Empire by Collaboration - Robert Michael Morrissey Early American Studies

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extensive lineages, possibly similar to the doodemag among Algonquians like the Anishinaabeg.80 Among the Illinoisspeakers were at least fourteen distinct subgroups—or familles as La Salle called them—at the time of contact: Peoria, Kaskaskia, Tamaroa, Coiracoentanon, Chinko, Cahokia, Chepoussa, Amenakoa, Oouka, Acansa, Moingwena, Tapuaro, Maroa, Ispeminkias, and Metchigameas.81 As a later French observer would say of the Illinois, these were inclusive units not necessarily based solely in biological kinship and included “degrees of kinship that [Europeans] … would not even call cousins.”82 In any event, these patrilineal “familles” were the primary units of identity among the Illinois. As Illinoisspeakers moved into their new territory, they likely used intermarriage, as well as adoption and other kinds of fictive kinship, to build bridges, to welcome other newcomers into their familles, and to create borders. For the Illinois-speaking newcomers in the 1600s, the world was organized into “a8enti8aki”—relatives—and “ninaca8atisi”—strangers.83 Kinship created obligations, identities, and responsibilities that helped the newcomers negotiate their immigration to the borderlands.

      Extended and intermarried families were almost certainly the basis for the decentralized and autonomous villages, which were the most important social units in pre-contact Illinois.84 One early observer said that there were fully sixty villages of Illinois-speakers in the 1640s.85 On the first contact-era map of the Illinois, Marquette drew seven distinct villages of Illinois-speakers that he saw with his own eyes in just a month’s time, which probably represented just a fraction of the total that actually existed. As Marquette’s map shows, the Pe8area (Peoria) were divided into three villages, while the Moing8ena (Moingwena), Kachkaskia (Kaskaskia), Maroa, and Metchigamea all lived in distinct villages. La Salle noted that the numerous villages on early maps constituted “only some of the tribes composing the nation of Illinois.”86

      La Salle also emphasized that the pre-contact Illinois lived in distinct villages, far away from one another, both to the east and to the west of the Mississippi.87 The demands of bison hunting probably joined with kinship to create the bonds and relationships that united local groups into larger familles. Indeed, it is likely that bison hunting, since it required large groups, was helping to “unite” some of these villages in the pre-contact era.88

      In addition to whatever kinship ties may have joined Illinois villages in the prehistoric period, trade certainly helped create a loosely unified identity among the Illinois-speakers and structured relationships with neighbors. Over the course of their colonization of the Illinois Country, trade clearly came to the fore of Illinois Indian life. In Native societies in the Midwest, trade was an important way of expanding power, building cohesion, and dealing with outsiders.89 Trade connections could even produce fictive kinship bonds, as trading partners became a kind of kin.90 Illinois-speakers also established trade connections beyond their local region, creating an interregional trade network that allowed them to import materials from foreign regions. Exotic goods in protohistoric Illinois archaeological sites included prestige goods like Olivella shell beads, marine shell gorgets, and other objects from the lower Mississippi Valley, as well as exotic materials from the Plains.91 By the early 1600s, north-south trade networks were augmented by east-west trade networks, spanning the Algonquian and Siouan borderlands.92

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      Courtesy of the Illinois History and Lincoln Collections, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

      The Illinois began trading for European metal as early as the 1620s and possibly earlier.93 Archaeologists argue from this evidence that the Illinois were aggressively pursuing trade with the Wendats, far to the north in the Great Lakes, probably beginning in the early 1600s.94 Other evidence suggests that they then carried these metals farther south and west, toward modernday Missouri, where they traded them for profit and to make alliances among the Siouan neighbors, descendants of the Oneota. In other words, by the mid-seventeenth century the Illinois had emerged as merchants, middlemen, and go-betweens.95 As newcomers to a region that was borderland between Siouan and Algonquians, as well as at the crossroads of cultures, the Illinois used trade to build consensus, friendships, and cohesion.

      One sign of the opportunistic stance in the Illinois newcomers’ human relationships is the calumet. Like bison hunting and other aspects of the Illinois’s lifeway, the calumet was a recent adoption. As Algonquians among the Siouan Oneota-speakers, the Illinois probably used it frequently when they arrived in the new territory, relying on it to “speak to strangers.”96 The first and most detailed early examples of calumet ceremonialism among the Illinois reflect the fact that they used the calumet not only for peace but also to intimidate and to declare and celebrate their hegemony. The dance featured scenes of conflict, the dancer “repairing his arms, attiring himself, running, discovering the foe, raising the cry, slaying the enemy, removing his scalp, and returning home with a song of victory.” Marquette noted how the whole setting for the dance was decorated with war paraphernalia, “the weapons used by the warriors of those Nations … namely: clubs, war-hatchets, bows, quivers, and arrows.”97 The dancers reenacted a battlefield victory, with the one dancer, near defeat, turning around in defiance and “caus[ing] his adversary to flee.” The climax of the dance was a speech about conquest. As Marquette said, the dance ended with “a lofty Discourse, delivered by him who holds the Calumet … he recounts the battles at which he has been present, the victories that he has won, the names of the Nations, the places, and the Captives whom he has made.”98

      One way to read the calumet among the Illinois, then, is that it was an accommodation to the language of their new territory. But within this ostensible accommodation was actually a declaration of Illinois power. Through kinship and alliance, rather than Cahokia’s territorialism and hierarchy, the Illinois had expanded. The Illinois at contact were probably close to fifteen thousand people.99 They had repopulated the prairies with close to the same number of people who had once inhabited the city at Cahokia. The Illinois Country was no longer a vacant quarter but was home to an aggressive, opportunistic group of newcomers. At midcentury, their world began to feel the effects of a different colonialism in the East.

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      In the 1650s, powerful and unified Iroquois warriors, supplied by their Dutch allies at Albany, began to attack people of the Great Lakes in an effort to subject Algonquians, gain captives, and control fur resources in the region.100 For several groups—the Wendats most especially—the result was near devastation.101 Refugees fled through the Great Lakes, pushing west. Meanwhile, the French at Quebec adopted a policy of supporting the Algonquian allies of the Great Lakes against the Iroquois violence, hoping to prevent them from making peace with the Iroquois and their Dutch and English allies. With French support, the Algonquians counterattacked against the Iroquois. The previously “limited-indecisive” warfare characteristic of pre-contact Native American societies turned much more violent, now producing thousands of casualties, prisoners, and deaths.102

      The Illinois felt some early effects of this violence, on a relatively small scale. In 1653, a “small village” of the Illinois was attacked by the Iroquois.103 They suffered another attack a few years later.104 But Illinois warriors bounced back from these episodes. In fact, in the 1650s at least, they counterattacked against the Iroquois and may have got the better of them.105 More important, far from simply defensive, the Illinois became aggressive. It was as if the Iroquois violence and resulting disorder in the region combined with the Illinois’s colonizing trajectory to trigger their own ambitious bid for supremacy. In the 1650s, Illinois warriors attacked the Winnebago and routed them.106 Later they attacked an Iroquois party and took forty Iroquois “who were on their way to hunt beaver in the Illinois Country.”107

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