Native American Men - and Women - at Home in Plural Marriages in Seventeenth-Century New France

‘To live among us without a wife is to live without help, without home, always a vagabond’. So declared an Algonquin ‘juggler’ (or healer, or as the Jesuits had it, sorcerer), Pigarouıch, who was in the process of converting to Christianity in the 1630s.He fretted over the consequences of giving up multiple wives (something acceptable, even desirable, for a powerful healer), should his wife, by choice or necessity, leave him. He found this possibility a powerful deterrent to adopting monogamy; he was not the only one. He was also not simply pointing out, in a sweetly pathetic way, that men could barely survive without their loving wives. Rather, ‘to live without help, without home, always a vagabond’ was to be a socially, economically and politically disadvantaged man. A man needed a home, and a wife (or wives). Social rank came in part from the ability to live in one’s house, to be a husband and father. Such begins to explain why plural unions mattered so much in New France in the seventeenth century. Understanding the importance of these unions illuminates much about men– and women – at home.Even some of the most seemingly avid believers in Catholicism would not adhere to a single permanent spouse, which ‘caused us all some trouble’, as Jesuit superior Paul Le Jeune later phrased it. Historians of these colonial encounters, following the missionaries, have usually focused less on polygyny’s internal dynamics than on how it seemed to Jesuits: an ‘obstacle’, a ‘target’, ‘disorder’ and ‘savagery’. While early feminist accounts of these encounters argued that polygyny was one of many Native ‘freedoms’ given up with conversions, more recent work has argued that women converted to Catholicism in part to escape polygyny. Even historians who disagree about how ‘Frenchified’ or not Natives became in New France, agree that polygyny was an oppressive regime propelling women into Christianity and a European way of life. However, what if we refuse to take plural unions simply as an ‘obstacle’, instead seeing them as an invitation to immerse ourselves in Native American households, in ways rarely possible? Doing so reveals much about masculine status and its relation to households and gender frontiers, as well as conversion.