New Amsterdam became New York.
In 1665, Radisson and Groseilliers sailed for England to seek royal backing for their fur-trade plan.
Lords and Proprietors
1665–1692 · coda 1710
In England, they took their plan to King Charles II, who paid them forty shillings a week while they waited for a ship. Instead of paddling past French posts on the St. Lawrence, English ships would sail north into Hudson Bay and trade directly with the Cree.
The lands around Hudson Bay, an inland sea far north of the Hudson River, were home to Cree hunters and traders.
In the autumn of 1666, a French army marched into Mohawk country, where Radisson had once lived as an adopted son, and burned the towns. Most Mohawk families escaped, but the soldiers burned their stored corn.
On May 2, 1670, Charles II chartered the Hudson's Bay Company and made its investors owners of all the land that drained into the bay.
A clerk of the Crown The true and absolute Lords and Proprietors.
The charter left out the two Frenchmen whose idea it was, and it gave the Company no real control over the Cree who lived there.
The Company's posts on the bay depended on Cree hunters, and when French rivals offered better deals, the Company had to lower its prices. At Hudson Bay, England needed Native hunters just as France did, even though its other colonies wanted farmland.
Far to the southwest, Spain kept demanding Pueblo labor and tribute, even when drought and famine struck New Mexico in the late 1660s.
Fray Juan Bernal In the past year, 1668, a great many Indians perished of hunger, lying dead along the roads, in the ravines, and in their huts.
Officials had also whipped Pueblo religious leaders for keeping their ceremonies, and in August 1680 many Pueblo towns rose up together. In the Pueblo Revolt, they killed about four hundred colonists and friars and drove the Spanish out of New Mexico for twelve years. When the Spanish returned in 1692, they eased their labor demands and tolerated more of the Pueblo religion.
Compare what Spain, France, the Dutch and England each needed from Native people.
Every empire wanted wealth, and every one claimed land that Native nations already held. From Native people, Spain needed labor and converts, France and the Dutch needed trading partners, and England mostly needed land.
Radisson switched sides twice more, from England to France and back to England. He died in London in 1710 on a Hudson's Bay Company pension. Years before, he had written this about his Mohawk family:
Radisson · remembering his refusal in 1653 For then I began to love my new parents, that were so good and so favourable to me.