A maritime map of the explorer Samuel de Champlain, journals kept by the French Jesuits, and a manuscript dictionary of the Iroquoian language … an array of objects unravel multiple facets of French-Indigenous encounters in seventeenth-century New France, the French colonies in North America. In late 2021, amid the ongoing pandemic, I embarked on a transient archival trip across the Atlantic to Canada for my PhD in History at the University of Cambridge. During the journey, I recommended Objets de référence for purchase by Cambridge University Library. All the books mentioned in this blog post feature in the library collections. The exhibition catalogue Objets de référence showcases the materiality of textual and visual sources, including a few treasures that I personally touched, photographed, and scrutinised at the archives of the Musée de la Civilisation in Québec City – a place that bore witness to those profound encounters. Moreover, this catalogue prominently features Indigenous artefacts ranging from the wampum belt to a hunter’s tunic, casting light on Indigenous agency, identities, and their intricate relations with settlers over the centuries.

Published by the same museum, yet taking a broader perspective, another exhibition catalogue Voyage au cœur des collections des Premiers Peuples or Journey to the Heart of the First Peoples Collections extends its scope to encompass the Americas and Oceania. This catalogue not only explores historical items but also includes present-day pieces, with critical attention to the museum’s acquisition process.

Learning from archivists and curators, my doctoral research delves into language learning, translation, and print culture in the seventeenth-century North Atlantic world, particularly as regards English-Indigenous and French-Indigenous encounters. Francophone scholars in Canada play an integral role in these themes. Loosely defined by language and region, this category of scholarship consistently contributes to our understanding of French-Indigenous encounters during the colonial period. However, it is noteworthy that their books are usually published in Québec Province and infrequently available in languages other than French.

At Cambridge University Library, one can find classic works from the 1970s in the weave of the ‘cultural turn’, a movement that elevated ‘culture’ in humanities and social sciences. In Le Théâtre canadien-français (also available on the Internet Archive), Roméo Arbour and Baudouin Burger position dramas from the colonial period in Canadian-French theatrical production and reception. The art historian François-Marc Gagnon, in his La Conversion par l’image, investigates the missionary usage of images among the French Jesuits who converted Indigenous peoples. At the turn of the century, literary scholars shifted towards recontextualising texts within their historical milieux, while comparative and interdisciplinary approaches became increasingly prevalent in historical research. The Jesuit missionary reports Relations attracted Marie-Christine Pioffet’s literary, historical, and religious attention in her La Tentation de l’epopée. Shenwen Li’s Stratégies missionnaires compared seventeenth-century French Jesuit missions in New France and China, contributing to the fermenting global missionary context. With musicologists, Paul-André Dubois interpreted the role of music and songs in French-Indigenous missions, enriching inquiries into La Vie musicale en Nouvelle-France from the angle of cultural history. Illuminating New France missions, these studies provoke further insights into European-Indigenous encounters from transcultural, translingual, and transregional perspectives.

On my reading list, several secondary sources come from the Presses de l’Université de Montréal and Presses de l’Université Laval, two major French-language university presses in Canada. In his recent monographs, Dubois explores the religious intricacy by recounting the Recollects, friars of the Franciscan order who were oftentimes overshadowed by their Jesuit counterparts in New France. He further elucidates the reading and writing practices of the original inhabitants of New France, who responded to and were submitted to colonisation. Concerning Indigenous literacy and authorship, practices of reading and writing are in parallel observed in English-Indigenous and Spanish-Indigenous encounters.

Moreover, numerous works by these two publishing houses take the form of edited volumes, which promote the studies of French-Indigenous encounters in diverse ways. Monuments intellectuels and Les Autochtones et le Québec, for instance, offer diachronic perspectives on colonial encounters and the formation of Francophone Canada, addressing present-day concerns of Indigenous traditions, rights, and justice in Québec. Rencontres et interculturalité signals a more global research community on historical encounters by incorporating multilingual chapters from around the world. Hereby, studies in the French language from Canada (see the previous blogpost on Francophone writing and indigenous literature in Canada) rejuvenate the in-depth and relatively local focus on French-Indigenous encounters in New France.

References:

• Arbour, Roméo. ‘Le Théâtre de Neptune de Marc Lescarbot’. In Le Théâtre canadien-français : Évolution, témoignages, bibliographie, edited by Paul Wyczynski, Bernard Julien, and Hélène Beauchamp-Rank, 21–31. Montréal: Fides, 1976. (737:14.c.95.9 and Internet Archive)
• Beaulieu, Alain, Martin Papillon, and Stéphan Gervais, eds. Les Autochtones et le Québec : Des premiers contacts au Plan Nord. Montréal: Presses de l’Université de Montréal, 2013. JSTOR Books Perpetual
• Brooks, Lisa. Our Beloved Kin: A New History of King Philip’s War. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018. EBSCOhost Ebook Academic Collection
• Burger, Baudouin. ‘Les Spectacles dramatiques en Nouvelle France (1606–1760)’. In Le Théâtre canadien-français : Évolution, témoignages, bibliographie, edited by Paul Wyczynski, Bernard Julien, and Hélène Beauchamp-Rank, 33–57. Montréal: Fides, 1976. (737:14.c.95.9 and Internet Archive)
• Corbo, Claude, ed. Monuments intellectuels de la Nouvelle-France et du Québec ancien: aux origines d’une tradition culturelle. Montréal : Presses de l’Université de Montréal, 2014. DOAB Directory of Open Access Books
• Desbarats, Catherine M., ed. Monuments intellectuels de la Nouvelle-France et du Québec ancien : Aux origines d’une tradition culturelle. Montréal: Presses de l’Université du Montréal, 2014. DOAB Directory of Open Access Books
• Dubcovsky, Alejandra, and George Aaron Broadwell. ‘Writing Timucua: Recovering and Interrogating Indigenous Authorship’. Early American Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 15, no. 3 (2017): 409–41. Project Muse Standard Collection
• Dubois, Paul-André. ‘Les Amérindiens, les missionnaires et la musique européenne’. In La Vie musicale en Nouvelle-France, by Elisabeth Gallat-Morin and Jean-Pierre Pinson, 255–80. Québec: Septentrion, 2003. (M516.c.200.23) 
• ———, ed. Les Récollets en Nouvelle-France : Traces et mémoire. Québec:  Presses de l’Université Laval, 2018. EBSCOhost Ebook Academic Collection
• ———. Lire et écrire chez les Amérindiens de Nouvelle-France : Aux origines de la scolarisation et de la francisation des Autochtones du Canada. Québec: Presses de l’Université Laval, 2020. EBSCOhost Ebook Academic Collection 
• Gagnon, François-Marc. La Conversion par l’image : Un aspect de la mission des jésuites auprès des Indiens du Canada au XVIIe siècle. Montréal: Bellarmin, 1975. (171:5.c.95.22) 
• Gallat-Morin, Elisabeth and Jean-Pierre Pinson. La vie musicale en Nouvelle-France. Sillery, Québec: Septentrion, 2003. (M516.c.200.23)
• Havard, Gilles and Vidal, Cécile. Histoire de l’Amérique française. Paris: Flammarion, 2003. (660:7.c.200.7)
• Havard, Gilles. L’Amérique fantôme: Les aventuriers francophones du Nouveau Monde. Paris: Flammarion, 2019. CAIRN eBooks
• Laurent, Michel, ed. Objets de référence : 122 témoins de l’histoire. Montréal: Les Éditions de l’Homme, 2011. (S950.a.201.7803)
• Li, Shenwen. Stratégies missionnaires des jésuites français en Nouvelle-France et en Chine au XVIIe siècle. Québec: Presses de l’Université Laval, 2001. (103:6.c.200.28)
• Lopenzina, Drew. Red Ink: Native Americans Picking up the Pen in the Colonial Period. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2012. (730:35.c.201.225 and Ebook Central Literature & Language)
• Pinson, Guillaume, Pei Jiang, and Shenwen Li, eds. Rencontres et interculturalité entre la Chine et l’Occident. Québec: Les Presses de l’Université Laval, 2022. EBSCOhost Ebook Academic Collection
• Pioffet, Marie-Christine. La Tentation de l’épopée dans les Relations des Jésuites. Québec: Septentrion, 1997. (9007.c.9230)
• Robitaille, Marie-Paule, ed. Voyage au cœur des collections des Premiers Peuples. Québec: Septentrion, 2014 ; Journey to the Heart of the First Peoples Collections. Montréal: Baraka Books, 2014. (C200.a.5914) 

Weiao Xing