Canada as Bothwell Points Out, Canada\'s Native

Canada

As Bothwell points out, Canada's Native peoples have always been and are still a crucial component in any analysis of the relations between English and French," providing a lens by which to view the entirety of Canadian history.

Not only do Native peoples provide the historical means to analyze critically the dual histories of Canada. The history of encounter between Canada's First Nations and the European conquerors reveal the striking similarities between the cultures of the oppressors: the English and the French.

The Iroquois resistance movements gave rise to formative struggles that distinguished French from English settlements. The strategic alliances formed between Native and European communities promoted the political interests of each. However, the Iroquois resistance movement reveals also the common trend in European post-colonial hegemony that persists now in the 21st century. It is therefore worth drawing parallels between the French treatment of Iroquois during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries with that of the modern French treatment of North African immigrants and its growing Muslim minorities. Issues of citizenship become central to the argument that France demonstrates similar sociological stances in its treatment of non-Christian minorities now as it did in the seventeenth century.

Formal religious institutions played a major role in the creation and maintenance of cultural hegemony throughout North America's history. The Catholic and Anglican Churches, the Jesuits, and other religious organizations viewed their roles as preservers of moral, intellectual, social, and spiritual righteousness. As Mann puts it, in the seventeenth century "came the most extraordinary group of hard-nosed religious zealots: mystics who knew how to run a business…They saw New France in their dreams and speculated about a new Christian race composed of French and Indians."

To begin this new "Christian race" depended on breaking ties with the old country and resettling in the new. However, the New World settlement never did become the "New Kingdom" that the missionaries envisioned.

Culture clashes between the English and the French seemed ironically more poignant than those between the French and Canada's indigenous peoples. The reason for the strategic alliances formed between the French and the Native peoples almost always depended on good business sense. The fur trade provided tremendous impetus for peace treaties on both sides. For French settlers, fur trade made their religious goals possible. For the Native peoples, the fur trade facilitated the political goals of rival tribes and enforced existing power hierarchies among the various First Nations. When England began encroaching on established French trade routes and relationships, the first seeds of warfare began to bloom profusely. Frontenac's programs of westward expansion, coupled with new problems with the Iroquois treaty, made France's program of New World colonization more difficult. The Iroquois raid in 1689 on Lachine near Montreal, for example, "led to a new round of conflict between the French and the Iroquois and their allies, the English colonies."

In the late seventeenth century, Jesuit priests fomented greater strife among the Iroquois and helped wreak havoc on the Iroquois Confederacy and its tentative peace.

Greer highlights some of the key sociological differences between Iroquois and French settlers that might have also fomented strife. For example, the Iroquois "gender regime stands in basic contrast with that of the French, for it was not patriarchal."

Even among Iroquois that had converted to Christianity, gender parity and the political, economic, and social empowerment of women remained commonplace among Iroquois: a fact that irked the Jesuits. "Christianity had surprisingly little effect on Iroquois sexual equality. In some of their earliest missionary efforts in Canada, the Jesuits did their best to enforce patriarchal norms, encouraging parents to beat their children, humiliating 'rebellious' wives, and trying to get men to dominate their families."

The efforts did not pay off entirely, but patriarchy was generally a well-established political, economic, and social institution in the colonies.

All of the inherent problems with colonialism and patriarchy caused New France to be in a "precarious" situation.

Dismissal of Iroquois and other Native peoples as inferior was the European modus operandi in the New World. Historiography proves that "self-laudatory accounts of explorers such as Jacques Cartier or Samuel de Champlain, or the missionary propaganda of the Recollet and Jesuit orders" offer at best an incomplete picture of the formation of French Canada.

It has even been assumed that "the Indians had no history of their own or that what history they did have consisted solely of their reactions to European colonization," in spite of evidence that "the history of New France prior to 1665 was overwhelmingly shaped by the Indians."

The Native peoples facilitated the French colonization of Canada via their geographic knowledge and yet their contributions were subsumed by xenophobia and a persistent sense of cultural superiority.