The Vincent-Picard Family’s Investments: Wendat Wealth and Notarized Contracts in the Mid-Nineteenth Century

Abstract

In the nineteenth century, several Wendat families from Jeune-Lorette earned comfortable livings producing moccasins, snowshoes, and other traditional goods manufactured for sale on capitalist markets. In writing about these families, historians have neglected their creation and management of wealth, such as Wendat couple Marguerite Vincent La8inonkie and Paul Picard Honda8onhont’s investment in the notary-based credit market. Between the 1830s and the 1860s, the couple lent large sums at interest to their French Canadian neighbours in the rural region immediately north of Québec City. The Picard-Vincent family’s wealth management is evidence not of economic marginalization but rather of Indigenous affluence, of a family attuned to and able to capitalize on changing religious and market conditions, and of class formation in one First Nations community.