Detroit's Hidden Channels

Detroit’s Hidden Channels overflows with sharp insights and stunning revelations about gendered experience in the Great Lakes trading societies of the eighteenth century. Drawing on a vast array of sources, Marrero expertly reconstructs the intricate world of colonial Detroit, revealing this common space of Indigenous and French wives, husbands, traders, merchants, military officers, and political officials to be one of enmeshed familial relationships and layered political intrigue. Here, no single imperial power or individual representative of any crown is capable of holding sway in the face of the complex and fluid relations of kinship ties and obligations that form a dense web of relationality across the region and beyond.

— Tiya Miles, author of The Dawn of Detroit: A Chronicle of Slavery and Freedom in the City of the Straits

Detroit’s Hidden Channels is an insightful social analysis of the French-Indigenous community that evolved with Cadillac’s founding of this frontier trading center. Long subsumed by nationalistic histories about this region, Marrero’s gender analysis uncovers both the power of these interwoven kin networks and the role that Indigenous women played in forging these kin linkages that controlled the course of events. This is a must-read for early American historians and for anyone wishing to know more about the “real” history of early Detroit.

— Susan Sleeper-Smith, Professor, Department of History, Michigan State University

In this meticulous and sophisticated analysis of Detroit’s founding era, Marrero offers an important rejoinder to standard imperial histories by parting the curtains for us to see, with more clarity and precision than we have before, the place of Indigenous and French women in the making of Detroit. Methodically clawing away at French and English colonial records, Indigenous sources, oral histories, and even folk songs, she exposes at every turn the scattered traces of individual women, and reveals the gender dynamics instrumental in establishing the far-ranging networks of trade and kinship that were the building blocks of empire. A masterful study.

— Sophie White, Associate Professor of American Studies, University of Notre Dame