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In the Book Indian Women and French Men, Susan Sleeper-Smith depicts the importance of interracial marriages and how they played key role in the Great Lakes fur trade. She also focuses on how much traders relied on women. This book also shows how religious kin networks had a great deal of power in the trade. The women discussed in this book were key players in the fur trade through the entire Great Lakes region. Native women would marry French fur traders and bring them to their tribes and they would establish them into their communities. Fur traders who would marry Indian women with a strong kin network often held a strong advantage over their competition. It would plug the traders into some type of hierarchical trade network with the native tribes. An example of religious kinship in this book is Marie Madeleine, who played a significant role in the tr