Flesh Reborn Read online

  To be sure, a double standard was at work, insofar as the early modern French were themselves a highly mobile people. Proverbial French attachment to native soil notwithstanding, much of the workforce was in constant flow within the home kingdom, even across its borders; refugees of war sought to escape armies, both enemy and friendly; itinerant preachers roamed the land with zeal; and, until Louis XIV fixed his abode at Versailles late in the century, the monarch himself moved from palace to palace with his court at a dizzying rhythm. Officials, traders, and varied personnel who served at Quebec and in the other posts of the embryonic colony were no less mobile, coming and going across the Atlantic, often staying put for only a season – Champlain himself would make the journey twenty-nine times. Blind to the paradox, French observers placed the Indigenous peoples they encountered into one of two categories: there were those who “live assembled in villages” and who “cultivate the fields,” producing enough to sustain themselves year round, and having “some sort of political and civic life”; and then there were others, like the Montagnais and Algonquins, whose peripatetic way of life barely raised them beyond the “condition of beasts.”38 Although commercial profit remained the fundamental impulse of colonization in these early decades, the civilizing mission gradually came to occupy an important place in French thinking about Indigenous peoples.

  It is in the writings of Marc Lescarbot, who reported in 1612 on his experience in Acadia, that we find the earliest call to sedentarize the Algonquian hunter-gatherers of the vast expanses claimed as New France. Whereas good missionaries would be sure to reap great fruits as soon as they reached more sedentary agriculturalists such as the Armouchiquois (Wabanakis) and Iroquois, he wrote, the “vagabond and divided” Mi’kmaq and Wolastoqiyik or Maliseet who lived in the immediate vicinity of the French posts in Acadia needed “to be assembled by the culture of the soil and forced in this way to reside in one place. For whoever has made the effort to cultivate a piece of land does not leave it easily. He fights to preserve it with all his courage.” In Lescarbot’s thinking, agricultural bounty would ensure sedentism, and a solid colonial settlement would be a precondition to this shift. Only by harvesting wheat and raising cattle and fowl themselves would the French be in a position to offer inspiration to their Algonquian neighbours and sustenance to tide them over during their gradual transition from nomadism to the sedentary life. All of this, he concluded, would not be possible without the strong financial backing of the king of France or some other great prince.39

  Champlain had been a companion of Lescarbot in Acadia, and this line of reasoning may very well have informed his exchanges with the Algonquins. The Christianizing and civilizing mission, which do not appear to have greatly preoccupied him during his first decade in New France, came to occupy an increasingly important place in Cham-plain’s thinking – his personal religious awakening conveniently coinciding with the growing influence at court of the dévots, the Catholic party. When he returned to Quebec in 1615, it was in the company of four Recollets, men belonging to a French branch of the Order of Friars Minor or Franciscans. Other missionaries had served in Acadia, but these four, at Champlain’s invitation, were the first to reach the Saint Lawrence valley to attend to the spiritual needs of the colonists and to convert the Natives. The Recollets had apparently not given much prior thought to the forms that their activity might take, but it was not long before they realized that nomadism posed considerable challenges to evangelization: the seasonal dispersal of unaccompanied bands during the hunting season unavoidably encouraged religious backsliding; there were far too few missionaries to accompany each family band as they scattered; and, besides, having to keep up with any one of them entailed considerable physical and mental hardships. Faced with such challenges, the Recollets sketched the contours of a missionary and colonial program reminiscent of that of Lescarbot. Indigenous peoples were to live among the French, and to achieve this required two interdependent conditions: the sedentarization of the former, and the development of a settler colony.“The surest means” to convert the Natives, wrote Brother Denis Jamet, head of the Recollet contingent in the colony, in the summer of 1615, “[…] is French settlement.” The Algonquians would, “little by little become accustomed [to this lifestyle] by seeing the fruits of labor,” they would receive religious instruction alongside the colonists, and be bound to adopt the latter’s ways of life. As another Recollet later expressed it, “by cultivating the land, we will find ways of cultivating souls.”40

  This remained the Recollets’ core policy until the departure of their order from the Saint Lawrence valley in 1629. Yet it was more easily sketched out than carried out. Owing to their order’s strict vow of poverty, they were not well equipped to provide to Algonquian bands the sort of material enticements and transitional assistance for which their ambitions called. They remained wholly dependent on compatriots most of whom, given the centrality of the fur trade to the colonial endeavour, were in no hurry to act on preconceived notions of the inherent superiority of the settled, agricultural life. Although the French at Quebec began to till and sow the soil as early as 1608, as noted previously, farming operations remained small – not for another nineteen years did the first plow arrive in the colony. Colonists remained dependent on foodstuffs brought by ship.41 What is more, though Champlain himself and a few of his companions and patrons shared the missionaries’ vision of a thriving settler colony, most traders saw it as a threat to their profits. Each new Frenchman on the ground represented a potential competitor, and the promise of stationary Montagnais and Algonquins was equally unappealing. Mindful that business depended on the latter’s wide-ranging hunt, some fur traders went as far as to warn the Recollets that they would drive away any local family they attempted to settle near Quebec.42 French efforts to impose a commercial monopoly and restrict Indigenous freedom of trade compounded these difficulties, fostering an intercultural relationship that was in these early decades occasionally strained and punctuated by interpersonal violence.43

  Nonetheless, Quebec remained a vibrant site of engagement. Through these years, some Algonquian family bands and individuals encamped in the vicinity. The extent to which they were altering their subsistence and residential pattern in so doing is difficult to ascertain, but it appears to have been minimal. They exploited the area’s natural bounty, traded with colonists, and drew on the material assistance of the missionaries and officials.44 In 1622, an Innu by the name of Miristou allowed Champlain and the Recollets to hope for more. He had spent the fall, winter, and spring in the vicinity of Quebec with thirty followers, apparently in an attempt to cultivate the French alliance and to gain the newcomers’ support in a bid for leadership among his people. It so happened that the colonial trading monopoly was being turned over from one merchant consortium to another, and that Champlain was eager in this uncertain context to demonstrate his worth and secure his own position of authority. When, come June, Miristou approached him for his support, Champlain asked him to first set about cultivating maize near Quebec with his thirty followers, and to “tak[e] up their fixed residence there.” In this way, they would become self-sufficient. If they complied, promised Champlain, the French would regard his people as “as brothers.”45

  Reporting on this encounter, Champlain confided to his readers that he hoped that his request would encourage others to henceforth seek out the consent of the French before electing a chief. In this way, he reasoned, “we should begin to assume a certain control over them, and be able the better to instruct them in our faith.” Miristou declared himself willing to go along with Champlain’s proposal, but was clearly not inclined to submit to his control. He and his followers began to clear a plot of land at half a league’s distance from the habitation. They sowed a portion of it, covering about seven arpents, limited we are told only by the lack of seed corn. Judging this to be “enough for a beginning,” Champlain was satisfied. Indeed, it was respectable work at a time when the colonists themselves had at the most eighteen
or twenty arpents under cultivation.46 Yet it was not long before Miristou, who took up the name of Mahigan Aticq Ouche (Wolf Stag), upon being named as chief, drifted back with his followers towards Tadoussac, having satisfied their immediate needs. His fields are not mentioned again in the colonial record, and the Jesuits who arrived at Quebec in 1625 observed that little progress had been made in terms of either evangelization or sedentarization.47

  Adopting casual agriculture in the vicinity of Quebec increased the economic security of family bands, but it did not fundamentally disrupt their hunting, fishing, and gathering activities. Crops represented a dietary supplement rather than a staple, and their production in this particular context, rather than a measure aimed at complete self-sufficiency, may very well have been undertaken above all as a symbolic gesture calculated to elicit the generosity of the French. This production did not lead to a year-round, permanent occupation of the area, either. Agricultural work, the building of permanent dwelling structures, and coalescence within a fortified village were discrete variables, however strongly related they may have been in the minds of the French officials and missionaries. In these early years Algonquians were visibly willing to experiment with one or the other at different times, to satisfy immediate needs of sustenance or security, in a way that did not entail rapid or extreme cultural change. The pattern displayed by Miristou persisted, with various Algonquian bands preferring different sites: some encamped near the habitation, on the river and at the foot of the cliffside, where the Lower Town of Quebec would spread; others gathered near the Recollet convent, which, because the habitation’s surroundings were crowded, had been built about a kilometer west on the Saint Charles River; and yet others stayed near the Jesuit residence, constructed on the Saint Charles’s opposite bank.48 To the rare ones who did show an inclination to work the land and settle down, missionaries of both orders were quick to offer whatever support they could, designating plots of land for them that hired hands cleared for the sowing of maize or wheat. Rather few of the individuals who orbited around Quebec in this way are named in the colonial record, and those who are tend to disappear from view as soon as they enter it, in a way that suggests the fleeting nature of their engagement with the settled life. A few names stand out, however – individuals who would continue in the coming years to play a central role in Algonquian experimentation with sedentism. Prominent among them were a certain Chomina and his brother Negabamat, as well as a man named Manitougache, whom the French had nicknamed La Nasse (The Hoop Net). The latter, an Innu, spent the summer of 1626 assembled with his twenty followers near the Jesuit residence. Of that number, three or four individuals took the time to clear two or three arpents of land and sow them with maize.49

  The Jesuits were much better organized and better funded than the Recollets, but they too ran headlong into the bulwark of Algonquian nomadism. They experimented with what they called flying missions, following hunting bands as they dispersed during the cooler months, and with the establishment of an elementary school. Projecting their evangelical hopes onto more distant nations, primarily the Wendats, whose semisedentary, agricultural lifestyle suggested a greater potential for conversion and civilization, they nevertheless continued to entertain an ambition for the settlement of Algonquian bands closer to the heart of the colony. “[W]e shall work a great deal and advance very little,” wrote Father Le Jeune, “if we do not make these barbarians stationary.” Elsewhere, he reiterated the belief that it would be a great blessing for the bodies and souls of the Innu “if those nations were stationary, and if they became docile to our direction, which they will do, I hope, in the course of time. If they are sedentary, and if they cultivate the land, they will not die of hunger, as often happens to them in their wanderings; we shall be able to instruct them easily.”50

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  Hunger – both of the literal and of the perceived spiritual kind – was one argument in favour of the settled, agricultural life. Fear was another. Conflict would have considerable influence on these early experiments with alliance, agriculture, and village aggregation. In 1627, war was declared between France and England, leading to a brief maritime sideshow to the Thirty Years’ War. New France represented a vulnerable target. Although it drew on a vast and profitable trading network, presence on the ground remained light, amounting to a handful of habitations, simple trading posts strung along the Saint Lawrence valley and Acadia, occupied by barely a hundred individuals, most of whom resided at Quebec. Relatively few were established on a permanent basis, and their number included only a dozen women and girls.51 The capture of Tadoussac and of the supply fleet by English privateers made it impossible for the Recollets to furnish provisions to a few Innu who had asked to be assisted for a year or two, to allow them time to prepare enough fields to sustain themselves. When Quebec itself capitulated to these privateers in 1629, the rare Algonquian families who had begun to grow crops in the vicinity decamped.52

  The year 1627 was also significant for another event, the foundation of the Compagnie de la Nouvelle-France or Company of New France, also known as Compagnie des Cent-Associés or Company of One Hundred Associates. Frustrated by the merchants’ failure to do more for the settlement and development of the colony, King Louis XIII and his chief minister, Armand Jean Du Plessis, Cardinal de Richelieu, chartered this new joint stock company and entrusted it with exclusive trading privileges, considerable power, and a more sharply defined mandate. The company was expected to settle four thousand colonists in the decade and a half to come. The stipulation that they should be Catholics, and that Protestants would henceforth not be welcomed in New France, reflected a hardening attitude towards the relationship between colonization and religion. The company’s charter formalized the assimilationist approach to Indigenous peoples sketched out by Champlain and the Recollets. “[T]he only means of leading these peoples to knowledge of the true God is to settle the said lands with natural French Catholics so as to, by their example, prepare these nations to the Christian religion, to a civil way of life.” It was further stated that “the Sauvages who will be led to the faith and to profess it will be considered natural Frenchmen.”53 Thus, when the French took back possession of Quebec, in the summer of 1632, following a peace treaty with England, it was with the understanding that, in theory at least, neophytes would be granted the status of French subjects.

  The Algonquians of the Saint Lawrence valley who orbited around Quebec during this period revealed themselves less preoccupied by the English interloping in the valley than by the increasing intrusion of their long-standing enemy, the Iroquois. The previous decade had been a relatively quiet one on this front, largely because conflict with another Algonquian group far to the south, the Mahicans, had occupied the Mohawks.54 The French returned to a changing landscape of war. In November of 1632, a sense of pressing danger brought Manitougache alias La Nasse and his band to encamp near the Jesuits’ new residence, relocated from the east bank of the Saint Charles River to the heights of what would become Quebec’s Upper Town. They had orbited around Quebec before the English intrusion, and immediately upon the return of the French, Manitougache had made a display of goodwill by declaring his intention to rebuild his cabin nearby and to resume his experiment with agriculture. Safety, rather than sustenance, now prompted his action. He had decided to interrupt his band’s hunt because of reports that two or three families had been “devoured by large unknown animals, which they believed were Devils” and which had been spotted downriver in the vicinity of Cap Tourmente and Tadoussac.55

  The basis for these fears became clearer in the following days, when Manitougache once again appeared with his family before the Jesuits at their residence. Now, however, he reported that a large number of Iroquois had been spotted near Quebec, and that this was causing great alarm among his people. Wishing to put his loved ones in a safe place, Manitougache asked the missionaries “if his wife and children could not come and lodge with us.” Alas, priestly scruples made for a less than welcoming re
ception, as the Jesuits responded that while the boys would be welcome, the women and girls would not be allowed to stay. Even in France women were prohibited from spending the night in Jesuit residences, they explained, adding quite rudely that “just as soon as we could close our doors” they “would not again be opened” to Manitougache’s female relatives. As an alternative, the missionaries suggested that he and his family might find strength in numbers by linking with one of the several Innu family encampments in the area, promising that some arquebusiers would be sent there to protect them. With no other alternative, Manitougache complied and was welcomed by an unnamed captain who invited him and his people to stay with his own “until the fright should have passed away.” As soon as he had placed his followers in safety, Manitougache returned to the Jesuits’ residence, displaying his intent to maintain a relationship based on reciprocity and making a show of his willingness to participate in their mutual defence against the Iroquois. “If he had to die,” he declared to the missionaries, “he wanted to die near us.” A week later he set out to erect a cabin near the missionaries’ residence, built with boards and nails, in an effort to emulate the newcomers’ building style. Though no Iroquois warriors materialized in the region of Quebec that winter, the persistent threat of enemy raids meant that defensive cooperation was on everyone’s mind.56

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