Trigger Bruce G. The Indians and the Heroic Age of New France

Ottawa: Canadian Historical Association, 1977. — 24 p. — (The Canadian Historical Association Booklets; No. 30). — ISBN: 0-88798-044-9.History is usually written with at least one eye to the future, historians are limited to those data which as a result of circumstances beyond their control manage to survive the ravages of time, and their interpretations may be influenced by racial or cultural prejudices of which they are often unaware. All three of these problems have bedevilled the study of New France prior to the Royal Regime of 1663. Historians have been anxious to trace the origins of New France and, because they view the Indians as a lost cause, have tended to dismiss or underrate the role played by the Indians in the early historic period. The data for this period are mainly the self-laudatory accounts of explorers, such as Jacques Cartier or Samuel de Champlain, or the missionary propaganda of the Recollet and Jesuit orders. Finally, it is often assumed that the Indians had no history of their own or that what history they did have consists solely of their reaction to European colonization. The latter view has been espoused even by historians primarily concerned with the Indians, such as George T. Hunt in his influential The Wars of the Iroquois.
Contrary to conventional interpretations, the history of New France prior to 1665 was overwhelmingly shaped by the Indians. Throughout that period, they far outnumbered the Europeans and were militarily superioi to them. They also knew Canada and its resources and had long interacted with each other, both as friends and as foes. It was therefore the Indians’ reactions to what they perceived Europeans and each other to be doing, rather than the initiatives of Europeans, that were crucial at that time. We must begin to understand the early history of Canada by understanding the ways of life of the Indian groups that inhabited the northeastern part of North America in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Relations between Indians and Europeans at that time can be interpreted largely as a confrontation between the tribal values of the Indians and those of a technologically more complex society that was in a process of transition from feudal to capitalistic organization.