This dissertation is a study of nonspeech communication and its significance for mutual acculturation and colonial power dynamics in the context of French-Indian contacts across the Americas in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Most scholars have considered sign-language, pantomime, and other nonverbal means of communication (visual, sonorous, tactile, etc), as temporary, imperfect, and insignificant solutions to the lack of mutual linguistic understanding during early colonial encounters. It is also often assumed that these means of communication, combined with seemingly insurmountable cultural differences, inevitably promoted misunderstandings, incomprehension, and violent conflicts between early colonists and native populations. Seeking to challenge these assumptions, this work closely analyzes the nature, origins, change overtime, and cultural implications of nonverbal and paralinguistic forms of communication, which I argue importantly contributed to the accommodation process and the emergence of cultural hybridity in the early French-Indian Atlantic.;This dissertation offers to expand and refine our understanding of cross-cultural communication and miscommunication in various colonial settings. to do so, it brings in a comparative perspective the experiences of a wide range of French explorers, missionaries, colonial officials, mariners, soldiers, and settlers with a variety of native peoples, cultures, and societies in Brazil, Florida, the Caribbean, Canada, and the Upper Mississippi Valley, from 1500 to the conclusion of the Great Peace of Montreal in 1701. Research for this project was conducted in both published and archival sources, using the original French language versions of the sources, for which I provide new or first translations. The comparative scope of this work brings into question the predominant Canadian-centered chronology that has lead past studies of French America, and seeks to put greater emphasis on the influence that local indigenous cultures and contexts had on colonial developments and in shaping the alliance.;Through five thematic/chronological chapters, my work traces the emergence of a culturally-syncretic repertoire for communication in the early French Atlantic, in which non-linguistic elements were at least as important as spoken words to mediate relations between individuals and groups. Starting with the emergence of shared nonverbal codes during first contacts, the project then explores the process of acculturation as a sensory journey through otherness, then demonstrates the permanence of nonverbal means of communication during and after the mutual acquisition of language by French and Indians. It provides an in-depth look at the role of nonverbal performances in ceremonial oratory in seventeenth-century New France with particular attention to the contest between Jesuit and Indian orators. The dissertation ends with a comparison of nonverbal dimensions of diplomacy in New France and the Caribbean, until the eve of the eighteenth century.

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"American Languages: Indians, Ethnology, and the Empire for Liberty" is a study of knowledge and power, as it relates to Indian affairs, in the early republic. It details the interactions, exchanges, and networks through which linguistic and racial ideas were produced and it examines the effect of those ideas on Indian administration. First etymology, then philology, guided the study of human descent, migrations, and physical and mental traits, then called ethnology. It would answer questions of Indian origins and the possibility of Indian incorporation into the United States. It was crucial to white Americans seeking to define their polity and prove their cultivation by contributing to the republic of letters.;The study of Indian languages was both part of the ongoing ideological construction of the "empire for liberty" and it could serve practical ends for the extension and consolidation of imperial relations with the native groups within and on the borders of the United States. Administrators of Indian affairs simultaneously asserted continental mastery and implicitly admitted that it was yet incomplete. Language could be used to illustrate Indian "civilization" and Indian "savagery," the openness of the U.S. nation and its exclusivity, Indian affinities to "Anglo-Saxons" and their utter difference. Language was a race science frequently opposed to understandings of race defined through the body alone.;The War Department repeatedly sought linguistic information that it could use as the basis of policy, but philology was not a discourse of scientific control imposed upon helpless Indians. On the contrary, Indians lay at the heart of almost all that was known of Indian languages. This was especially true once European scientific interest shifted from the study isolated words to grammatical forms, which happened to coincide with debates over Indian removal in the United States. This meant that Indians were in an unprecedented position to shape the most authoritative scientific knowledge of "the Indian" at the moment that U.S. Indian policy was most uncertain. Native tutoring, often mediated through white missionaries, led Peter S. Du Ponceau to refute the notion, shared alike by apologists for removal (e.g. Lewis Cass) and European philosophers (e.g. Wilhelm von Humboldt) that the American languages indicated Indian "savagery.";Yet in attempting to prove that Native American languages were not "savage," Du Ponceau defined Indian grammatical forms as unchanging "plans of ideas" that all Indians, and only Indians, possessed. Henry R. Schoolcraft, Indian agent, protege of Cass, and husband to the Ojibwa-Irish Jane Johnston, extended this line of thought and defined a rigid "Indian mind" that refused "civilization." Such conclusions suggested that Indians possessed fixed mental traits. This conclusion largely agreed with those that ethnologists of the "American school" would advance years later, but those scientists argued that language could offer no information on physical race. The rapid (but brief) rise of the American school undermined the ethnological authority of the philological knowledge that Indians, such as David Brown (Cherokee) and Eleazer Williams (Mohawk) had produced in the preceding decades.;After decades of debate over Indian "plans of ideas," "patterns of thought," and whether Indian languages were a suitable medium for teaching the concepts of Christianity and republican government---debates intensified by the invention of the Cherokee alphabet and the understanding that Sequoyah, its author, intended it to insulate Cherokee society from white interference---the federal government began moving toward a policy of English-only instruction. Even after the strident opposition of the American school, language remained a key marker of civilization and nationhood.

This study focusses on the Kahnawake Iroquois Indians, a collection of individuals who emigrated from the Iroquois homeland to a Jesuit mission community, or reserve, outside of Montreal, starting in 1667.;Their history and development as a people is traced from the beginnings in 1667 up to the end of the French power in Canada, at the end of the Seven Years' War in 1760. Through the topics of diplomacy, warfare, and trade, these Kahnawake Indians are examined and it is determined that they were important players in the power politics and military balance between the English, the French, and the Iroquois proper from the 1680s to 1760.;They became a pivotal group within the French military machine in northeastern North America, but forced the French to meet them on their own terms, refusing to become subject to French authority. They initiated and sustained an illegal but highly important trade in furs and European blankets, defying the mercantilist rules of both the French and the English imperial authorities in New France and New York.;Culturally, the Kahnawake people developed a distinct identity, successfully blending elements of both traditional Iroquois and European Catholic culture. Born in an era of struggle, they thrived and maintained their distinct identity and culture in the face of imperial powers and the designs of their Iroquois relatives.

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