Marriages between Aboriginals and Whites
This article relates events happening in Kahnawake in the 1830s and 1840s as members of the community contested the acceptability of Mohawk-white marriages. It shows how a preexisting discomfort about the presence of Euro-Canadians in the community was used by local Native and non-Native actors to serve their economic and political interests, whether personal or collective. For that purpose, they sought to redefine the acceptability of those marriages according to racial and patriarchal criteria. By focusing on the role of local actors, this article shows that the legal definition of Indian status in the laws of 1850 and 1851 introduced racial and gendered lines to frame the integration of whites by marriage, reflected the contradictory discourses in circulation in the St. Lawrence Valley’s Native communities, notably in Kahnawake.