First nations

While France’s alliances with Indigenous peoples were essential to their colonization efforts in North America, the development of New France was also marked by major conflicts which occupied an important place in the documents produced during the French regime. The incursion of the French into Indigenous territories exacerbated existing conflicts and helped create new ones.

The Relations des Jésuites de la Nouvelle France are the annual reports sent to France by the superiors of Canadian missions. Published from 1632 to 1673, for propaganda purposes, they nonetheless shed considerable light on Indigenous societies and French colonization in North America.

An abundance of travel narratives from New France, and the consecration of a colonial Canadian canon beyond the realm of fiction, long overshadowed a vast corpus of exoticism. In the early 20th century Gilbert Chinard rediscovered such texts, and explored how their Indigenous characters revealed the imagined America of early modern France.

Starting with Christopher Columbus’s first encounters on the island of Hispaniola, the discursive construction of Indigenous Peoples was at the heart of European travel writings about the New World.