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

Abstract

‘To live among us without a wife is to live without help, without home, always a vagabond’.1 So declared an Algonquin ‘juggler’ (or healer, or as the Jesuits had it, sorcerer), Pigarouïch, 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.2 Such begins to explain why plural unions mattered so much in New France in the seventeenth century.3 Understanding the importance of these unions illuminates much about men – and women – at home.