The French, unlike the English and the Spanish, saw Indians as trading partners. The French realized that their best opportunity for economic gain was having Native American trading partners who would retain their autonomy and provide them with furs. To do this, the French understood that knowledge of Indian cultures and Indian languages was necessary. It was not uncommon for the French traders to marry Indian women, dress in Indian clothing, and even participate in Indian ceremonies.
The French explorers quickly established trading relations with the Native nations. In his chapter in North American Exploration. Volume 2: A Continent Defined, Conrad Heidenreich writes:
“The French obtained geographical information from natives, hired them as guides, traveled with natives, lived among them, and learned from them.”
Conrad Heidenreich also writes:
“To work with natives effectively, the French had to establish peace with those among whom they settled and had to forge diplomatic ties with others through existing native alliance systems.”
The French understood the need for rituals and ritual gift-giving in establishing good relationships with American Indian nations. Historian Matthew Dennis, in his book Cultivating a Landscape of Peace: Iroquois-European Encounters in Seventeenth-Century America, writes:
“From the native points of view, they constituted an extension of friendship and reciprocity between people, an extension that was neither fundamentally commercial nor military, although trade and the exchange of military aid played an important role.”
Using Indian bark canoes, the French moved inland, engaging in a highly ritualized diplomacy and asking permission to establish their trading posts on Native land. In his book Indians, William Brandon summarizes it this way:
“The Indians wanted the wonderful kettles and hatchets of the foreigners, but the French wanted even more the help and good will of the Indians, their woodland skills, their knowledge of winter snowshoe traveling, their birch-bark canoes (up to forty feet in length) and the paddlers to man them, their familiarity with the river-and-lake waterways to still more treasures of fur, and above all the French wanted to maintain in working condition the tribal channels of trade.”
With regard to the trading relationships between the French and the Indians, John Jennings, in his book Bark Canoes: The Art and Obsession of Tappan Adney, writes:
“Trading partners were expected to demonstrate generosity in the exchange of gifts and in military assistance; their enemies became your enemies.”
The French colonial policy encouraged intermarriage with the Indians and the exchange of children to be raised in the other’s society. Sioux writer Vine Deloria, Jr., in his chapter in Lewis and Clark Through Indian Eyes, writes:
“The French sought to create a new kind of society of mixed Euro-Indian genetic background that would and could hold the lands claimed by the French king under the Doctrine of Discovery by appealing to their common ancestry.”
Overall, the French viewed the land, the resources, and the people of the Americas very differently than other European cultures. In his chapter in Attitudes of Colonial Powers Toward the American Indian, Mason Wade writes:
“The French, unlike the Spaniards and the English, did not try to exterminate the relatively sparse Indian population in their region of exploration because they needed their aid in the fur trade and in war against their more numerous white rivals.”
They were the only Europeans who did not insist that the Indians assimilate into European culture.
Iroquois Confederacy
The largest, most powerful, and best organized Indian nation that the seventeenth-century French encountered as the Iroquois Confederacy, also known as the League of Five Nations and the Haudenosaunee. Formed prior to the European invasion, the Iroquois Confederacy was composed of five culturally related tribes: Seneca, Cayuga, Mohawk, Onondaga, and Oneida. With regard to the Great Law which established the Confederacy, Kevin White, in an article in Indian Country Today, writes:
“The core concepts of the Great Law of the Haudenosaunee are peace, power, and righteousness.”
Former Commissioner of Indian Affairs John Collier, in his book Indians of the Americas, writes:
“The plan was to renounce warfare between one another and to present an alliance against a warring world.”
The Haudenosaunee were a farming people whose territory included what is now upstate New York and the Canadian Lake Ontario region. They maintained diplomatic and trading relations with many other Indian nations, so their actual influence spread out far beyond their own territory.
In the first part of the seventeenth century, the Haudenosaunee were in contact with French, Dutch, and English traders. In 1624, a peace treaty between the Haudenosaunee and the French was negotiated. This was the first treaty between the Haudenosaunee and a European nation. In his entry on the Iroquois Confederacy in the Encyclopedia of North American Indians, John Mohawk writes:
“The peace was short-lived, and intermittent hostilities continued. France had developed extensive alliance with Indian nations north of the St. Lawrence River and the Great Lakes, and the European introduction of the fur trade greatly enhanced competition among various Indian nations.”
John Mohawk also writes:
“France continued to view the Haudenosaunee as a threat to their ambitions for economic hegemony over the Indian nations and lands around the Great Lakes and into the Ohio Valley.”
More seventeenth-century histories
Indians 101: The French and American Indians in the 17th century
Indians 101: French missionaries and American Indians in the 17th century
Indians 101: Jesuit Relations in New France, 1632-1635
Indians 101: American Indians 400 years ago, 1623
Indians 101: American Indians and Europeans 400 years ago, 1622
Indians 101: American Indians 400 years ago, 1621
Indians 101: American Indians 400 years ago, 1620
Indians 101: American Indians and French explorers 350 years ago, 1673