Empire by Collaboration. Robert Michael Morrissey

Fox.¹⁰⁸ They attacked enemies to the south and west.¹⁰⁹ Soon they were at war with “seven or eight” different nations.¹¹⁰ Illinois-speakers were not defensive or desperate; they were belligerent.

      Moreover, if we look closely at the Illinois engagements, one important pattern emerges. Not only were the Illinois routing their enemies, they were also usually taking huge numbers of captives. Against the Winnebago, they took an entire village captive. As one French account put it, “So vigorous was their attack that they killed, wounded, or made prisoners all the Puans, except a few who escaped.”¹¹¹ Describing the Winnebago after the same event, another account told how “All the people of this Nation were killed or taken captive by the Iliniouek.”¹¹² Far from defeated, the Illinois were on a concerted campaign to capture slaves.

      Like so many other things in Algonquian life, the central logic of slavery among peoples of the Great Lakes was based on kinship. Since kinship networks were fundamentally how people gained their status, identity, and power in the world, a person’s lineage and family were absolutely central to his or her life. Maintaining and extending a kinship network was fundamental to a person’s success in trade, warfare, political diplomacy, and marriage. Kinship was the bedrock of life.¹¹³

      This context helps explain the phenomenon of slave raids among Algonquians like the Illinois. As war and disease impacted Native societies during the Beaver Wars, people died by the thousands. This created great disorder among Great Lakes Indians in the seventeenth century, as many kin went missing. The fundamental logic of Indian warfare was that the deceased needed to be replaced. Captives could fill the spaces left vacant by deceased relatives in the kinship order. Adopted into the family, they could literally replace the dead.¹¹⁴

      It is no accident that many of our best informants on Indian slavery were eyewitnesses to the Illinois, where captivity became such an important part of life during the contact period. As one Jesuit visitor to the Illinois Country in the seventeenth century wrote, expressing the logic of Indian captivity and slavery, “When there is any dead man to be resuscitated, that is to say, if any one of their warriors has been killed, and they think it a duty to replace him in his cabin,—they give to this cabin one of their prisoners, who takes the place of the deceased; and this is what they call ‘resuscitating the dead.’”¹¹⁵ Another priest in the Illinois Country, Jacques Gravier, lived with the Illinois in the 1690s. His dictionary of the Illinois language contains a virtual primer for understanding the subtleties of Indian slavery in this period. One telling term for slavery in the five-hundred-page dictionary expressed the essence of the phenomenon: nirapakerima: “I adopt him in place of the dead.”¹¹⁶

      This was the basic principle of Native warfare throughout the Algonquian world in this period. In the wake of disease and violence, the dead needed to be replaced. But this was a complicated business, and certain requirements governed the taking of slaves. Most important, a captive could not be kin or the kin of allies.¹¹⁷ As the French would learn as they began buying and receiving slaves from Indian allies, owning a slave immediately antagonized the culture and lineage to which that person belonged.¹¹⁸ In the Algonquian-speaking world in the midst of the Beaver Wars, many groups had consolidated, uniting kin lines in an effort to reestablish their networks. For instance, the Anishenaabeg created a new collective identity out of previously disparate local identities.¹¹⁹ In this context, Algonquian-speaking captives were often useless, for attempting to enslave or adopt them into a lineage would only upset neighbors in the mixed-up world of the pays d’en haut. Only true “strangers” would do, those who were not only not kin but also did not share kin with an ally. For this purpose, in the Algonquian Great Lakes, Siouan-speaking groups from the West made the best slaves. They had no kin—they were complete strangers. And so they could become a8enti8aki—relatives.¹²⁰

      Given the preference for “strangers” in the business of captive adoption, the Illinois-speakers had a hugely important strategic advantage in slaving. They lived in, and increasingly controlled, the borderlands. They could raid among the Siouan-speakers of the West, very few of whom had kinsmen among the Algonquian-speakers of the Great Lakes. The Illinois took advantage of this as they raided in the 1660s.¹²¹ When they attacked the Winnebago, taking the whole village captive, they were enslaving a group of Siouanspeaking people who would not make them enemies among the other Algonquian-speakers in the North. The same goes for their reported raids to the south and west in the 1660s.¹²² When the Jesuit Claude Allouez reported that the Illinois were engaged in wars with the Iroquois on one side and Siouans on the other, he thought it was a lamentable situation for them. It was actually the heart of the Illinois advantage.¹²³

      It is important to note that when they went on slave raids in the precontact era, the Illinois probably mostly captured women. Not only was this typical of most Algonquian slave systems, and certainly typical of the Illinois’s practices in the contact era, as we will see, but the Illinois’s new bison economy gave women a new significance in the 1600s—as laborers. Evidence from the contact era suggests that female slaves were welcomed into polygamous families among the Illinois as second and third wives and put under the subordination of a mistress.¹²⁴ As La Salle would write in the 1680s, by the early contact period, female slaves in Illinois were not just replacement kin but people “who they compel to labor for them.”¹²⁵ It seems almost certain that the bison economy’s labor demands and the traditional kinshipreplacement imperatives of slavery dovetailed in Illinois in the contact era. The Illinois’s location in the borderlands allowed them to replace kin and to expand the capacity of their bison-based mode of production.

      By the 1660s, through slavery and adoption, the Illinois had probably begun to replace the people they had lost in early Iroquois attacks and probable epidemics, as their population figures suggest.¹²⁶ This created a fork in the road. It seems clear that the Illinois might have stayed out of further conflicts, safe from the fighting that embroiled the Algonquian world. They could have remained, heedlessly hunting bison west of the Mississippi, avoiding Iroquois aggression. Instead the ambitious Illinois continued their opportunistic trajectory. Taking advantage of a respite from Iroquois attacks beginning in the late 1660s, the Illinois resumed their trading to the north vigorously. Several French accounts from this period report the Illinois making their first visits to newly established French outposts in Green Bay, the Fox River, and Lake Superior (St. Esprit).¹²⁷ As Allouez wrote in 1669, by this time the Illinois were entrepreneurs, traveling north “from time to time in great numbers, as Merchants, to carry away hatchets and kettles, guns, and other articles that they need.”¹²⁸ Allouez commented that one Illinois merchant—Chachagwessiou—had distinguished himself as a skilled trader and a tough negotiator. Commenting on the Illinois, Allouez wrote: “They act like traders and give hardly any more than do the French.”¹²⁹

      But every good merchant needs a commodity for sale. For the Illinois, their prairie homeland lacked lakes and woods that made for good beaver habitat, as many French pointed out. And so it just made sense: living in the borderlands, the Illinois were in a strategic spot. They projected power both in the Algonquian world to the northeast and in the Siouan-speaking world to the south and west. They were slavers, having restored their own depleted population with a whole village of Winnebagos and probably others. They had a long tradition of acting as merchants and middlemen. Taking a bold and aggressive step, they combined the roles. The Illinois continued to capture and trade for ever more slaves in the south and west, Siouans and Caddoans like the Pawnee, Osage, and Missouri. Then, following the trade routes that they had established earlier in the protohistoric period for trade with the Huron, the Illinois now brought these slaves north. Using a market-oriented logic, they began to “traffic” in slaves, as one French observer later put it.¹³⁰ Ambitious merchants who lacked good beaver for the fur trade, the Illinois took advantage of the other commodity available to themselves: people. By 1673, when Marquette visited the Illinois, the strategy was consummate: “They are warlike, and make themselves dreaded by the Distant tribes to the south and west, whither they go to procure Slaves; these they barter, selling them at a high price to other Nations, in exchange for other Wares.”¹³¹

      Like their migration to the Illinois Valley in the late 1500s, the Illinois’s embrace of slavery and