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In my paper “An unlikely tie: Rethinking Indian women’s contributions in an interracial marriage in the Western Great Lakes”, my particular research interest wants to focus on Indian women and the role they played when they married French traders. I want to analyze how scholars have interpreted marriages between Frenchmen and Native American women. Throughout my paper I specifically want to pin point how historians have portrayed Indian women in their research. My historiography will particularly be centered during the lucrative fur trade during the early nineteenth century in the Great Lakes region. Majority of the scholarship will focus on why Frenchmen married Indian women. In addition there will be an emphasis about the two different ethnic groups creating political, social, and economic alliances. In order for the Frenchmen to build strong alliances with native tribes they had to become a part of the Native American’s family. Thus interracial marriages to Indian women were important and common. French men wanted to improve their status in the fur trade and gain access to the Native American’s hunting and trapping groups.
By focusing on interracial marriages between French men and Native American women I seek to answer the following questions. How have scholars interpreted Indian women since the 1980s? Do certain scholars focus more on women’s gender roles or political and economic contributions to their communities? Has religion been a center focus on majority of the texts or is it a new lens that historians are focusing on? Have narratives centered Native American women as key players who constructed elaborate mixed-blood kinship networks that paralleled those of native society? Lastly, I want to address the author’s methodological approach towards their texts. Do scholars utilize the methodological approach of separate or conjoined spheres? Separate spheres is an ideology that defines and separates women and men. Furthermore, the topic is written about men and women separately to focus on them as solely agents. On the contrary, conjoined spheres are about how men and women interacted and cohabited with each other in a social context.
The overall objective of my paper is to focus on Native American women and their role in expanding the transatlantic economy while securing the survival of their own native culture. I will try and accumulate a wide range of primary and secondary sources. Some of the sources I plan to explore are manuscripts, original documents from treaties, photographs, travel journals, historic maps, and any books dating from the earliest contact with European setters. Eventually, these sources will highlight how Indian women created a middle ground while being associated between two disparate cultures.