Raudot Ordinance of 1709

On April 13, 1709, New France intendant, Jacques Raudot passed the Ordinance Rendered on the Subject of the Negroes and the Indians Called Panis, legalizing the purchase and possession of Indigenous slaves in New France.

"Having good knowledge of how this colony would benefit if it were possible for the inhabitants to purchase slaves known as panis, whose nation is Distant from this country [...] We for the great pleasure of his Majesty, ordain that all Panis and Negroes who have been purchased or who will be purchased at some time, will belong to Those who have purchased them."

When intendant Jacques Raudot pronounced Indigenous slavery to be legal in New France, the practice had already been well established component of the Native and French alliances throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

In all of the Indigenous societies the French encountered in North America, the basis of social relationships was kinship. This system allowed for alliances to transcend ethnic and linguistic lines, thereby explaining early Franco-Native relationships.

Indigenous slavery prior contact with Europeans took the form of captivity raids on enemy territory with an objective to kill or capture members of the enemy nation — usually men were killed, while women and children were taken captive. Among the Northeastern communities, the death of a kin member decreased the spiritual power of the community. In order to reestablish spiritual balance, members of enemy nations would be taken captive, then either killed or adopted and made slaves. Captives who escaped death but were not adopted into their captors’ community, were then used as instruments of diplomacy. In contrast to European slavery, the Indigenous practice focused more on the act of enslavement itself than on the production of commodities. In Bonds of Alliance, historian Brett Rushforth argues that Indigenous slavery was: “at its heart a system of symbiotic dominion, appropriating the power and productivity of enemies and facilitating the creation of friendships built on shared animosity toward the captive’s people". Thus, Indigenous slavery was part of a much larger social phenomena that focused more on the symbolic display of power and the building of alliances, than on the economic value of the labour.

At the turn of the eighteenth century, New France's major export was fur, which was, historian James Pritchard argues, obtained through “a symbiotic relationship between native hunters and French traders” which “gave rise to a set of socioeconomic and politicomilitary relations in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries that became unique in the Western Hemisphere". These relations, coupled with a dogged westward drive towards the Pays d'en Haut, resulted in the French involvement in the Indigenous slave trade".

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