.\PPENI)IX 35
SAMUEL DE CHAMPLAIN: FRENCH-AMERINDIAN RELATIONS
i amuel de Champlain. . . became the key figure in L’the history of French colonization between 1608 and his death in 1635.... We know Champlain mostly from his action in Acadia and Canada, and of these, unfortunately, we have a rather one-sided account almost exclusively from his own books (Des Sauvages, 1603, and the Voyages, 1619, 1632).... [T]here is little in the way of familial or personal history, no portrait except little drawings of a man in armour that decorate his books and maps. He seems to have been a moral and upright man, although typically blinkered by the European ethnocentrism of his age. To him, European culture and religion were the measure of man and the native Indians were hopelessly inferior, lacking the rudiments of religion or civil society.... Champlain found little of value in Indian culture and looked forward to a necessary assimilation of Indians to French ways. Cultural imperialism rather than racism marked the French of Champlain’s day....
Because of the fundamental importance of the trade, Champlain’s role in Canada was to a great extent that of a fur trade diplomatist. The trade depended upon establishing good relations with the Indian hunters and traders, and this invariably entailed becoming the military ally of one’s economic partners....
The first French and Indian neighbours were a great puzzlement to each other. They never achieved a full, mutual understanding, and even if they had, their needs and wishes were different and sometimes at cross purposes. The consensual Indian societies were confronted by the hierarchically organized society of the French in which authorities were always giving orders to those below them. French (or Canadian) leaders.., found that neither they nor the Indian headmen could easily impose their authority upon Indian peoples. The French usually became involved in warfare with their neighbours for reasons of state such as gaining territory, markets, or privileges. The objectives for
which they fought were often far-distant ones. This did not mesh well with the Indian idea of warfare to prove valour, revenge blood feuds, and to secure prisoners for the stake. As likely as not, Indians had achieved their war objectives when the French thought a campaign was just beginning.... As concerns the fur trade, it raised immediately the questions of property and economic distribution. The Indian kinship concept of trade and the practice of sharing was in marked contrast to the European idea of exchange for profit, of acquisition as a way of life, and of private property.
The French, and indeed Europeans in general. . .also contrasted with the Indians in their attitude to nature itself. They believed that men and women were above and outside of nature and saw nothing sacred in the sticks and stones and bones of creation.... The thoroughly mechanical conception of nature was the viewpoint of the elite and marked the direction in which European society was moving.... To a seventeenth- or eighteenth-century Frenchman, civilization existed because men and women were subjected to the authority of church and state, were disciplined and made to work, in particular to work the land. That is, they had risen above nature. The French rightly saw that the Indians were in closer contact with nature than they themselves were, and for that reason concluded that they were wild men (sauvages) who needed to be tamed or brought out of nature (civilized). Although the French established good relations with a great many tribes, they were in no danger of thinking the Indians were their equals. For their part, the Indians, while conceding that the French were clever technicians, were unimpressed by the physical presence of these short, hairy men and saw French social organization as brutal. Indians were as ethnocentric as other peoples of the time; indeed, each Indian nation’s lack of fellow feeling for other Indian nations long stood in the way of the development of a common Indian consciousness and so of a common front against European intruders.
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