My latest book is Here to Stay/Lives in 17th Century Canada. In this post, I want to make clear that people then lived with different paradigms. It’s the only way I can explain things. Telling the past of New France was not easy.

As I was writing Here to Stay, a story of my ancestors in New France, it became ever so obvious that the story was set in a time that operated under different paradigms than ours.

The players in my story were from various Indian and European cultures. The book’s central focus, however, is on my seventeenth-century ancestors. It was their story I wanted to tell.

I had not set out to write a comprehensive telling the past of New France, as I told the story of my ancestors—what they encountered, how it impacted them and how they probably related emotionally to events.

How could I portray them in a way that showed I understood the unacceptable culture they lived with and in but also be true to many of the other noble truths I saw in their struggle?

My challenge in telling the past of New France was respecting different paradigms.

1. The relationship of Indigenous people and French people to land was different.

Here to Stay is a story about the colonization of a land that had been in use by Indigenous people. I can’t write “owned” by Indigenous people, as the Native population of the early and mid-seventeenth century had no concept that land could be owned. The upshot, however, was that when the French arrived, they imposed a different paradigm to the Saint Lawrence Valley: that of ownership. It was how they saw things! It was the way they understood life.

The French sincerely believed that the land was up or grabs as no one “owned” it. When they negotiated with the Indians for a transfer of ownership, the Indians agreed as they had no idea what the French were referring to.

For my ancestors who were poor people in France without much of a future, taking possession of the “free” land available to them was beyond what they could imagine in France. It was a once-in-a-lifetime bonanza.

By the second generation of colonization, I believe both the French and the Indians had a clear sense of each other’s relationship to land.

For the Hurons (Wendats), the exchange of land for protection against the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) seems to have been worth the price. Many of the St. Lawrence Valley Natives (Hurons, Etchemins, Montagnards) welcomed the French in their struggle against the Haudenasaunee, who waged a war of extermination against the Hurons. In this willful destruction of their racial brothers and sisters, the Haudenosaunee almost succeeded in their brutal genocide.

In telling the past of New France, I saw that my ancestors were not bad people, even if they could not see the world as the Natives did. They were not bad people either because their numbers eventually surpassed that of the Native population.

2. Indigenous cultures were anything but monolithic.

The above paragraphs underline that the Natives were not part of a uniform culture. They could be both allies and sworn enemies to each other.

Indian cultures practiced brutality that is beyond what we can envision without cringing. Captives were tortured by beatings and burnings. And on occasion, they were eaten by their captors. The word “Mohawk” comes from a Narragansett word meaning “people who eat people.”

In mid-seventeenth century, the Haudenosaunee would come to my native state of Maine to capture Abnaki young people (under about 16) to use as slaves or to sell to the English and the Dutch. The women were taken on occasion to be wives (makers of new Haudenosaunees) while the men and boys (over 16) were usually put to death.

3. The conflict with the French was uneven for the Indigenous people from the start.

The Indian population was living in a stone-age culture. They didn’t have the wheel—not even the Aztecs and the Incas, with their astrological sophistication, had the wheel.

The confrontation of the French and the Native was bound to end in favor of the French. Why? The French had the superiority of weaponry and more ability to strategize.

• Indians could not produce their own rifles and bullets, but were dependent on Europeans. This necessarily limited their ability to wage war with state-of-the-art weaponry.
• The Indian population did not have the skills to carry out a siege. Many times, they besieged a fort or redoubt for several days and then they had to leave to hunt and fish. This pause allowed the French to regroup. This fact alone was instrumental in saving the French on many occasions from the Iroquois.

4. There were better relations between the French and the Indians than between other Europeans and the Indians.

My challenge here was not to present the French as the “good guys,” but in telling the past of New France, I did need to portray them in their culture rather than transpose what American schools teach about British and American colonization of North America onto the French. While not the “good guys” by any means, they were also not the villains we see elsewhere in the European takeover of the Americas.

If you read colonization material, you know that this more positive light on French colonization has been observed over and over again. There were, of course, many instances of betrayal and abuse attributable to the French. Their attacks of my ancestors on the people of New England (where I now live) were brutal, ferocious and lethal, but I want to stay with the French and Indian relations for the moment.

5. Here are five reasons in telling the past of New France I believe account for the better—even if far from perfect—relations:

A. Canada’s economy was based on fur trading, not on farming. The French needed to collaborate with the Indians to make fur trading work. One source of the fierce enmity the Iroquois bore toward the French was that the Iroquois sought to control the fur trade, and this was something which the French were not willing to concede to them. The enmity can be called, in some part, “a trade war.” The value of furs was due to European clothing styles . Before the market in Europe for beaver furs skyrocketed, the furs the Iroquois could gather had little value beyond what they themselves attached to them.

The French did not take the market away; both the French and the Haudenosaunee came upon the lucrative fur trade at the same time and both wanted to be the middlemen in the trade.

B. The French honored the sovereignty of the Indian nations. They lived side by side with the Natives. When they waged war together, the Indigenous nations kept their prisoners—even when these were Europeans—and were allowed to kill them or make slaves of them. The English generally relegated their Indian allies to less than equal positions and controlled the fate of prisoners captured by Indians. (I would much rather have been captured by an Indian ally of the English than by one of the French!)

C. The French adhered to a sacramental religion. Salvation could be achieved through the practice of a sacramental life. Indians did not have to be literate to be saved and did not have to read the Bible.

English colonies practiced Protestantism which was a biblical religion: it depended on literacy to read the bible. While there were certainly conversions of Indians by the English, it was not as widespread as conversion was among the French. Catholic Indians were considered French subjects for almost a hundred years with access to courts. The Haudenosaunee convert Kateri Tekakwitha was honored by the locals as a Catholic saint soon after her death in the 1680s. (Actual canonization took longer.)

D. The French colonization did not push westward in a line. Instead, the French scattered across the continent, forming a French archipelago. Colonies were scattered: Détroit, Chicago, St.Louis, Des Moines, Coeur d’Alène, Baton Rouge. This colonization pattern did not pressure the Indigenous population as did the English pattern of denser, more compact settlement that pushed ever westward. Also, the number of English colonials was immensely greater and so that much more threatening.

E. The French administrators were noblemen who believed in rank and standing. Unlike the British colonies where democracy was growing with the help of a leadership that was local and “from the ranks,” Canada was governed by nobles. (Frontenac, for instance, was a cousin of Louis XIV.) These nobles understood the Indians’ prizing of dignity and chiefdom. It was what the nobles themselves emphasized. There are many instances of French administrators donning their most elegant robes, capes and feathered hats when they palavered with Indian chiefs. It is said that the Indians respected this pomp and circumstance exhibited by the French leaders and felt honored by their pageantry.

In conclusion to this look at telling the past of New France

History is always written by the winners. This was something I kept in mind as I portrayed life in seventeenth-century Canada. Much of what I knew about the various Native nations, I knew because of French sources—the winners. So, I have kept this in mind as I was telling the past of New France.

What I have written just touches the surface of what I struggled with in telling the past of New France.

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