(uplifting instrumental music) - Thinking about women often can be complex because in the past, I think, a lot of the historical narrative has been, men have jobs, they're identified by being a fisherman or a soldier.

When we talk about women in the past and lump them together, that gets really dangerous.

We wanna make sure that we're being specific about what we're thinking about when we're talking about women, because the experiences of every individual matters and every individual is coming from a different background.

So, at the Straits of Mackinaw, the first women that we always talk about are our indigenous allies.

Odawa and Ojibwe women are always here.

We can see that in the first marriages recorded in the church records.

We can see that in the business records, in the military records.

Native women are the farmers in their communities.

They're the ones that are making the clothing.

They provide for most of the material needs of their families.

When the fur trade comes in, that drastically starts to shift.

Women, instead of just being producers in indigenous communities, now have the opportunity to also become consumers, which is a really, really interesting thought.

To go from producing the things that your family needs to producing the things that your family needs, but also being able to purchase new technologies that change how you operate your whole life.

Being able to buy European wool textiles that come in beautiful colors that are generally hard-wearing saves you so much labor and time.

A lot of the indigenous communities here from going to producing things just for their household, spending their time making birch bark baskets, reed mats, maintaining their house, farming, gardening, that sort of thing, to producing more furs that are ready for sale to buy the new technology that they wanted.

The way that they spend their time changes as the fur trade moves in.

And then of course, the marriages that they have with French men changes the way that they move throughout the Great Lakes.

Being more or less stationed at Michilimackinac year round was a very different experience for most of our native allies.

They tended to move from the lake shore in the summer where they would fish a lot, where they would meet with people to being more stationary in the winter, hunkering down, going into the interior and hunting, and spending more time with their families.

Once the fort is built, and there are houses here, a lot of the women that end up marrying French men, Marines Cash, for example, she was more or less stationary at Michilimackinac.

So, the way that they move throughout the Great Lakes changes, the way they spend their time changes, and the opportunities that they have change as well.

There's another lady that comes here in the 1760s, as a single divorced fur trader.

Her name was Sally Ainse.

Sally Aunts came here after going through a messy divorce with her husband.

She ended up traveling through the Great Lakes.

At one point she was mentioned as selling blankets and alcohol in Southern Michigan.

And then she ended up coming up to Mackinac and had a relationship with a British officer.

And luckily for us, that British officer wrote a letter to his friend and said that Sally had abused him with her mouth and her hands and moved back to her own house after he proposed that they should live together for a year and then he would marry her.

So, Sally seems to have been a very independent lady.

He had, (chuckles) she had been in a relationship with a British officer.

She was a fur trader herself.

She owned or rented a house of her own, and when their relationship did not work out, she said goodbye and moved back to her own house.

So, I really appreciate Sally's story.

She also worked with another fur trader here named John Askin.

John Askin makes note of her at least twice in his journals.

She ended up going to Cross Village, which is a nearby village, and he just kept track of where she was going in his journal.

We're not sure if she was working for him, or if he was just, just knew her.

But later on in life, they both ended up down by Detroit.

And he made another note in his journal, in his records about her and said he had sold her some brandy or rum and didn't expect payment.

So, he's basically giving her this, and it seems like he appreciated the work that she did.

So, women definitely work as business people at Michilimackinac.

Putting people, no matter if it's a man or a woman into a very specific box, is really hard to do.

Women bring quite a lot to any relationship, and they also on occasion have the ability to work on their own, especially in the case of a divorced lady or someone that ends up being widowed.

That's a place where we also see women working on their own.

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