The Indians of the Saint Lawrence Valley and their religion: An essay on four centuries of scholarship in French

Abstract

During the century and a half from Champlain to Charlevoix a vast corpus was written in French about the Indians of the Saint Lawrence Valley. The rich material from these writings opens a discourse on native religions and serves to affirm a common nature between the two populations. However, the British conquest and subsequent developments interupted this production of material. This paper examines the attitudes towards natives and native religion that inform the earlier French material and considers the differences between them and the English inter-cultural policies and practices that followed. It brings its discussion to the 1970s, showing how, with the rise of ethno-historical studies, a new Quebec corpus is being written which attends to the interaction of the French and native populations.