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Red mothers and white milk: maternal lactation and American Indians in post-revolutionary France.

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Between 1793-1800, the seven-year period in which the influential French author Francois-Rene de Chateaubriand wrote his immensely popular New World romance Atala, Napoleon rose to power within France. These were the years of the Haitian Revolution, and the beginning of French colonial ambitions in Egypt. As slave rebellions cost the lives of countless French soldiers in the Caribbean, Parisians were decorating their homes with American Indian-patterned wallpaper, eating off of Indian-printed plates and watching Indian-themed plays. More than thirty years later, Delacroix's painting Les Natchez, inspired by that romantic novella, was completed and exhibited shortly after his government-sponsored colonizing voyages to Morocco. (1) It seems that France's harsh suppression of slave revolt and brutal colonial expansion in North Africa were parallel to a striking domestic interest in the "dying" culture and bodies of the American Indians. Why did domestic revolution and imperial expansion demand a parallel retreat backwards in the French national imagination? What function did the Indian, figure of France's great lost hope of a colonial empire in the West, play in constructing a national and imperial identity in post-revolutionary France? To begin to address these questions, I have singled out the trope of motherhood, and particularly of breastfeeding, as central to questions of racial and national identity in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century France. The themes of birth and of nursing not only link the two art works mentioned above; they also link metropole and colony, and unite pre- and post-revolutionary French history. This essay will reveal the ways in which the nation of France, in the decades after the Revolution, negotiated a space for itself chronologically, culturally, and racially through representations and manipulations of the body of the American Indian.

Historically, European discussion of the New World had evaluated both land and people in direct reference to their fecundity. European writers from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries struggled to come to terms with the dual potentials of this "virgin" land: glorious fertility or immature sterility. On the one hand, a discourse of Indian impotence and infertility was employed to justify expansion, expulsion, and systematic annihilation. On the other hand, scientists and explorers singled out the female Indian as the "perfect mother," superior in her parenting practices to mothers in the Old World. The close bonds between Indian mother and her papoose struck every European observer, who would simultaneously and paradoxically comment on the Indians' reputed lack of progeny, understood as a sign of unavoidable extinction. In particular the Indian woman's extraordinarily long period of breastfeeding imprinted itself upon the minds of eagerly watching Europeans, who implicitly and explicitly envied the infant its constant access to the Indian breast. Stories and paintings showed in sensual detail both nursing Indian women and Indian-grieving rituals for dead children, frequently depicting mothers tending the graves of their infants by watering the funeral mound with their overflowing breasts. The imperial irony of the colonizer's need for Indian breast milk (Indian maternity nourishing the Indians' oppressor) is most shockingly evident in the numerous renderings of the illness of famed Spanish traveler, historian, and priest Bartolome de Las Casas....

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