“THREE HUNDRED LEAGUES FURTHER INTO THE WILDERNESS”

Conceptualizations of the Nonhuman during Wendat-French Culture Contact,

1609-49: Implications for Environmental Social Work and Social Justice

By

Arielle Dylan

A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Factor-Inwentash Faculty of Social Work University of Toronto

© Copyright Arielle Dylan, 2010

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“Three hundred leagues further into the wilderness” Conceptualizations of the nonhuman during Wendat-French culture contact, 1609-1649:

Implications for Environmental Social Work and Social Justice

Doctor of Philosophy 2010

Arielle Dylan

Factor-Inwentash Faculty of Social Work University of Toronto

Abstract This study concerns an essential but, until recent years, little explored area of social work:

environmental social work. The social work profession has long considered persons in their

environment; however, use of the term environment has typically referred to social rather than

nonhuman physical dimensions of space and place. It is common knowledge that we face today a

number of serious environmental challenges, but less common is an understanding of how things

came to be as they are. Why, for example, did things not develop differently? Why is our human-

nonhuman relationship so strained? This research asserts human conceptualisations of the

nonhuman other influence treatment of not only the nonhuman but also other human beings.

Having an interdisciplinary focus involving social work, environmental studies and early

Canadian history, Wendat and French conceptualisations of the nonhuman are explored through

an ecofeminist framework in a culture-contact context to initiate consideration of, and in due

course attending to, the uneasy intersection of the human and the nonhuman, social work and

environmental issues, and current Aboriginal-non-Aboriginal relations.

Through locating our environmental crisis within a historical context, it is possible to

unsettle some contemporary assumptions about the human-nonhuman relationship, drawing

attention to the fact that things could have been otherwise, that the environmental challenges

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experienced today were not inescapable. While there are certainly many ways to approach a

history of our present environmental crisis, this investigation in the Canadian context involving a

clearly defined case of culture contact between the Wendat and French in the early seventeenth

century offers a variety of advantages deriving, in part, from the comparable but different

complexities belonging to each group and the opportunity to explore two highly dissimilar

cultural practices and belief systems from the time of initial contact. This study examines in

detail how the two cultures understood and interacted with the nonhuman, and each other,

through a forty-year period from 1609-1649. From this historical exploration of Wendat and

French worldviews and land-use practices implications for social work are described and a

model for place-based social work is generated.

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Acknowledgments I have been supported throughout this doctoral process by a nexus of scholarly and personal

relations for which I wish to express my sincere gratitude. Sadly, an account of this kind cannot

possibly do justice to those who have assisted me with this project. My supervisor, Dr. Adrienne

Chambon, has mentored me in innumerable ways bringing wisdom, inspiration, rigour, vast

insight, humbling theoretical and methodological expertise, and challenge to the process while

simultaneously approaching our work together with such warmth, liberality of spirit, and

confidence that I felt free to heed both intellectual and intuitive impulses throughout the research

process and was able to proceed organically to exciting, unanticipated scholarly places. To her I

owe an immeasurable debt. Dr. Susan Stern’s passion for social work, profound knowledge of

our professional discipline, and uncanny ability to pose the right questions, tremendously

improved the social work sections of this dissertation. Dr. Alan Bewell’s considerable intellect,

commitment to excellence, and thoughtful approach surrounding concepts, theory, and methods

helped me reconsider important ideas, organize my thoughts, and further elaborate guiding

theories in my work. To each of you, my Committee members, I extend my heartfelt gratitude

for the various and thoughtful ways in which you engaged so meaningfully with this thesis. I also

wish to thank Dr. Ernie Lightman for his generous support, helpful comments regarding the

limitations of translations, and the rich understanding he brought to class and economic

considerations. Dr. John Coates, truly a pioneer of environmental social work, whose work I

often revisited, as a gauge and springboard for the kind of research I hoped to produce and a

foretaste of where our profession could one day be, brought to his evaluation of the thesis his

enormous grasp of environmental social work scholarship matched by his humanity. His

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comments have strengthened my work and to him I am deeply grateful both for the bravery of

his scholarship and his thoughtful engagement with this thesis.

My family, my mom, Bartholemew, and Zuzu, has supported me in incalculable ways,

listening to ideas, reading sections of this work, and acting as pillars during times when I needed

to lean. My mother would always ask whether she could help in any way, and this generous

gesture meant more to me than I could ever express. Bartholemew was beautifully ever ready to

extend any support he had at his seemingly endless disposal. I thank you deeply for this.

Dr. Cardish has been an invaluable support person whose insight and constancy are

matched by none. Dr. Dorothy Goldin Rosenberg believed in me and my work and provided

high-level encouragement equaled only by the intensity she brings to her role as an educator and

activist. Dr. Norma Lang has always been a vocal and affectionate supporter of my work,

encouraging me to pursue the doctoral degree and expressing unfailing faith in my ability. I

thank each of you.

I must also single out Dr. Paul Lamarre, dear and kind friend, who allowed me to use his

apartment as an office when I needed a quiet space for writing. Thank you for this incredible

kindness without which this thesis might still be incomplete. To Kevin Couch, Salomé Shyan,

Bob Mackowycz, Karen Miller, Joanne Proulx, Tylla Carlisle, Maureen Toth, Clark Henderson,

Michael Antoine, Mark Thompson, Dr. Claude Gratton, and Dr. Kenneth Montague, I extend

warm thanks for your friendship during this process.

To Sharon Bewell, Faculty Registrar, and Angela Umbrello, Administrative Coordinator,

I also wish to extend my sincerest thanks for your support, kindness, encouragement, and the

countless ways you have helped me during my doctoral years.

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Thanks also to Caitlin and Elizabeth Tracey (my lovely nieces), Marina Moore, Dale

Lewis, and Andrea Ritchie for your invaluable help with the notes.

Without the financial support of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of

Canada and the Ontario Graduate Scholarship, this research would not have been possible. With

gratitude I acknowledge my debt to them both.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS Title Page i Abstract ii-iii Acknowledgements iv-vi Table of Contents vii-ix INTRODUCTION 1

Research Focus Elaboration of the Problem Purpose My Social Location Dissertation Outline

1 DESCRIBING THE RESEARCH AND METHODOLOGY PROCESS: 13

APPROACHING HISTORY FROM A CRITICAL PERSPECTIVE Methodology Theories

Ecofeminism Vexed Issue of Feminism Critical Theory Postcolonial Theory

2 SCOPE OF THE ENVIRONMENTAL PROBLEM AND THE ROLE OF SOCIAL 45

WORK Beginnings Environmental Challenges

Global Warming Water Scarcity Industrial Challenges Responses

Social Work and the Environment Professional Role Person-in-Environment Differential Exposure, Environmental Racism Sustainability

Disconnections and Misunderstandings 3 MAJOR ENVIRONMENTAL DEBATES 73

Some Hypothesised Sources of Our Current Environmental Challenges The Nature Construct Early Environmental Theorists

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Preservation versus Conservation – Sustainability and Population Links Biocentrism Critical Environmentalisms – Ecofeminist and Social Ecological Perspectives Gaia Hypothesis Toxic Exposure and Environmental Justice Indigenous Knowledge and Bioregionalism

4 CONSTRUCTIONS OF INDIGENOUS PEOPLES IN THE AMERICAS 103

A Recent Apology Representations and Constructions of Aboriginal Peoples Voyages, Territorial Appropriation and Cultural Deprecation The “Wild Man,” “Barbarism” and Conquest Cartier, Champlain, and Eastern North America Eurocentrism and Numerical Supremacy Counterviews

5 WENDAT AND FRENCH WORLDVIEWS IN THE EARLY SEVENTEENTH 132

CENTURY Introduction Stories Creation Stories Time Souls Human Well-being Morality Conclusion

6 WENDAT AND FRENCH PRE-CONTACT LAND-USE PRACTICES 164

Introduction The Pre-Contact Wendat in Wendake Shift to Mixed Horticultural Subsistence Effects of Wendat Population Growth The Pre-Contact French and New France Naming French Land “Improvement” The Fur Trade Trade, a New Market and Wendat Changing Land-Use Practices Trade, New Terrain and French Settlement Aboriginal-French Contact in the Early Seventeenth Century Conclusion

7 WENDAT-FRENCH CULTURE CONTACT AND LAND-USE PRACTICES, 201

1609-1629 Introduction Contact and French Settlement Fixity and Mobility

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French Survival in New France Competing Interest Groups Wendat and Champlain Meet Wendat Seek Direct Trade with the French Champlain in Wendake Wendat Land-Use Practices Division of Labour Traditional Ecological Knowledge French Cultural Blindness Wendat and French Land-Use Practices During Early Contact—A Summary Comparison Interruption of French Presence in Northeastern North America Conclusion

8 WENDAT-FRENCH CULTURE CONTACT AND LAND-USE PRACTICES, 241

1632-1649 Introduction Retrocession of New France and the New Regime Jesuit Monopoly Epidemics Cultural Disruption Trade Fixity and Mobility Language Conclusion

9 CONCLUSION 287

Review of Findings Linking Past and Present Relevance of Findings to Environmental Social Work Future Directions

BIBLIOGRAPHY 330

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Introduction

Research Focus

This study concerns an essential but, until recent years, little explored area of social work:

environmental social work. Our profession has long considered persons in their environment;

however, our use of the term environment has typically referred to social rather than nonhuman

physical dimensions of space and place. I developed initial thoughts about the problem to be

investigated in this thesis after reading an article by Vandana Shiva1 while enrolled in an

epistemology class in my doctoral coursework. I had just recently reread Edward Said’s

Orientalism,2 which underscores the dominant culture proclivity to reify the “Other” (in this case

the Oriental) and the concomitant tendency to develop and transmit an entire scholarly practice

and intellectual tradition based on this reification, and after appraising Shiva’s thoughts on the

links between feminism and environmentalism, the prospect of studying human-environment

relations in the crucible of early-contact Canadian history captivated my attention. I wanted to

investigate social and human-nonhuman relations in an early period of this country’s history to

discover links with present day environmental challenges and cultural unrest, and to add to the

growing environmental social work literature, which has not yet adequately penetrated our

discipline’s discourse, arguing the relevance of environmental concerns to our professional

purview. In such matters as social work practice and scholarship I have often been in

considerable sympathy with place-based perspectives perhaps because of my own rurally forged

connections with the land, growing cycles, and nonhuman species. My formal study of eastern

philosophy—Buddhism, Taoism, and Vedanta—has helped not only to situate me among other

critical scholars who challenge the ideological assumptions undergirding a Eurocentric social 1 Vandana Shiva, “Development, Ecology and Women,” Women, Ecology and Development, 8th ed. (1989; Atlantic Highland, NJ: Zed Books, 2002) 1-14. 2 Edward Said, Orientalism (1979; New York: Random, 2003).

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work model but also to reinforce philosophically and epistemologically my intuited and deeply

visceral sense of connectedness to place and others.

My thesis is based on the premise that the way we as human beings conceptualise the

nonhuman other influences how we relate to and treat not only the nonhuman but also other

human beings. It is common knowledge that we face today a number of serious environmental

challenges, but less common is an understanding of how things came to be as they are. Why, for

example, did things not develop differently? Why is our human-nonhuman relationship so

strained? How have we created a world where numerous bodies of water are filled with toxic

effluvia and the sun has become a danger from which we must shield ourselves? I have used a

historical case study involving early seventeenth-century Aboriginal-non-Aboriginal culture

contact to explore these questions. My research has an interdisciplinary focus, involving social

work, environmental studies, and Canadian history. I have explored Aboriginal and non-

Aboriginal conceptualizations of nature, how contact and ongoing interactions shaped and

reshaped beliefs about and relationships to the land and nonhuman animal species, for the

purpose of being able to begin to think about, and ultimately address, the intersection of the

human and the nonhuman, social work and environmental issues, and Aboriginal and non-

Aboriginal issues from an informed position. In my analysis, I have paid close attention to power

issues and hierarchical dualisms (e.g., European vs. Other, civilized vs. uncivilized, culture vs.

nature, productive land use vs. unproductive use, etc.) and identified the ways in which the

ascendancy of certain values contoured history and the present. Because Aboriginal communities

suffer some of the worst environmental injustices in Canada today, my exploration, which is

grounded in a particular historical case, will make more intelligible persistent inequities and

colonial fallout.

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Elaboration of the Problem

This thesis developed as a refinement of my initial research itinerary. Originally my focus was

broadly Canadian environmental history, involving an investigation of British and French (the

two strongest pre-twentieth-century colonial forces in Canada), and First Nations experience of

and philosophical views pertaining to the nonhuman environment. My work was premised

largely on the idea that the way we conceptualise the nonhuman other in many ways determines

our interactions with said other (and other human beings for that matter), so I wanted to pursue a

research agenda that would lead to an understanding of British, French, and First Nations beliefs

about and relationships to the natural world. Specifically, I wanted to learn the following: (1)

how these views changed and developed over time; (2) how variant views shaped and reshaped

each other as cultures and civilizations interrelated; (3) how the dominant view of the nonhuman

environment, namely, nature as storehouse of exploitable resources (commerce and dominant

economics), nature as restorative retreat (Romantic and transcendental underpinnings) or nature

as recreation (new brand of consumerism) came to prevail; and (4) what are the key cultural,

philosophical, political, ideological, and institutional contexts in which the nonhuman

environment has been discussed, thought of, mythologized and written about by the British,

French and First Nations. Locating our current ecological crisis within this historical context can

unsettle some of our contemporary assumptions about the human-nature relationship,

underscoring that this relationship did not have to develop as it did, that the human-nonhuman

relationship could have been otherwise. Perhaps, the overarching historical question of my

original research plan is best framed: How did the human-nature relationship in the Canadian

context come to develop as it did (bringing us to our current ecological crisis), rather than in

another manner?

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As my research progressed, however, I made an intellectual detour that led not so much

to an entirely new direction but an adjustment of scope. A combination of scholarly excitement,

discovery, and logic convinced me to pursue the same themes and questions as those I had

originally selected but instead having a new focus on a specific case study. Just as there is no

pan-Aboriginal worldview, there is no pan-British or pan-French worldview. To see European

peoples as homogeneous is an error not unlike viewing Aboriginal cultures as undifferentiated.

Such misapprehensions produce persistent and problematic categories which prevent diverse

cultures from being seen as dynamic, evolving, and unavoidably hybrid. As Said so eloquently

asserts, “Partly because of empire, all cultures are involved in one another; none is single and

pure, all are hybrid, heterogeneous, extraordinarily differentiated, and unmonolithic.”1 In an

epoch when the majority of peoples were not yet living in urban centres, the influence of

geography, terrain, and regions was great, and the effect of a vast ocean separating a metropole

from its fledgling satellite colony and colonists cannot be overstated. Imperial newcomers cannot

be considered equivalent to their cultural counterpart from their home country. Having begun to

think in terms of particularisms, I came to see how a focused case study could be more fruitful

for my research goals. While there are certainly many ways to approach a history of our present

environmental crisis, an investigation of early culture contact in the Canadian context involving a

clearly defined case study could offer a variety of hermeneutical advantages: greater knowledge

of groups studied; increased integrity as distinctions are not elided into universals; and the more

highly nuanced findings characteristic of depth as opposed to breadth analyses. Our

environmental crisis is not a phenomenon separate from European demographic ascendency in

lands previously belonging to other peoples. Jacobs refers to North America as “a graveyard of

1 Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage Books, 1994) xxv.

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lost Aboriginal cultures”1 and this sad truth is a function of both material forces and imperial

imaginings. A focused case study provides the structure for a close examination of these

influences.

With historical research it is not possible to begin at a definitive beginning because it

does not exist. The task is to determine an appropriate starting point and justify the parameters of

the period under investigation. The case study I have selected is that of Wendat-French relations

in the early seventeenth century. I have chosen this case study for a number of theoretical

reasons.2 First, the French were the earliest peoples to establish an enduring colony in what is

now Canada, and their impact, documentary, cadastral, social, commercial and political, was

considerable. Moreover, France has had a lasting reputation as having developed better relations

with Indigenous peoples than the British, Spanish and Dutch colonial powers, a questionable

reputation, however, given the French typically viewed cajoling Aboriginal peoples as a

necessary strategic practice serving mercantile objectives.3 Second, the Wendat were

horticultural peoples and the French were agricultural, so the potentiality for similarity and

comparison in terms of land use practices was significant. Third, the early French explorers were

keen to meet the Wendat because their horticultural status preceded them, and the French

believed sedentary peoples to be more civilized than peripatetic bands. The French also saw in

Wendat semi-sedentariness a tremendous opportunity to Christianize a nation. Fourth, Wendat

diplomacy and finesse in matters of trade was unsurpassed by other First Nations in the early

1 Jane Jacobs, Dark Age Ahead (Toronto: Random, 2004) 3. 2 See John Walton, “Making the Theoretical Case,” What Is a Case? Exploring the Foundations of Social Inquiry, eds. Charles Ragin and Howard Becker (New York: Cambridge UP, 1992). 3 See Olive Dickason, “Sixteenth Century French Vision of Empire: The Other Side of Self-Determination,” Decentring the Renaissance: Canada and Europe in Multidisciplinary Perspective, 1500-1700, eds. Germaine Warkentin and Carolyn Podruchny (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1996) 87-109.

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seventeenth century.1 This penchant for trade possessed by the Wendat and the French facilitates

a comparison between the two nations, their worldviews, land-use practices, and social and

societal formations. In fact, the trade and land cultivation practices of the two nations invites an

exploration of culture contact, examining how the systems changed and influenced each other

over time socially, economically, politically, philosophically, and ideologically as a result of

interacting. Fifth, there are more primary source documents pertaining to the Wendat than any

other First Nation in this early contact period. Such a vast body of writings about the Wendat

allows a degree of textual analysis not possible for any other early contact group. Lastly, the

Wendat were a powerful confederacy whose numbers, technologies, mercantile and military

prowess rivalled that of the French. Indeed the French depended on Wendat technologies and

expert local knowledge (as they had depended on other First Nations in the early contact period)

at different times throughout their association.

Comparing two cultural groups of comparable but different complexity is important as

the parallels provide a built-in safeguard against the European proclivity to situate western

achievements at the cultural centre while relegating Aboriginal triumphs to the margins. This

case study is also of special significance because Wendat territory was located in the region of

Ontario between Lake Simcoe and Georgian Bay, which is now Simcoe County, and Ontario has

experienced in the past two decades a spectacular reduction of environmental protection.2 Of

course, despite however carefully delimited in place and time my case study may be, it

inherently includes much larger regions, focusing as it does on Aboriginal-newcomer relations.

The developments in Wendat territory and New France during the contact period here considered

1 See Bruce Trigger, Children of Aetaentsic: A History of the Huron People to 1660, (1976; Kingston and Montreal: McGill-Queen’s UP, 1987). 2 See Robert Paehlke’s “Spatial Proportionality: Right-Sizing Environmental Decision-Making,” Governing the Environment: Persistent Challenges, Uncertain Innovations, ed. Edward A. Parson (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2001) 73-123.

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cannot possibly be explained or accounted for by an entirely regional analysis but ultimately

must be situated in the context of an international and overseas economy.

Purpose

The purpose of this historical case study investigating Wendat-French culture contact and

exchange from 1609-1649 is manifold. In the spirit of transformative social work practice I wish

to demonstrate that the present, our environmental crisis, was not inescapably predestined and

should not be taken as such.1 Myriad factors, including human technologies, ideologies,

worldviews, demography, land use and societal formations occurring in a historical and

geographical context need be considered. As Cronon suggests, whenever one inquires into the

nature of the present, asking how things developed as they did, the “answer is almost never as

obvious as it seems.”2 An uncomplicated, explanatory line spanning the past four centuries does

not exist. Indeed history is messy because it is an interpretive venture not a pursuit of absolute

truth. While one scholar may emphasize how societies use their natural environment for survival

but ultimately cause their demise through overuse, and another scholar may focus on internal

political or social strife seeing the natural environment only as a setting or backdrop, I am

choosing to foreground the environment by asking how the Wendat and French perceived and

valued the natural world. I want to demonstrate that there is a link between such perceptions and

values, and human treatment of the nonhuman world. It is not only the particularities of place

that influence how peoples of different cultures exploit and change their environments but also

their conceptualisations of the nonhuman that affect how peoples manage and protect their

surrounds. Such conceptualisations change over time and a period of culture contact between

1 See Adrienne Chambon, “Foucault’s Approach: Making the Familiar Visible” Reading Foucault for Social Work, eds. A. Chambon, A. Irving and L. Epstein (New York: Columbia UP, 1999) 51-81. 2 William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists and the Ecology of New England (1983; New York: Hill and Wang, 2003) 171.

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peoples who are exceptionally foreign to each other can provide a catalyst for tremendous

change. Underlying much of my analysis is a profound moral concern. We are the only species

that has the ability to completely annihilate not one but numerous species, and each year the

extinction list lengthens. In trying to understand an early part of the “story” behind our current

environmental challenges, I am acknowledging human responsibility and attempting to frame our

present and future actions both ethically and socially. As Eagleton argues, “the link between the

natural and the human, the material and the meaningful, is morality.”1 Ultimately I hope to

discover principles that can be gleaned from the historical investigation which will be useful to

provide directions for potential social work responses in this era marked by the degraded

nonhuman natural environment.

My Social Location

As a non-Aboriginal scholar, writing a thesis with a strong Aboriginal focus has been

challenging. The fear of scholarly misstep in the form of accidental and offensive reifications or

representations of the Wendat has loomed large throughout this process. I am well aware that my

outsider status is problematic, potentially rendering my scholarship doubtful at best for

Aboriginal persons. The question of who speaks for whom is always important. While I do not

subscribe to any notion of essentialism, and believe strongly in the role of social constructionism

and the malleability and multiplicity of individual, social, and cultural identities, for oppressed

groups that have been researched excessively by the dominant culture with little to no benefit to

their communities, not to speak of the innumerable acts of cultural appropriation, it is absolutely

essential to think of, and theoretically, analytically, and ethically correct for, outsider location.

Sound Indigenous research is based necessarily on a firm understanding of Indigenous

epistemology and ontology, leading some scholars to question whether it is possible for non- 1 Terry Eagleton, After Theory (New York: Basic Books, 2003) 157.

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Indigenous researchers to conduct studies having relevance to Indigenous communities.1 That

Indigenous knowledge is not only situated socially, culturally, and spatially but also learned

contextually and built on iteratively through daily activities, further complicates the relevance of

Aboriginal-focused research conducted by non-Aboriginal persons.2 I have responded to this

important challenge in a number of ways. First, recognising the significance of epistemology and

ontology not only to Indigenous research but also to the specific focus of my case study in which

I aimed to understand conceptualisations of the human and nonhuman, I have dedicated an entire

findings chapter to Wendat and French ways of knowing. Second, because my case study

involves a historical First Nations confederacy, of which there are descendants today but not the

same society or polity, I felt less of an ethnographic interloper. Third, the historical documents

with which I worked were written by French men, for the Wendat were oral peoples at this time

and authored no lasting written documents during this period, so my first understanding or

interpretation is of the French and then of the Wendat through French narratives. This remove

alters to some extent the implications of my location, as I am then a non-Aboriginal person

examining European texts about French-Wendat contact in Wendake, land of the Wendat

confederacy, rather than a scholar directly intruding into Aboriginal texts. Fourth, Wilson, a Cree

scholar suggests a strong link between axiology and methodology in Indigenous research,

recommending that research involving Aboriginal communities must have a strong moral

1 Evelyn Steinhauer, “Thoughts on an Indigenous Research Methodology,” Canadian Journal of Native Education 26.2 (2002): 69-81; Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (London: Zed, 1999); Shawn Wilson, Research Is Ceremony: Indigenous Research Methods (Black Point, NS: Fernwood, 2001). 2 George J. Sefa Dei, “African Development: The Relevance and Implications of ‘Indigenousness,’” Indigenous Knowledges in Global Contexts: Multiple Readings of Our Worlds, eds. George J. Sefa Dei, Budd L. Hall, and Dorothy Goldin-Rosenberg (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2000) 70-88.

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commitment to the community.1 This includes research involving historic Aboriginal societal

formations.2 My research includes a considerable ethical concern that historical and persistent

inequities toward Aboriginal peoples be redressed, and that the continuing influence of imperial

practices (political, cultural, ideological) be replaced with a new, respectful kind of relationship

between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal peoples. Fifth, my location as a Macedonian Roma

woman, while still situating me outside of Aboriginal communities, situates me equally outside

of the dominant culture. I and my family have experienced directly the discrimination and

alienation that several centuries of Roma people experienced before us. Not only do I know

firsthand how it feels to be cast as an inferior Other, but my people also share with Aboriginal

peoples the tragic history of genocide, the most devastating example being the ethno-racial

extermination strategy that was part of the Final Solution which destroyed “over half the Romani

population in Nazi occupied Europe.”3 Last, I have over fifteen years of personal and

professional experience with Aboriginal communities both urban and rural. From a filiative

perspective I am indeed non-Aboriginal, but this says nothing of my strong affiliation

(representing a shift from nature to culture) for Aboriginal understandings, ways of knowing, and

cultural practices, which are more akin to my collectivist, clan oriented, earth-centred

Macedonian Roma roots than are the practices of the dominant culture. If at times my

scholarship reads as idealisation despite my best efforts, it is a reflection not of a deliberate

attempt to construct a falsely positive view of the Wendat peoples but a desire not to offend.

Dissertation Outline

1 Shawn Wilson, Research is Ceremony: Indigenous Research Methods (Black Point, NS: Fernwood, 2008); see also Carolyn Kenny, “When the Women Heal: Aboriginal Women Speak About Policies to Improve the Quality of Life,” The American Behavioral Scientist 50.4 (2006): 550-561l 2 Devon A. Hihesuah, “A Few Cautions at the Millennium on the Merging of Feminist Studies with American Indian Women’s Studies,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 25.4 (2000): 1247-1251. 3 Ian Hancock, We Are the Romani People, (Hatfield, Hertfordshire: U of Herfordshire P, 2002) 34.

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This thesis provides multiple apertures for investigating the interaction between Wendat-French

conceptualisations of the nonhuman and social, economic, geopolitical and moral concerns that

are mediated by a period of culture contact in the early seventeenth century, marked by

increasingly colonial forces impinging on the Wendat, within the historical and cultural context

of human-land relationships with a view to supporting social-environmental practices and

Aboriginal-non-Aboriginal relations today.

My thesis is organized in the following manner. In Chapter One, I outline the

methodology and theoretical frameworks used to perform my case study analysis. Chapter Two

provides an introduction to the scope of the environmental crisis we face today and the important

role social work can play in addressing a variety of social-environmental issues. Chapter Three

presents the key ecological debates that have developed and dominated environmental discourse

since the emergence of environmentalism, and Chapter Four takes a similar long-lens view but

focuses on early Indigenous-non-Indigenous contact in the Americas, with a special emphasis on

European representations and social constructions of Indigenous peoples. Chapters Two, Three,

and Four serve as a kind of detailed prologue providing necessary information in which to

contextualize my findings chapters. The first of these substantive chapters, Chapter Five

examines Wendat and French worldviews in the early seventeenth century, for within these

cultural understandings and frames of reference can be found ideas about human relationships

with and beliefs about the nonhuman. Taking a more social-geographic approach Chapters Six,

Seven and Eight investigate Wendat and French land-use practices in the late pre-contact, early

contact, and late contact periods respectively. The purpose of dividing the timeline in this fashion

is to get a sense of land-use practices before culture contact, so that an understanding of changes

could be traced over the forty year culture-contact period. Finally, in Chapter 9, I present a

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summary of the research, draw conclusions, make important links with environmental social

work, and suggest implications.

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Chapter One: Describing the Research and Methodology Process: Approaching History from a Critical Perspective

The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the “state of emergency” in which we live is not the exception but the rule. We must attain to a conception of history that is in keeping with this insight. Then we shall clearly realize that it is our task to bring about a real state of emergency, and this will improve our position in the struggle…” Walter Benjamin Methodology

I have placed the environment central to my analysis, together with the Wendat and French, to

ensure that all three receive similar consideration. This is a methodological approach derived

from environmental history.1 Canadian history has often in a general way focused on

environmental matters, being an account of extractive processes and the hardships experienced

by those seeking to exploit resources in a struggle between humans and their new surrounds. The

more recent trend in environmental history considers the human impact on the environment

rather than the earlier interest in environmental determinism.2 Although my historical research is

not purely environmental it is essential that my research treats nature as an actor, not necessarily

as the lead actor but a force influencing the Wendat and French differentially. Environmental

history owes a tremendous debt to the Annales School whose founders Marc Bloch and Lucien

Febvre introduced environmental factors into the study of human history and reoriented the

temporal lens to la longue durée. These two features combined created an opening for a type of

historical understanding which placed human history in the context of extended periods and

natural cycles. When world history emerged powerfully toward the mid-twentieth century, 1 See Alan MacEachern, Natural Selections: National Parks in Atlantic Canada, 1935-1970 (Montreal: McGill UP, 2001); William Cronon, “What is Environmental History?: Ecological Prophecies,” Major Problems in American Environmental, ed. Carolyn Merchant (Lexington, MA: D.C. Heath and Company, 1993) 9-13; Carolyn Merchant, “What is Environmental History? Ecological Revolutions,” Major Problems in American Environmental History, 22- 31; and Donald Worster, “Doing Environmental History,” The Ends of the Earth: Perspectives on Modern Environmental History, ed. Donald Worster (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989) 289-307. 2 Ramsay Cook, “Cabbages Not Kings: Towards an Ecological Interpretation of Early Canadian History,” Journal of Canadian Studies 25.4 (Winter 1990-91): 5-16.

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eschewing the former narrow historical focus on individual nations or groups for the study of

relations across national and ethnic boundaries, historians were then required to broaden their

geographic scope.1

Environmental history developed in part due to the coalescence of these factors and they

are important to the research I have undertaken. I am interested in the key beliefs held by the

Wendat and French regarding the shared region they inhabited—the Wendat as established

residents, the French as recent colonial interlopers—in the early seventeenth century and what

this tells us about the role played by duration of land tenure, complex bioregional knowledge,

French imperialism and the contested meanings of culture, nature, and providence. What new

forms of land practices, cultural patterns, social formations and political structures did Wendat-

French culture contact engender or require? What changes and transfigurations occurred within

and between the two cultures and how did these affect traditional beliefs about, and relationships

to, the land and nonhuman others? Like all relationships the human-nature relationship is

dynamic, not static; it is dialectical not a linear sequence. By studying this environment-related

thread of human thought and behaviour through the lens of culture contact and cultural

difference, it is possible to discern disparate cultural commitments and philosophical

assumptions regarding human-nature relationships despite the moderately restrictive challenge of

cultural incommensurability.

The issue of incommensurability can be handled in part by endeavouring to decentre

one’s understanding of difference.2 Historically Aboriginal peoples have been reduced by

Europeans to the “other” in actual dealings and in textual representations. To counter such

1 See David Freeland Duke, “Introduction to Environmental History,” Canadian Environmental History: Essential Readings, ed. David F. Duke (Toronto: Canadian Scholars’, 2006) 1-8. 2 For this discussion of decentring I owe a great debt to Germaine Warkentin and Carolyn Podruchny for their Introduction titled “Other Land Existing” in Decentring the Renaissance: Canada and Europe in Multidisciplinary Perspective, 1500-1700, eds. Germaine Warkentin and Carolyn Podruchny (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1996) 3-16.

15

mistreatment my research is as much about culture contact as it is about environmental history. A

study of culture contact and environmental history makes sense. As Said observed, “Everything

about human history is rooted in the earth, which has meant that we must think about habitation,

but it has also meant that people have planned to have more territory and therefore must do

something about its indigenous residents.”1 The French were clearly interested in doing

something about the Wendat, and this manifested as attempts to remake them as French and

Christian while simultaneously ensuring that they extracted and processed pelts needed for

French mercantile ambitions. Vico maintained that human beings can study and understand

human culture and history because it is made by humans and therefore accessible to us,2 and

Kant suggested that history reveals to us our own culpability in human injustices.3 All colonial

relations are marked by injustices, and if I as a social worker interested in social justice,

environmental justice, and Aboriginal-non-Aboriginal history seek to alter and interrogate the

narrative of our collective Canadian past, to investigate what it meant to live and function in

another time, so as to begin to transform the present, then I must decentre received categories

and work against the problematic bifurcation of centres and peripheries.

The primary source documents with which I am working are certainly rife with

representations of the “other.” But through approaching this category of “otherness” critically,

investigating it as a construct, iteratively scrutinizing its insidious presence in the texts, it is

possible to work against the Eurocentric bias. Similarly, the same strategy must be applied to the

French authorial imperial voice. The implied assertion of French dominance and superiority that

characterizes the primary source writings must be subjected to scrutiny in order to evaluate

1 Edward Said Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage, 1994) 7. 2 See Giambattista Vico, New Science: Principles of the New Science Concerning the Common Nature of Nations, trans. David Marsh, 3rd ed. (1725; New York: Penguin Books, 2001) 489. 3 See Immanuel Kant “Conjectures on the Beginning of Human History,” Kant: Political Writings, ed. H.S. Reiss, trans. H.B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1991) 221-34.

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responsibly the period under investigation. Just as it is important to interrogate the received

constructs of historical Wendat and French persons and communities it is also imperative to

avoid the too common tendency in both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal writing to differentiate

the two groups along Manichean lines. Such thinking is unproductive and mistaken and “actually

ossifies and folklorizes cultural forces”1 rather than facilitating a greater understanding of

cultural groups. As Trigger suggests, the Wendat and French of the seventeenth century had

much more in common with each other than present day French persons would have with their

seventeenth-century European ancestors.2

Of course the nature of the primary source materials makes this discussion and the

exercise of carefully dissecting received constructs and categories paramount. The history of the

Wendat is less the history of the Wendat among themselves or their interactions with other

Aboriginal groups than it is the history of their contact with, and attempts at social programming

by, the French. In addition to this Wendat absence in the primary sources, is the equally

significant absence of voices of French traders who certainly had distinctive experiences with the

Wendat, experiences that diverged considerably from those recorded in the surviving texts, as the

traders typically shared domiciles with the Wendat and adopted, more eagerly, cultural practices.

Every primary source document with which I am working was written by French men, all of

whom were political or religious emissaries of the French crown. The three most important

1 Denys Delâge and Jean-Philippe Warren, “Amerindians and the Horizon of Modernity,” Decentring the Renaissance, 315. 2 See Bruce Trigger’s discussion of this point in Natives and Newcomers: Canada’s ‘Heroic Age’ Reconsidered (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s UP, 1994) 298-343. See also Charles Mann, 1491: New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus (New York: Knopf, 2006) for his suggestion in the final chapter (p. 337) that present day Americans would have more in common with early contact Indigenous peoples than they would their own ancestors. Mann bases this assumption on his perception that the two groups share a belief in cultural relativism, have similar sexual freedoms, and comparable ideas about individual rights.

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primary sources are Samuel de Champlain’s writings,1 Gabriel Sagard’s Long Journey to the

Country of the Hurons, and the Jesuit Relations. In a 1615 war against the Haudonesaune

Champlain accompanied Wendat warriors. He was wounded and taken by the Wendat to winter

among them while he convalesced. Although Champlain had travelled with the Wendat and

accompanied them in a previous war against the Haudonesaune in 1609, it was during his 1615

stay in Wendake that he documented his first in-depth observations of Wendat customs which

were accompanied by a variety of sketches. These accounts are included in Champlain’s Works

and represent an important record of early Wendat practices. Unfortunately, because the Wendat

were preliterate peoples, there is no written document produced by a member of the Wendat

confederacy and historians are faced with the challenge of trying to ascertain Wendat

worldviews and cultural practices through layers of Eurocentrism. It is true that Champlain had

recommended intermarriage between French and Wendat peoples so that the two nations could

become one; however, his obdurate imperialism and Francocentrism never allowed for a true

blending of cultures but instead insisted on the Christianizing and Frenchifying of the Wendat.

Despite the obvious biases of Champlain’s Works, they constitute some of the most important

“first-hand” accounts, through a French filter of course, of Wendat peoples in the seventeenth

century.

Gabriel Sagard, like Champlain, lived among the Wendat although his stay lasted more

than a season. Sagard, a member of the Franciscan Recollet order, travelled in 1623 to a Wendat

village where he remained doing missionary work for almost a year before being recalled by his

superior to Paris. His work The Long Journey is rightly celebrated as the most ethnographic of

the primary sources pertaining to the Wendat because of his sensitive handling of many cultural

1 The Works of Samuel de Champlain, a six-volume set edited by H.P. Biggar and published by The Champlain Society, is widely recognized as the most authoritative text.

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differences. Subject matter that Champlain and the Jesuits treated with disdain is often reported

remarkably with an ostensible cultural relativism by Sagard. Although his work is more

accessible to current sensibilities and comparatively less prejudiced than the writings of

Champlain and the Jesuits, The Long Journey too suffers from ethnocentrism. Nonetheless,

Sagard’s work is matchless for its detailed treatment of numerous Wendat customs, rituals and

quotidian practices. Both Sagard and Champlain provide meticulous accounts of their respective

fishing and hunting trips taken with the Wendat that are not to be found in the Jesuit Relations.

The authors of the Jesuit Relations share with Sagard lengthy residence in Wendake and

therefore their writings are invaluable supplying one of the major sources of information about

the Wendat and Jesuit missionary efforts in early North America. The Relations however are

extremely difficult texts to read for they document coldly the cultural, economic, religious and

demographic consequences of Jesuit presence in Wendake, a presence which contributed

significantly to the demise of the Wendat confederacy and the dispersal of surviving Wendat

people. Beginning in 1632 under the directive of Jesuit priest Paul Le Jeune, the Relations were

written annually in New France but were published in Paris by Sebastien Cramoisy. They were

always carefully edited by Le Jeune before being sent to Paris, and they are saturated with a self-

promoting tone that is impossible to ignore. Indeed Goddard suggests that the Relations are more

than “propaganda for the colonizing effort”; they represent “a figuration of neostoical fantasy, a

place where the hard, pure life might be imagined, full of test to the faith and to life itself.”1 And

to this it should be added that the Relations also represent the Jesuits’ annual attempt to recruit

new missionaries, garner financial support, and perhaps most importantly, maintain their unique

status of having a religious monopoly on the missionary effort in New France. The Treaty of

1 Peter Goddard, “Canada in Seventeenth-Century Jesuit Thought: Backwater or Opportunity?” Decentring the Renaissance, 191.

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Saint-Germain-en-Laye enabled France to officially regain possession of their former colony

after the English takeover and three-year occupation. When the French returned to New France

in 1632 it was decreed that the only religious order to be reinstalled in New France was the

Jesuits. The Relations are as much a neostoical fantasy as they are the Jesuits’ repeated

declaration of their own irreplaceability.

Fortunately historians in the latter part of the twentieth century distanced themselves

from the anachronism and ethnocentrism that marked earlier European-Indigenous histories. In

contrast to Francis Parkman’s proclivity to peddle “Indian” stereotypes1 more recent scholars

including anthropologist Bruce Trigger,2 geographer Conrad Heidenreich,3 and ethnographer

Elisabeth Tooker,4 among others, provide insightful, measured secondary sources of Wendat

peoples, their cultural practices, worldviews, social behaviours, societal structures, and Wendake

territory itself. In these works the authors have sifted through the layers of ideological detritus

marking the primary sources and have produced works that earnestly attempt to present an

unprejudiced portrait of Wendat peoples and their culture. Of particular interest is George Sioui’s

Huron-Wendat: Heritage of the Circle5 because the author is not only conversant in all the

primary and secondary Wendat sources but he is also a Wendat descendent and possesses

unique, orally transmitted knowledge of his own peoples.

1 See Francis Parkman, The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century (1908; New York: Cosimo, 2005) in which the author describes the “Hurons” as “desperate gamblers,” who were “notoriously dissolute” but possessed a brain size that made them superior to all other Indigenous groups with the exception of the Iroquois and the “civilized races of Mexico and Peru.” See pp. xxxvi, xxxiv, xliii. 2 Bruce Trigger was the foremost academic expert of Wendat history having written Children of Aetaentsic which is widely considered to be an authoritative text. He has also authored Huron: Farmers of the North, Natives and Newcomers and a host of articles about the Wendat. 3 Conrad Heidenreich’s Huronia: A History and Geography of the Huron Indians (Toronto: McClelland, 1971) is an important work studying peoples of Wendake in the context of their physical environment to unearth a human geography that reflects space-specific cultural values. 4 Elisabeth Tooker’s monograph An Ethnography of the Huron Indians 1615-1649 is an important work for its detailed, balanced treatment of the Wendat peoples gained through an impartial handling of the primary sources. 5 Georges Sioui, Huron-Wendat: Heritage of the Circle, trans. Jane Brierley (Vancouver: UBC P, 1999).

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Conducting textual analysis always poses interpretive challenges and in the case of

Wendat-French history one challenge is to overcome the one-sidededness of the primary sources

themselves. Trying to enter into or comprehend a cultural world that reflects the interests of the

various groups, and groups within groups, inhabiting a remote historical time is difficult through

the tendentious lens of the primary sources; however, to grasp the shifting and evolving

conceptualizations the Wendat and French held of the non-human world, to identify the ideas of

nature held by the groups it is necessary to get beyond the biases. In social work we are typically

seeking to understand social phenomena, sometimes with an explanatory objective in terms of

cause and effect, sometimes with more qualitative goals involving a richer understanding of a

case or issue, and sometimes a combination of both approaches, but always sensitive to power

imbalances, social justice issues, and equity. My objective when working with the primary

sources is not to perform a hermeneutics that will allow for a correct interpretation or a recovery

of the authors’ original intention but to uncover Wendat and French worldviews despite the

authors’ intentions. Each of the primary sources is embedded in a particular tradition that is itself

located on a temporal horizon. Whether or not the primary source authors were aware, their

consciousness was affected by the culture and specific history in which it was formed. The

Gadamerian approach to textual analysis is useful here for his investigative method was

philosophically concerned with what occurs in a text beyond authorial intention.1 In this regard I

must be mindful not only of the historical and temporal horizons of the primary source authors

but also the manner in which my own contemporary perspectives and historically shaped

consciousness intersect with the texts with which I am working.

Part of my task is to consider the ways in which the production of discourse is regulated,

streamlined and distributed in agreement with existing social, political and ideological 1 See Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (1975; London: Continuum, 2004).

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parameters. As Foucault recognises, discursive content begs the question, “How is it that this

statement appeared, rather than some other one in its place?”1 In this regard my analysis must

endeavour to uncover, to the extent that it is possible, the voices that have been silenced or exiled

by the textuality of the primary source documents. The series of selective and deictic moments in

discursive production which roves between emphasis and neglect, privileging certain subjects

and voices while displacing others in the process of information presentation and organization is

described by de Certeau as “acquired rationalizations.”2 The kinetic tensions formed by the

inclusion or exclusion of material and routes taken or avoided are potentially revealing if

pursued. Such pursuit can militate against the inherent limits of the texts3 exceeding the

temporalised and spatialised bounds of their production while simultaneously serving as a

reminder of their absolute contingency.4 In this regard the historical analysis undertaken in my

research is a borderline practice of attempting to interpret the writings of a cultural group (early

seventeenth-century French colonial and religious authors) that is foreign to me both temporally

and culturally, making avenues for comprehension incomplete and aspects of thematic content

untranslatable.5 However, while it is impossible to transcend textual challenges and grasp history

exactly, there are still events and a chronology that form “an irreducible core to the story of the

past”6 and this core together with a hermeneutical approach are at the heart of my analysis.

1 Michel Foucault, “On the Archaeology of the Sciences: Response to the Epistemology Circle,” Michel Foucault: Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, ed. J. Faubion, trans. R. Hurley et al. (New York: New Press, 1994) 307. 2 Michel de Certeau, The Writing of History, trans. T. Conley (New York: Columbia UP, 1988). 3 See Mikhail Bakhtin’s “The Problem of the Text in Linguistics, Philology and the Human Sciences: An Experiment in Philosophical Anaylsis,” Speech Genres and Other Late Essays (Austin: U of Texas P, 1986) 104. 4 See Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s discussion of absolute contingency in Death of a Discipline (New York: Columbia UP, 2003) 88. 5 See Homi K. Bhabha’s discussion of translational challenges intrinsic to interdisciplinarity due to the disjunction between symbol and sign in The Location of Culture (1994; London: Routledge, 2004) 234. 6 See Margaret MacMillan, The Uses and Abuses of History (Toronto: Viking, 2008) 38; see also Edward Said’s discussion of the importance of maintaining a focus on historical circumstances despite textual limitations in The World, the Text and the Critic (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1983) 4.

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I am also using the archaeological record and Wendat oral tradition to comprehend more

fully this “irreducible core” and attempt to get beyond the authoritative voice of the early French

writers, a voice typically more committed to satisfying conventions and tradition building than

presenting observations. Consulting materials from a variety of disciplines (History,

Archaeology, Anthropology, Aboriginal Studies, and Ethnography) can help to adjust for errors

and inaccuracies in the primary source documents. The archaeological scholarship of Bruce

Trigger and Gary Warrick1, among others, is invaluable for enriching understanding of Wendat

culture and societies. For the purposes of this study, archaeology can be used to learn about

Wendat societal and cultural practices in the period just before contact with the French, to

corroborate or counter claims made in the primary source materials, to understand Wendat uses

of various aspects of their material culture, and to disprove myths generated and reiterated by

early historians, such as the belief that Aboriginal cultures were radically and immediately

transformed simply by having access to European goods. The Wendat oral tradition is accessible

to me largely because of Marius Barbeau’s magnificent collection of transcribed oral history that

he gathered from Wyandot peoples, descendents of the Wendat.2 Barbeau’s work provides a

window into Wendat culture that the archaeological record never could, and the oral history his

work contains supports some of the cosmologic and cosmogonic stories recorded by the primary

source authors, making the oral tradition an indispensable avenue to understanding Wendat

culture. “Storytelling, oral histories, the perspectives of Elders and of women have become an

integral part of all indigenous research.”3 Barbeau’s compilation contains a part of the collective

story of the Wendat peoples.

1 Gary Warrick, A Population History of the Huron-Petun, AD 500-1650 (New York: Cambridge UP, 2008). 2 C. Marius Barbeau, Huron and Wyandot Mythology, Memoir 80 (Ottawa: Department of Mines, Government Printing Bureau, 1915). 3 Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (London: Zed, 1999) 144.

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Before discussing the theoretical frameworks selected for my analysis, I should make one

final point about my methodology. I view Wendat culture and society at the time of European

contact as equal in every way to that of the French. The idea of an eternal pristine state in which

Aboriginal peoples lived prior to contact with Europeans strips first peoples of agency and has

no place in my, or any, analysis.1 Nor do I subscribe to a belief in unilineal evolution, the

outdated and conservative European assertion of universality and uniformity which placed

Indigenous peoples at some earlier evolutionary point on the continuum of human development

and so-called progress. “The concept of the historical progress of mankind [sic] cannot be

sundered from the concept of its progression through a homogeneous, empty time.”2 By

interrogating the modernist teleological myth of progress, value-laden suppositions about

cultural differences can be laid to rest and the oppressively homogenizing approach to historical

understanding can be replaced by the more fair and valid concept of absolute simultaneity.3 This

concept suggests that cultures and societies, in this case the Wendat and French, do not represent

different stages on a continuum of cultural and societal development but instead different, but

equal, ways of developing. Using this model, Wendat social and cultural practices are not

mistaken for some earlier or lesser form of societal evolutionary development. Absolute

simultaneity is an invaluable concept when examining culture contact between two vastly

different groups, as it precludes the proclivity to assume that influences during contact were

1 See Charles Mann’s 1491: New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006) p. 12, for a discussion of Holmberg’s Mistake, the notion, which predominated academic works and mainstream thinking until recently, that first peoples of the Americas “lived in an eternal unhistoried state.” 2 Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. H. Arendt (New York: Shocken, 1968) 261. See also Bruce Trigger, Time and Traditions: Essays in Archaeological Interpretations (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1978) 134 for a discussion of the problem of the “concept of unilineal evolution where all societies are seen as stages on a continuum toward the most ‘advanced’ societies.” 3 See Natalie Zemon Davis’s discussion of this concept in “Iroquois Women, European Women,” Feminist Postcolonial Theory, eds. R. Lewis and S. Mills (New York: Routledge, 2003) 135-160 where she makes the case against viewing Indigenous societies as a former developmental stage of European societies and insists that both societies are complex and not polarized as they have been depicted; they are differently, but equally, developed.

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largely unidirectional, from the European to the Aboriginal, or specifically in this case, the

French to the Wendat. The idea of absolute simultaneity will be used in combination with three

other common historical strategies identified by Zemon Davis: examining the European gaze,

exemplified by Dickason’s work Myth of the Savage1; foregrounding both First Nations and

Europeans as actors in a relationship of dominance and resistance, epitomized by Trigger’s

Natives and Newcomers and Anderson’s Chain Her By One Foot2; and privileging the middle

ground, the place of hybridity, exchange and accommodation between two cultures, illustrated

by White in The Middle Ground.3 The idea of the middle ground represents an important

departure from former historic accounts that framed European ascendancy in the Americas as

inevitable and offers a necessary counter-approach to considering Aboriginal-non-Aboriginal

relations in early contact periods, an approach that pivots around the common ground the two

groups discovered and co-created through interacting. Using the European gaze exclusively is

unsatisfactory, for French and Wendat cultures after initial contact did not develop independently

and therefore the single narrative falls short.4 The difficulty with both Trigger and Anderson’s

equal actors approach is that their analyses occur within a dominance and resistance framework

which reinforces problematic polarities.5 This perspective, however, is vastly superior to the

commonly held view of many historians that Aboriginal people were doomed to be overcome by

1 See Olive Dickason, Myth of the Savage: And the Beginning of French Colonialism in North America (Edmonton, AB: U of Alberta P, 1984). 2 This use of a dominance and resistance model is truer of Karen Anderson’s work Chain Her by One Foot: The Subjugation of Native Women in Seventeenth-Century New France (New York: Routledge, 1991) than it is of Bruce Trigger’s Natives and Newcomers in which he makes ample use of the notion that two cultures in contact are adaptive systems. 3 See Natalie Zemon Davis, “Polarities, Hybridities: What Strategies for Decentring?” Decentring the Renaissance for a discussion of these strategies. Indeed my thinking and methodology owe a great debt to Zemon Davis’s analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of these approaches which I reiterate here. 4 See Toby Morantz, “Plunder or Harmony? On Merging European and Native Views of Early Contact,” Decentring the Renaissance, 48-67. 5 In fairness to Trigger, he only employs the dominance and resistance model to Wendat communities after they had been ravaged by epidemics, and at this point the French were in a position to exercise coercive ideological and political power against which the Wendat resisted.

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Europeans, a view here typified by Trudel’s argument, “In this meeting of two cultures, the one

sophisticated and exerting powerful attractions, the other primitive and almost defenceless, we

can already foresee that the one will destroy the other.”1 White’s middle ground approach,

though rich, like the gaze and polarity approach, “does not address the question of how to place

European and Amerindian cultures, of how to frame them historically in relation to each other.”2

My methodological approach begins in many ways with Cronon’s thought about culture, nature

and environmental history as it pertains to my case study: Wendat-French culture contact has

nothing to do with “wild” versus “civilized” landscapes, “one with and one without a human

influence; it is between two human ways of living, two ways of belonging to an ecosystem.”3

And then following Zemon Davis’s suggestion, my historical strategy builds on this premise and

employs a combined consideration of the gaze, polarities, and hybridities, all within the context

of a theoretical and applied commitment to absolute simultaneity.

Theories

The main theoretical framework I have used for my analysis is ecofeminism. This theory figures

prominently in my examination of Wendat-French relations and the relationship each group had

with its land base in what is now Canada. Critical Theory in its social work manifestation,

though less central to my analysis, is nonetheless important because of its intrinsic social justice

aims. I include postcolonial theory in my discussion of theoretical frameworks used, however my

analysis does not proceed along a postcolonial methodological vein, but there are important

aspects of postcolonial thought that profoundly influenced my thinking: namely the concepts of

1 Marcel Trudel, The Beginnings of New France, 1524-1663 (Toronto: McClelland, 1973) 162. 2 Natalie Zemon Davis, “Polaritiies, Hybridities: What Strategies for Decentring?” Decentring the Renaissance, 29. 3 William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists and the Ecology of New England (1983; New York: Hill, 2003) 12.

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epistemic violence, discrepant experiences, and difference, which will be discussed further

below.

Ecofeminism

Indeed the concept of absolute simultaneity is consistent with the primary theoretical framework

used in my research: ecofeminism, a theory and praxis which questions, critically analyses and

eschews all hierarchical dualisms. The belief that European societies were more developed, more

complex at the time of contact with Indigenous peoples is an instance of a disjunctive pair

formation in which European culture is assigned a higher value than Indigenous cultures. This

European habit of pairing things, peoples, and practices disjunctively is part of a logic of

domination that occurs not only in the realm of ideas but in the material realm as well. Francoise

D’Eaubonne coined the term “ecofeminism” when she articulated the need to overthrow power

hierarchies to ensure a future for the human species.1 Because ecofeminism offers a unique

framework in which both feminist concerns and environmental ethics coalesce, it has become a

theory of choice among environmental social workers. Hoff, a social work scholar and activist

committed to promoting the incorporation of environmental issues into the social work

discipline, through professional re-appraisal, theoretical modification, enhanced understanding of

ecological issues and the environmental-social links, and growing environmental justice

concerns, realizes the distinctive role ecofeminism plays as an expanded feminist analysis of

power dynamics with a view to environmental problems.2 Berger and Kelly, identify how the

early awareness of gender issues in a predominantly female profession like social work makes

ecofeminism, an environmental feminism investigating micro- and macro-dynamics of power in

1 Francoise D’Eaubonne “The Time for Ecofeminism,” trans. R. Hotell, Ecology: Key Concepts in Critical Theory, ed. Carolyn Merchant (Amherst, NY: Humanity, 1994) 174-197. 2 Marie Hoff, “Environmental Foundations of Social Welfare: Theoretical Resources,” The Global Environmental Crisis: Implications for Social Welfare and Social Work, eds. in Marie D. Hoff and John G. McNutt (1994: Aldershot, Eng.: Ashgate, 1998).

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the context of social and environmental justice, consistent with social work values.1 And Kahn

and Scher include ecofeminist theory in an undergraduate social work course designed to infuse

environmental content into the discipline because of its critical and practical location.2

Ecofeminism is an especially fitting theory for my research precisely because it

emphasises power dynamics and environmental matters, the two themes of focus in the Wendat-

French case study being examined. Ecofeminism is best understood as a multifaceted term

encompassing a variety of distinct, sometimes competing, feminist branches, practices and

theories. To a great degree the range of ecofeminist positions reflects the range of feminist

perspectives (e.g., liberal, radical, socialist, Marxist, womanist, and anticolonial and postcolonial

feminisms), as well as different ideas about the causes of and solutions to current ecological

issues.3 Despite some significant differences, ecofeminists generally agree on three basic points.

First, notable connections exist among the domination and oppression of women, marginalized

and exploited humans, and nonhuman plant and animal species. Second, these overlapping and

interconnected forms of oppression warrant attention of an integrated kind. Third, ecofeminism

has at its core a commitment to replace systemic structures of oppression with truly equitable

models and practices. This movement to identify and dismantle the matrix of domination that

underpins oppression toward women, marginalised others, and nonhuman nature is what makes

ecofeminist theory unique praxis.

The kind of ecofeminist theory used in my work is transformational and political,

inspecting and challenging historical, material, social, political and environmental practices and

injustices. Transformational ecofeminism dislodges the ontological and epistemological 1 Raymond M. Berger and James J. Kelley, “Social Work in the Ecological Crisis,” Social Work 38.5 (1993): 521-26. 2 M. Kahn and S. Scher, “Infusing Content on the Physical Environment into the BSW Curriculum,” The Journal of Baccalaureate Social Work 7.2 (2002): 1-14. 3 Noel Sturgeon, Ecofeminist Natures: Race, Gender, Feminist Theory and Political Action (New York: Routledge, 1997).

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assumptions of Western culture that have come to dominate global and popular discourse,

creating ideological and substantive space for subordinated and subjugated knowledge systems.1

In this regard ecofeminism will be immeasurably useful for discerning and working with Wendat

ontology and epistemology which is depicted darkly through the heavy inflection of French

understanding and tendentiousness. Warren’s ecofeminist critique of patriarchy as an “unhealthy

social system” is relevant to my work although I resist the term patriarchy for its impenetrably

monolithic and undifferentiated implications. However, the quaternary of oppressive dimensions

Warren identifies as characterising the patriarchal model are found in the French colonial project

in New France and are therefore applicable to my analysis: faulty beliefs (stemming from a

misapplied Eurocentric framework); impaired thinking and language of domination (evidenced

by the use of the word sauvage and renaming the Wendat Huron); behaviours of domination

(revealed in a variety of social programming mechanisms employed by the French); and the

unmanageability of life (apparent in the excessive demands made by the French on local

resources).2 I am using ecofeminism not to interrogate patriarchy but to deconstruct hierarchical

dualisms where mind and body, reason and nature, self and other are constructed and endlessly

reified in a way that expunges the agency of the less valued in these polarities.

As Plumwood claims in the logic of rational antinomianism where corporeality and

materiality are devalued, “Humans are seen as the only rational species, the only real

subjectivities and actors in the world, and nature is a background substratum which is acted

upon, in ways we do not usually need to pay careful attention to after we have taken what we

1 See Vandana Shiva, “Reductionism and Regeneration: A Crisis in Science,” Ecofeminism, eds. Vandana Shiva and Marie Mies (Halifax: Fernwood, 1993) 22-35. 2 See Karen Warren, Ecofeminist Philosophy: A Western Perspective on What It Is and Why It Matters (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman, 2000) 207.

29

want of it.”1 This line of argument applies not only to “nature” but to all irrational others,

including “barbarians” and “savages” in culture contact situations. How monological rationalism

functioned in Wendat-French relations is a key part of my analysis as the Wendat were

repeatedly depicted as “simple,” “child-like” and “innocent,” which, however veiled, always

implied inferiority when compared to the understood rational standard. Because ecofeminism has

social justice and redistributive aims, highlights the human-nature relationship, aspires to

deconstruct Eurocentrism,2 and adumbrates that discourse is never monologic but always

multivocal and polysemous, it is an ideal theory for my research purposes.

The primary criticism levelled at ecofeminism comes from other feminists, and it is the

charge of essentialism.3 By finding a similarity between nature and women, between nature and

marginalised groups, feminists argue that ecofeminism is perpetuating an essentialist discourse

that has been historically damaging to oppressed groups. In response to this critique, Birkeland

asserts women and marginalized groups are not closer to nature through biologism or ontology,

but through historical and social constructs.4 It can also be argued that the seeming essentialism

of certain ecofeminist writers, for example Susan Griffin5 and Mary Daly,6 is better understood

as a deliberate strategy of oppositional politics not to be confused with a naive regressive

location.7 Indeed these radical and cultural ecofeminist branches could be seen as an example of

what Spivak calls a “strategic use of positivist essentialism in a scrupulously visible political

1 Val Plumwood, Environmental Culture: The Ecological Crisis of Reason (London: Routledge, 2002) 19. 2 See Ariel Salleh Ecofeminism as Politics: Nature, Marx and the Postmodern (London: Zed Books, 1997). 3 See Catriona Sandilands, The Good-natured Feminist: Ecofeminism and the Quest for Democracy (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P 1999); see also Janet Biehl, Finding Our Way: Rethinking Ecofeminist Politics (Boston: South End Press, 1991). 4 Janis Birkeland, “Ecofeminism: Linking Theory and Practice,” Ecofeminism: Women, Animals, Nature, ed. Greta Gaard (Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1993). 5 See Susan Griffin, Woman and Nature: The Roaring Insider Her (London: Women’s Press, 1984). 6 See Mary Daly, Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism (1978; Boston: Beacon, 1990). 7 See Elizabeth Carlassare’s balanced discussion of this issue in “Essentialism in Ecofeminist Discourse,” Ecology: Key Concepts in Critical Theory, ed. Caroly Merchant (New York: Humanity, 1994).

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interest.”1 The more important criticism of ecofeminism is that it inadequately considers the

experiences of non-European women and fails to meaningfully understand the differences

between white women and women belonging to racialized communities as well as the

differences within these groups.2 Smith specifically critiques ecofeminist thinkers who

appropriate Indigenous spirituality and valorize the “ability to live harmoniously with nature,”

but do not sufficiently consider the stark material conditions of many Indigenous peoples or

participate in strategies and activisms to end the colonial practices that mark their lives.3 These

criticisms were certainly true of early ecofeminist writings, as many of the early contributors

were white women adopting a seeming liberal ecofeminist position with little understanding of

the challenges faced by racialized communities. But, like feminism, ecofeminism has been

evolving and through this process a variety of new voices have entered the discourse,

representing diverse ethnoracial backgrounds. In recent ecofeminist literature most authors are

discussing issues of race, ethnicity, colonisation, class, and the differential effects of ecological

damage on less privileged groups. This is not to dismiss the critiques, for they are certainly

important, but rather to recognize that ecofeminism is not fixed but fluid, and as an evolving

discourse, ecofeminism has responded to the critique making pertinent changes.

Vexed Issue of Feminism

Ecofeminism may seem a peculiar choice of theoretical framework given that feminism among

Indigenous scholars and activists, as among other racialized communities, has been generally a

1 See Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak “Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography,” Selected Subaltern Studies, eds. R. Guha and G. Spivak (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1988) 3-33. 2 See Janet Biehl Finding Our Way; see also Andy Smith “Ecofeminism through an Anticolonial Framework” and Dorceta Taylor “Women of Color, Environmental Justice and Ecofeminism,” Ecofeminism: Women, Culture, Nature, ed. Karen Warren (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1997). 3 Andy Smith, “Ecofeminism through an Anticolonial Framework,” Ecofeminism, ed. Karen Warren (Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP, 1997) 30; see also Linda Hogan, “Women: Doing and Being,” in The Stories We Hold Secret: Tales of Women’s Spiritual Development, eds. Linda Hogan, Carol Bruchac, and Judith McDaniel (Greenfield Center, NY: Greenfield Review Press, 1996) ix-xv, for a similar critique of mainstream feminism.

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contested issue. During the decades-long fervent debate surrounding feminist theory, many early

Indigenous scholars were vehemently opposed to feminism. In this past decade, however, the

debate has changed and more Indigenous scholars, including those who formerly eschewed

feminism, are now observing the theoretical and practice value of some aspects of feminism.

Aboriginal scholars who decry feminism see it is a “white” colonial approach that lacks

relevance to Aboriginal societies and comprises proponents who are complicit in various forms

of persistent colonial forces.1 Whereas Aboriginal feminists agree white liberal feminism or

Anglo-American feminism is fraught with imperial collusion, they on the other hand appreciate

streams of feminism developed by scholars and activists from racialized communities or those

white scholars advancing progressive, critical, decolonizing forms.

Feminism’s emphasis on patriarchy has been problematic for many Aboriginal women

who do not believe male domination to be universal.2 Aboriginal societies, it is argued, had

worldviews that greatly esteemed women, producing social and cultural practices in which

women held high status and positions of authority. As Tohe asserts, “We didn’t need to fight for

our place in our societies because it surrounded us constantly.”3 Although Aboriginal

communities possessed economic models dependent on a division of labour, the indispensable

work of both sexes is described as having been valued equally. LaDuke claims, “Traditionally,

American Indian women were never subordinate to men…. What native societies have always

been about is achieving balance in all things, gender relations no less than any other. Nobody

1 Devon Mihesuah, “A Few Cautions at the Millennium on the Merging of Feminist Studies with American Indian Women’s Studies,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 25.4 (2000): 1247-1251; Patricia Monture-Angus, Thunder in My Soul: A Mohawk Woman Speaks (Halifax: Fernwood, 1995); Janet McCloud, in Women of the Native Struggle: Portraits and Testimony of Native American Women, ed. Ronnie Farley (New York: Orion, 1993). 2 Annette Jaimes and Theresa Halsey, “American Indian Women: At the Center of Indigenous Resistance in Contemporary North America,” The State of Native America: Genocide, Colonization, and Resistance, ed. Annette Jaimes (Cambridge, MA: South End, 1999). 3 Laura Tohe. “There Is No Word for Feminism in My Language,” Wicazo sa Review: A Journal of Native American Studies 15.2 (2000): 110.

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needs to tell us how to do it. We’ve had that all worked out for thousands of years. And, left to

our own devices, that’s exactly how we’d be living right now.”1 While some Aboriginal scholars

believe egalitarian pre-European contact gender relations survived colonization,2 others feel they

were altered by the European patriarchal model and must be recovered through cultural

restoration. However, some Aboriginal scholars question the assertion of pre-contact gender

parity, arguing, “It should not be assumed, even in those original societies that were structured

along matriarchal lines, that matriarchies necessarily prevented men from oppressing women.

There are indications of male violence and sexism in some Aboriginal societies prior to

European contact and certainly after contact.”3

Nonetheless, because sexism and women’s oppression is cast by many Indigenous

scholars and activists as having a colonial origin,4 cultural restoration is advocated as an

important approach to regain gender reciprocity. Part of this restitution process requires that

Aboriginal women, reported to be less marginalized than men in post-European contact

economies,5 assist Aboriginal men to resume their former roles. It is thought the process by

which Aboriginal men were drawn into the European market system and consequently removed

from traditional economies and established roles was deleterious, while Aboriginal women were

safeguarded from this negative influence as their economic roles centred on home and family.

Although non-Indigenous feminists might balk at assisting men in their communities to

rediscover meaning and identity, Aboriginal scholars argue the pre-eminence of responsibility in

1 This statement is from an audio-taped archive of Winona LaDuke quoted in Annette Jaimes and Theresa Halsey, “American Indian Women,” 319. 2 Patricial Monture-Angus, Thunder in My Soul, 176. 3 Emma LaRocque, “The Colonization of a Native Woman Scholar,” Women of the First Nations: Power, Wisdom and Strength, eds. Christine Miller and Patricia Chuchryk (Winnipeg: U of Manitoba P, 1996) 14. 4 Paula Gunn Allen, The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions (Boston: Beacon, 1986); Wilma Mankiller and Michael Wallis, Mankiller: A Chief and Her People (New York: St. Martin’s, 1993). 5 Ramona Ford, “Native American Women: Changing Statuses, Changing Interpretations,” Writing the Range: Race, Class, and Culture in the Women’s West, eds. Elizabeth Jameson and Susan Armitage (Norman, OK: U of Oklahoma P, 1997).

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their cultural understanding, in contrast to the rights-based focus of feminism, represents another

discrepancy between Aboriginal and feminist theorizing and community practice.1 However, the

idea that the marginalizing effects of the new economic system harmed Aboriginal men in a

manner out of proportion with the harm done to women in the colonizing process is not

unchallenged. Smith insists, “By narrowing our analysis solely to the economic realm, we fail to

account for the multiple ways women have disproportionately suffered under colonization – from

sexual violence to forced sterilization,”2 and Allen suggests the belief that men have endured

greater hardship “is more a reflection of colonial attitudes toward the primacy of male experience

than of historical fact.”3

Aboriginal scholars who look to historical and cultural practices for gender relation

models, where women and men had different roles but each was esteemed in a reciprocal system,

underscore the considerable differences between their gender relations and those found in

European societies. On this basis of cultural and historical difference, some Aboriginal scholars

find the feminist concept of gender equality entirely irrelevant to Aboriginal societies,

representing yet another site of colonization in the form of cultural imposition, to say nothing of

the diminution potentially done to respected womanhood in their own cultural system. For this

reason, Monture-Angus asserts, “Involving myself deeply in the women’s movement, including

locating my quest for identity there, means being willing to accept less than the position

accorded to women of my nation historically. Equality is not a high standard in my way of

thinking.”4 Turpel, too, makes a similar statement. While she recognizes the importance of

gender equality and access to equal opportunities for non-Aboriginal women, she regards this

1 Lisa Udel, “Revision and Resistance: The Politics of Native Women’s Motherwork,” Frontiers 22.2 (2001): 43-62. 2 Andrea Smith, “Native American Feminism, Sovereignty and Social Change,” Making Space for Indigenous Feminism, ed. Joyce Green (Blackpoint, NS: Fernwood, 2007). 3 Paula Gunn Allen, Sacred Hoop, 202. 4 Patricia Monture-Angus, Thunder in My Soul, 179.

34

framework as “inappropriate conceptually and culturally for First Nations women” whose

peoples historically understood “the responsibilities of women and men to the community.”1 To

highlight the point that equality “is not an important political or social concept” in First Nations

communities, Turpel cites a Mohawk woman who explains, “I don’t want equality. I want to go

back to where women, in aboriginal [sic] communities, were complete, where they were

beautiful, where they were treated as more than equal – where man was helper and woman was

the centre of that environment, that community.”2 Aboriginal women scholars writing from this

perspective understandably identify historical and persistent colonial processes, not gender

disparity, as the issue to be addressed.

Recently, Aboriginal scholars, who are aware of the far-reaching effects of colonization,

are also raising gender concerns despite the former tendency to reject these issues in favour of a

decolonization approach. They are distressed by the ways internalized European gender values

are manifesting in Aboriginal communities irrespective of the stated culturally respected place of

women. St. Denis argues, “most if not all Aboriginal people, both men and women, who are

living in western societies are inundated from birth until death with western patriarchy and

western forms of misogyny.”3 These beliefs are adversely affecting women in Aboriginal

communities. The idea of the immateriality of women’s issues when compared with Aboriginal

cultural survival issues is now being questioned. An Issue Paper produced by the Native

Women’s Association of Canada describes the “devastating impacts of violence against

Aboriginal (First Nations, Inuit and Métis) women and girls, particularly systemic violence

1 Mary Ellen Turpel, “Patriarchy and Paternalism: The Legacy of the Canadian State for First Nations Women,” Canadian Journal of Women and the Law 6 (1993): 174-192. 2 Turpel, “Patriarchy and Paternalism,” 179. 3 Verna St. Denis, “Feminism is for Everybody: Aboriginal Women, Feminism and Diversity,” Making Space for Indigenous Feminism, ed. Joyce Green (Black Point, NS: Fernwood, 2007) 44.

35

resulting from factors deeply rooted in colonization,”1 and includes contemporary statistical

findings that Aboriginal women between 25 and 44 years of age die of violence at a rate five

times that of Canadian women in the same age range. In part, it is statistics of this kind that have

propelled a growing number of Aboriginal women to identify as feminist. Smith, who is

researching Native American critical race feminisms, argues the sovereignty-first model, which

minimizes the oppression of Aboriginal women, is untenable when gender violence of such

magnitude remains unaddressed.2

In the past when Indigenous women rejected feminism their anti-feminist stance was

largely supported by arguments of cultural differences—such as former respectful gender roles,

centrality of responsibility ethic, valorized motherhood, and support rather than oppression

derived from the family—that made the objectives of feminism appear unrelated to the

experiences of Indigenous women.3 But feminism was bluntly rejected in part because the kind

of feminism typically discussed, namely white liberal feminism, was individualistic and aimed to

create equality between women and men using dominant-culture political and legal reform, two

systems which had historically excluded Indigenous voices. Employment equity understandably

meant little to Aboriginal women whose communities practiced traditional economies or

experienced race-based marginalization in the mainstream workforce. Naturally Indigenous

women would not find this model of social reform applicable to their lives: it suffered from a

totalizing and alienating discourse; constructed gender as a universal category based on white

feminist experience; failed to tackle race blindness; lacked historical specificity; and maintained

1 Native Women’s Association of Canada, Violence against Aboriginal Women and Girls: An Issue Paper, NAWC (2007) 2 <http://www.nwac-hq.org/en/documents/nwac-vaaw.pdf>. 2 Andrea Smith, “Native American Feminism, Sovereignty and Social Change,” Making Space for Indigenous Feminism, 93-107. 3 See for example Ana Mariella Bacigalupo, “Rethinking Identity and Feminism: Contributions of Mapuche Women and Machi from Southern Chile,” Hypatia 18.2 (2003): 32-57; Lisa J. Udel, “Revision and Resistance: The Politics of Native Women’s Motherwork,” Frontiers 22.2 (2001): 43-62.

36

the status quo as regards non-white women. LaRocque, a Métis scholar, suggests the complex

“political, historical, cultural and socio-economic factors” that diminished feminism’s appeal

were compounded by “misunderstanding about feminism.”1 Meranto elaborates this point

stating, “Narrow interpretations of feminism, Marxism and other “isms” are often rejected purely

on the notion that they are Eurocentric, that they come from progressive non-Indians, or have not

grown out of the experience of Indians.”2 Based on limited definitions of feminism, it was

believed an Aboriginal woman who identified as feminist lacked cultural authenticity.3 Jaimes

and Halsey on the topic of Indigenous feminists claimed unapologetically, “Those who have

most openly identified themselves [as feminists] have tended to be among the more assimilated

of Indian women activists, generally accepting of the colonialist ideology.”4 These authors

favourably distinguished non-feminist Indigenous activists arguing, “Native American women

who are more genuinely sovereigntist in their outlook have proven themselves far more dubious

about the potentials offered by feminist politics and alliances.”5

Despite the risk involved with openly identifying as an Aboriginal feminist, Sharon

McIvor, former vice-president of the Native Women’s Association of Canada, a national

organization developed using an Indigenous feminist epistemology,6 claims she has “always

been a feminist” because she viewed feminism as a practical and important means to confront

1 Emma LaRocque, “Métis and Feminist: Ethical Reflections on Feminism, Human Rights and Decolonization,” Making Space for Indigenous Feminism, ed. Joyce Green (Black Point, NS: Fernwood, 2007) 54. 2 Oneida J. Meranto, “From Buckskin to Calico and Back Again: An Historical Interpretation of American Indian Feminsim,” New Political Science, 23.3 (2001): 333-349. 3 See Joyce Green’s discussion of this point in “Taking Account of Aboriginal Feminism,” Making Space for Indigenous Feminism, 25. 4 Annette Jaimes and Theresa Halsey, “American Indian Women: At the Center of Indigenous Resistance in Contemporary North America,” The State of Native America: Genocide, Colonization, and Resistance, ed. Annette Jaimes (Cambridge, MA: South End, 1999) 331. 5 Jaimes and Halsey, “American Indian Women,” 331. 6 See Elizabeth Archuleta, “‘I Give You Back’: Indigenous Women Writing to Survive,” Studies in American Indian Literatures, 18.4 (2006): 88-114.

37

inequality issues in general, and “Aboriginal women’s issues in particular.”1 In recent years a

number of Aboriginal women scholars, drawing on critical race, anti-colonial, and postcolonial

feminisms, and their own Indigenous theorizing have begun to write about the relevance and

utility of feminism. Meranto, who disagrees with the practice of mechanically disregarding

“Eurocentric paradigms” on the a priori assumption of their irrelevance, finds feminism to be

valuable for the act of “self-confrontation and the rejection of capitalist consciousness” both of

which are essential for social change.2 Bacigalupo, whose theoretical affiliation resembles

strongly the womanist tradition articulated by Alice Walker, suggests Indigenous women can

help decolonize “first world” feminism and add to feminist theory by contributing historically

and contextually-specific understandings.3 Keating proffers a womanist self-recovery model

based on a “metaphysics of interconnectedness” and conceives a “cosmic, fluid spirit or force

that manifests itself as material and nonmaterial forms.”4 Several Aboriginal scholars, like

Sharon McIvor, self describe as feminist because they find critical feminism when combined

with anti-colonialism and Indigenized through cultural specificities, is a useful praxis for

combating gender oppression and violence against women.5 Smith argues Native feminist theory

is in the position to significantly alter feminist politics through interrogating the authority and

appropriateness of the nation-state as a form of governance. North American Aboriginal peoples,

unlike African, Asian, Latin and other non-white peoples, are not integrated into the body politic

1 Sharon McIvor with Rauna Kuokkanen, “Sharon McIvor: Woman of Action,” Making Space for Indigenous Feminism, 241, 244. 2 Oneida J. Meranto, “From Buckskin to Calico and Back Again,” 347. 3 Ana Mariella Bacigalupo, “Rethinking Identity and Feminism,” 32-57. 4 AnaLouise Keating, “Self-Help, Indian Style? Paula Gunn Allen’s Grandmothers of the Light, Womanist Self-Recovery, and the Politics of Transformation,” Cultural Sites of Critical Insight: Philosophy, Aesthetics, and African American and Native American Women’s Writings, eds. Angela L. Cotton and Christa Davis Acampora (Albany, NY: State University of New York P, 2007) 41. 5 See Joyce Green “Taking Account of Aboriginal Feminism,” Verna St. Denis, “Feminism Is for Everybody,” and Emma LaRocque, “Métis and Feminist,” in Making Space for Indigenous Feminism, ed. Joyce Green (Black Point, NS: Fernwood, 2007).

38

but instead are fighting for sovereignty and therefore bring a unique and richer perspective to

their critique of the nation-state.1

Aboriginal scholars considering the relevance of feminism to Aboriginal women’s lives

have begun to make links between subjugation of women and destruction of lands. For example,

Smith states, “The connection between the colonization of the bodies of Native peoples,

particularly those of Native women, is not simply metaphorical.”2 Borrowing an ecofeminist line

of inquiry, Smith expands on this comment asserting, “It is the same colonial/patriarchal mind

that seeks to control the sexuality of women and Indigenous peoples that also seeks to control

nature.”3 Jaimes*Guerrero who argues for a Native feminist spirituality and a Native Womanism

overtly incorporates an ecofeminist perspective into her analysis of the intersecting oppressions

plaguing Indigenous peoples, women, and the nonhuman realm.4 She calls for theorizing and

activism that confront genocide, ethnocide, and ecocide collectively because she sees these

issues as inextricably connected. With Aboriginal feminist scholars adopting ecofeminist

theoretical approaches as part of their theory and praxis, and looking “to coalition with

ecofeminists in struggle against ecocide of our planet earth,”5 using ecofeminism in my analysis

is both culturally relevant and theoretically and politically current.

Critical Theory

Critical theory does not represent a single cohesive theoretical viewpoint, but from a social work

perspective critical theory, like ecofeminism, is normative: It goes beyond descriptions of power

1 Andrea Smith, “Native American Feminism: Sovereignty and Social Change,” Making Space for Indigenous Feminism, ed. Joyce Green (Black Point, NS: Fernwood, 2007) 93-107. 2 Andrea Smith, “Not an Indian Tradition: The Sexual Colonization of Native Peoples,” Hypatia, 18.2 (2003): 80. 3 Smith, “Not an Indian Tradition,” 80. 4 M.A. Jaimes*Guerrero, “‘Patriarchal Colonialism’ and Indigenism: Implications for Native Feminist Spirituality and Native Womanism,” Hypatia, 18.2 (2003): 58-69. 5 Anne Waters, “Introduction: Indigenous Women in the Americas,” Hypatia, 18.2 (2003): ix.

39

relations or arcs of genealogical inequities, desiring to effect positive social change.1 Social

workers adopting a critical approach typically stress emancipatory education, transformative

social practices, and a variety of liberatory approaches geared toward structural change2 but

environmental concerns and theory typically do not figure prominently, if at all, in this discourse.

This is peculiar because early critical theorists, represented by the Frankfurt School philosophers,

certainly did thoughtfully consider environmental matters. Critical theory in its early

development was based on the philosophy of Kant and the Marxian critique of ideology,3 but it

exceeded the reach of Marxist analysis of political economy by investigating the connections

between the economic, nonhuman, societal, political, cultural and psychological realms. While

there are a variety of viewpoints adopted by critical theorists, this theory, as developed by the

Frankfurt School philosophers, levelled a penetrating and unsparing attack on those conditions

damaging to human dignity and spirit, conditions to which individuals must resist acclimation.4

Because critical theory cuts a wide swath across a multiplicity of disciplines, it was articulated

through a multilayered critique of philosophical traditions and social conditions. Critical theory

proceeds through dialogue, using a dialectical method to analyse various phenomena under

consideration. Two preeminent critical theorists, Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, used a

transmuted form of Hegelian dialectics called “negative dialectics” to analyse society as a whole

exposing how instrumental reason, which undergirds the capitalist and scientific program of

Western society, leads to the domination of humans, nonhuman others and the nonhuman world.

1 Robert Mullally, Structural Social Work: Ideology, Theory and Practice (Toronto: Oxford UP, 1997). 2 Bob Pease, June Allan and Linda Briskman, “Introducing Critical Theories in Social Work,” Critical Social Work: An Introduction to Theories and Practices, eds. June Allan, Bob Pease and Linda Briskman (Crows Nest, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 2003). 3 Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhardt, eds., The Essential Frankfurt School Reader (1982; New York: Continuum, 2000). See also Karen Healy, Social Work Practices: Contemporary Perspectives on Change (London: Sage, 2000) 13-18. 4 Wolfgang Schirmacher, ed., German 20th-Century Philosophy: The Frankfurt School Reader (New York: Continuum, 2000).

40

Herbert Marcuse furthered this line of enquiry and encouraged refusal of one dimensionality,

resistance to the popular positivism that promoted production, consumption, and heedless

commodification of countless things, including humans and the nonhuman realm.1 Leiss, a

critical theorist who apprenticed under Marcuse, argues the quest for security and improved

quality of life has led us to seek to control nature, but with technological advances our present

means to overmaster the nonhuman is now profoundly destructive.2

Conceived as a philosophy for social and political change, critical theory explicitly joins

materialistic theory with the idealistic project of improving social conditions. In this regard

critical theorists refuse to isolate knowledge from concrete action and insist that social research

must always have an applied dimension as well as a historical context. Given critical theory’s

transformational potentiality and inherent challenge to the authority of oppressive systems and

practices, its adoption by a number of social workers is no surprise.3 What is perhaps most

innovative about critical theory is that the early Frankfurt School members linked the domination

of human beings with the domination of nature. The novelty and valour of this philosophical turn

cannot be underscored enough, for it occurred in an era that predated the environmental

movement (commonly thought to have commenced after Rachel Carson’s groundbreaking Silent

Spring) by several decades and took quite a different shape from that of the earlier Romantic

Movement. For example, critical theory does not recommend romantic retreatism or some

alternative, back-to-the-land, utopian response, but instead provides a normative compass that is

to guide us through the disenchanted topography resulting from the kind of Enlightenment

rationality that has severed human beings from nonhuman nature. This separation is identified as

1 Herbert Marcuse, One Dimensional Man (1964; New York: Routledge, 2002). 2 William Leiss, The Domination of Nature (1972; Montreal: McGill-Queen s̀ UP, 1998). 3 For example, see June Allan, Bob Pease, and Linda Briskman, eds., Critical Social Work: An Introduction to Theories and Practices (Crows Nest, NSW: Allen and Unwin, 2003; see also Karen Healy, Social Work Practices: Contemporary Perspectives on Change (London: Sage, 2000).

41

problematic not only because human beings are of and from nature, and therefore have a shared

fate, but also because critical theorists trace the madness of twentieth-century civilisation to the

broken relationship humanity has with nature. Horkheimer and Adorno assert, “[T]he fully

enlightened earth radiates disaster triumphant”1 because they see at the core of Enlightenment

rationality a subjugative force affecting both humans and nonhumans where people “pay for the

increase of their power with alienation from that over which they exercise their power.”2

In the social work literature, only Tester3 makes use of critical theory as a system for

contemplating and discussing environmental issues, as well as a means for arbitrating the

juncture between social work and environmentalism. This is surprising given the prominence

which early Frankfurt School theorists attached to ecology and the degraded environment.4

Perhaps environmental social workers underutilise critical theory for the reasons Eckersley

proposes regarding the limited influence of critical theory in general. She purports critical theory

is hampered by its typically pessimistic view, anti-romanticist stance, obscure language,

academic aloofness from lived experience, and increasing emphasis on theory over praxis, all

factors which diminish its theoretical appeal and form barriers to its use.5 But when we are

experiencing an environmental crisis that demands a reconsideration of our values in relation to

the nonhuman natural environment, turning to critical theory makes sense. Critical theory

concentrates on human relations, but it looks more specifically at the inequities of those relations

1 Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, trans. Edmund Jephcott (1944; Palo Alto, CA: Stanford UP, 2002) 1. 2 Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 7. 3 Frank Tester “In an Age of Ecology: Limits to Voluntarism and Traditional Theory in Social Work Practice,” The Global Environmental Crisis: Implications for Social Welfare and Social Work, eds. M. Hoff and J. McNutt (1994; Aldershot, Eng.: Ashgate, 1998). 4 See for example Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightment; Max Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason (1947; New York: Continuum, 2004); and Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man (1964; Boston: Beacon, 1991). 5 Robyn Eckersley, “The Failed Promise of Critical Theory,” Environmentalism and Political Theory: Toward an Ecocentric Approach (Albany, NY: State University of New York P, 1992) 97-118.

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while simultaneously exploring human-nature relations. Clearly, this theory will prove

immensely useful for my research which is examining precisely these areas.

Postcolonial Theory

A third and final theory informing my textual analysis is postcolonial theory. While both

ecofeminist and critical theory scrutinise colonial fallout as part of their transformative scope,

neither assumes this theme as its central preoccupation. Of particular interest is the idea of

epistemic violence as articulated by Spivak1 who argues Western Europeans imposed their

epistemology on those parts of the world they sought to colonize. Because the exercise of French

epistemic violence is found throughout the primary source documents with which I have worked,

Spivak’s concept emerged as a powerful organizing theme for my ecofeminist analysis of power

imbalances. The fact of French epistemic violence does not suggest, of course, that the Wendat

passively accepted this aggression, for they certainly resisted and asserted their own knowledge

systems, traditions and intellectual practices, but textual instances of epistemic violence created

avenues for comprehending the force and systematic approach with which the French sought to

divest the Wendat of their traditional ways, the Wendat response, and the two groups in contact.

Also of interest is Said’s notion of “discrepant experience” which creates a possibility for

communication between two groups that transcends the usual binarism of the West, a binarism

associated both with hegemonic trends in Wendat-French relations and the persisting power

imbalances in Aboriginal-non-Aboriginal relations today. “In juxtaposing experiences with each

other, in letting them play off each other, it is my interpretative political aim (in the broadest

sense) to make concurrent those views and experiences that are ideologically and culturally

1 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Postcolonial Studies Reader, ed. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin (1995; London: Routledge, 2003) 24-25.

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closed to each other and that attempt to distance or suppress other views and experiences.”1 In

the case study I have selected the French hold the predominant textual power as the authors of

the texts. Using Said’s concept of discrepant experiences can help surpass the reified division of

European and Aboriginal, of French and Wendat, and can militate against any tendency to think

in terms of undifferentiated categories. It also requires that fixed ideas of cultural and political

identities must be discarded and replaced with something more fluid, in keeping with the

struggle for a fuller comprehension of the past. Postcolonial theory can be used then to

investigate the polarities so common to colonial discourse rendering historical texts accessible to

new understandings.

In a similar way I find Bhabha’s insistence on cultural “difference” rather than

“diversity” to be an important distinction. Bhabha sees cultural diversity as “the recognition of

pre-given cultural contents and customs”2 whereas he believes the “aim of cultural difference is

to rearticulate the sum of knowledge from the perspective of the signifying position of the

minority that resists totalization.”3 Cultural diversity does not permit fluidity with regard to

defining boundaries, and thereby rules out the possibility of hybridity. Cultural difference on the

other hand reveals the problems inherent to the concept of cultural diversity, exposing how it

reinforces dominant culture norms and values. In short, the cultural diversity perspective

produces categories and classifications and maintains the status quo under the guise of parity and

liberality whereas cultural difference exposes the hidden ethnocentrism of cultural diversity and

creates emancipatory space for resistance. This distinction is especially relevant to my work

because the authors of the primary source documents often appear ideologically progressive,

almost pluralistic, with their schemes for French-Wendat intermarriage, mixed societies,

1 Edward Said Culture and Imperialism, 33. 2 Homi K. Bhabha Location of Culture, 50 3 Bhabha, Location of Culture, 233.

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celebration of Wendat strengths, and so on, but all such instances when investigated and

problematised reveal ethnocentric interests and strivings. Cultural difference as a transformative

location “is not simply a matter of individual style or costume or of a formal hybridity without

content, but becomes the informing principle of a mode of anti-colonial dissent and of a vision of

an anti-racist future,”1 and an invaluable strategic basis for historical investigations.

Ironically, postcolonial criticism is sometimes guilty of creating the same binary

oppositions it seeks to eliminate setting up the dominant and minority cultures as fixed monoliths

unintelligible to each other. As Slemon observes the terms colonial and postcolonial are

problematic themselves not only because it is difficult to define meaningfully the term “colonial”

but also because the use of the terms structures analysis around binary oppositions once again.2

Moreover, postcolonialism as a term is also suspect because it conjures the idea of continuity,

evokes the image of progress, and suggests the colonial period has come to an end. Many

Aboriginal people have difficulty with the term postcolonial because they experience persistent

colonial influences in their lives.3 Battiste, who regards postcolonialism as a liberatory term

signalling the end of colonialism, argues postcolonialism remains an aspirational practice.4 But if

one considers postcoloniality to be a helpful reminder of, and means to interrogate, these

unremitting colonial forces, then the use of a postcolonial strategy and mentality can aid in

historical investigations and responses to present circumstances through the development of

resistive and transformative practices.

1 Asha Varadharajan “The ‘Repressive Tolerance’ of Cultural Peripheries,” Reclaiming Indigenous Voice and Vision, ed. Marie Battiste (Vancouver: UBC P, 2000) 149. 2 Stephen Slemon, “Post-Colonial Critical Theories,” Postcolonial Discourses: An Anthology, ed. Gregory Castle (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2001) 100-116. 3 See Marie Battiste, Introduction. “Unfolding the Lessons of Colonization,” Reclaiming Indigenous Voice and Vision, xvi-xxx. 4 Battiste, “Unfolding the Lessons of Colonization,” xvi-xxx.

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Chapter Two: Scope of the Environmental Problem and the Role of Social Work

We tend to regard our age as exceptional, and in many ways it is. But the parochialism of the present—the way our eyes follow the ball and not the game—is dangerous.

Ronald Wright In this chapter I will discuss global warming, water scarcity and industrial issues to present

broadly the extent and gravity of the environmental challenges we face and simultaneously to

intimate how a fractured human-nonhuman relationship is implicit in each of these problems. I

will also introduce the ways in which social work as a profession and scholarly discipline is

poised to respond to our environmental challenges based on its historical roots, person-in-

environment focus, and social justice purview. Just as it is difficult to move forward intelligently

and responsibly without sufficient knowledge of the past (hence the historical case study) it is

equally problematic to delineate the role of social work with respect to environmental matters

without sketching generally the reach of the current crisis.

Beginnings

A couple of years ago I was facilitating a documentary group with adolescent girls from a First

Nations community. We would sometimes reward ourselves after an especially fruitful day of

work with a trip to the nearest cinema. The girls were always encouraged to select consensually a

film of their choice and I would treat, the only proviso being that restricted and horror films were

not an option. On occasion a few of the girls would entreat me to take them to the latest blood-

and-gore blockbuster only to be met with refusal. To their credit, they would quickly decide

upon a film within the specified selection parameters and we would all proceed to an enjoyable

time. One day while driving to the cinema Kianna*, a talented and gifted member of the film

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group, asked why I did not like horror films. I told her that I thought there were enough horrible

events in the world that to have filmic experiences of horror as entertainment felt, at best,

wasteful. Kianna nodded her head understandingly and the girls never requested to see a horror

film with me again. As we drove along, they talking and intermittently singing to the local radio

songs, my mind revolved over some of the obvious cultural evils—Nazi concentration camps,

genocide in Rwanda and Kurdistan, rape of Darfur women, rape here at home, the Trail of Tears,

multi-generational trauma in First Nations communities resulting from the Canadian institution

of residential schools, and so on.

And then my thoughts came to my breath. As the late astronomer Carl Sagan famously

asserted in Cosmos, “we are all made of [recycled] star stuff.”1 The more contemporary and

spiritually infused variant of this thought, which makes a case for species interpenetration, holds

that in “our lungs are oxygen molecules breathed by every type of creature ever to have lived on

earth, along with the very hydrogen and oxygen atoms that Jesus, Confucius, and Rachel Carson

breathed.”2 While I appreciate the non-speciesist3 thrust of this thought and the way it functions

to combine both linear (historical figures) and circular (past contemporaneous with the present)

time, I found myself thinking that the air we breathe today is considerably different from what

Jesus or Confucius breathed. Our air contains anthropogenic4 pollutants (carbon monoxide,

volatile organic compounds, dioxins, sulphur dioxide, furans, etc.) that have a grave impact on

* Kianna is a pseudonym not the actual name of the young woman in the group. 1 Carl Sagan, Cosmos, dir. Adrian Malone, PBS 1980, DVD, Cosmos Studies, 2002. See also Sagan’s interesting discussion of the “molecular unity” of all “creatures on the planet” because we “descended from a single and common instance of the origin of life in the early history of our planet” Cosmos (New York: Random House, 1980) 38. 2 Paul Hawken, Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Movement in the World Came into Being and Why No One Saw It Coming (New York: Viking, 2007) 71. See also Dan Millman, Body Mind Mastery: Creating Success in Sport and Life (California: New World Library, 1999) 64; Tim Flannery, The Weather Makers: How We Are Changing the Climate and What It Means for Life on Earth (Toronto: HarperCollins, 2005) 22. 3 Speciesists believe that human beings are superior to and separate from all other species. 4 Anthropogenic is the term used in an environmental context to describe human-made effects rather than natural occurrences.

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human health. The World Health Organization (WHO) suggests we could save approximately 13

million lives per year globally if we improved the environment.1 In the twenty-five countries of

the European Union alone, more than 280,000 premature deaths are ascribed to air pollution.2

Upon contemplating these data and an abundance of related statistics, it is not difficult to

discover in the lineaments of environmental findings a cause for unease, perhaps even horror, as

we have contaminated not only our air but also our water and soil, elements upon which our

continued existence depends.

Environmental Challenges

Global Warming

Of the environmental challenges we now face, global warming, and the resultant climate change,

is doubtless the most serious because of its scope. The 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate

Change (IPCC) states, “Warming of the climate system is unequivocal, as is now evident from

observations of increases in global average air and ocean temperatures, widespread melting of

snow and ice and rising global average sea level.”3 Scientists studying climate change and

compiling data for the IPCC reports are confident that the source of temperature increase is

human. They identify the combustion of fossil fuels, agriculture, and land-use changes as factors

responsible for the record levels of greenhouse gases (GHG) – carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous

oxide, and ground-level ozone.4 These gases heat the atmosphere by absorbing the thermal

infrared radiation emitted from the earth and trapping it within the surface-tropospheric system,

preventing the heat from escaping into the stratosphere which would cool the earth. While three

of the four greenhouse gases are related to burning fossil fuels, anthropogenic methane derives 1 See World Health Organization, Preventing Disease through Healthy Environments: Towards an Estimate of the Environmental Burden of Disease (Geneva: WHO, 2006). 2 WHO, Preventing Disease through Healthy Environments. 3 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Climate Change 2007: Synthesis Report: Summary for Policy Makers (Valencia, Spain: IPCC, 2007) 3. 4 IPCC, Climate Change 2007, 4.

48

from cultivated rice paddies, fermentation in the digestive tracts of cattle and sheep, cooking

fires, and biomass1 burning for fuel or industrial production. The melting of permafrost2 in the

Arctic Circle has also begun to release methane into the atmosphere. The extent to which this

will accelerate global warming can be understood when considering the Western Siberian bog

which began thawing in 2005. This bog is “believed to contain 70 billion tonnes of the

gas…whose liberation would equate to 73 years of current man-made [sic] carbon dioxide

emissions.”3

Atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases are substantially higher than they were

at pre-industrial levels 150 years ago, rising from 280 parts per million (ppm) to 380ppm, and

carbon dioxide (CO2), comprising roughly two thirds, is chief among them. Climatologists use

the phrase dangerous anthropogenic interference (DAI) when discussing the mounting hazards of

rising levels of greenhouse gases.4 Threats to human health both directly (through heat stress,

floods and storms) and indirectly (through changing disease vectors, food availability, and water

and air quality), especially in lower income communities, are expected to increase.5 Such health

impacts will be mediated by political, socio-economic and regional conditions together with the

range of institutional and technological means available to a given population to reduce health

risks. The adverse consequences of altered frequency and intensity of extreme weather effects

are expected primarily to impact natural and human systems.

The new climate has already generated some extreme weather events: “the most powerful

El Nino ever recorded (1997-98), the most devastating hurricane in 200 years (Mitch, 1998), the

1 Biomass is recently dead organic matter (e.g., plant material, vegetation, or agricultural waste). 2 Permafrost is soil that has remained below zero degrees Celsius for at least two years. 3 George Monbiot, Heat: How To Stop the Planet from Burning (Toronto: Anchor, 2006) 11. 4 Elizabeth Kolbert, Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change (New York: Bloomsbury, 2006). 5 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Climate Change 2001: Synthesis Report: Summary for Policy Makers (Wembley, UK: IPCC, 2001).

49

hottest European summer on record (2003), the first South Atlantic hurricane ever (2002), and

one of the worst storm seasons ever experienced in Florida (2004).”1 The record-breaking

temperatures of the 2003 heat wave were responsible for the deaths of 35,000 people and

reduced harvests from France through to Eastern Europe.2 Approximately 420 million people

currently live in countries where insufficient farmland forces dependency on imported food. “By

2025, this number could exceed 1 billion as population grows and the amount and quality of

cropland decline. More than a half billion people now live in regions prone to chronic drought.”3

It is predicted that some areas will be affected by drought while others flooding. South and

central regions of the African continent, for example, will experience more extreme drought

while some coastal regions will be inundated by rising sea levels. Scenarios of both kinds will

produce displaced persons who are either seeking and pursuing water sources or escaping

deluged areas. The Yup’ik peoples of Newtok village in southwest Alaska have become the first

North American climate-change refugees as their land is being flooded at a staggering pace.4 If

the world’s land ice were to melt entirely, the resulting increase in sea level would be almost 65

metres.5 Scholars are anticipating as many as 50 million environmental refugees worldwide by

2010 due to rising sea levels, drought, and other severe environmental changes.6

Human beings are not the only displaced species. As temperatures rise and the climate

changes countless species are at risk of extinction. Although there is a lack of consensus

regarding the current rate of extinction, scientists generally agree that species are becoming

1 Tim Flannery, The Weather Makers, 108 2 Lester Brown, Outgrowing the Earth: The Food Scarcity Challenge in an Age of Falling Water Tables and Rising Temperatures (New York: Norton & Co., 2005) 118. 3 David Korten, The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community (San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler, 2005) 59. 4 See Ed Pilkington, “The Village at the Tip of the Iceberg,” The Observer 28 Sept. 2008; and Shari Gearhead, “A Change in the Weather,” Natural History, 117.1 (2008): 32-38. 5 See United Nations Environment Programme. World Glacier Monitoring Service, Global Glacier Changes: Facts and Figures (Zurich, Switzerland: UNEP and WGMS, 2007). 6 See Molly Conisbee and Andrew Simms, Environmental Refugees: The Case for Recognition. (London, UK: nef, 2003).

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extinct at a disquieting pace. The World Resources Institute estimates 100 species become

extinct daily from tropical deforestation alone. Those of an anthropocentric persuasion who are

not ruffled by such news should heed UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s message,

“Biodiversity is the foundation of life on earth and one of the pillars of sustainable development.

The richness and variety of life on earth makes possible the ecosystem services on which we

depend: clean water, food, shelter, medicine and clothing.”1 People who feel the effects of

biodiversity loss more directly are those possessing a strong relationship to their land base. Low-

income people who live in developing countries often need biodiversity to meet basic needs, and

First Nations people who have lived in a particular region for a long time, depend on their

ancestral resources.2 Biodiversity as a concept involves more than tallying numbers of species; it

suggests interrelationships among species as all species interact with others. The extinction of the

gastric brooding frog from Queensland Australia and the Golden toad from the Monteverde

Cloud Forest Reserve in northern Costa Rica signals a planet in distress. Literally all our food

crops, diseases, and disease vectors are biological species. Unambiguous evidence pointing to

distributional and numerical changes for species necessarily implies the same for crops, illnesses,

and pests.3

Water Scarcity

Since 1980, glaciers have been retreating rapidly throughout the world due to global warming,

and data reveals this recession pattern has increased conspicuously since 1995. The melting of

glaciers threatens local water stores in glacial regions because glaciers provide, through

1 See Ban Ki-moon, “Conservation, sustainable use of biodiversity essential for adapting to climate change: Message for International Day for Biological Diversity” (New York: United Nations, Department of Public Information) <http://www.un.org/News/Press/docs/2007/sgsm10994.doc.htm>. 2 See Vandana Shiva, Biopiracy: The Plunder of Nature and Knowledge (Boston: South End, 1997) and Nancy J. Turner, Marianne Boelscher Ignace, Ronald Ignace, “Traditional Ecological Knowledge and Wisdom of Aboriginal People in British Columbia,” Ecological Applications 10.5 (2000): 1275-1287. 3 See Elizabeth Kolbert, Field Notes from a Catastrophe.

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mountain runoff, a summer water supply during peak heat and dry periods when non-

mountainous water sources are diminished. In an effort to safeguard glaciers from warmer

temperatures some alpine regions in Austria, Germany, and Switzerland have resorted to

wrapping sections of glaciers in large white plastic blankets to delay melting.1 The global

decrease in streamflow from watersheds is problematic because the water is actually being lost to

the hydrological cycle, meaning there is less potable water for humankind and other aquatic

users. Glaciers constitute a unique freshwater source for domestic, industrial and agricultural use.

It is estimated that a rise of just 2.1 degrees Celsius “will expose between 2.3 and 3 billion

people to risk of water shortages. Some [receding] glaciers in the Andes and the Himalayas will

imperil the people who depend on their melt water, particularly in Pakistan, western China,

Central Asia, Peru, Ecuador and Bolivia.”2 A problem with glacier retreat is that the melting not

only raises sea levels but also contributes to further global warming in a positive feedback

system known as the ice-albedo effect. Ice has greater reflectivity than ocean water, so glaciers

reflect more light (and heat) than do ocean waters which have a low albedo and therefore a

greater heat absorptive capacity. Basically, the more the ice melts, the more the global

temperatures rise; the more the global temperatures rise, the more the ice melts. “Anthropogenic

warming and sea level rise would continue for centuries due to the time scales associated with

climate processes and feedbacks, even if GHG concentrations were to be stabilised.” 3

A large percentage of global glaciers are predicted to disappear, and this makes the threat

to world water availability considerable. Because we are currently depleting our finite freshwater

supply at an alarming rate through pollution, GHG, and diversion, developing the infrastructure

to provide clean water to water-stressed regions, while important, is a short-range and

1 See Erla Zwingle, “Meltdown: The Alps under pressure,” National Geographic 209. 2 Feb. 2006. 2 George Monbiot, Heat, 6. 3 IPCC, Climate Change 2007, 12.

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incomplete response, for it does not solve the problem of diminishing supply. According to the

WHO 2.4 billion people lack access to hygienic personal sanitation, and 1.8 million people die

annually from diarrhoeal illnesses.1 In 2006 almost 9.7 million children died before the age of

five (27,000 per day), and contaminated water, poor sanitation, and inadequate hygiene are key

factors in world child mortality figures.2 As the global environmental crisis worsens, the human

condition worsens commensurately. Water has long been a potent symbol of global inequities

where “First World” water use is commonly one hundred times the use in “Third World”

countries. With freshwater volumes declining and “hot stains”3 increasing worldwide, the divide

between wealthy and poor nations will begin to close as water scarcity, which according to

Postel “ranks among the most critical and difficult challenges of the 21st century,”4 becomes a

great leveller.

Maude Barlow, national chairperson of the Council of Canadians and founder of the Blue

Planet Project, has written extensively about water scarcity and suggests a need to change course

as “dwindling freshwater supplies, inequitable access to water and the corporate control of

water”5 represent the greatest threat to human survival. Environment Canada officials, in a

leaked 2005 document, identified an absence of national leadership regarding water issues, and

“short-term, fragmented and inadequately informed”6 approaches. Canada has long possessed a

congenial relationship with the US, a relationship hinging primarily on amicable trade involving

the export of Canadian raw materials to the US. Because the Canadian water policy has become

progressively more ambiguous in recent years, with “both dominant political parties choosing to

1 World Health Organization, The Sanitation Challenge: Turning Commitment into Reality (Geneva: WHO, 2004). 2 United Nations Children Fund, The State of the World’s Children, 2008 (New York: UNICEF, 2007). 3 The term “hot stains” refers to regions of the world beginning to run out of safe drinking water. 4 Sandra L. Postel, “Entering an Era of Water Scarcity: The Challenges Ahead,” Ecological Applications 10.4 (2000) 941. 5 Maude Barlow, Blue Covenant: The Global Water Crisis and the Coming Battle for the Right to Water (Toronto: McClelland, 2007) 142. 6 Quoted in Maude Barlow’s Blue Covenant, 185.

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avoid legislation specifically preventing the export of freshwater,”1 Canada will be in a

compromised position when the US insistently seeks our water to compensate for their growing

shortage. The authors of the United Nations’ Climate Change 2007 report expect climate change

to “exacerbate these issues and create new challenges for binational cooperation."2

Industrial Challenges

Issues of this kind are undoubtedly going to multiply within North America and globally in the

near future. This chapter, thus far, has introduced only the two key global environmental

concerns: climate change and water scarcity. But we are also polluting vast tracts of land and

destroying ecosystems through mining and oil extraction processes; devastating precious forests

(which act as enormous carbon sinks that counter the effects of GHGs); depleting numerous fish

populations through non-sustainable harvesting of renewable resources; experiencing

anthropogenic land degradation and desertification which threatens food security3; generating

non-GHG air pollution responsible for more than two million premature deaths annually4;

releasing toxic (sometimes carcinogenic) chemicals into air and water; causing large-scale

bleaching and death of coral reefs through coastal development, overfishing, inland pollution and

1 David Schindler and Adele Hurley, Rising Tensions: Canada/U.S. Cross-Border Water Issues in the 21st Century (Notes for Remarks to the Centre for Global Studies Conference on Canada/U.S. Relations, Nov. 27-28, 2004) 10. 2 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, “Chapter 14: North America,” Climate Change 2007: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability (Cambridge, UK: IPCC and Cambridge UP, 2007) 629. 3 United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification, “Human Rights and Desertification: Exploring the Complementarity of International Human Rights Law and the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification, Land Degradation and Drought” Desertification, Land Degradation and Drought, Issue Paper 1 (Bonn, Germany: UNCCD, 2008). 4 World Health Organization, WHO Air Quality Guidelines for Particulate Matter, Ozone, Nitrogen Dioxide and Sulphur Dioxide: Global Update 2005: Summary of Risk Assessment (Geneva: WHO, 2006).

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climate change1; and burdening all global ecosystems with a growing human population that is

fast outpacing its carrying capacity.2

Home to approximately one-fifth of the world’s population (1.3 billion), undergoing

rapid development and burning abundant amounts of coal in the process, China is often used as

an extreme example of poor environmental management. It is true that China has a high annual

death rate attributable to air pollution, and it is certain that China’s population size and economic

priorities will ensure their domestic environmental issues become increasingly, through long

range transboundary air pollution (LRTAP), global issues, but it is important that we not

complacently disregard our own international environmental effects. With a population less than

one per cent the size of China’s, Canada is “among the world’s leading producers of domestic

waste.”3 And our third-place ranking on the global stage for largest energy consumption per

capita is a dubious distinction.4 In the past few decades Canada’s progress in tackling

environmental challenges has been limited. Like many western nations, Canada has chosen

largely to deflect rather than remedy its domestic environmental issues, prioritizing income

growth instead.5 As world population continues to grow and necessary resources become scarcer,

the need to rethink sacrificing the environment for economic growth will become clear.

Responses

1 Australian Institute of Marine Science, Status of Coral Reefs around the World, ed. Clive Wilkinson, vol. 1 (Townsville, Queensland: AIMS, 2004). 2 See David Korten, The Great Turning (San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2005) and Eban Goodstein, Fighting for Love in the Century of Extinction: How Passion and Politics Can Stop Global Warming (Lebanon, NH: U of Vermont P, 2007). 3 Dianne Draper and Maureen Reed, Our Environment: A Canadian Perspective, 3rd ed. (Scarborough, ON: Thompson, 2005) 537. 4 See Draper and Reed, Our Environment. 5 David Suzuki and David R. Boyd, David Suzuki’s Green Guide (Vancouver: Greystone Books, 2008); Edward A. Parson, “Environmental Trends and Environmental Governance in Canada,” Canadian Public Policy 26.2s (2000) S123-S143;�see also Clare Demerse “Denying Canada’s Environmental Truths: Ottawa Has Offered a False Choice between Economic Growth and Environmental Progress” The Toronto Star, November 8, 2009.

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The extreme nature of the environmental challenges humanity faces today on a global scale

necessitates a concerted international response. History suggests under the right conditions, it is

possible for nations to work collaboratively toward shared environmental protection goals. For

example, the international cooperation of industrialized countries to manage the depletion of

stratospheric ozone strongly demonstrates the application of political will to an environmental

challenge, perhaps because the relative costs to economic growth were few. The Montreal

Protocol, which was introduced in 1987 at a United Nations environmental conference held in

Montreal, is the international agreement encouraging action to protect the ozone layer from

further damage. Canada played a lead role with a team of Environment Canada scientists

researching the issue, and their findings were central to the world’s understanding of ozone

depletion.1 All Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development countries and all those

that were signatories to the Montreal Protocol agreed to phase out most ozone-depleting

substances by 1996. Canada managed to eliminate 97 per cent of these substances from 1987 to

1998.2

Internationally, the response to climate change has not been as successful. Even though

the majority of the world’s countries have signed the Kyoto Protocol, the dictates of this

initiative are not sufficient to prevent the worst climate change scenarios. In Canada despite

participating in the UN Convention on Climate Change, and developing a Climate Change Plan

for Canada and other related federal initiatives, we have not met established goals.3 While it is

too late to stop global warming, many impacts of climate change could be reduced or avoided by

mitigation, but delaying reduction of GHG emissions seriously limits opportunities to restrict

1 Tom McElroy and Jim Kerr, interview “The Montreal Protocol: Twenty years of progress,” EnviroZine 75, Feature 1, 14 Sept. 2007 <http://www.ec.gc.ca/EnviroZine/english/issues/75/feature1_e.cfm>. 2 Edward A. Parson, “Environmental Trends: A Challenge to Canadian Governance,” Governing the Environment, ed. Edward Parson (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2001) 16. 3 See Draper and Reed, Our Environment: A Canadian Perspective.

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global temperature increase and prevent the more harmful climate change effects.1 “The

immediate thing [for each of us to do as individuals] is to reduce our carbon footprint, to cut

down on flying and driving.”2 But individual Canadians are only responsible for approximately a

quarter of the nation’s GHG emissions, while big business is responsible for roughly half. While

countries may agree to an environmental protocol, the issue of accountability remains, and many

nations are moving toward deregulation with regard to environmental protection so as to be more

competitive in a global economic system.3 The result of such deregulation can only mean greater

environmental risk for human populations.

Social Work and the Environment

Professional Role

There is a prominent role for social work in the environmental crisis, a role as policy makers,

health advocates, community organizers, educators, and group workers and clinicians working

from a truly “person-in-environment” paradigm.4 Indeed, both the Canadian Association of

Social Workers (CASW) and the National Association of Social Workers (NASW) have

mandated environment-related information and approaches be incorporated into the social work

discipline. Section 10.4 of the CASW code of ethics states, “A social worker shall advocate for a

clean and healthy environment and shall advocate the development of environmental strategies

consistent with social work principles.” The NASW delegate assembly passed a significant

platform on environmental policy in August 1999, taking a stronger professional position on

environmental issues than that of the CASW. The NASW code of ethics now mandates that

social workers operate more proactively in the struggle against environmental exploitation and 1 See Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Climate Change 2007: Synthesis Report: Summary for Policy Makers (Valencia: IPCC, 2007). 2 David Suzuki, interview with Sam Solomon, “Meet the ‘greatest living Canadian,’” National Review of Medicine 5.5, 2008. 3 See Edward Parson, “Environmental Trends”; see also Maude Barlow, Blue Covenant. 4 By this I mean a model where the term environment includes the nonhuman natural world on which we depend.

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environmental injustices in all aspects of their professional activities. The NASW also promotes

energy alternatives: “We advocate for fossil fuel elimination or reduction to be replaced, where

feasible, with clean energy such as solar, wind and water.”1

Social work has a long tradition of intervening in the public wrongs surfacing in the

physical environment of the modern, industrialised world.2 The settlement house movement that

addressed the problems of urban overcrowding, sanitation, and occupational safety is an example

of the historical extra-individual emphasis of our profession.3 However, social work’s

fundamental concern to improve the human condition has been primarily focused on individuals

and families in their social environment. Because the modern social welfare institutions

developed to remedy problems resulting from the industrial revolution, the orbit of social policy

research includes political, economic, cultural, and other structural factors impacting social

welfare.4 Conspicuously absent in most social work theory and practice literature is a

consideration of nonhuman nature, which is remarkable given that human welfare, human life

itself, depends upon the maintenance and protection of the natural environment. Without radical

political change at the international level, the twenty-first century will be marked by continued

depletion of increasingly scarce resources, growing pollution problems and ongoing difficulties

with environmental hazards and toxins. Although industrially- and technologically-advanced

societies have managed to conceal humanity’s unequivocal dependence on the nonhuman natural

environment, closed beaches, smog alerts, and ultra violet and pollution indexes have begun to

unsettle the collective denial. The threats to our continued survival and the social problems

1 National Association of Social Workers, Social work speaks: NASW policy statements—Environmental policy statement, 2000-2003 (Silver Spring, MD: NASW Press). 2 Carol B. Germain, Human Behavior in the Social Environment (New York: Columbia UP, 1991). 3 Mary E. Rogge, “Environmental Injustice: Social Welfare and Toxic Waste.” The Global Environmental Crisis: Implications for social welfare and social work, eds. Marie D. Hoff and John G. McNutt. (1994; Aldershot, Eng.: Ashgate, 1998) 53-74. 4 Marie D. Hoff, “Environmental Foundations of Social Welfare: Theoretical Resources,” The Global Environmental Crisis (1994; Aldershot, Eng.: Ashgate, 1998) 12-35.

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produced by the current environmental crisis demand more attention from social work research

and practice.

Person-in-Environment

Fortunately, social work is well situated to bridge the gap between social and natural

environments, a fact that has been identified by scholars both within and outside our profession.

For example, renowned sociologist Robert Bullard views social work proficiencies as especially

suited for addressing issues of environmental racism,1 and Jeremy Rifkin, celebrated economist

and futurist, believes social work is capable of addressing the unprecedented change families will

experience environmentally.2 The practice of multilevel intervention, an equality- and

empowerment-based philosophy, and a stated commitment to diversity comprise social work’s

unique methodology.3 And our historic and continued dedication to social justice issues positions

social work, both in terms of analysis and practice, to take a lead role in treating the negative

impact of environmental degradation on individual, social, and community well-being.4

Moreover, the person-in-environment model that characterises the social work profession

strongly equips social workers to understand the effect of environmental toxicity on the physical,

mental and social health of clients.

Because social work practice is in many ways predicated upon this very process of

improving transactions among people and their environments, extending the person-in-

environment model to address contemporary social work needs by including interactions

1 Environmental racism is a term that was coined by Ben Chavis in 1981 and further developed in the report he co-authored, while Program Director of the United Church of Christ’s Commission for Racial Justice, titled Toxic Waste and Race in the United States. 2 See Robert Bullard, Dumping in Dixie: Race, Class and Environmental Quality, 3rd ed. (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2000) and Jeremy Rifkin, The European Dream: How Europe’s Vision of the Future is Quietly Eclipsing the American Dream (New York: Tarcher-Penguin, 2004). 3 Madeline L. Lovell and Douglas L. Johnson, “The Environmental Crisis and Direct Social Work Practice.” The Global Environmental Crisis, eds. M. Hoff and J. McNutt (1994; Aldershot, Eng.: Ashgate, 1998) 199-218. 4 John Coates, Ecology and Social Work: Toward a New Paradigm (Halifax: Fernwood, 2003).

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between humanity and the nonhuman natural environment is not too great a theoretical or

practice challenge.1 Having examined two radical environmentalisms, deep ecology and

ecofeminism, for themes relevant to environmental social work theory, Besthorn was among the

first to argue the need to reconsider our profession’s foundational metaphor.2 Rather than person-

in-environment, he recommends a person-with-environment conception which restates our

relationship to the nonhuman environment in a manner more accurately reflecting the human-

nonhuman interconnection. More recently Besthorn has urged the recovery of an “old self,” an

ecological self that is not conceptually separated from the nonhuman realm but instead

recognizes the centrality of reciprocal relations with the nonhuman environment as essential to

experiencing full human potentiality.3 Similarly, Lysack suggests that an ecological self, one

able to link personal with environmental issues, is well positioned to engage in resistive and

transformative practices such as community action and activism.4 Zapf’s reconceptualisation of

our established binary person and environment focus is important. He suggests that we retire our

outmoded person-in-environment metaphor and shift toward a person as environment

perspective or, more collectively, people as place.5 This perspective involves understanding

ourselves as the very places and bioregions we inhabit, which “calls social work to look beyond

interpersonal relationships to the very nature of our spiritual connection with the planet we

inhabit—literally our ‘common ground.’”6 This understanding of person as place represents the

1 Mary Rogge, “Social work, disenfranchised communities, and the natural environment: Field education opportunities.” Journal of Social Work Education 29.1(1993): 111-120. 2 Fred Besthorn, Reconceptualizing Social Work's Person-in-Environment Perspective: Explorations in Radical Environmental Thought, Diss., University of Kansas, 1997. 3 Fred Besthorn, “Radical Environmentalism and the Ecological Self: Rethinking the Concept of Self-Identity for Social Work Practice,” Journal of Progressive Human Services 13.1 (2002): 53-72. 4 Mishka Lysack, “From Environmental Despair to the Ecological Self: Mindfulness and Community Action,” Mindfulness and Social Work, ed. Steven F. Hick (Chicago, IL: Lyceum Books, 2009): 202-218. 5; Michael Kim Zapf, Social Work and the Environment: Understanding People and Place (Toronto: Canadian Scholar’s, 2009). 6 Michael Kim Zapf, “Transforming Social Work’s Understanding of Person and Environment: Spirituality and the ‘Common Ground,’” Journal of Religion and Spirituality in Social Work 27.1: 171.

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most important retooling of our foundational metaphor, for it best reflects the human-nonhuman

ontology and moves us out of modernity’s hyper-separated human-nonhuman perspective into a

more indigenized understanding of place.1

Social work’s person-environment practice was strongly influenced by developmental

psychologist Urie Bronfenbrenner, renowned for his delineation of ecological systems theory. In

this conceptual model Bronfenbrenner believes people exert an influence on their environments,

environments exert an influence on people, and environments are multiple, interconnected and

nested. The “interaction between person and environment is viewed as two-directional, that is,

characterized by reciprocity” in a mutually accommodative process between person and place.2

Bronfenbrenner’s ecological systems model clearly illustrates the intrinsic fit between the

science of ecology and the social realm. It was Gitterman and Germain who popularized a

similar concept for the social work profession with their development and articulation of the

ecological model.3 This model, though sometimes used to address asymmetrical power relations,

does not have the interrogation of, and a commitment to eradicating, power hierarchies at its

core. Although the original version of this model considered primarily the goodness-of-fit

between persons and their social environments, Gitterman and Germain’s most recent

conceptualisation has been greatly modified to strongly encompass issues related to the

nonhuman realm.4 While the ecological model enables social work professionals to incorporate

1 M.A Jaimes*Guerrero, “‘Patriarchal Colonialism’ and Indigenism: Implications for Native Feminist Spirituality and Native Womanism,” Hypatia 18.2 (2003): 58-69. I am using the term “indigenized” here in the way that Jaimes*Guerrero has used it, and the way the term is generally understood anthropologically, as transforming to fit a local bioregion and culture. 2 Urie Bronfenbrenner, The Ecology of Human Development: Experiments by Nature and Design (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1979) 22. 3 Alex Gitterman and Carel B. Germain, The Life Model of Social Work Practice (New York: Columbia UP, 1979); Carel B. Germain and Alex Gitterman, “The Ecological Approach to People-Environmental Transactions,” Social Casework 62.6 (1981): 323-31. 4 Alex Gitterman and Carel B. Germain, The Life Model of Social Work Practice: Advances in Theory and Practice, 3rd ed. (New York: Columbia UP, 2008); Susan P. Kemp, James K. Whittaker and Elizabeth M. Tracy in their work Person-Environment Practice: The Social Ecology of Interpersonal Helping briefly discuss the nonhuman

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more readily issues of the nonhuman environment, it is important that the model’s stress on

adaptation and the goodness-of-fit not be misunderstood or misapplied in practice. Tester rightly

observes that the value of personal adaptation in an ecological crisis, where the nonhuman

environment is severely compromised, is questionable especially in the context of an economic

paradigm disjointedly supporting further consumption, material accumulation and

individualism.1 Germain and Gitterman themselves state “[a]dapatedenss and adaptation are

sometimes confused with passive or conservative adjustments to the status quo. However, in the

ecological social work perspective and in life-modeled practice, adaptedness and adaptation are

firmly action oriented and change oriented.”2 Clearly, no client or community is expected to

adapt to an unsound environment, rather the emphasis in such circumstances would be on change

and environmental improvement.

Differential Exposure, Environmental Racism

Health problems and discriminatory effects are two examples of the many areas of convergence

among social and ecological challenges.3 Growing evidence indicates that commercial pesticide

use and nuclear and toxic waste discharged into land, water and air are linked to high rates of

cancer, birth defects, infant mortality, respiratory illnesses and other serious health problems

around the world.4 And while exposure to toxic waste endangers the physical, mental, and

emotional health of any individual, statistics reveal that racialised communities and low-income

environment in their chapter “The Diversity of Environmental Experience,” referencing other scholars who have treated the issue of differential exposure. 1 Frank J. Tester, “In an Age of Ecology: Limits to Voluntarism and Traditional Theory in Social Work Practice.” The Global Environmental Crisis, 75-99. 2 Gitterman and Germain, The Life model of Social Work Practice, 54. 3 Marie D. Hoff and Robert J. Polack, “Social Dimensions of the Environmental Crisis: Challenges for Social Work.” Social Work, 38.2 (1993): 204-211. 4 See Mary Rogge, “Environmental Injustice” 1998; See also Marie Hoff and Robert Polack, “Social Dimensions of the Environmental Crisis” 1993.

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people contend with disproportionate amounts of environmental toxins.1 For example, in Canada,

maps based on Statistics Canada Census 2001 and the National Pollutant Release Inventory 2005

reveal a correlation between the location of high-emission industrial facilities within the Greater

Toronto Area and racialised immigrant, and low-income communities. This same pattern is

generally present throughout North America, and in Canada specifically “[d]eadly toxic waste

sites are more likely to be found near First Nations communities, or near non-First nations

communities of poorer people, people of colour and politically marginalized people.”2 Spatial

considerations and human geography reveal that socio-political and economic forces constitute

environmental health determinants.

Low-income communities at home and abroad are often burdened with by-products

resulting from affluence and technology, yet they receive few of the benefits of this technology

and they tend to be systemically excluded from the decision-making processes pertaining to toxic

waste management.3 Both Canada and the US have a reputation for exporting toxic wastes, in

contravention of international law, to poorer nations where they jeopardize the health of the

importing country. Many of Asia’s rural communities are contaminated by hazardous elements

leaching from North America’s electronic waste. Canada, among other wealthy nations, attempts

to circumvent the 1989 Basel Convention, which controls transboundary movement of hazardous

wastes, by labelling the exported material recyclable rather than disposable.4 Developed nations

also export pesticides banned for use in their country but not the importing country. Many of

1 See Robert Bullard, Dumping in Dixie, 2000; C. L.Streeter and J. Gonsalvez, “Social justice issues and the environmental movement in America: A new challenge for social workers.” The Journal of Applied Social Sciences, 18.2 (1994): 209-216. 2 Maude Barlow and Elizabeth May, Frederick Street: Life and Death on Canada’s Love Canal (Toronto: HarperCollins, 2000) 182. 3 Mary E. Rogge, “Environmental Injustice” The Global Environmental Crisis 1998. 4 See Jennifer Clapp, “Seeping Through the Regulatory Cracks,” SAIS Review 22.1 (2002): 141-155; see also Sangeeta Sonak, Mahesh Sonak and Asha Giriyan, “Shipping hazardous waste: Implications for economically developing countries,” International Environmental Agreements: Politics, Law and Economics, 8.2 (2008): 143-159.

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these pesticides are “suspected of causing cancer, reproductive organ damage and genetic

mutation.”1 Because Canadian law holds the destination country responsible for imported wastes,

the US finds Canada an attractive nation to absorb US waste. Approximately thirty per cent of all

US waste shipped to Canada during the final decade of the 20th century went to Sarnia, Ontario

to a landfill owned by SafetyKleen, a US company.2 A hazardous waste landfill and incinerator

belonging to this company, now called Clean Harbor Canada, has been found to have the largest

emissions of carcinogenic substances in Canada.3 This is but one more factor affecting the

already environmentally beset Aamijiwnaang First Nation whose reserve is adjacent to Sarnia’s

“chemical valley.”

There is the related problem of disadvantaged workers, namely low-income persons and

racialised groups, experiencing occupational disease resulting from exposure to industrial

toxins.4 Evidence suggests a connection between powerlessness and increased risk of

environmental exposure and residential contamination. A potent example is found in the plight of

migrant farm workers in Canada. This racialised group experiences limited legislative protection,

does not enjoy the health and safety standards granted to other Canadian workers, and develops

work-related cancers due to pesticide exposure, but does not receive the benefits of our

healthcare system.5 Instead, they are typically sent home to die. The practice of saddling

racialised communities with toxic burdens unacceptable to the dominant culture is described as

1 Mary E. Rogge and Osei K. Darkwa, “Poverty and the environment: An international perspective for social work.” International Social Work, 39.4 (1996): 395-409. 2 Jeff Sallot and Rick Mackie. “Ottawa to Seek Waste-disposal Standards,” The Globe and Mail [Toronto] 26 June 2001. 3 “Canadian polluters increased chemical releases by 20% from 1995 to 2001,” Pollutionwatch 19 June 2003 <http://www.pollutionwatch.org/media/20030619-e.jsp>. 4 Paula T. Silver, “Occupational Disease and the Disadvantaged Worker: A Mandate for Social Work,” The Global Environmental Crisis, 1998, 170-198. 5 See Chris Ramsaroop, “Fighting for Migrant Workers’ Rights,” Environmental Justice and Racism in Canada: An Introduction, eds. Andil Gosine and Cheryl Teelucksingh (Toronto: Emond Montgomery, 2008) 121-126.

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environmental racism. Gbadegesin calls this practice “toxic terrorism,”1 and it represents part of

the contemporary expression of cultural imperialism. Environmental racism is not a new

phenomenon but has existed alongside imperial practices since the time when environmental

pollution first became a social concern. McCurdy’s case study of Africville, Nova Scotia, a

disenfranchised community established circa 1848 and evacuated by 1967, illustrates this point.2

Africville suffered some of the worst environmental violations, including lead poisoning,

industrial toxic emissions, contaminated water and fish from sewage and chemical run-off, and

pervasive rodent infestations, as the City of Halifax repeatedly chose to unload, with impunity,

its environmental burden on Africville.

This phenomenon of differential exposure to toxins, this custom of environmental racism

and environmental classism, requires a social work response. As a profession we must address

not only the suffering caused by toxic exposure but also the discriminatory nature of toxic waste

management or we should relinquish our social justice claim. Other indicators related to

environmental health and toxic exposure are population density and age: population density

because of the generally higher number of environmental contaminants in metropolitan centres,

and age because of the vulnerable physiology and biological development of children. It was

Rogge who, after rigorously examining demographics along with social and economic factors in

eight southeastern US states, discovered the significance of population density as an indicator of

social vulnerability to toxins. Based on this finding she recommends the implementation of

social welfare and health-oriented, harm-reduction environmental interventions in existing urban

1 Segun Gbadegesin, “Multinational Corporations, Developed Nations, and Environmental racism: Toxic Waste, Oil Exploration, and Eco-Catastrophe,” Faces of Environmental Racism: Confronting Issues of Global Justice, eds. Laura Westra and Bill E. Lawson (1995; New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001) 187-202. 2 Howard McCurdy, “Africville: Environmental Racism,” Faces of Environmental Racism, 95-112.

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areas and concurrent prevention strategies in growing rural areas.1 Recently, scholars have

learned children and foetuses represent a unique at-risk population with respect to environmental

contaminants because chemical toxins concentrate more readily in rapidly developing cells and

can potentially interfere with proper organ systems development.2 Our commitment to child

welfare must extend to protecting children from compromised health due to environmental

contamination.

A consideration of intervention strategies leads again to the suitability of social work for

handling environmental threats: The multilevel social work intervention approach allows

workers to intervene with individuals and families, and communities, as well as to advocate for

policy and legislative reform. Soine was the first to argue the importance of integrating

environmental hazards content into the social work profession through expanding our conception

of the environment and including relevant practice modules and literature in social work

curricula to fulfill our profession’s commitment to person-environment transactions.3 Rogge and

Darkwa, identifying the link between income and toxic exposure, recommend three arenas for

social action that aims to militate against environmental racism and classism: “campaigning for

meaningful public participation, institutionalisation of access to resources needed to deal with

environmental problems, and initiation of legal and policy actions to reverse environmental

discrimination.”4

There is a strong likelihood that citizens coping with an existing community

environmental challenge or labouring to prevent the presence of such a problem will feel

1 Mary E. Rogge, “Social Vulnerability to Toxic Risk,” Journal of Social Service Research 22.1/2 (1996): 109-129. 2 Mary E. Rogge and Terri Combs-Orme, “Protecting Children from Chemical Exposure: Social Work and U.S. Social Welfare Policy,” Social Work 48.4 (2003): 439-450; see also Dan Orzech, “Chemical Kids: Environmental Toxins and Child Development,” Social Work Today 7.2 (2007): 37. 3 Lynne Soine, “Expanding the Environment in Social Work: The Case for Including Environmental Hazards Content,” Journal of Social Work Education 2 (1987): 40-46. 4 Mary E. Rogge and Osei K. Darkwa, “Poverty and the environment: An international perspective for social work.” International Social Work, 39.4 (1996): 400.

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powerless.1 However, when citizens organise, they can create positive changes that work to

mitigate these feelings of powerlessness. Social workers who have knowledge, skills, and

experience in the process of community organisation can greatly assist environmentally

challenged communities through advocating and promoting empowerment and community

enhancement.2 To facilitate collective action interventions in cases of community toxic exposure,

Rogge developed an integrative framework illustrating the relationships between meaning

(including the ability to understand health effects and conduct risk assessments), community

conflict, access to resources, and mobilizing strategies and how these factors can be understood

and employed to arrive at a community-specific practice agreement.3 Empowerment strategies

can be especially useful when intervening with individuals and families. Whether it is exposure

to environmental toxins or knowledge of the extent and ramifications of environmental

degradation that leads to feeling helpless and disempowered, social workers can assist clients to

experience an increased sense of control.4 Empowerment methods include correcting negative

self-appraisals, informing about power dynamics, forming coalitions, overcoming systemic

barriers, and strategizing for political action. For successful environmental community

empowerment, a “shared-power paradigm” is necessary where citizens are equal collaborators

with social workers in solving for beneficial change.5 Rogge et al., in their case study involving

African American residents from the Alton Park/Piney Wood neighbourhood of Chattanooga,

Tennessee, demonstrate just how empowering community action can be. Using an adapted

1 Jan Gallagher Shubert, “Case Studies in Community Organizing around Environmental Threats,” The Global Environmental Crisis, eds. Marie D. Hoff and John G. McNutt (1994; Aldershot, Eng.: Ashgate, 1998) 240-257. 2Hussein H. Soliman, “Community Responses to Chronic Technological Disaster: The Case of the Pigeon River.” Journal of Social Service Research, 22.5 (1996): 89-107. 3 Mary E. Rogge, “Coordinating Theory, Evidence, and Practice: Toxic Waste Exposure in Communities,” Journal of Community Practice 2.2 (1995): 55-76. 4 Madeline L. Lovell and Douglas Johnson, “The Environmental Crisis and Direct Social Work Practice,” The Global Environmental Crisis, 199-218. 5 Nancy Mary, Social Work in a Sustainable World (Chicago: Lyceum, 2008) 176.

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version of Rogge’s integrated framework for community collective action, academics and

community organizers formed an effective interdisciplinary university-community partnership in

which the community made gains in combatting environmental discrimination in the form of

disproportionate industrial and commercial chemical neighbourhood toxins, and simultaneously

acquired government funds for community redevelopment and remediation activities.1 In the

coming years the need for social work community practice interventions of this kind are only

going to multiply. With global heating and erratic weather patterns, natural disasters and

traumatic events are escalating. At the same time the release of innumerable chemicals into our

environments has sweeping implications for public health. Natural and chemical disasters can

harm entire communities, sometimes so irremediably that people are displaced and become

environmental refugees. Helping communities to ameliorate loss and damage and to respond

effectively to natural and chemical disasters is an important role for social workers in this

century of the enviroment.2

Sustainability

When discussing social work responses to the environmental crisis, a concept that arises

repeatedly in the literature is one borrowed from the field of environmental studies –

sustainability. Sustainability applied in the context of human and non-human entities, asks that

human rights and needs be considered in a manner that ensures the continued survival of the

nonhuman environment.3 Environmental management is only sustainable if development reflects

an understanding of the finite nature of the planet. For this reason the concept challenges the

prevalent assumption of industrial society and western economics, that unbridled economic 1 Mary E. Rogge, Kimberly Davis, Deborah Maddox, and Milton Jackson, “Leveraging Environmental, Social, and Economic Justice at Chattanooga Creek: A Case Study,” Journal of Community Practice 13.3 (2005): 33-53. 2 Mary E. Rogge, “The Future Is Now: Social Work, Disaster Management, and Traumatic Stress in the 21st Century,” Journal of Social Service Research 30.2 (2003): 1-6. 3 L. Roughley, “Development for People and Nature: Toward a Socioenvironmental Ethic.” Social Development Issues, 17 (1995): 66-80.

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growth is desirable in itself, and that the environment possesses the infinite capacity to sustain

such unrestrained growth. Further, the idea of sustainability subverts the mistaken premise that

human beings, through the use of science and technology, can indefinitely exploit natural

resources while serving the interests of social welfare. Sustainable social work is also normative,

valuing the rights of future generations to a habitable planet and the rights of all global citizens

and communities to environmental parity in the form of equitable access to existing resources

and the right to be safeguarded from contaminants.1 Because of our professional commitment to

environmental considerations, sustainability has been one of the obvious entry points for social

workers embracing environmental social work discourse and practice. How can we talk about

righting power imbalances and facilitating equitable distributions of resources without

considering place, the extraction, manufacture and circulation of resources, and the sustainability

of the human and nonhuman? Muldoon argues social change and sustainability concerns be

considered jointly.2 Lysack offers the moving suggestion that the sustainable is the personal, that

is, not only are community action, policy reform, and structural change necessary to

sustainability, but also personal and societal transformation, a movement toward simplicity and

an earth-guardian role.3

By the current standard of living in the industrialised north, becoming truly sustainable

requires reduced consumption, reduced environmental destruction, and appropriate future

planning. Moreover, sustainability requires an economic and political order that does not exceed

1 M.W. Lusk and M. Hoff, “Sustainable Social Development,” Social Development Issues, 16.3 (1994): 20-31; L. Roughley, “Development for People and Nature: Toward a Socioenvironmental Ethic,” Social Development Issues 17.2-3 (1995): 66-80; R.J. Estes, “Toward Sustainable Development: From Theory to Praxis,” Social Development Issues, 15.3 (1993): 1-29; and D. Gamble and M. Hoff, “Sustainable Community Development” The Handbook of Community Practice, ed. Marie Weil (New York: Sage, 2005) 169-187. 2 Annie Muldoon, “Environmental Efforts: The Next Challenge for Social Work,” Critical Social Work 7.2 (2006). 3 Mishka Lysack, “Practices and Skills for Building Social and Ecological Resiliency with Individuals and Communities,” Structural Social Work in Action: Examples from Practice, eds. Steven F. Hick, Heather I. Peters, Tammy Corner, and Tracy London (Toronto: Canadian Scholars’, 2009).

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the biological base of its society (or other societies through oppressive, exploitative “first world”

practices). “Indeed, sustainable development is all about meeting human needs and aspirations –

not just those of one country or region, but those of all people who inhabit the earth, both now

and in the future.”1 As Berry states, “An extractive economy is by its nature a terminal

economy”2 because it pollutes the environment while simultaneously eliminating the resources

upon which its very social structures depend. The Western model of unlimited growth and

extraction of non-renewable resources cannot possibly be replicated globally but the current

trend is to launch the impossible. In many respects modernity, however incomplete,3 is a failed

project, an unfulfilled promise, the prodigal progeny of rationalism and disembodied

materialism, possessing an impetuous obsession with markets and profits, and casting a tragic

shadow of calamity and uncertainty despite the initial and confident assurance of progress.

Coates is right to call for a new paradigm, one that shifts from modernity to sustainability in a

transformative process that reconceptualises our relationship to the nonhuman world.4 Through

such a process of deep transformation, which necessarily involves re-empathising our human-

nonhuman relationship, it is possible to rethink our traditional economic, social and land-use

practices and make choices with long-term benefits for both peoples and places. Mary echoes

this sentiment when suggesting that we reorient our values to include appreciation for all life

forms, use participation and partnership social and community action models, and build

awareness of and respect for ecological limits, in our efforts to promote sustainability.5

Disconnections and Misunderstandings

1 W. Linder, “Preface,” Development: Journal of the Society for International Development 12.2-3 (1989): 3-6. 2 Thomas Berry, The Great Work: Our Way into the Future (New York: Bell Tower, 1999) 138. 3 Jurgen Habermas, “Modernity: An Incomplete Project,” The Anti-aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, ed. H. Foster (Port Townsend, WA: Bay Press, 1983). 4 John Coates, Ecology and Social Work. 5 Nancy Mary, Social Work in a Sustainable World (Chicago: Lyceum, 2008).

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Many trace our contemporary environmental issues to a fundamental conceptual split existing in

mainstream western society between humankind and the nonhuman other, between culture and

nature,1 a split that some suggest arose with the advent of agriculture and was further

exacerbated by industrialization. Some social work scholars argue that the primacy of a

“technical-rational” tradition and an interactional practice model (despite an emphasis on the bi-

directional influences in the client-practitioner relationship) distort our understanding of the

“life-world,” reducing its complexity, making relations within and between the human and

nonhuman realms less than favourable.2 Whatever the root cause, our changing environment is

forcing us to reconsider how we define and measure progress. When we have created the

technology to handily annihilate ourselves and our world perhaps, as Wright wryly asserts,

“[W]e have made rather too much progress.”3 As our environmental challenges multiply and

intensify we are imperilling ourselves as a species. History has shown us that civilizations, when

vulnerable, can sometimes fall suddenly. Suzuki’s dramatic analogy for our present predicament

is that of bacteria in a test tube which after 55 minutes only occupies three per cent of the tube,

but by the 60th minute, due to exponential growth, the test tube is full. By Suzuki’s reckoning

humanity at present has passed the 59th minute.4 While technology is often invoked as the

modern-day redeemer, “advances in technology just increase our ability to do things, which may

be either for the better or for the worse.”5 As Homer-Dixon has identified, human societies both

1 See R.M. Berger and J. Kelly, “Social Work in the Ecological Crisis” Social Work, 38.5 (1993): 521-526; S.U. O’Hara “Discursive Ethics in Ecosystems Valuation and Environmental Policy,” Ecological Economics, 16 (1996): 95-107; Al Gore, Earth in the Balance: Ecology and the Human Spirit (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1992). This matter will be discussed further in chapter three. 2 Richard Pozzuto, Paul Dezendorf, and Margaret Arnd-Caddigan, “Social Work and the Colonization of the Life-World,” Critical Social Work 7.2 (2006). 3 Ronald Wright, A Short History of Progress (Toronto: House of Anansi, 2004) 5. 4 David Suzuki, From Naked Ape to Superspecies (Toronto: Stoddart, 2001). 5 Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (New York: Penguin, 2005) 505.

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rich and poor, are not always able to provide the necessary ingenuity to deal with the gravest

issues.1

Global environmental challenges make evident the gap between the problems we are

generating and our ability to comprehend and address them. Numerous illustrations of our

attempts to manage environmental problems reveal our persistent linear thinking and utter lack

of understanding of interconnectedness. One need only consider Operation Cat Drop to be aware

of how disconnected we have become from natural cycles and rhythms of ecosystems. During

the 1950s a region in Borneo suffering from malaria was sprayed with the insecticide DDT by a

WHO organized intervention to kill mosquitoes. The poison not only killed the mosquitoes but

also wasps, who unbeknownst to the WHO, kept a thatch-eating caterpillar population in check.

With the wasps gone the caterpillars thrived and building roofs soon collapsed. Combined with

this, geckoes were also poisoned, and these were common prey of the local cat population. Cats

started to die off and the rat population flourished, leading to outbreaks of typhus and sylvatic

plague. The WHO ultimately responded by parachuting live cats into Borneo. Clearly, when we

intervene imperfectly, with deficient understanding, in ecosystems, our effects are multiple and

unpredictable. Yet scientists have since proposed, in a similarly linear approach, putting billions

of pieces of tin foil in orbit to counteract excessive atmospheric greenhouse heat, by reflecting

incoming sunlight away from the earth, and they have also recommended remedially placing iron

in the oceans to encourage photosynthetic activity in plankton which might then soak up some

greenhouse gases.2 Today numerous countries internationally shoot silver oxide into clouds via

1 Thomas Homer-Dixon, The Ingenuity Gap: Can We Solve the Problems of the Future? (Toronto: Vintage, 2001). 2 See Al Gore, Earth in the Balance.

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aircraft or ground dispersion devices to promote rain. In China inter-city disputes have already

begun over the resulting “cloud theft.”1

It seems that we as a species are suffering from a condition that could be described as

“landscape amnesia”2 or a “disconnection from our land base.”3 In an effort to contribute to

undoing our collective forgetting, I am conducting a historical analysis. Ichiyo claims, “The

slogan in the beginning of the twentieth century was progress. The cry at the end of the

twentieth century is survival.”4 Some would explain this degree of environmental damage as an

unsurprising inevitability dating back to our evolutionary beginnings. But a calamity of this

magnitude, where we may be the last generation to be able to choose what kind of relationship

we will create with the nonhuman environment and nonhuman others, warrants some

investigation.5 The major environmental debates explored in the next chapter form part of the

scholarly investigation of this issue to date.

1 See Maude Barlow, Blue Covenant. 2 See Diamond, Collapse. 3 Derrick Jensen, Endgame: Volume 1: The Problem of Civilization (Seven Stories Press, 2006) 4 Muto Ichiyo, “For an Alliance of Hope,” Global Visions: Beyond the New World Order, eds. Jeremy Brecher, John Brown Childs and Jill Cutler (Cambridge, MA: South End, 1999) 147-162. 5 See Eban Goodstein, Fighting for Love in a Century of Extinction: How Passion and Politics Can Stop Global Warming (Lebanon, NH: University of Vermont Press, 2007); J.A. Wainwright, ed., Every Grain of Sand: Canadian Perspectives on Ecology and Environment (Waterloo, ON: Wilfred Laurier UP, 2004); and Nancy Mary, Social Work in a Sustainable World.

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Chapter Three: Major Environmental Debates It is axiomatic that we are in no way protected from the consequences of our actions by remaining confused about the ecological meaning of our humanness, ignorant of ecological processes, and unmindful of the ecological aspects of history.

William Catton, Jr. Chapter two investigated the scope of our environmental challenges and outlined some of the

ways social work is ideally suited to respond. This chapter examines some of the hypothesised

sources of our human-nonhuman imbalance and presents key environmental debates. Given the

thesis premise that conceptualisations of the nonhuman other inform our treatment of, and

interactions with, the said other, an exploration of the chief arguments put forward by leading

environmental theorists provides a context both from which to consider contemporary

environmental challenges and with which to ground the case study analysis. This chapter also

provides a foundation for understanding the various ideological gateways through which social

work theory can coalesce with and build upon existing environmental debates, while

underscoring complementarities between social work values and select environmental

approaches.

Some Hypothesised Sources of Our Current Environmental Challenges

The crux of our contemporary environmental crisis is often conceived as an error in thinking, a

problem of values.1 Western culture has a long legacy of dualistic thought that some trace to the

human-nature bifurcation of Greek philosophy. While this diremptive tendency is thought to

1 See Gregory Bateson “Pathologies of Epistemology,” Steps to an Ecology of Mind (New York: Ballantine, 1972); see also Donald Worster, Nature’s Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge UP, 1991).

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have originated in the West with the purification and divinization of the Pythagorean program,1

Plato is the Greek philosopher most associated with dualism. Platonic philosophy sought to

replace the former authority of the gods with a normative ontology.2 Transcendent, timeless

Platonic forms provided standards for human behaviour, but because these forms were ideal and

atemporal, there followed a division between the eternal and the temporal, between the soul and

the body, between thinker and the world pondered. Aristotle, unlike his teacher Plato, developed

a metaphysical approach that emphasized particulars, where reality could be discerned through

the study of concrete temporal entities, not Platonic abstractions. Aristotle believed “that

everything in our intellect comes from the senses, and thus the thinker is powerfully connected to

the world he [sic] thinks about.”3

This philosophical disagreement which began in ancient Greece persisted throughout the

early thought of the Christian church, to the Middle Ages to the present. In the first quarter of the

seventeenth century, Descartes advanced the dualistic argument with his famous aphorism,

Cogito ergo sum. This philosophical turn, separating mind from matter, is believed to have

offered the natural sciences a much needed conceptual framework, and to have ushered in, along

with Baconian science and Newtonian physics, the modern era via the Scientific Revolution.

Bacon put forward a fundamentally anthropocentric worldview wherein human beings were

capable of mastering nature. His well-known dictum “knowledge is power”4 finds service in his

belief that scientific knowledge gave humankind an unparalleled opportunity to intercede in the

natural world and create an almost Virgilian second world where human misery, the material

1 See Patrick Lee Miller, “Purity of Thought: Dualism and Divinization in Greek Philosophy,” diss., U of NC at Chapel Hill, 2005, 72-93. 2 Michael H. McCarthy, Crisis of Philosophy (New York: State of New York UP, 1990). 3 Al Gore, Earth in the Balance (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1992) 249. 4 Francis Bacon, The New Organum, ed., Fulton H. Anderson (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1960) 39.

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effects of sin, is overcome.1 It can be argued that Newtonian mechanistic science, while not

directly set on conquering or altering nature, “lays nature bare for exploitation by eliminating a

teleological conception of nature as purposive process.”2

To this seemingly destructive ratio-reductive trinity is added the Christian conviction that

human beings, made in God’s image, are superior to a nonhuman realm where God is neither

reflected nor immanent. The Scientific Revolution developed within a decidedly Judaeo-

Christian monotheistic framework and the influence of this religious tradition on scientific and

philosophic thought is irrefragable. Lynn White Jr., the first to argue forcefully that Christianity

is the source of our environmental woes, claims, “By destroying pagan animism, Christianity

made it possible to exploit nature in a mood of indifference to the feelings of natural objects.”3

The biblical concept of dominion is considered an environmentally pernicious attitude, creating a

scriptural authorization for all manner of exploitation provided moral laws defined elsewhere in

scripture are properly followed. Some scholars suggest that, together then, Greek philosophy, the

Judaeo-Christian tradition, and the rising scientism promoted a dualistic severance from nature,

where human beings were above nature because they possess mind and soul, while nature was

divested of intrinsic meaning, existing only to serve human needs.

It is not uncommon for literature investigating the source of our contemporary

environmental crisis to follow some form of this exegetical arc.4 While not wholly inaccurate, it

misses possible nuances through a failure of overconfidence, a kind of post hoc ergo propter

1 See Virgil, The Works of P. Virgilius Maro: Including the Aeneid, Bucoloics and Georgics, trans. Levi Hart and V.R. Osborn (Philadelphia: McKay, 1882) in which Virgil posits in the Eclogues, particularly Eclogue X, an ideal realm, Arcadia. 2 Trish Glazebrook, “Toward an Ecofeminist Phenomenology of Nature” Every Grain of Sand: Canadian Perspectives on Ecology and Environment, ed. J.A. Wainwright (Waterloo, ON: Wilfred Laurier P, 2004) 93. 3 Lynn White Jr., “The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis” Science 155 (1967): 1206. 4 See, for example, Carolyn Merchant, Death of Nature (New York: Harper, 1983); Vandana Shiva, Staying Alive: Women, Ecology and Development (1989; Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Zed Books, 2003); Al Gore, Earth in the Balance, and William Leiss, The Domination of Nature (1972; Montreal: McGill-Queen s̀ UP, 1998).

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hoc. Amongst other things, social work trains one to be wary of such monolithic, totalizing

narratives. Proceeding from an anti-discriminatory, egalitarian base critical social work is

distrustful of the too tidy explanation, recognizing most phenomena to have multiple, and

sometimes recondite influences. It is true that Platonic dualism created an unnecessary divide

between human beings and the natural world, contributing to the rise of humanism, and this

could indeed be a factor in our current predicament; however, Plato also conceived of a world

soul, of which he writes in the Timaeus, the harmonious substrate of all living things and the

entire universe. And Descartes, famous for his mind-body split was not an obstinate dualist, for

he writes in his Sixth Meditation, “I am not merely present in my body as a sailor is present in a

ship, but that I am very closely joined and, as it were, intermingled with it, so that I and my body

form a unit.”1 Within the Judaeo-Christian tradition too there is the argument that “dominion”

does not mean “domination” but a thoughtful and humble stewardship, where God’s grace

combined with human humility ensure benevolent use.2 Investigating the role of dualistic

thought, scientific rationalism, and Christianity as mediators of, and influences on, our

relationship to nature, and therefore factors in environmental degradation, is certainly important,

but we need to be careful not to end our enquiry here. The roots of our contemporary

environmental crisis are richly complex and resistant to unproblematic summarisation.

Some scholars include in their human-nature analysis the development of agriculture3

during the Neolithic revolution4 which changed possibilities for human relationships to the land.

1 René Descartes, Discourse on Method and Meditations, trans., Elizabeth S. Haldane (Mineola, NY: Dover, 2003) 40. 2 Al Gore, Earth in the Balance, 244; see also Max Oelschlaeger, The Idea of Wilderness: From Prehistory to the Age of Ecology (New Haven: Yale UP, 1991) 109. 3 See, for example, Oelschlaeger, The Idea of Wilderness and Roderick Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind, 4th ed. (New Haven: Yale UP, 2001). 4 It was the archaeologist Gordon Childe who coined the phrase ‘Neolithic Revolution’ to suggest that the development of agriculture initiated a sedentary pattern of peoples residing in larger villages which led to the invention of technologies such as pottery and metallurgy. Peter Watson, however, in Ideas: A History of Thought

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Though other cities predate Sumer, it is often the example used to illustrate the changing human-

nature relationship because its people were the earliest to employ intensive agriculture producing

sufficient foodstuffs to allow permanent settlement of large populations. No longer did

Sumerians have to follow grazing animals and uncultivated crops. Diamond suggests that the

presence of edible wild animals and plants made it possible for early Fertile Crescent dwellers to

put together a nourishing crop growing and animal husbandry assemblage.1 For Neolithic

peoples, settled areas became their established milieu and all around became a “wilderness,” a

concept with which their earlier Palaeolithic relatives were unfamiliar. This “transition from

Paleolithic hunter-gatherer to Neolithic farmer is for many wilderness advocates a crucial turning

point, marking a ‘fall’ from a primal ecological grace.”2 Agriculture, it is thought, created the

original divide between human beings and the nonhuman other that Greek philosophy, Judaeo-

Christianity, and modern science later augmented. By the nineteenth century, with Watt’s

improvement to the steam engine, the West was philosophically, theoretically and scientifically

poised to embrace enthusiastically the Industrial Revolution. This change in production

occurring not only within a capitalistic and democratic system, but also inheriting the nature-as-

other principle from the humanistic tradition, treated nature as merely a stockpile of resources

awaiting processing and the market. “Modernism thus completes the intellectual divorce of

humankind from nature,”3 and our ostensible ability to overpower nature created an almost

inviolable faith in the myth of progress and humankind as the measure of all things.4

and Invention, from Fire to Freud (New York: Harper, 2006) asserts that the Neolithic revolution concept has been overturned as evidence suggests sedentary patterns were well established by the time the agricultural revolution occurred. 1 See Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (New York: W.W. Norton, 1999) 141. 2 Greg Garrard, Ecocriticism: The New Critical Idiom (New York: Routledge, 2005) 60. 3 Oelschlaeger, Idea of Wilderness, 96. 4 See Donald Worster, Under Western Skies: Nature and History in the American West (New York: Oxford UP, 1992) 86-87 for a discussion of the way the revolution in western culture toward the modern, progress-oriented paradigm altered the relationship between the human and nonhuman.

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The Nature Construct

My point has not been to present a comprehensive analysis of the sources of our contemporary

environmental crisis. I have attempted to situate the problem within a cultural and historical

context. Because the environmental crisis is a reflection of our flawed relationship with the

natural world, understanding the changing meanings attached to the human-nature dyad is

beneficial. The remainder of this chapter will explore the major debates in the ecological

literature, debates that revolve around the human relationship to the nonhuman other, and what a

variety of scholars and activists think this relationship should be. But before turning to this

undertaking, the concept of nature itself must be considered. What is nature? We have seen how

Western thought has separated humankind from the natural world, but what do we mean by

nature, arguably the “most complex word in the language.”1 The terms ‘nature’ and ‘natural’ are

slippery often signifying different things to different people, and having mutable meanings

depending on the historic period to which they belong. Prior to the Romantic era, wild places

were avoided as they were deemed chaotic and repugnant, inhospitable to humans.2 After

significant refiguring by Romantic-period writers, vast unpopulated regions formerly thought

valueless came to be highly esteemed. The extent of this shift is well evidenced by Thoreau’s

celebrated remark, “In Wilderness is the preservation of the world.”3 And the change continues.

The idea of nature is a shifting construct contingent upon historical particularity, and in this age

of global circulation of information environmental scholars and activists dispute what is cultural

and what is natural.

Neil Evernden accepts “the convention of speaking of ‘nature’ when referring to the great

amorphous mass of otherness that en-cloaks the planet, and to speak of ‘Nature’ when referring

1 Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford UP, 1983) 219. 2 See Roderick Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind. 3 Thoreau, “Walking,” The Works of Thoreau, ed. Henry S. Canby (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1937) 672.

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specifically to the system or model of nature which arose in the West.”1 One difficulty with

adopting this convention is that ‘nature’ when viewed as a “mass of otherness” can still be

festishized as something different from, and perhaps superior to built, human environments

where most of humanity lives.2 This could create an anti-urbanist sentiment which further

confuses the already difficult city-country dichotomy. As Cronon observes the two are not so

separate, “The journey that carried so many travellers into the city also carried them out again,

and in that exchange of things urban for things rural lies a deeper truth about the country and the

city. The two can exist only in each other’s presence.”3 Cronon’s explication of the ties between

the city and the country are helpful. However, I think he overstates his point when asserting “the

urban and the rural landscapes…are not two places but one.”4 Interdependence is not similitude.

My experience at my northern home tells me this. The air is qualitatively, and I am certain

quantitatively, different, and at night I can see a sky full of stars. While the northern region I

describe has surely been immeasurably reworked by human hands, in large part through

deforestation during its European settlement period in the mid-nineteenth century, it is

nonetheless a region where living, organic entities far outnumber manufactured things. This

makes it substantially different from the city. The point is not to elide the difference between city

and country but to examine the effect our idealizing the natural world has on our experience of

and relationship to the nonhuman.

A second difficulty with conceiving nature as “otherness” is that this formula places

human beings outside of nature. This is the traditional, thorny, culture-nature divide, a variation

on the human-nature separation where culture is categorized as the human realm and nature the

1 Neil Evernden, The Social Creation of Nature (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1992) xi. 2 See David Harvey, Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1997) 427. 3 William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: Norton, 1991) 18. 4 Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis, 384.

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nonhuman. Useful here is Heidegger’s concept Dasein, the idea that to exist is to be a being

somewhere temporally, not a subject or an object but a cohesive ‘being-in-the-world.’ It is our

social and cultural constructs that create nature as something separate from us “out there.” And

the problem with such constructs, along with the fact they are false and lead to faulty

understandings of our place in the world, is that they empower certain groups while

disempowering others. Wilderness parks are a fine example of the differential effect our nature

constructs have socially. We generally believe nature is paramount in national and provincial

parks, and because we see ourselves as separate from nature, we seek park experiences to

encounter nature meaningfully. But historically it has been the dominant culture, white,

privileged people, who have had the means to visit these sites. Wilderness sites were not

developed with equal access for all citizens in mind, and Canada’s Riding Mountain National

Park in Manitoba illustrates this point. Aboriginal peoples were not consulted at any point in the

planning of this park’s establishment in the late 1920’s, and unconscionably, they were forced to

relocate from traditional territory to less desirable locales. Gros-Louis identifies the toll

dominant culture infringement, through government park development, has had on hunting and

fishing regions, preventing younger generations from practicing time-honoured customs. While

he concedes “wild animal reserves are necessary,” Gros-Louis insists there is no reason to

exclude Aboriginal peoples from the planning process.1 In the same way that constructions of

race, gender, and class, are not neutral, the social creation of ‘nature’ is value-laden, sometimes

serving to safeguard hegemonic prerogatives.

Environmental activists are sometimes troubled by the idea that nature is socially

constructed. They are concerned that examining nature as a construct could weaken activist aims

as some may conclude nature is only an idea without a tangible referent in the world. But as Kate 1 See Max Gros-Louis, First among the Hurons (Montreal: Harvest House, 1973) 37.

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Soper famously asserted, “it is not language that has a hole in its ozone layer, and the ‘real’ thing

continues to be polluted and degraded even as we refine our deconstructive insights at the level

of the signifier.”1 Of course it is imperative that ‘real’ environmental challenges be addressed,

but an uncritical environmental praxis risks reinscribing the very power and domination systems

that have produced our contemporary crisis. A stunning example of this danger is found in

Schama’s extraordinarily rich meditation on the effect of landscape on culture, in which he

devotes a section to an exploration of the links connecting German utopian primitivist myths

with Hitler’s militant nationalism.2 The idea of nature has a powerful hold on the Western

cultural imagination, and the various forms and incarnations of this idea have created

innumerable related intellectual and social formations. The construct is also the basis of a

number of positions addressing the apparent environmental decline.

Because “nature” and “wilderness” are problematic and vigorously contested terms,3 in

this thesis I generally use the terms “nonhuman” instead of nature, and sometimes “natural

world” (as opposed to the human-made environment). I also use the term “nonhuman other” to

refer to nonhuman animals and plants. I avoid the term “wilderness” because it reflects a

Eurocentric belief in “pristine” places emptied of human beings, in particular Aboriginal peoples

who once inhabited and travelled through these spaces. To speak of wilderness, except as the

term is used in the context of the environmental debates and policy discourse, would be to

undermine my project at the outset and to disrespect First Nations peoples who have been

negatively impacted by Western environmentalism.

Early Environmental Theorists

1 Kate Soper, “The idea of nature,” The Green Studies Reader: From Romanticism to Ecocriticism, ed. Lawrence Coupe (New York: Routledge, 2000) 124 2 See Simon Schama. Landscape and Memory (Toronto: Vintage, 1996). 3 Peter Hay, Main Currents in Western Environmental Thought (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2002) 19.

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George Perkins Marsh, American diplomat and polymath, is often identified as the first

environmentalist. He is remembered today for his enormously influential book Man and Nature1,

published in 1864, which addressed the inadvertent and profound effects of human activity on

nature. His now legendary observation “Man is everywhere a disturbing agent” was at the time

radical, bringing about a sea change in the understanding of human culpability in degraded

natural environments. A commitment to progress and economic growth coupled with

technological development enabled humankind to deforest entire regions, practice extensive land

reclamation, and redirect river courses. Marsh chronicled in painstaking detail the effects of

these transformations, establishing links between deforestation and soil erosion, habitat

destruction and declining wildlife, revealing an ecological understanding ahead of his time. In

his environmental analysis his scope was global and his speculation almost prescient. He

discerned the now established connection between human activity and climate, and his

arguments a century and a half later remain remarkably relevant.

Marsh, it must be stated, was not an apocalyptic writer, though he strongly censured

humankind for destroying natural environments. By exposing growing environmental issues, his

intention was to inspire change, not frighten. Like most Western persons of his time, Marsh

believed human beings to be above other animals, possessing an entitlement to dominion. But

attached to this right was a responsibility. Humankind, Marsh insisted, was to practice

“enlightened management” of nature, and in this way he prefigured the conservation movement,

his management mantle being assumed in the late nineteenth century by Theodore Roosevelt and

Gifford Pinchot. However, Marsh cannot be readily categorized as a foregone conservationist,

for his question regarding how to “live within the boundaries established by nature’s harmonies”

1 See George Perkins Marsh, Man and Nature: Or, Physical Geography as Modified by Human Action (1864; Michigan: U of Michigan Library, 2006).

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also connects his thinking with contemporary sustainable development and bioregionalist

positions. His economic analysis of post-Revolution France also challenges a strict conservation

reading of Marsh, as his arguments evoke those of current-day environmental justice writers.

Oelschlaeger is right to ascribe foundational status to Marsh.1

Contrary to Marsh’s belief in the superiority of human beings to nonhuman others,

Thoreau recognized humankind to be organically embedded in nature. He had been patently

influenced by the Bhagavad Gita and the Upanishads, from which perhaps he acquired his desire

for perfection of the inner self. His pronounced individualism also made him deeply a product of

the romantic tradition.2 It is for this combination, together with Thoreau’s trenchant critique of

nineteenth century modernism and the status quo, that he is often credited with having given rise

to a unique American notion of wilderness.3 His thought does not allow for an uncomplicated

association between culture and nature and introduces an early form of biocentrism. “Every

creature is better alive than dead, men and moose and pine trees, and he who understands it

aright will preserve its life than destroy it.”4 Thoreau is the unwitting architect of the

preservationist movement, where his wilderness mythology gives primacy to experiences of

“Contact!” and the natural world is perceived to have a true meaning that surpasses

categorization and utility. In this way his Walden, The Maine Woods and other writings provide

an alternative environmental position to the conservation doctrine. But as Westling shows,

Thoreau’s project is flawed by his unexamined gendered, imperialist stance.5 He casts the

nonhuman other as unambiguously female which makes this feminized realm implicitly

subordinate in a male-dominated culture: “Nature is hard to be overcome, but she must be 1 Max Oelschlaeger, Idea of Wilderness, 107. 2 See Peter Hay, Main Currents in Western Environmental Thought. 3 Oelschlaeger, Idea of Wilderness, 133. 4 Henry David Thoreau, The Maine Woods, intr. Paul Theroux (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2004) 121. 5 See Louise Westling, “Thoreau’s Ambivalence toward Mother Nature,” The Green Studies Reader: From Romanticism to Ecocriticism, ed. Lawrence Coupe (London: Routledge, 2000) 262-266.

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overcome.”1 Thoreau’s idea of courage as expressed in Civil Disobedience is a brand of social

action not intended for the unmanly2 and his high opinion of his own education constitutes a kind

of “intellectual imperialism,”3 which reinforces the imperial tone created in Walden through

Thoreau’s romanticizing of his surrounds, a practice which tended to disguise the effects of

European conquest and devastation.4 Even though it is unfair to hold historical figures

accountable to current cultural standards, Thoreau’s masculinist proclivity warrants inspection

because present day wilderness preservationists have a lineage which extends back to him, and

they have been susceptible to inheriting his “distaste for ‘effeminacy’”5 as part of their

wilderness pedigree.

John Muir, American naturalist and founder of the Sierra Club, had in common with

Thoreau a conviction that nature possesses intrinsic worth. This is best reflected in his rejoinder

to the question “What are rattlesnakes good for”: They are “all, head and tail, good for

themselves, and we need not begrudge them their share of life.”6 Muir’s relationship to nature

was reverential, and his life in the outdoors was a spiritual experience. He built a cabin along

Yosemite Creek and he referred to Yosemite as the “grandest of all special temples of Nature.”

In terms of environmental politics, Muir outpaced both Marsh and Thoreau, campaigning

tirelessly to protect “wilderness” from the hungry maw of “progress,” but socially Muir

contributed to the idea that Indigenous peoples had no role in government development of parks

1 Henry David Thoreau, Walden and Civil Disobedience, intr. Jonathan Levin (New York: Barnes, 2005) 174. 2 For an example of Thoreau’s masculinist proclivity, see Walden and Civil Disobedience, 276 where he uses the word “manhood” when speaking of matters of conscience. See also Holloway Spark’s excellent article “Dissident Citizenship: Democratic Theory, Political Courage and Activist Women,” Hypatia 12.4 (Autumn 1997): 74-110, in which she interrogates the implicit masculinism of Thoreau’s writings. 3 See Ira Brooker, “Giving the Game Away: Thoreau’s Intellectual Imperialism and the Marketing of Walden Pond,” The Midwest Quarterly 45.2 (Winter 2004): 137-154 for an interesting discussion of this idea. 4 Westling, “Thoreau’s Ambivalence toward Mother Nature,” 262. 5 Westling, “Thoreau’s Ambivalence toward Mother Nature,” 262. 6 John Muir, John Muir: Life and Work, ed. Sally Miller (Albuquerque: U of New Mexico P, 1995) 108.

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and wilderness preserves.1 His limited cross-cultural understanding and his failure to

comprehend the impact of Western imperialist and expansionist practices on Indigenous peoples

cast him as a social conservative, unreflectively enjoying his white male privilege. Disappointed

that the Miwok Indians of the Sierra Nevada did not satisfy his mind’s image of the “noble

savage,”2 Muir wrote of a Miwok woman in 1869 that she “seemed sadly unlike Nature’s neat

well-dressed animals, though living like them on the bounty of wilderness.”3 He concluded that

the Miwok were “debased fellow beings [not] a whit more natural than the glaring tailored

tourists we saw that frightened the birds and the squirrels.”4 Muir, however, also praised Native

Americans for their positive relationship with nature, making an invidious comparison with

European abuses of the natural world. And, over time, Muir’s outlook toward Native Americans

improved, as positive encounters disabused him of his earlier ignorance. Sadly, it is his earlier

assessment which had greatest influence.

Preservation versus Conservation – Sustainability and Population Links

The non-resourcist framework used by Muir is what separates preservationists from

conservationists. For conservationists, all nonhuman natural phenomena are thought to possess

only instrumental value and are consequently viewed as resources existing to be exploited for

human ends. Preservationists, conversely, see such phenomena as possessing intrinsic value, and

therefore worthy of being preserved in their “pristine” state, esteemed for spiritual, aesthetic, and

health purposes, and judged to have teleological rights. This philosophical, and ultimately

political, distinction created a rift between former friends Muir and Gifford Pinchot. So great was

the utilitarian approach of US Forest Service founder Pinchot that he once declared “there are 1 See M. Kat Anderson, Tending the Wild: Native American Knowledge and the Management of California’s Natural Resources (Berkeley: U of California P, 2005); Mark D. Spence, Dispossessing the Wilderness: Indian Removal and the Making of the National Parks (New York: Oxford UP, 1999). 2 “Noble savage” is a term that will be discussed at some length in the next chapter. 3 John Muir, John Muir: My First Summer in the Sierra (1911: New York: First Mariner, 1998) 58. 4 Muir, My First Summer, 59.

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just two things on this material earth – people and natural resources.”1 This tension between

instrumental and intrinsic value was dramatically manifested in the Hetch Hetchy Valley debate,

which has come to symbolize the chasm between preservationists and conservationists. In need

of a greater water supply for domestic use and electrical generation, San Francisco wanted to

dam the Tuolumne River in Hetch Hetchy Valley in Yosemite National Park to create a

reservoir. Muir, as president of the Sierra Club, fought vigorously to prevent the construction of

the dam, deeming such an act a desecration, “for no holier temple has ever been consecrated by

the heart of man.”2 Pinchot, on the other hand, advocated vociferously for the building of the

dam, insisting on conservation not preservation of the nonhuman world. For Pinchot instrumental

value, the fulfilment of human needs through wise use of natural resources, trumped intrinsic

worth.

In the Raker Act of 1913 Congress approved the construction of the dam and reservoir

along the Tuolumne River, and the modern environmental movement is often depicted as

originating from this century-old debate between Muir’s urge to preserve wilderness places and

Pinchot’s insistence on managing natural resources.3 Bell correctly draws connections between

traditional conservation and the rise of sustainable development as articulated in the Bruntland

Report titled Our Common Future, from the 1987 World Commission on Environment and

Development.4 Sustainable development leaves our relationship to the nonhuman world

unexamined, and therefore does nothing to adjust human exploitation of the environment but

aims to promote greater efficiency in the service of the utmost public good. Environmental social

1 Gifford Pinchot, Breaking New Ground (1947: Washington: Island, 1998) 325. 2 Quoted in Stephen Fox, (1985). The American Conservation Movement: John Muir and His Legacy (Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1985) 144. 3 See John Opie, Nature’s Nation: An Environmental History of the United States (New York: Harcourt 1998); see also Roderick Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind. 4 Anne Bell, “Protecting the Tatshenshini: Wild Nature as Resource?” Canadian Issues in Environmental Ethics, eds. Wesley Cragg, Allan Greenbaum and Alex Wellington (Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 1997).

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workers have adopted sustainable development as a model for practice because it fits logically

within the humanist framework of the profession.1 Understandably a true humanist would place

human needs above those of an endangered species, and above the intactness of a so-called

natural resource, as in the Hetch Hetchy case.

However, sustainable development without a radical rethinking of the human-nature

relationship is contentious because we are currently experiencing a crisis of living beyond the

carrying capacity2 of the earth. Thomas Malthus, the English political economist writing at the

turn of the eighteenth century, analysed population growth and outlined in his treatise An Essay

on the Principle of Population the discrepancy between the geometric rate of human increase and

the arithmetic growth of food supply. To prevent a food shortage, Malthus recommended

population control. He was not the first in the Western world to worry about overpopulation.

Plato, Polybius and Tertullian had all considered the possibility of shortages, but Malthus is the

name most associated with this concern. His critics are quick to mention not only were his

predictions wrong, but human societies have also increased in density through the application of

technology. When Paul Ehrlich’s best-selling book The Population Bomb was published in 1968,

he envisaged an overpopulation catastrophe where unprecedented global famine would strike,

leading to record starvation levels in the 1970s and 1980s. Like Malthus before him, Ehrlich’s

predictions did not come to pass, making his work a ready mark for censure. Those who have an

optimistic belief that population growth is always beneficial for its contribution to market

productivity, technological and intellectual ingenuity, and general human potentiality, found

Ehrlich’s work reprehensible. A thoughtful critique by Betsy Hartmann accused Ehrlich and all

1 See See R.M. Berger and J. Kelly, “Social Work in the Ecological Crisis” Social Work, 38.5 (1993): 521-526; see also Nancy Mary, Social Work in a Sustainable World (Chicago: Lyceum, 2008). 2 Human carrying capacity refers to the maximum sustainable rate at which we can consume the non-human other and discharge wastes without permanently damaging the integrity and productivity of the relevant ecosystem.

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environmental activists who advance a population-control agenda of being misanthropes who

lacked a feminist and social class perspective.1 A 1991 sequel to The Population Bomb titled The

Population Explosion presents an unambiguous message that the world’s runaway population

surpasses planetary capacity for sustaining human life.2 Recommending the implementation of

enormous international birth-control programs, the authors outline steps toward population

reduction and a more environmentally sound lifestyle.

Despite the fact that Malthus and Ehrlich (in his The Population Bomb) may have

overstated their case and certainly misjudged timelines, the overpopulation crisis is real. In 1804

the global human population was only one billion. By 1927 the population had increased by one

billion, doubling to two billion in one century. And in less than a century the global population

has increased more than threefold to 6.7 billion. With a global population level this high and

rising, we are unequivocally exceeding our carrying capacity. This point was made by Garrett

Hardin four decades ago in his “Tragedy of the Commons” where he identified the proclivity of

the West’s political economy to foster a consumptive lifestyle of interminable material demands

which outstrip the limits of our natural world.3 The difficulty with Hardin’s thesis is that he

presents an unconscionable solution to the very real environmental challenge of overpopulation.

In Hardin’s “Living on a Lifeboat,” Third World nations and peoples are blamed for the

environmental crisis.4 Hardin argues that essential supplies, such as foodstuffs, should be

withheld from poor nations based on their exacerbation of the environmental problem through

maintenance of high rates of population growth. Shiva rightly notes that Hardin’s imperialistic

view does not account for the fact that the “largest pressures on resources does not come from

1 Betsy Hartmann, Reproductive Rights and Wrongs: The Global Politics of Population Control and Contraceptive Choice (Boston: South End, 1995). 2 Paul R. Ehrlich and Anne H. Ehrlich, The Population Explosion (London: Hutchinson, 1990). 3 Garrett Hardin, “The Tragedy of the Commons,” Science 162 (1968): 1243-1248. 4 Garrett Hardin, “Living on a Lifeboat,” BioScience 24 (1974): 561-568.

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the large numbers of the poor, but from the wasteful production systems, long distance trade, and

overconsumption in the First World.”1 Hardin’s lifeboat metaphor is used to put forward his

isolationist strategy which foregoes an international “sharing ethic” because it is believed to lead

to a loss of global resources. Hardin also critiques the world food bank as nothing more than an

agent that forgives and enables resource mismanagement, usually by the poorer nations, failing

to consider the siphoning of Third World resources for Northern demands and overlooking the

reality that the commons are degraded when resources are used solely for private profit.

Understandably scholars and activists sometimes recoil from overpopulation arguments,

in large part due to the imperialistic handling of the issue by writers such as Hardin; however, the

population challenge is important. The 1994 United Nations Conference on Population and

Development displayed noteworthy conformity on the need for non-coercive population control

in the interest of environmental sustainability and economic development. Recommended was a

two-pronged approach focused on women, comprising education and health care. The earth has

been able to support, through technological advances, more people than Malthus ever

anticipated, but there are environmental indicators (including higher greenhouse gas emissions)

suggesting a limit to the population size that can be reasonably sustained. The challenge is both

to limit population growth and to share the planet’s renewable and non-renewable natural

resources in ways that combine environmental knowledge and understanding with justice. This

necessarily requires a global perspective on environmental rights and ethics. To live sustainably

on the global scale we must determine the earth’s carrying capacity and arrive at minimum

standards of living to which all nations agree and adhere.

1 Vandana Shiva, Earth Democracy: Justice, Sustainability, and Peace (Cambridge, MA: South End, 205) 58. See also John McNutt, “Social Welfare Policy and the Environmental Crisis: It’s Time to Rethink Our Traditional Models” The Global Environmental Crisis, eds. Marie D. Hoff and John G. McNutt (1994; Aldershot, Eng.: Ashgate, 1998) 36-52.

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In this sense sustainability is complicated because it parades as a virtue, making it a

highly popular buzzword, but in actuality is difficult to define and meaningfully implement.

Merchant is not amiss when describing sustainability as a reworked dream of recovery in which

humans aim to recapture a lost harmonious, Edenic relationship with the garden.1 Haque

identifies five shortcomings of sustainable development: perpetuating the harmful agenda of

economic growth; coupling stage of a nation’s development with level of consumption; having

deficient interest in cultural aspects of development and misapprehending the successful

development of “tribal” cultures; failing to adequately address international environmental

inequalities; and, with regard to environmental conventions and laws, lacking the ability to

adequately tackle hegemonic practices at internal and international levels.2 I would add that the

sustainable development model in neglecting to include an ontological component in which the

human relationship to the nonhuman world is investigated, in which we consider our vital

connection to our land base and other species, cannot possibly present a robust response to our

environmental dilemma.

Biocentrism

No environmental thinker better articulates our connection to and dependence on the nonhuman

world than Aldo Leopold, American ecologist, forester, and exponent of wilderness preservation.

His major literary achievement A Sand County Almanac includes his extraordinary formulation

of the “land ethic,” a biocentric eschewal of human chauvinism where scientific, economic,

recreational, and other anthropocentric grounds for preserving the nonhuman are rejected in

favour of a collective species entitlement. Leopold asserts in his land ethic, “A thing is right

1 See Carolyn Merchant, “Eve: Nature and Narrative,” Canadian Environmental History, ed. David Freeland Duke (Toronto: Canadian Scholars’, 2006) 42-70. 2 M.S. Haque, “Environmental discourse and sustainable development: Linkages and Limitations,” Ethics and the Environment, 5.1 (2000): 3-21.

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when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong

when it tends otherwise.”1 At first glance this may seem contrary to the humanistic project and

therefore inconsistent with social work principles, but Leopold was attempting something not

dissimilar to the desire environmental social workers have to expand the definition of

“environment” in the ecological model to include nonhuman natural environments. Leopold’s

countless observations of ecosystem dynamics as a professional forester and wildlife manager

convinced him “that the individual is a member of a community of interdependent parts…. The

land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and

animals, or collectively: the land.”2 His desire was not to depose humankind deliberately from

their place of prominence in the modernist program, but to attempt to express aright the actual

location—versus the socially constructed location—of human beings in ecosystems. Leopold’s

“land ethic changes the role of Homo sapiens from conqueror of the land-community to plain

member and citizen of it. It implies respect for his [sic] fellow-members, and also respect for the

community as such.”3 Leopoldian environmentalism is overtly normative abandoning the

political and economic quest to dominate a mechanistic nature, and the first to make the

community the locus of moral consideration. Implicit in Leopold’s ecological conscience is a

conviction that individuals share a responsibility for the condition of the land.4

While the effect of Leopold’s land ethic is extensive, it is perhaps the deep ecologists

who have been most obviously influenced by this concept. Arne Naess coined the term “deep

ecology” in his 1973 article, “The Shallow and the Deep, Long-Range Ecological Movement.”

Naess and later deep ecologists distinguish their position from conventional environmentalism

1 Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac: With Essays on Conservation from Round River (1949: New York: Ballantine, 1966) 262. 2 Leopold, Sand County Almanac, 239. 3 Leopold, Sand County Almanac, 240. 4 See Oelschlaeger, Idea of Wilderness.

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through an intrinsic versus instrumental disparity. According to Naess, deep ecologists insist

nature has inherent value that must be recognised, while “shallow” environmental approaches

maintain an instrumental conception of nature.1 This shift from anthropocentrism to biocentrism

represents the radical turn associated with deep ecology, positioning it in contrast with much of

Western philosophy—Spinoza being a notable exception and therefore frequently invoked in

deep ecology discourse. Spinoza’s philosophical system posits God as immanent in the world,

part of the human and nonhuman, the cause of everything. Spinoza articulates this monism as

“Deus sive Natura – ‘God or Nature’” and this has led to his being interpreted both as an “atheist

and as a pantheist, even – in the famous words of Novalis – as a ‘God-intoxicated man,’ for

whom the divine countenance shines forth from the whole of nature.”2 Deep ecology demands a

rejection of our human-centered worldview and behaviour for the preservation of the earth.

While recycling, conservation, and reduced consumption will help, the real solution to

environmental challenges consists in deeper, philosophical, spiritual understandings of the

human relationship with the nonhuman world.

The effort to establish deep ecology as a distinct philosophy—sometimes resorting to the

use of abstruse terms like Ecosophy T—has tended to ignore the important task of creating

concrete avenues for application in the world. As a philosophy it is muscularly prescriptive

promoting “widening of the Self,” “gestalts” and “ecological consciousness” yet never manages

to ground its theory in practice.3 This retreatist aspect of deep ecology makes for a maladroit fit

with social work, but environmental social work scholars have found certain elements of deep

ecology constructive. Ungar integrates deep ecological principles into a value-enhanced

1 See Arne Naess, “The Shallow and the Deep, Long-range Ecology Movement,” Inquiry 16 (1973): 95-100. 2 Roger Scruton, Spinoza: A Very Short Introduction (1986; New York: Oxford UP, 2002) 51. 3 See Arne Naess, “Ecosophy T: Deep Versus Shallow Ecology,” Deep Ecology, ed. Michael Tobias (Santa Monica: IMT Productions, 1985); and Bill Devall and George Sessions, Deep Ecology: Living as if Nature Mattered (Salt Lake City: Peregrine, 1985).

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ecological social work model where intrinsic worth becomes central to individual, community,

diversity, service delivery, resource distribution, public policy, and economic development

considerations.1 And Besthorn rightly observes the compatibility of deep ecology with the trend

in the past decade toward holistic approaches and spirituality in social work practice.2

Critical Environmentalisms – Ecofeminist and Social Ecological Perspectives

Ecofeminists critique deep ecology for holding anthropocentrism, instead of androcentrism,

responsible for the construction of a worldview that separates nature and culture, and man and

woman, entitling man to exploit nature at his discretion.3 King argues deep ecology overlooks

vital structural economic and political issues, focusing entirely on self-realization and elevating

nature over culture.4 Ecofeminism is a theory that identifies and explores the development of

hierarchical dualisms in the Western tradition and their influence in the world. This theory makes

connections between the degradation of the environment and the domination of women,

racialized communities, marginalized groups, and nonhuman species. Some hierarchical

dualisms that have developed in Western thought include male/female, Western male/other,

mind/body, and nature/culture where the first constituent of these couplings is granted superior

status. Ecofeminism promotes a situated politics that considers people, culture and place in

context and uses an analysis that respects both women and the nonhuman while paying close

attention to political, social, economic, and environmental inequities.5

1 Michael Ungar, “A Deeper, More Social Ecological Social Work Practice,” The Social Service Review, 76.3: (2002): 480-497. 2 Fred Besthorn, (2001). “Transpersonal Psychology and Deep Ecological Philosophy: Exploring Linkages and Applications for Social Work,” Journal of Religion in the Social Services, 20.1-2: (2001): 23-44. 3 See, for example, Ariel Salleh, “Deeper than Deep Ecology: The Eco-feminist Connection,” Environmental Ethics 6 (1984): 340-45 4 Ynestra King, “What is ecofeminism?” The Nation (December 12, 1987): 702, 730-31. 5 See Karen Warren, Ecofeminist Philosophy: A Western Perspective on What It Is and Why It Matters (Lanham, MD: Rowman, 2000); see also Vandana Shiva and Maria Mies, Ecofeminism (Halifax: Fernwood, 1993).

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Ecofeminists also offer an incisive critique of globalization and the changing politics of

international trade, especially with respect to the burden borne by the global south.1 Because

feminist theory has long been relevant to social work, facilitating analyses of societal inequalities

involving intersecting systems of oppression, ecofeminism is an obvious and highly relevant

theory for environmental social work scholars to choose when linking environmental and social

issues. Besthorn and McMillen believe the interrogation of the human-nature split, analysis of

systemic oppressions, and strong social justice stance of ecofeminism make it a significant

theory for a revision of the ecological model.2 And Mack-Canty sees ecofeminism as especially

suited for reintegrating the nature-culture divide that has proven problematic both socially and

environmentally.3 As Germain and Gitterman suggest, “Ecofeminism perspectives deepen and

enrich ecological theory and the life-model practice.”4

Like ecofeminism, social ecology views all dominance-submission, superior-inferior

hierarchies as socially constructed phenomena serving institutional purposes. And social ecology

makes associations between social and environmental problems: “The way human beings deal

with each other as social beings is crucial to addressing the ecological crisis.”5 However, this is

where the similarities end. Recognizing the destructive impact that the growth imperative of our

capitalistic economy has on the environment, social ecology advocates a politico-moral reform

and societal reconstruction in an ecological direction. This reform takes the shape of synthesizing

1 See Vandana Shiva, Earth Democracy: Justice, Sustainability and Peace (Cambridge, MA: South End, 2005); Ariel Salleh, Ecofeminism as Politics: Nature, Marx and the Postmodern (London: Zed Books, 1997); and Asoka Bandarage, Women, Population and Global Crisis: A Political-economic Analysis (London: Zed Books, 1997). 2 See Fred Besthorn and Diane McMillen, “The Oppression of Women and Nature: Ecofeminism as a Framework for an Expanded Ecological Social Work,” Families in Society, 83.3 (2002): 221-232 3 Colleen Mack-Canty, “Third-wave Feminism and the Need to Reweave the Nature/Culture Duality,” NWSA Journal 16.3 (2004): 154-179 4 Alex Gitterman and Carel B. Germain, The Life Model of Social Work Practice: Advances in Theory & Practice, 3rd ed. (New York: Columbia UP, 2008) 69. 5 Murray Bookchin, “What Is Social Ecology?” Environmental Philosophy: From Animal Rights to Radical Ecology, eds. M. Zimmerman, J.B. Callicott, G. Sessions, K. Warren, and J. Clark, 3rd ed. (1993: Upper Saddle, NJ: Prentice, 2001) 436-454.

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the natural with the social, viewed as first (biotic) and second (cultural) natures respectively,

through decentralising metropolitan centres into communities adapted to their natural surrounds.

Though social ecology is prepared to invest these eco-municipalities with substantial power and

autonomy, it offers no safeguards against anarchistic machinations that might develop within

such small municipalities,1 nor does it provide any practical steps toward decentralisation.

Further, a “social ecology that fixes its gaze rigidly on the forms of freedom that might exist in

an ideal world neglects the material basis for the actualisation of freedom in a real world and in

real history.”2 Perhaps for these reasons, environmental social workers have been less

enthusiastic about assuming a social ecological position, preferring instead the ethic of care,

analysis of hegemonic power vectors, and situatedness of ecofeminism.

Gaia Hypothesis

If situatedness and power relations form the hallmark of ecofeminism, it is unexpected

interrelations that are central to Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis.3 This ecological hypothesis

proposes that a complex interacting system comprising the biosphere and physical parts of the

earth, for example the hydrosphere, lithosphere, and atmosphere, is what makes the climate and

biogeochemical state of the earth relatively stable. This self-regulating system reduces

temperature variability enough to be conducive to life on earth. Because the global warming

crisis has become increasingly grave, Lovelock has embraced nuclear power as a way to lower

greenhouse gas emissions.4 He discounts biomass fuels, solar energy and wind farms as solutions

because he deems them insufficient technologies to meet planet-wide human energy needs,

1 John Clark, “The Matter of Freedom: Ecofeminist Lessons for Social Ecology,” Environmental Philosophy: From Animal Rights to Radical Ecology, 455-470. 2 Clark, “The Matter of Freedom,” 468. 3 See James Lovelock, Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth (1979: Oxford and New York: Oxford UP, 2000); and James Lovelock, The Ages of Gaia: A Biography of Our Living Earth (New York: Bantam, 1988). Lovelock has since reclassified his Gaia hypothesis as a theory because it has passed several predictive tests. 4 See James Lovelock, Revenge of Gaia: Earth’s Climate in Crisis and the Fate of Humanity (New York: Basic, 2006).

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necessitating a continued reliance on greenhouse gases. Such reliance, according to Lovelock,

will not allow us to reduce our GHG emissions in time to halt global warming. Although

Lovelock is not a name typically invoked by environmental social work scholars because the

application of his “earth as organism” theory to social issues is not readily discernible, the

dangers posed by his recent enthusiasm for nuclear power are. Nuclear power reactors use

uranium which requires considerable fossil fuel burning in the mining and refining process.1

Nuclear sites have the potential to become targets for terrorist attacks, and the uranium is usually

mined by lower income racialised groups who then experience disproportionate cancer rates

related to radioactive exposure.2 Lovelock’s Gaia theory which was gladly adopted by New Age

exponents for its holism, but not so eagerly approved by social theorists for its want of a critical

perspective, now demands consideration as its most recent turn raises questions of toxic exposure

and environmental injustice.

Toxic Exposure and Environmental Justice

Clearly, environmental thought has not developed linearly through time, but has had a more

circular progress involving a multiplicity of voices with significant disagreement. There is,

however, widespread agreement that the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring marked the

beginning of the modern environmental movement. Released in 1962, this work rejected the idea

that nature writing must separate the natural from the social and had as its central concern the

deleterious impact of pesticides and other toxic chemicals on living entities, namely human

beings and nonhuman others. Infused with her scientific acumen, Carson’s detailed account of

poisoning caused by ubiquitous human-made chemical toxins inadvertently challenged corporate

1 See Helen Caldicott, Nuclear Power Is Not the Answer (New York: New Press, 2006). 2 See Susan Dawson, “Navajo Uranium Workers and the Environment: Technological Disaster Survival Strategies” The Global Environmental Crisis, eds. Marie D. Hoff and John G. McNutt (1994; Aldershot, Eng.: Ashgate, 1998) 150-169.

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authority by debunking the “science” underpinning commercial claims of safety, and weakening

the accepted hold industry had on the environment. Carson did not focus on aesthetics,

economics, or recreation, but human rights. “A human being, unlike a laboratory animal living

under rigidly controlled conditions, is never exposed to one chemical alone...we are subject to

multiple exposures...This is a problem of ecology, of interrelationships, of interdependence.”1

Carson’s work prompted readers to question the authority of a government, scientific community

and health care system that would subject human beings to the public health threat of

undetectable chemical poisons many of which are persistent and bioaccumulative.

Steingraber, who traces her environmental lineage to Carson, makes the human rights

claim more explicit by naming the release of known and suspected carcinogens into the

environment an “intolerable” practice and insisting on “the right to protection” for all human

beings.2 In this way Steingraber connects environmental issues with social justice concerns and

simultaneously makes environmental illness (any disease having anthropogenic toxins as an

aetiology) a human rights issue. But Steingraber does not discuss the differential exposure of

human populations to harmful chemicals and consequently her work falls short of making an

environmental justice argument. Although racialised communities in North America suffer a

disproportionate amount of environmental toxins,3 they were for a long period uninterested in the

environmental debates. Environmental concerns were thought to detract from the more pressing

civil rights issues. However, in 1987 a report sponsored by the United Church of Christ

Commission for Racial Justice (UCC-CRJ ), titled Toxic wastes and race in the United States: A

national report on the racial and socio-economic characteristics of communities with hazardous 1 Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (1962: New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2002). 2 Sandra Steingraber, Living Downstream: An Ecologist Looks at Cancer and the Environment (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1997). 3 See Robert Bullard, Dumping in Dixie: Race, Class and Environmental Quality, 3rd ed. (Boulder, CO: Westview, 2000); see also Andil Gosine and Cheryl Teelucksingh, Environmental Justice and Racism in Canada: An Introduction (Toronto: Montgomery, 2008).

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waste sites provided the crucial finding that initiated a movement. Race was found to be the

leading factor in exposure to environmental toxins, and the Reverend Benjamin Chavis, who was

then the executive director of the UCC-CRJ, following publication of this report, coined the term

“environmental racism.” The environmental justice movement was born. Advocates and scholars

affiliated with this movement analyse, expose, and attempt to overcome systemic power

structures that have historically frustrated environmental parity and reform.

The mainstream environmental movement has historically dealt with conservation,

wilderness preservation, endangered species, energy use, reduced consumption, recycling and

overpopulation. This largely anti-urban bias of traditional environmentalism excluded racialised

communities and other marginalized groups from the dialogues emphasizing environments

existing outside of metropolitan centres, privileging discourses of aesthetic natural environs, and

not infrequently recommending urban-rural migration in search of rustic utopias. Certainly,

among the celebrated figures in the environmental pantheon there have been wilderness

advocates holding dystopic views of cities. Environmental justice advocates redefine the

environment as the place where people “live, work, and play” thereby including affordable

housing, workplace safety and neighbourhood resources in their change efforts.1 This form of

environmentalism knits social justice into the fabric of environmental theorizing and politics,

making it an obvious approach to be used by social work theorists and practitioners. In the social

work discipline, group work and dimensions of community organization have their roots in the

settlement house movement. As founder of Hull House in Chicago, Jane Addams worked

tirelessly advocating for labour reform, factory inspection, tenement house regulation, justice for

African Americans and recent immigrants, women’s rights, and research to determine factors

1 Patrick Novotny, Where We Live, Work and Play: The Environmental Justice Movement and the Struggle for a New Environmentalism (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2000).

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associated with poverty and crime.1 Her efforts would suggest she was an early environmental

justice advocate, and social workers today, who continue her work by addressing urban

environmental issues through advocacy, education, policy change, and community organizing,

deepen their approach with an understanding of environmental justice and environmental racism.

More recently the environmental justice lens has begun to focus on international issues

such as climate change, water scarcity, deforestation, diminishing biodiversity, long-range

transboundary air pollution, transboundary export of hazardous wastes, and population control

among others. Attached to each of these concerns are the disproportionate environmental harm

generated by the North and the related challenges suffered by the South. Here the terms North

and South reflect not only global geography but also the superior military and economic power

of First World nations as opposed to the “historically determined social and economic

conditions” of people in Asia, Africa, and Latin America “resulting from their colonial and

imperial past.”2 The more powerful nations of the North enjoy the economic benefits of Third

World environmental plunder at a relatively safe distance from the industrial pollution they

produce in the South. There is a need for international cooperation to create a framework for

environmental protection that ensures the safety of all the world’s citizens, but consistent with

any inequality the powerful party, in this case the North, is customarily loath to relinquish its

advantages.

Indigenous Knowledge and Bioregionalism

1 Louise Knight, Citizen: Jane Addams and the Struggle for Democracy (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2005). It is important to note not all scholars agree that Addams was entirely supportive of African Americans. Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn, Black Neighbors: Race and the Limits of Reform in the American Settlement House Movement, 1890-1945 (Chapell Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1993) 10, makes the vital point that the founding figures of the settlement house movement, including Addams, “to varying degrees all described the character of blacks as somehow maladjusted and their culture as lacking. The harsh system of slavery, they believed, had obliterated morality, family integrity, social organization, and even culture and civilization itself.” 2 Ruchi Anand, International Environmental Justice: A North-South Dimension (Brookfield, VT: Ashgate, 2004) 1.

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As global corporatization continues to enclose what remains of the world commons through the

commodification of water, the development of terminator seeds,1 and the patenting of naturally

occurring plants, invaluable lessons can be learned from Indigenous knowledge (also called

traditional ecological knowledge, TEK) and practices. Indigenous knowledge does not belong to

any one culture but exists among any community having a lengthy history of a material and

spiritual relationship with its land base.2 While bioregionalism, a strand of western

environmentalism, has at its core a politics of place and the importance of living an

environmentally rooted life,3 it lacks the cultural dimension and historical continuity of TEK.

Bioregionalism is a retrospective recreation of a lost relationship to the land in which Westerners

are attempting to become Indigenous to place, whereas TEK has been transmitted orally through

generations of peoples and communities intimately knowledgeable about the land. TEK requires

each Indigenous community member be responsible through reciprocal relations with all other

members, human and nonhuman, belonging to one’s surrounds or bioregion. This is a “Native

Land Ethic,” and if one is to relocate “as an individual or as part of a group, one is expected to

practice this bioethic in a new environment respectful of the bioregion in its biodiversity.”4

While the science and language of ecology has surfaced in popular environmental discourse,

moving away from the earlier failed linearity applied to ecosystems and embracing instead an

1 This is a term used for seeds that have been genetically engineered to produce sterile plants, forcing dependency on the companies that manufacture and supply them. Supporters argue terminator seeds are a fair way to protect technological innovations and recover research expenses associated with engineering new plant species. Opponents are concerned about environmental effects, health issues, and the reported inequities and ecological imperialism experienced by poor farmers in the global south who are penalized for not using terminator seeds and are losing control over their traditional economies involving locally adapted species. 2 Robin W. Kimmerer, “Native Knowledge for Native Ecosystems,” Journal of Forestry 98.8 (2000): 4-9. 3 See Kirkpatrick Sale, “Principles of Bioregionalism,” The Case against the Global Economy: And for a Turn toward the Local eds. Jerry Mander and Edward Goldsmith (San Francisco: Sierra Club, 1996); and Gary Snyder, The Practice of the Wild (San Francisco: North Point, 1990). 4 M.A. Jaimes*Guerrero, “‘Patriarchal Colonialism’ and Indigenism: Implications for Native Feminist Spirituality and Native Womanism,” Hypatia 18.2 (2003): 66.

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understanding of interdependence, it still diminishes the “role of intuitive insight or vision” that

is “the heart of Aboriginal science.”1

Because scientific knowledge lacks the compass of Indigenous knowledge (an equally

empirical and more qualitative orientation), non-Indigenous parties, often research arms of

government, have begun seeking TEK to enhance their understanding of ecosystems in this era

of environmental management. Some Aboriginal communities in Canada have chosen to share

their Indigenous knowledge believing that doing so would protect their homelands and advance

land claims rights.2 Unfortunately, TEK is often appropriated by non-Aboriginal cultures in the

service of solving the growing environmental crisis. This non-cooperative use of TEK to

accomplish the objectives of the dominant culture represents a reinscribing of colonial and

imperial practices3 and contravenes Article 29 of the UN Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous

Peoples.4 Even collaborative attempts to bring together western and Indigenous knowledge are

difficult because Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal understanding of the nonhuman can be

considerably different. For non-Indigenous groups preservation often describes a practice of

separating humankind from nonhuman spaces and species; however, Indigenous peoples have

“demonstrated that it is possible for human societies to evolve with a detailed knowledge of their

terrain, their geography, and the wildlife in their environment.”5 From an Aboriginal perspective

1 Marlene B. Castellano, “Ethics of Aboriginal Research,” Journal of Aboriginal Health 1.1 (2004): 104; see also Milton M.R. Freeman, “The Nature and Utility of Traditional Ecological Knowledge,” Northern Perspectives 20.1 (1992): 9-12. 2 Deborah McGregor, “Traditional Ecological Knowledge and Sustainable Development: Towards Coexistence,” In the Way of Development: Indigenous Peoples, Life Projects and Globalization eds. Mario Blaser, Harvey Feit and Glenn McRae (New York: Zed, 2004) 72-91. 3 McGregor, “Traditional Ecological Knowledge and Sustainable Development,” 72-91. 4 Article 29 states: “Indigenous peoples are entitled to the recognition of the full ownership, control and protection of their cultural and intellectual property. They have the right to special measures to control, develop and protect their sciences, technologies and cultural manifestations, including human and other genetic resources, seeds, medicines, knowledge of the properties of fauna and flora, oral traditions, literatures, designs and visual and performing arts.” 5 See George Erasmus, “A Native Viewpoint” Endangered Spaces: The Future for Canada’s Wilderness ed. Monte Hummel (Toronto: Key Porter, 1989) 97.

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the dominant culture’s preservationist approach could seem more neglectful than protective.

According to the Chisasibi Cree worldview, “When you don’t use a resource, you lose respect

for it.”1 Respect in the Indigenous paradigm usually comprises four fundamental and integrated

elements: community of all beings sharing a bioregion, connectedness, consideration of unborn

generations and humility.2 The following chapter will investigate Aboriginal-non-Aboriginal

issues relevant to the environmental and historical focus of this thesis.

1 This statement is made by a Cree man quoted in Firket Berkes, Sacred Ecology: Traditional Ecological Knowledge and Resource Management (Philadelphia: Taylor, 1999) 87. 2 See Ronald L. Trosper, “Traditional American Indian Economic Policy, American Indian Culture and Research Journal 19.1 (1995): 65-95.

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Chapter Four: Constructions of Indigenous Peoples in the Americas We think of prehistoric North America as inhabited by the Indians, and have based on

this a sort of recognition of ownership on their part. But this attitude is hardly warranted. The Indians were too few to count. Their use of the resources of the continent was scarcely more than that by crows and wolves, the development of it nothing.

Stephen Leacock Because conceptualisations of the nonhuman are thought to influence the way societies interact

not only with the said nonhuman but also other humans both from within and outside one’s

cultural or national group, this chapter explores beliefs Europeans had about Indigenous peoples

during early contact, beliefs that have persisted in various, and sometimes attenuated but

nonetheless pernicious, forms since this time. When the French made contact with the Wendat in

1609 and later entered into a trade alliance and initiated proselytising projects, they possessed a

historical understanding and pre-existing cultural lens through which Aboriginal peoples were

viewed. It is important to appreciate early European constructions of Indigenous peoples of the

Americas because they represent part of the cultural baggage that the French brought to their

interactions with the Wendat which hampered cross-cultural relations and reduced the possibility

of meaningful contact. While Wolf and Said are right to argue the unfeasibility of studying a

society in isolation for a project of this kind would necessarily and artificially neglect the

actuality of innumerable cultural interpenetrations,1 it is equally problematic to examine a case

study involving Wendat-French culture contact without first giving ample thought to the ways

European narratives produced circulating discourses of alterity that emerged among theologians

and filtered into the minds of the nobility, explorers and settlers. The various constructions of

Aboriginal peoples in what is now Canada began with the French who had been evidently

influenced by writings of explorers and theologians who were their predecessors or 1 See Eric Wolf, Europe and the People Without History (1982: Berkeley: U of California P, 1997); and Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage, 1994).

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contemporaries. The uneasy Aboriginal-non-Aboriginal relations in Canada today, though also

profoundly influenced by more than two centuries of British imperialism, stem in part from

problematic sixteenth- and seventeenth century French-Aboriginal relations. These relations

which are strongly influenced by conceptualisations of the “Other” are also inextricably

connected with ideas about the nonhuman world.

A Recent Apology

On June 11, 2008, Prime Minister Stephen Harper publicly apologized to Aboriginal peoples of

Canada for the government policy of mandatory removal of First Nations, Inuit, and Métis

children from their homes, families, communities and culture and placing them in residential

schools. My partner and I both having worked in First Nations communities, having seen the

residential school legacy of multigenerational trauma, arranged our work schedules that

Wednesday so that we could watch the televised apology together. We were mesmerized by this

historic event, however long overdue, the apology having a greater resonance for him, an

Aboriginal man whose elder family members were residential school survivors. The first

federally funded Canadian residential school opened in 1874. Most of the schools were closed

approximately a century later, with the last school closing its doors in 1996. More than 150,000

Aboriginal children were forced to attend these Christian schools which were largely assimilative

institutions masquerading as educative facilities. Children were required to speak either French

or English and were punished for speaking their own language, many experienced physical and

sexual abuse, and a large percentage who attended during the early period of residential schools

died of tuberculosis due to overcrowding, inadequate sanitation, and deficient medical care.1

Despite the warning of a senior official with the Department of Indian Affairs in 1907 that

1 See J.R. Miller, Shingwauk’s Vision: A History of Canadian Residential Schools (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1996); and John S. Milloy, A National Crime: The Canadian Government and the Residential School System 1879-1986 (Winnipeg: U of Manitoba P, 1999).

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residential schools were failing to quarantine children with contagious diseases from healthy

children, no effort to separate children was made and they consequently died in disturbing

numbers for the next four decades.1

Prime Minister Harper was right to describe the treatment of Aboriginal children in

residential schools as a “sad chapter in our history,” and the Canadian government’s recognition

that “the consequences of the Indian residential schools’ policy were profoundly negative and

that this policy has had a lasting and damaging impact on aboriginal culture, heritage and

language” is important.2 However, the Canadian government’s refusal to describe residential

school practices as genocidal could be perceived as rendering the apology incomplete, though no

less historic. Article II of the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of

the Crime of Genocide (CPPCG) defines genocide as

any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.3

Yet through manoeuvres of sophistry and self-preservation efforts, the Canadian government

endorsed a definition of genocide that included only mass homicide, not acts of cultural

genocide.4 In 1952 Canada adopted aspects of the CPPCG into the Canadian Criminal Code but

notably omitted the following parts of Article II: “causing serious bodily or mental harm to

members of the group” and “forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”

1 J. Milloy, National Crime. 2 Prime Minister Stephen Harper, Apology for Indian Residential Schools, Parliament Hill, Ottawa, 11 June 2008. 3 United Nations, Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, Article 2, entry into force 12 Jan. 1951. 4 See Roland D. Chrisjohn, Tanya Wasacase, Lisa Nussey, Andrea Smith, Marc Legault, Pierre Loiselle and Mathieu Bourgeois, “Genocide and Indian Residential Schooling: The Past is the Present,” Canada and International Humanitarian Law: Peacekeeping and War Crimes in the Modern Era, eds. R.D. Wiggers & A.L. Griffiths (Halifax: Dalhousie UP, 2002).

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Aboriginal scholars suggest the deliberate omission of these two points was to protect Canada

from its own official policy of compulsory relocation of Aboriginal children to Indian residential

schools, where many students were forced not only to abandon their culture and language on

threat of corporal punishment, but also experienced grisly forms of abuse.1

The apology as it stands is a powerful step toward an Aboriginal-non-Aboriginal

rapprochement, the Canadian government acknowledging its flagrant oppressive and racist

practices. However, the apology allows the state to position itself as a repentant political force

moving toward benignity without having to concede international law as outlined in the CPPCG,

which would categorise Indian residential school policy as genocidal. The manifestation of this

brand of neoliberalism while not entirely reprehensible masks persistent detrimental state effects

and simultaneously makes it more difficult to challenge systemic inequities and institutional

practices after such a display of atonement and seeming beneficence. Even the fact that

Aboriginal leaders were not originally granted an opportunity to respond officially in the House

of Commons chamber reflects the continued lack of parity. However, in a last-minute decision,

House leaders agreed to permit Aboriginal speakers to reply on the record in the House of

Commons. Former residential school student, Assembly of First Nations National Chief Phil

Fontaine was among several who took the floor. He said poignantly, “For the generation that will

follow us, we bear witness today…. Never again will this House consider us the Indian problem

just for being who we are.” But an apology alone does not undo the “web of oppression which

obstructs economic, social and political mobility” of Aboriginal peoples in Canada.2

1 See Pierre Loiselle, “Like Weeds in a Garden: Genocide, International Law and Canada’s ‘Indian Problem,’” The Dominion: News from the Grassroots, 40, Original Peoples, [Canada] 12 Oct. 2006 < http://www.dominionpaper.ca/original_peoples/2006/10/12/like_weeds.html>; see also Roland Chrisjohn and Sherri Young, The Circle Game: Shadows and Substance in the Indian Residential School Experience in Canada, rev. ed. (Pentiticton, BC: Theytus, 1997). 2 See Joshua Miller and Ann Marie Garran, “The Web of Institutional Racism,” Smith College Studies in Social Work, 77.1 (2007): 33-67.

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Representations and Constructions of Aboriginal Peoples

Aboriginal peoples have been disparaged for “being who [they] are” long before Canada became

a country. Interrogating the history of this subjugative treatment proves instructive in the

understanding of current Aboriginal-non-Aboriginal issues. Berkhofer was among the first

historians to develop a thesis pertaining to the racist preconceptions European newcomers held

regarding the original inhabitants of the Americas.1 The term “Indian” itself is based on the

faulty geography of Columbus, and then it was misapplied pan-Indigenously to all peoples of the

Americas, reducing over two thousand cultures to a single people, disregarding cultural, social

and linguistic diversity for the purpose of making simplistic, often invidious, comparisons

between Europeans and first peoples. For this reason Berkhofer refers to the “Indian” as a

“White invention.”2 As Francis has identified, it is not uncommon for two largely disparate

cultures, such as those of the three major European imperial presences in the Americas (Spanish,

British, and French) and the variety of Indigenous nations, to interpret each other crudely,

sometimes stereotypically. “At its best, in a situation of equality, this might be seen as a phase in

a longer process of familiarization.” 3 Unfortunately, this ideal form of culture contact did not

occur in the Americas as European nations typically imposed their stereotypes on the original

inhabitants exhibiting both political and ideological condescension.

Representations and constructions of the “Indian” have taken a variety of forms spanning

the spectrum from ignoble to noble savage, the most recent incarnation being that of the

“ecological Indian” emerging in the 1960s.4 The truth about all stereotypes, positive or negative,

1 See Robert F. Berkhofer, The White Man’s Indian: Images of the American Indian from Columbus to the Present (New York: Random, 1978). 2 Berkhofer, White Man’s Indian, 3. 3 Daniel Francis, The Imaginary Indian (Vancouver, BC: Arsenal Pulp, 1992) 221. 4 See Shepard Krech III, The Ecological Indian: Myth and History (New York: Norton, 1999). Krech discusses the media image of the Crying Indian first used on Earth Day in 1971 to connect putative American Native conservation ethics, “tribalism,” and anti-technology with the environmental movement.

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is that they are damning: They reduce entire groups and peoples to passive recipients of

xenophobic projections often imposed by a dominant culture. Stereotyped persons are divested

of their individual characteristics and are expected to operate within their narrowly defined

parameters of otherness. The “ecological Indian” stereotype though ostensibly celebrating a

special relationship Indigenous peoples are thought to have with their land base at the same time

denies them the right to evolve, the right to adopt modern technology, the right to enjoy urban

living.1 In actuality the “ecological Indian” is just another objectified other, a media image,

subordinate to the non-Indigenous counterpart, the white male environmentalist subject

responsible for constructing the representation.2 As ecofeminist Val Plumwood has asserted

hegemonic centrism, which forms the core of stereotypes, invariably involves a system of

valuation where the producer of stereotypes occupies the centre and classifies marginal Others

pejoratively, and secondarily in relation to this centre.3 The use of stereotypes and the related

notion of fixity, in the sense of tracing the ahistorical lineaments of cultural and ethnic difference

in the Other, are central to colonial discourse and practice, buttressing claims of vice and

disorder in the non-European.4

Voyages, Territorial Appropriation and Cultural Deprecation

On October 12, 1492 when Columbus first arrived in the Americas believing himself to be on the

Asiatic continent, he encountered the Taino peoples who were the Indigenous inhabitants of the

1 For an interesting discussion of this issue see George Erasmus, “A Native Viewpoint” Endangered Spaces: The Future for Canada’s Wilderness ed. Monte Hummel (Toronto: Key Porter, 1989) 92-98; see also Wendy Donner, “Animal Rights and Native Hunters: A Critical Analysis of Wenzel’s Defence,” Canadian Issues in Environmental Ethics, eds. Alex Wellington, Allan Greenbaum and Wendy Cragg (Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 1997) 153-164; see also Ken Coates, A Global History of Indigenous Peoples: Struggle and Survival (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004) 9. 2 See Yoosun Park’s excellent analysis of the concept of culture in social work intervention and the hegemonic discursive paradigm in “Culture as Deficit: A Critical Discourse Analysis of the Concept of Culture in Contemporary Social Work Discourse,” Journal of Sociology and Social Welfare, 32.3 (2005): 11-33. 3 See Val Plumwood, Environmental Culture: The Ecological Crisis of Reason (New York: Routledge, 2002). 4 See Homi K. Bhabha’s discussion of the role “fixity” plays in constructing otherness in H.K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 2004).

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Caribbean islands. His description of the Taino peoples in his letter to Luis de Santangel, King

Ferdinand’s finance minister and comptroller of household expenditures, and in his journal entry

are significant, revealing not only an understandable failure to comprehend the Indigenous

islanders upon first contact but also an unwillingness to entertain any possibility of cultural

equality, for he was swift to cast the Taino peoples as suitable “servants.” Indeed these two

documents reflect both the Eurocentrism of the age and the Spanish chauvinism of the author,

while simultaneously serving as a kind of inadvertent prototype (replicated by Cartier in “New

France”) for wayward international relations in the so-called New World. Columbus’s first act

when stepping ashore was to ask his captains and shipmates “to bear solemn witness that in the

presence of them all I was taking possession of this island for their Lord and Lady the King and

Queen....”1 During this early period of exploration it was customary for the invading nation to

erect crosses at various landfalls as a claim to land title, an act essential for the declaration of

sovereignty.2 Columbus was to write during this first voyage, “I am leaving a cross planted

everywhere I land in these islands and territories”3 “to indicate that Your Majesties are in

possession of this land, and principally as a sign of Our Lord Jesus Christ and to the honour of

Christendom.”4

Planting crosses was one element of the two-pronged practice of territorial appropriation.

Renaming places—and people—was the other. Columbus wrote to Santangel, “the first island I

found I gave the name San Salvador in memory of his majesty who miraculously has given all

1 Christopher Columbus, The Journal of Christopher Columbus, trans. Cecil Jane (1960: New York: Bonanza, 1989) 94. 2 See L.C. Green, “Claims to Territory in Colonial America,” The Law of Nations and the New World, eds. L.C. Green and Olive P. Dickason (Edmonton, AB: U of Alberta P, 1993) for an excellent discussion of these “symbolic acts of possession.” 3 Christopher Columbus, The Four Voyages of Christopher Columbus, trans. Cecil Jane, (New York: Dover, 1988) 129 4 Columbus, Four Voyages, 137.

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this; the Indians call it Guanahani.”1 The Taino peoples are reduced to generic “Indians” and

their homeland Europeanized and Christianized through an act of “logomancy.”2 This process of

possession and renaming reflects the imperial objectives of the delegates of European nation-

states, and each time Europeans claimed title to various lands they were establishing, inscribing,

and reinscribing their belief in their superiority, while implicitly casting the Indigenous peoples

as inferior “others.” Increasingly the world began to be contained and contoured for Europe

through the cartographic information system which includes not only maps, but also ship logs,

explorers’ journals, the delineation of territories, and the raising of flags in newly appropriated

regions. This cartographic method is governed by a classificatory scheme that reveals a politics

of exclusion. Territory belongs to one nation-state and not another, especially not a “lawless”

people, and persons belong within the fold of Christianity or outside it. “Marking land and

marking bodies are related activities; not only did land seem to determine much of a putatively

biological nature, bodies themselves became markers of foreign lands.”3 For imperial powers to

colonise places and peoples, it was necessary to find them foreign and Columbus’s description of

the Taino peoples as “the colour of the people of the Canaries, neither black nor white”4 serves

this purpose. It is important to emphasize however that the tendency toward incommensurability,

principally as it pertained to European and non-European peoples, had an opposite thrust toward

commensurability (even if at times forced), in which “New World” flora and fauna species and

landscapes were found to be similar to “Old World” experiences.5 This tension between

1 Christopher Columbus, “Letter to Santangel, Feb. 15 1493,” trans. Cecil Jane, The Four Voyages of Christopher Columbus (New York: Dover, 1988) 2 See Ronald Wright’s discussion of European attempts to achieve cultural transfer from the “Old World” to the “New” through renaming Indigenous places in Stolen Continents (1992: New York: First Mariner, 2005). 3 Nicholas B. Dirks, “Introduction: Colonialism and Culture,” Colonialism and Culture, ed. N.B. Dirks (1992: Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2004) 6. 4 Christopher Columbus, Four Voyages, 24. 5 See Anthony Pagden, European Encounters with the New World: From Renaissance to Romanticism (New Haven: Yale UP, 1993) for an interesting discussion of this point.

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commensurability and incommensurability operated to enhance the appeal of overseas projects in

the Americas, legitimizing wholesale takeover of lands, while providing the confidence afforded

by recognizable, indeed often appealing, descriptions of the nonhuman other.

From the early fourteenth century through the era of Columbus’s voyages to the

Americas, Europeans believed the world was God’s property and the Pope being His authorized

representative had jurisdiction to distribute land. The European practice of seizing territories not

belonging to other Christian nations was predicated on the conception of the Indigenous peoples

as inferior “Others” and it was given credence by a series of papal bulls which divided the world

yet to be discovered by European states principally between Spain and Portugal. But the bull

Inter Caetera of May 4, 1493, issued by Pope Alexander VI made considerable changes to

previous bulls, changes that were highly advantageous for Spain. This bull drew a territorial line

from the “Arctic pole…to the Antarctic pole” and “to be distant one hundred leagues towards the

west and south from any of the islands commonly known as the Azores and Cape Verde”1

granting to Spain exclusive right to possess all lands to the west of this line. Land title was not

contingent upon “discovery” by Spanish envoys as the Bull stipulated both “found and to be

found” regions belonged to Spain the only proviso being that the said territories not “be in the

actual possession of any Christian king or prince.”2

Like other edicts sanctioned by the Vatican, the Inter Caetera bull instituted Christian

dominion in the designated territories and promoted the subjugation of non-Christian peoples.

Indigenous peoples have found this bull to be most damaging and have fought to have it

cancelled since 1992 when the Indigenous Law Institute began a global campaign asking Pope

John Paul II for the formal revocation of the 1493 bull. In July this year an International Council

1 “The Inter Caetera,” European Treaties Bearing on the History of the United States and its Dependencies to 1648, ed. Frances Gardiner Davenport (Washington, DC: Carnegie Institution of Washington, 1917) 76. 2 “The Inter Caetera,” 76.

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of Thirteen Indigenous Grandmothers visited the Vatican and requested three bulls be rescinded,

among them was the Inter Caetera. Indigenous peoples have not yet succeeded in having the bull

revoked, but they identify it as the main edict that countenanced the exploitation and destruction

of the first peoples of the Americas. At the time Europeans learned of America the binary

classification of peoples based on their religious membership, whether they were Christian or

pagan was a powerful idea having wide circulation, and the two terms typically carried notions

of civility and barbarity respectively.1 When Columbus wrote of the Taino peoples that they “all

go naked as their mothers bore them,” he was not simply recording an observation but to some

extent was manipulating the heathen motif to demonstrate that the Tainos were a people

“deficient in everything” who could “easily be made Christians, for it appeared to me that they

had no creed.”2

European travellers to the “New World” often reacted with profound contempt toward the

sacred practices of the Indigenous societies. The convention of voyage literature was to describe

the first peoples as lacking any true religion3 and to find in their ceremonies and rituals evidence

of devil worship.4 A well-known adage described the peoples of the “New World” as “sans roy,

sans foy, sans loy,”5 and this derogatory saw was used to categorize the first peoples as savages

lacking in “Old World” civility. The stereotype of the savage who was faithless, lawless and

1 See Peter Watson’s discussion of this point in P. Watson, Ideas: A History of Thought and Invention, from Fire to Freud (New York: Harper, 2006); see also Steven Newcomb’s insightful discussion about US federal Indian law which he claims is at present still premised on the centuries-old distinction between Christians and heathens in S. Newcomb, Pagans in the Promised Land: Decoding the Doctrine of Christian Discovery (Golden, CO: Fulcrum, 2008). 2 Christopher Columbus, The Journal of Christopher Columbus, 23-24. 3 See Olive P. Dickason, Myth of the Savage: And the Beginnings of French Colonialism in North America (Edmonton, AB: U of Alberta P, 1984); see also Robert Berkhofer, “White Conceptions of Indians,” Handbook of North American Indians, ed. W. C. Sturtevant, vol. 4: History of Indian-White Relations (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institute, 1978). 4 See André Thevet, The New Found Worlde or Antarctike (1568: New York: Da Capo Press, 1971). 5 Christopher Columbus, The Four Voyages of Christopher Columbus, 60; Jacques Cartier, The Voyages of Jacques Cartier, trans. H.P. Biggar, intr. Ramsay Cook (Ottawa: Acland, 1924) 161; Samuel de Champlain, Works of Samuel de Champlain, trans. H.P. Biggar, vol. 2 (Toronto: Champlain Society, 1922-1936) 46.

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lived with a complete absence of social order created two basic representations of Indigenous

peoples: Either they were brutish, disorderly, and indistinguishable from wild beasts or they were

childlike and innocent, simply lacking in Christian understanding.1 Both representations formed

part of the legitimization of European colonial and imperial practices, for peoples who lived

beyond the pale of civility and Christianity were not recognized as having rightful autonomous

societies. Perhaps the most pernicious expression of the savage stereotype is the cannibal, whom

both Columbus and Vespucci reported encountering during their first voyage to the “New

World.”2 The portrayal of the cannibal together with descriptions of human sacrifice, more than

anything else perpetuated the characterization of Indigenous peoples as ferocious evoking the

legendary European “Wild Man.”3

The “Wild Man,” “Barbarism” and Conquest

From the biblical epoch through the seventeenth century, the idea of the Wild Man was

connected to those areas of the physical world that were beyond the boundaries of domestication.

In the Renaissance period the Wild Man epitomized all that was diametrically opposed to the

Christian definition of civilised existence.4 The putative wild peoples practiced wanton sex,

lacked regulating social and economic institutions, and lived without institutionalised religion.

Repeated in the voyage literature is the trope of the “barbarous” Indigenous peoples who are

1 See Dickason’s excellently researched thesis on this topic replete with magnificent illustrative images, Myth of the Savage. 2 The term “canibales” appears first in Columbus’s The First Voyage in his description of the Caribs (p. 122), but it became popularized and more readily associated with Indigenous peoples of the Americas after the publication of Vespucci’s writings: see Amerigo Vespucci, The First Four Voyages: Reprinted in Facsimile and Translated from the Rare Original Edition (Florence, 1505-06) (London: Barnard Quaritch, 1893) 13; see also David Beers Quinn, “New Geographical Horizons: Literature,” First Images of America: The Impact of the New World on the Old, ed. F. Chiappelli, vol. 2 (Berkeley: U of California P, 1976) 638-40. 3 See Andre Thevet’s The New Found Worlde, or Antartike, in which he claims “the custom of the Americans is to eate their enemies” (p. 59) and alternately refers to Indigenous peoples as “Wild Men” and “barbarians.” 4 See Hayden White “The Forms of Wildness: Archaeology of an Idea,” The Wild Man within: An Image in Western Thought from the Renaissance to Romanticism, eds. Edward J. Dudley and Maximillian E. Novak (Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 1972).

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gluttonous, lascivious, promiscuous, and unabashedly deficient in sexual decorum.1

Unfortunately, Montaigne’s progressive, level-headed response of cultural relativism2 was not a

widely held position, and the majority of Europeans continued to associate New World peoples

with barbarism and the Wild Man figure. This led to the vexing but relevant question of the

ontological status of the non-Europeans. Were they human or subhuman? Did they have souls?

Such questions ultimately stemmed from the desire to exploit first peoples through slavery, and

the sadistic urge to massacre those unsuitable for exploitation.3 Europeans usually situated

Indigenous peoples outside of Christian natural law,4 because cultural differences made it

impossible for them to meet specific European criteria for ethical behaviour. From Indigenous

customs Europeans inferred a want of rationality and classified the non-Europeans as not quite

human but, through conversion to Christianity, capable of becoming human. The Christian

underpinnings of innumerable early modern European texts together with the tendency to invoke

the argument of natural right produced a philosophical exclusion of Indigenous peoples from

acceptable standards of human activity which was then used to rationalise colonial and imperial

activities such as slavery, appropriation of foreign lands and their resources, and genocide.

To be sure, this natural right argument was used as a justification for combat when the

standard grounds for a just war were absent. European imperial phalanxes seldom suffered

1 For example, these ideas are found in the voyage writings of Columbus, Vespucci, Cartier, Champlain and the documents produced by Jesuit missionaries. 2 See Montaigne’s essay “On the Cannibals” The Essays: A Selection, trans. and ed. M.A. Screech (1987; London: Penguin, 2004) in which he writes after having had an opportunity to meet with a Tupinamba person brought to France from Brazil, “We should be similarly wary of accepting common opinions; we should judge them by the ways of reason not by popular vote” (p. 79); and further about Indigenous peoples of the Americas he writes, “there is nothing savage or barbarous about those peoples, but that every man calls barbarous anything he is not accustomed to” (p. 82). 3 See Bartolomé de Las Casas, A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies, trans. and ed. Nigel Griffin (New York: Penguin, 1992) 15, for a grisly description of Spanish violence in Indigenous settlements: “They forced their way into native settlements, slaughtering everyone they found there, including small children, old men, pregnant women, …. They hacked them to pieces.” 4 This refers to natural law as discussed by Aristotle in Politics and encompasses the Aristotelian belief in subhuman natural slaves. It also suggests Aristotelian natural law modified by the Augustinian belief in salvation for humankind that is to be found in divine law and grace, through faith in Christ.

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motiveless attacks by Indigenous communities, and the Old World metropoles could not be said

to be at risk of Indigenous invasion. To circumvent the dilemma of perpetrating an unjust war, it

was necessary to invent the rationalization that would validate overseas violence. One branch of

medieval thought maintained that a Christian ruler could rightfully declare war on non-Christians

who rejected papal authority. This sweeping claim was decried by critics who deemed the refusal

by non-Europeans to accept papal authority inadequate grounds to substantiate war. One such

critic was Francisco de Vitoria, an early sixteenth-century Dominican scholar and theologian of

public and international law, who thought it was not only wrong to engage in an unjust war

against Indigenous peoples but also to take possession of a territory already inhabited. To the

familiar argument that the New World peoples lacked reason, Vitoria offered the rebuttal that

they “possess a certain rational order in their affairs” and “they have properly organized cities, a

recognizable form of marriage, magistrates, rulers, laws, industry, commerce, all of which

require the use of reason.”1 Juan Gines de Sepulveda, a Dominican theologian, philosopher and

contemporary of Vitoria, opposed his views proffering Aristotle’s theory of natural slavery as a

just cause, contending that the inherent inferiority of Indigenous peoples evidenced by their

forms of worship, charges of anthropophagy, and other offences legitimated not only war but

enslavement also. Almost a century later, Grotius was to reiterate the attitude of his predecessor

Sepulveda stating it is just to declare war against those who are outside of natural law: “For of

such Barbarians, and rather Beasts than Men, may be fitly said…that War against such is natural;

the justest War is that which is undertaken against wild rapacious Beasts, and next to it is that

against Men who are like Beasts.”2 It must be emphasized the division between barbarians and

1 Cited in Anthony Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man: The American Indian and the Origins of Comparative Ethnology (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1982) 68. 2 Hugo Grotius, The Rights of War and Peace, ed. Richard Tuck, vol. 2, book 2 (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2005) 1024.

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civilized persons in early modern times can be traced to Greek thought which held anyone who

was not Greek to be barbaric.1 In the sixteenth century in the New World the dividing line for

barbarity was not that separating Greeks from non-Greeks but Christians from non-Christians.

Identity thought of this kind formed the cornerstone of imperialist cultures.

Bartolomé de Las Casas, remorseful conquistador turned Dominican priest, was the most

outspoken advocate of Indigenous rights in the early sixteenth century, vociferously opposing

European brutality in the Americas. He was among the first to recognize signs of a long history

of Indigenous land tenure in the Americas, a fact that has only come to be accepted fairly

recently,2 and his classic Apologética Historia Sumaria written largely in the 1530s, is a richly

ethnological work, comprising an earnest attempt to give an authentic interpretation of

Indigenous peoples, and to defend their culture from European plunderers. Although Las Casas

denounced the cruelty of imperial envoys in the New World, he did not condemn the colonial

presence itself.3 Spanish imperialism was generally sanctioned by critics of European violence in

the Americas because Indigenous peoples were believed to need conversion and civilizing.

Moreover, the supposed failure of New World peoples to use fully their available resources

afforded an imperial right to Old World nations. Las Casas maintained, however, that the

Spanish imperial presence in the New World could only be adequately justified by the impulse to

Christianize Indigenous peoples, and he mitigated the claims of Indigenous civil transgressions

1 See Dickason’s Myth of the Savage. 2 See Olive P. Dickason, Canada’s First Nations: A History of Founding Peoples from Earliest Times (Toronto: McClelland, 1992). 3 Nor did Las Casas extend his concern for Indigenous New World peoples to Africans. Indeed he recommended importing Africans to the New World to ease the Indigenous peoples’ burden under Spanish rule; see Pagden The Fall of Natural Man.

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by underscoring their infrequency and identifying ethically comparable practices and examples

in Europe.1

Sepulveda and Las Casas were the lead figures in the important debate regarding the

conquest and coercive conversion of Indigenous peoples. Las Casas had been instrumental in the

Castilian Crown’s decision to create the New Laws of 1542, which were intended to protect

Indigenous peoples from exploitation and abuse by European landowners in the New World.

These laws were central to a reform movement that attempted to eradicate the system of forced

Indigenous labour and ultimately lead to the abolition of slavery and recognition of Indigenous

peoples as free. Like the 1537 bull of Pope Paul III which was designed to safeguard Indigenous

peoples from Spanish brutality in the colonies by adopting an official Church position that they

are “truly men,” the New Laws of 1542 were largely ignored. Charles I attempted to settle the

controversy by convening a panel of jurists and theologians in the city of Valladolid in 1550.

Sepulveda advanced the Aristotelian argument of natural slavery2 and Las Casas countered with

his position that Indigenous peoples were worthy of full human status based on their ability to

become Christian. Although the debate did not result in a resolution, it did become grist for

French, English, and Dutch anti-Spanish sentiments with foreign writers seizing on Las Casas’s

accounts of Spanish brutality in the New World and promulgating the notion of the Black

Legend.3

1 See Sankar Muthu, Enlightenment against Empire (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2003) 272 for a discussion of this point; see also the Chickasaw author, L. Hogan’s brilliant subversion of the savage Indian trope in her 1995 novel Solar Storms in which she writes that European expansionism and consumerism is “a story of people eating, as toothy and sharp and hungry as the cannibal clan was said to be—eating land, eating people, eating tomorrow.” 2 See Cornelius J. Jaenen, Friend and Foe: Aspects of French-Amerindian Cultural Contact in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Toronto: McClelland, 1976) 15: “In 1510, John Major, a Scottish professor living in Paris, published a justification of Amerindian enslavement and military conquest on the basis of the Aristotelian theory of natural slavery, which greatly influenced Spanish theorists.” 3 See Pagden’s discussion of the Black Legend in his introduction to Bartolome de Las Casas A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies. The term Black Legend was first used by Julian Juderias in his book The Black Legend and Historical Truth written in 1914. In keeping with the anti-Spanish literature that began circulating in the

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Cartier, Champlain, and Eastern North America

It is interesting to observe the different approach to international relations in New France taken

by Champlain and his more imperious predecessor Cartier. While some of this difference can

surely be ascribed to Champlain having learned from Cartier’s errors, it must be conceded that

the circulation of anti-Spanish propaganda in the period between the two explorers’ travels also

had an effect. The French in Champlain’s day were anxious to distinguish their foreign policy

from the alleged cruelty of the Spanish imperialists and desired to develop more humane

interactions with the Aboriginal peoples. Cartier’s voyage writings, on the other hand, reveal a

discourse not unlike that of his contemporaries for its condescension toward Indigenous peoples,

most patently revealed by his kidnapping of First Nations people on both his first and second

voyage and bringing them back to France.1 This distinction in diplomatic approaches is not

intended to suggest a pronounced difference between the cultural lenses of Cartier and

Champlain. In New France both men made use of the customary imperial practices deployed by

European colonisers of the Americas: erecting crosses to claim land for an overseas Crown;

renaming places and sometimes peoples, part of the apparatus of appropriation; reporting a lack

of faith among the Aboriginal nations; and disparaging the first peoples in name (sauvages) and

description portraying them as inferior to the French and not fully human.

On July 24, 1534 Cartier and his men made and erected, in front of a group of Aboriginal

onlookers, a thirty-foot cross at the entrance to Gaspé harbour. On the cross was written “Long

live the King of France.” On this occasion Cartier not only appropriated territory for France but

also seized two Aboriginal men, Taignoagny and Dom Agaya, teen-aged sons of the Stadaconan

sixteenth century, he described Spaniards as “intolerant” and “cruel.” Pejorative descriptions of Spanish imperialism were thought to be instigated by early Protestant Historians. 1 See The Voyages of Jacques Cartier pp. 65-67 and 225-227. Columbus had abducted Indigenous people on his first voyage and taken them back to Spain, and on his second voyage he sent back hundreds of slaves to be sold in Seville markets.

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(a Laurentian Nadouek1 village located at the present site of Quebec City) chief Donnacona, to

bring back to France as tokens of his journey. On July 22, just two days before, Cartier had

written of the Aboriginal people of the Gaspé region, “They are wonderful thieves and steal

everything they can carry off.”2 Despite his subsequent abduction of Donnacona’s sons, the irony

of this remark was not obvious to Cartier. During his second voyage, on May 3, 1536, Cartier

“issued his orders for the seizure of Chief Donnacona, Taignoagny, Dom Agaya and two other

headmen”3 whom he intended to take to France. Cartier’s duplicity and impropriety on this

occasion is only exacerbated by the knowledge that less than a month prior to this kidnapping,

when a great number of Frenchmen were gravely ill with scurvy and Cartier developed an

elaborate façade to prevent Aboriginal peoples from knowing his men’s vulnerability, it was the

Stadaconan Dom Agaya who showed Cartier the cure.4

Because of his ethnocentrism and unshakable worldview, Cartier was to write, when

referring to the Laurentian Nadoueks, “This tribe has no belief in God that amounts to

anything.”5 He was fully aware that these Nadoueks believed “in a god they call Cudouagny,”6

but Cartier’s monotheism did not permit the possibility of an alternative religious expression. He

and his men told the Nadoueks that “their god Cudouagny was a mere fool who did not know

what he was saying.”7 Interpreting Aboriginal religions in this contrapuntal fashion where their

faith is first denied and then compared invidiously with Christianity was customary for the early

chroniclers. Champlain uses precisely the same rhetorical structure when he writes of Aboriginal

1 Following Georges Sioui’s suggestion I am using the term Nadouek instead of Iroquoian. Because Nadouek is the term Algonkian peoples used for what the French termed Iroquoian, Sioui prefers the Aboriginal name Nadouek. 2 Jacques Cartier, The Voyages of Jacques Cartier, trans. H.P. Biggar, intr. Ramsay Cook (Ottawa: Acland, 1924) 63. 3 Cartier, Voyages, (1924), 227. 4 Cartier, Voyages, (1924), 213. Although Biggar’s notes suggest the cure was a tea made from hemlock or white pine, it is now believed that the men drank white cedar bough tea. 5 Cartier, Cartier, Voyages, (1924), 179. 6 Cartier, Voyages, (1924), 179. 7 Cartier, Voyages, (1924), 139.

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peoples almost a century later, “they recognize no divinity, they adore and believe in no God nor

in anything whatsoever, but live like brute beasts. They have indeed some regard for the Devil or

a similar name…”1 Such a statement is hard to reconcile with Fischer’s conviction that

Champlain did not maintain a belief in racial superiority. Fischer makes a similar error when

neutralizing Champlain’s use of the term sauvage throughout his journals, a term Cartier had

used plentifully before him. To establish etymologically that the word sauvage derives from the

Latin word silva, and then insist that it means nothing more than “forest dwellers,”2 as Fischer

has done, is to miss entirely its connotations. As I have discussed, the spatialized Wild Man was

traditionally a forest dweller, a menacing being lurking on the borders of civilization. For this

very reason Champlain’s use of the word sauvage so readily transmutes into other pejorative

expressions such as “brute beasts.” By using the word sauvage, and related terms such as Wild

Man, brute, and bestial, early chroniclers of the New World contributed to the incorrect belief

shared by many Europeans that Indigenous peoples were literally like wild beasts and therefore

hairy. Thevet attempted to disabuse Europeans of this fiction when he wrote of American

Indigenous peoples, to believe “they are hairy all over their bodies as a Lion, a Bear, or such

like…is altogether false and untrue.”3

Eurocentrism and Numerical Supremacy

It was through this ideological framework, set of preconditions, and Eurocentric lens that the

newcomers to the New World saw the first peoples. All cultures practice self-definition and use a

variety of rhetorical and authoritative redundancies to establish some manner of uniqueness. In

1 Samuel de Champlain, The Works of Samuel de Champlain, ed. H.P. Biggar, vol. 3 (Toronto: Champlain Society, 1922-1936) 143. 2 See David Hackett Fischer, Champlain’s Dream (New York: Simon, 2008). 3 See Thevet The New Found Worlde, or Antarctike, 47: see also Chrestien Le Clercq, New Relation of Gaspesia: With the Custom and Religion of the Gaspesian Indians, ed. and trans. W.F. Ganong (Toronto: Champlain Society, 1910) 92: “There is one error which is only too common, and of which it is desirable to disabuse the [European] public…. That the peoples of North America…” are like “wild” men “all hairy, like the bears, and more inhuman than the tigers and the leopards… as a matter of fact our Gaspesians have less hair than the French.”

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the case of Aboriginal-non-Aboriginal relations in Canada the legacy of early modern European

thought has had profound and persistent effects. From the earliest writings of Cartier, who so

clearly regarded Aboriginal peoples as inferior and in need of Christianizing and civilizing, to

the closing of the last residential school, our nation has employed some variation on the

assimilation theme, where Aboriginal persons are synonymous with Other, which is synonymous

with inferior, and therefore in need of remaking. The early Reductions in New Spain represent

this initiative to transform Indigenous peoples into their supposed superiors. These Reduction

settlements had the exclusive goal of Christianizing the Indigenous populations of the Americas,

and Canadian residential schools borrowed and adapted the idea at the core of New Spain’s

religious settlements using it to reduce Aboriginal students to “civility” so that they might be

ready for conversion and assimilation. 1

When Aboriginal peoples outnumbered European newcomers to Canada during the early

seventeenth century and possessed superior technologies necessary for travel into the interior of

the country, they were treated diplomatically by the French who were eager to obtain resources.2

Aboriginal peoples in this period created new opportunities and roles for themselves, entering

into multi-layered relations with Europeans and their markets to satisfy personal, social and

political desires. Diseases, new commerce, and most importantly European ideology profoundly

altered Aboriginal societies, both demographically and culturally. But for a period, before their

numbers were markedly decreased, Aboriginal and European peoples in various regions in

Canada “constructed a common, mutually comprehensible world” of an accommodative

1 See James Axtell, “The Invasion Within,” Natives and Newcomers: The Cultural Origins of North America (New York: Oxford UP, 2001) 145-173 for an important discussion of the peculiar confidence European people had that the restoration of cultural health for Indigenous peoples consisted in “reducing them to civility.” 2 See Champlain’s 1618 missive addressed to the Gentlemen of the Chamber of Commerce, Works, ed. Biggar, vol. 2 p. 339, in which he enumerates the various resources to be exploited in Canada.

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international, intercultural form aptly termed “the middle ground.”1 However, the seeming

insatiable ambitions of the European merchant-imperialists together with the deadly pathogens

they unwittingly harboured ultimately led to a change in demography2 where Europeans

outnumbered Aboriginal peoples in Canada. Miller is right to stress that the change was more

than numerical. Once Aboriginal peoples were no longer needed to penetrate the interior, to

provide a buffer against English and Dutch ambitions in the seventeenth century, and against

American incursion in the nineteenth century, they were judged irrelevant and relegated to

reserves.3

Counterviews

As this overview of early European thoughts regarding Indigenous peoples encountered in the

Americas elucidates, the vein of negativism remained strong throughout the period following

initial contact. Because at the time of contact many Indigenous societies were preliterate,

documents of their views of Europeans are few and typically biased by a European voice. For the

agile intellect of Montaigne, the “discovery” of the New World provided a yardstick for critically

evaluating the practices of the Old. Montaigne’s thoughts on the subject prove a welcome

contrast to many writings of his contemporaries. In his famous account of an enlightening

conversation he had with three Tupinamba captives brought to France from Brazil to be paraded

before the French court in 1562, Montaigne writes, “they had noted that there were among us

1 See Richard White’s sensitive analysis of the mutually intelligible terrain cultivated by Indigenous peoples and newcomers in the pays d’en haut in his extraordinary work The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1991). 2 See Alfred Crosby’s excellent Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1986) and Germs, Seeds and Animals (London: Sharpe, 1994) in which he discusses not only the pathogens European newcomers unsuspectingly brought to the New World but also seeds and animals forming what Crosby calls the “portmanteau biota” responsible for the European demographic takeover in the Americas, part of the geographic region Crosby identifies as the temperate zone lands. 3 See J.R. Miller’s insightful analysis of the declining relationship between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal peoples in Canada and our national practice of marginalizing and displacing Aboriginal peoples in Skyscrapers Hide the Heavens, rev. ed. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991).

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men fully bloated with all sorts of comforts while their halves were begging at their doors

emaciated with poverty and hunger: they found it odd that these destitute halves should put up

with such injustice and did not take the others by the throat or set fire to their houses.”1 The

Tupinamba penetrated the ersatz grandeur of the French court, and Montaigne was glad to report

their condemnation, characterizing the French as greedy and corrupt. Typically, however,

chroniclers of the early contact period who recorded Indigenous thoughts about European

customs used a partial lens where the concern was to deride not celebrate the Indigenous

interlocutor. Recollet priest Le Clercq captures a Mi’kmaq leader’s powerful response to

European acculturation attempts, which as a trenchant critique of French claims to cultural

superiority warrants being quoted at length.

Thou reproachest us, very inappropriately, that our country is a little hell in contrast with France, which thou comparest to a terrestrial paradise…. if thou dost not yet know the real feelings which our Indians have towards thy country and towards all thy nation, it is proper that I inform thee at once. I beg thee now to believe that, all miserable as we seem in thine eyes, we consider ourselves nevertheless much happier than thou in this, that we are very content with the little that we have; and believe also once for all, I pray, that thou deceivest thyself greatly if thou thinkest to persuade us that thy country is better than ours. For if France, as thou sayest, is a little terrestrial paradise, art thou sensible to leave it? ... Learn now, my brother, once for all, because I must open to thee my heart: there is no Indian who does not consider himself infinitely more happy and more powerful than the French.2

But Le Clercq’s point is to reveal a want of propriety and an inability to discard the fetters of

heathenism. He is not putting forward a laudatory example of diversity and cultural parity.

Europeans have viewed Indigenous peoples as culturally, ethnically, racially, and

ontologically inferior; and Indigenous peoples have fought back through, inter alia, scholarship,

1 Montaigne, “On the Cannibals,” 91-92. 2 Le Clercq, New Relation of Gaspesia, ed. and trans. William F. Ganong, (Toronto: Champlain Society, 1910), 104-6. I quote this passage at length because it is an unusual instance of an Aboriginal person rightly excoriating Europeans for their missionary and “civilizing” efforts. The only other lengthy rebuke of this kind in the Canadian context is that of the alleged “Adario,” a Wendat man, who appears in the writings of Baron de Lahontan, but he is thought to be a fictive figure, an amalgamation of various Aboriginal persons Lahontan met. The character Adario is more a romantic construction (one that was to profoundly influence Rousseau) than a realistic portrayal. See Baron de Lahontan, New Voyage to North America, ed. Reuben Gold Thwaites, 2 vols. (New York: Burt Franklin, 1905).

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activism, legal venues, national resistance and community organizing, political channels,

spiritual understanding, and cultural revival. One of the most pernicious issues Aboriginal

scholars and activists have tackled is the classic diffusionism theory, which in its most “value-

free” form is not inherently harmful but when entangled with centrist fantasies of colonizers who

conceived themselves fetishistically to be paragons of high culture and intelligence the theory is

dreadfully misapplied. In a world where the idea of universal humanity was a cherished principle

but at the same time a great divider, separating peoples into human and subhuman (including

those capable and incapable of becoming human) the concept of diffusionism served to support

Eurocentrism, a kind of solipsistic turn where all worthy human practices and advances were

thought to have originated in Europe. Such a model casts Aboriginal nations as stagnant and

ahistorical while European nations are innovative and historical. Youngblood identifies the

fourfold “myth of emptiness” at the heart of diffusionism: the non-European world has such a

low population that European encroachment is immaterial; the Aboriginal population comprises

mostly nomadic peoples who have no clearly defined territories and no sovereignty; the

Aboriginal peoples have no concept of private property and therefore are not landowners, so land

can be disbursed to newcomers through colonial administration; and the land is void of

creativity, spirituality and rationality.1

The idea of small Indigenous populations in non-European regions is associated with the

myth of pristine wilderness, a myth that has been propagated to some extent by nineteenth-

century romanticism2 and, as discussed in the previous chapter, forms the cornerstone of modern

1 See J. Youngblood Henderson’s thoughtful discussion of diffusionism in which he astutely links this seemingly innocuous concept with flagrant forms of cultural and geographic appropriation in “Postcolonial Ghost Dancing: Diagnosing European Colonialism,” Reclaiming Indigenous Voice and Vision, ed. Marie Battiste (Vancouver: UBC P, 2000) 57-76. 2 See William Denevan, “The Pristine Myth: The Landscape of the Americas in 1492,” Annals of the American Association of Geographers 82.3 (1992): 369-85 for a thoughtful examination of Indigenous population, vegetation, wildlife, agriculture, and built landscapes that is used to form an argument which disproves the pristine myth.

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day preservationism. Although the concept of pristine wilderness is used by contemporary

environmentalists to protect land and species from the ravages of wanton development, the same

myth has also been deployed to justify European takeover of Indigenous lands.1 According to

European opinion during the early contact era, unpopulated (or little populated), unaltered

regions could not properly be called occupied or sufficiently developed to warrant claims of

sovereignty. The legal fiction of terra nullius2 and res nullius3 in the Americas provided

European nations the right to lawful appropriation of lands. While it is impossible to determine

exact population figures, scholars now agree that pre-Columbian North America was

considerably populated. Descriptions of untouched wilderness and unpeopled lands of Edenic

abundance are often best explained by praetorian newcomer chronicling or depopulation from

disease. As Jennings has so aptly asserted, Europeans “did not settle a virgin land. They invaded

and displaced a resident population…. [the] “land was more like a widow than a virgin.”4

In the last several decades scholars have been revising pre-Columbian North American

population numbers upward. This serves several purposes: first it is an attempt to correct the

historic record with more accurate population estimates; second higher numbers work against the

myth of emptiness, on which so many acts of land appropriation were based, and therefore aid

current legal claims to land title; and third, establishing large populations militates against the

1 This is true both of juridical practices with respect to the New World in the early modern period and of the establishment of National Parks in the late 19th and 20th centuries. See Mark David Spence, Dispossessing the Wilderness: Indian Removal and the Making of National Parks (New York: Oxford UP, 1999) for a thoughtful discussion about the ways in which the “uninhabited land” argument was deployed to support the development of US parks. 2 For a detailed discussion of terra nullius (land title by occupation of empty land) see Olive P. Dickason’s “Routes of Challenge: Trade and Land,” The Law of Nations and the New World, eds. L.C. Green and Olive Dickason (Edmonton: U of Alberta P, 1993) 215-227. Dickason identifies how the French interpreted the St. Lawrence region as abandoned because of the disappearance of the Laurentian Iroquoians. 3 For a discussion of res nullius (useless, unimproved land) see Anthony Pagden, Lords of All the World: Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain and France, c.1500-c.1800 (New Haven: Yale UP, 1995) 77. 4 See Francis Jennings The Invasion of America: Indians, Colonialism and the Cant of Conquest (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1975) 15-30. Along with his original concept of “widowed lands” Jennings makes the excellent point that had the land been truly pristine, that is uninhabited, 16th- and 17th-cenutry European nations would not have had the ability to extract resources and maintain outpost colonies so far from their metropolitan centres.

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myth of the Aboriginal savage, for large populations are thought to be insupportable by

disorderly, unsophisticated societies.1 Ethnohistorian Henry Dobyns’s seminal article2 in which

he suggested that Aboriginal populations in the Americas were considerably higher than

previously allowed created a dispute that has persisted to this day. While Deneven,3 McNeil,4

and Crosby,5 among others, have further advanced this argument, detractors6 insist that

substantial population revisions represent white liberal guilt rather than scientifically acceptable

population estimates. Aboriginal activists and scholars reject low population estimates viewing

them as a rededication to colonial and imperial impulses, a reiteration of the fictional res nullius

argument.7

Many of those positing high populations at the time of contact propose diseases account

for almost ninety percent of the population loss suffered by Indigenous New World peoples

between 1492 and 1800, and in some regions the population of Aboriginal nations declined by as

much as ninety-five percent. These scholars also calculate the Indigenous population to have

1 See R.L. Carneiro, “On the Relationship between Size of Population and the Complexity of Social Organization,” Southwestern Journal of Anthropology, 23 (1967): 34-43. 2 See Henry F. Dobyns “Estimating Aboriginal American Population: An Appraisal of Techniques with a New Hemispheric Estimate,” Current Anthropology, 7.4 (1966): 395-416. 3 See again William Denevan’s “The Pristine Myth” in which the author refutes the “pristine myth,” the idea of an empty Edenic land, and suggests that Indigenous numbers in the Americas were far higher at the time of initial contact than they were in 1750. See also William M. Denevan, ed. Native Population of the Americas in 1492 (Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1976). 4 See William H. McNeil, Plagues and Peoples (Garden City, NY: Anchor, 1977) in which the author provides a detailed analysis of European diseases in non-European regions of the world and the impact on Indigenous populations. 5 See Alfred Crosby, “Virgin Soil Epidemics as a Factor in the Aboriginal Depopulation in America,” William and Mary Quarterly, 33.2 (1976): 289-299 in which the author coins the term “virgin soil epidemics” and puts forward the idea that the Americas were significantly more populated prior to being devastated by European diseases. 6 See David P. Henige, Numbers from Nowhere: The American Indian Contact Population Debate (Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1998). Henige is perhaps the most outspoken critic of high population numbers for Indigenous peoples of the Americas and he has coined the term “high counters” to refer to scholars who have revised numbers upward in magnitude; see also Shepard Krech III, The Ecological Indian: Myth and History (New York: Norton, 1999) for another low (by contemporary standards) contact population estimate. 7 See Lenore Stiffarm quoted in Charles C. Mann 1491: New Revelations of America before Columbus (New York: Knopf, 2005) 95: “You always hear that people try to minimize the size of the original populations their ancestors personally displaced…. It's perfectly acceptable to move into unoccupied land. And land with only a few ‘savages’ is the next best thing.”

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been between 90 and 112 million people in 1492, meaning fewer people lived in Europe than in

the Americas at the time Columbus first voyaged. Originally, the assertion that Indigenous

populations were decimated by epidemic disease was thought to be an argument that buttressed

Indigenous rights by debunking the myth of small numbers and strengthening the likelihood of

large complex pre-contact societies. The “virgin soil epidemic” theory appeared so sensible and

obvious that academics have cited it often, and seemingly unquestioningly, when discussing

European invasion and occupation of the Americas. As with any monopolistic explanation,

however, in due time the more counterintuitive possibilities emerge, not necessarily to replace

entirely existing theories but sometimes to deepen. The demographic catastrophe that occurred in

the Americas resulting from the introduction of foreign pathogens must be attributed to more

than the absence of acquired immunity contends Jones.1 He challenges the simplicity of the

immunological vulnerability theory and insists that ascribing vast population decreases primarily

to microbial factors diminishes European culpability for the tragedy. The way European

colonisation disordered social and cultural dimensions of Indigenous communities, and thereby

hampered forms of resistance and diminished protective factors, must be included in the

decimation discourse.

The Lakota author, Vine Deloria, like many Indigenous scholars, is troubled by a number

of European historical suppositions pertaining to the Americas. One of the most vexing issues for

Deloria is the generally accepted anthropological Bering land bridge theory that Indigenous

peoples first came to the Americas from Asia via the isthmus that has at three or four times in

history spanned the Bering Strait. This theory was first proposed by the Spanish Jesuit Jose de

Acosta in his Natural and Moral History of the Indies, published in 1590. Acosta, like other

theologians of his day, was trying to account for the presence of Indigenous peoples in the New 1 See David S. Jones “Virgin Soils Revisited,” William and Mary Quarterly 60.4 (2003): 703-742.

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World. While some scholars considered polygenesis a possibility,1 most adopted the

Augustinian2 monogenesis position in which all men descended from Adam, and Acosta’s land

migration theory proved useful for monogenists. But Deloria argues, “American Indians, as a

general rule, have aggressively opposed the Bering Strait migration doctrine because it does not

reflect any of the memories or traditions passed down by the ancestors over many generations.”3

Not only does the Bering land bridge theory disavow the creation and transoceanic migration

stories of Indigenous peoples, but it also invokes the maddening inhabitation theme that has

proven so damaging to first peoples’ communities. If Indigenous people are robbed

“scientifically” of the right to declare origination and deep historical land tenure in the Americas,

then it becomes easier to classify them as but one group of migrants to the continents, whose

claim to land title is then dubious in the face of European encroachment and dominance.

Indigenous scholar Hingangaroa Smith is right to censure the way science is constructed

and operates as a discourse and practice that reifies European thought and further disenfranchises

those on the margins. “Such positivistic framing of the world and social relations is at odds with

Indigenous ways of thinking… [and] is dangerous…because it begins to switch our thinking

from the circle to square boxes.”4 Further, this system creates centres and peripheries where

those who do not subscribe to the centrist location are deemed unreasonable. “Irrationality is

always an accusation made by someone building a network over someone else who stands in the

1 See, for example, Paracelsus, “For god…has populated the miraculously hidden countries with other men….that is why it is not necessary to prove that the people in the hidden countries are descended from Adam” quoted in J.S. Slotkin, Readings in Early Anthropology (Chicago: Aldine, 1965) 42. 2 See Saint Augustine, City of God, trans. Marcus Dods, vol. 2 (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1871) 119: “…the inhabitants of that distant region are descended from that one first man.” 3 See Vine Deloria, Red Earth, White Lies: Native Americans and the Myth of Scientific Fact (New York: Scribner) 97. 4 See G. Hingangaroa Smith “Protecting and Respecting Indigenous Knowledge,” Reclaiming Indigenous Voice and Vision, ed. Marie Battiste (Vancouver: UBC P, 2000) 211; see also Georges Sioui, Huron-Wendat: Heritage of the Circle, trans. Jane Brierley (Vancouver: UBC P, 1999) for an in-depth discussion of the significance of the circle in Aboriginal worldviews.

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way.”1 Sioui describes the “would-be scientist” as a “foe” similar to seventeenth-century Jesuits

in proselytizing zeal, the difference being that the scientist attempts to displace and improve

Aboriginal circular thought using scientific ideology of mainstream culture rather than Christian

faith.2 Deloria foregrounds the scientific problem when discussing Indigenous human origination

narratives versus the widely-accepted scientific explanation of pan-human African origin. To

counter the monogenesis theory is to risk ridicule by the scientific community and its adherents.

Deloria is similarly troubled by the “scientific” explanations of the disappearance of North

American megafauna, often called the Pleistocene extinctions—think woolly mammoths,

mastodons and Casteroides (a 225kg beaver). Carl Sauer was the first to suggest that Paleo-

Indian overhunting was responsible for the extinction3 and later eminent scholars have supported

this thesis.4 However, there is very little archaeological evidence to support this theory, only a

small number of bones from the Pleistocene period show carving marks made by human beings.

Deloria wonders would not there be more such archaeological artefacts if Paleo-Indian hunters

had indeed been so effectively destructive?5 The problem with the “Pleistocene Hit Men” thesis

is that it functions not unlike the Bering Land Bridge theory: it promulgates a scurrilous image of

profligate Indigenous peoples, who practiced poor resource management and lacked a proper

appreciation for other species, which makes them not unlike Europeans, and ultimately throws

into question any special claim to land title. That is, a facile argument could follow that

1 See Bruno Latour’s extraordinary study of the accumulation and circulation of scientific knowledge in Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1987) 259. 2 See Sioui, Huron-Wendat: Heritage of the Circle, 178. 3 See Carl Sauer, “The Agency of Man on Earth,” Man’s Role in Changing the Face of the Earth, ed. William L. Thomas (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1956) 49-69. 4 See Paul S. Martin, “Pleistocene Overkill,” Natural History 76 (1967): 32-38; Jared Diamond, “The American Blitzkrieg: A Mammoth Undertaking,” Discover 8 (1987): 82-88; and Tim Flannery, The Eternal Frontier: An Ecological History of North America and Its Peoples (New York: Atlantic Monthly, 2001). 5 See Vine Deloria, Red Earth, White Lies.

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Indigenous peoples did not know how to properly manage the land and nonhuman others, thus it

is best that a foreign system has been superimposed to this end.

Science, like religion before it, is one of many significant colonial institutions

determining centres and peripheries, reifying cherished viewpoints, establishing acceptable

parameters, and forcing unbelievers to the margins. Often many of us having been schooled in

the western scientific model that underpins modernism never pause to question this cumulative

and protean body of knowledge but instead fault pre-modern societies and Indigenous

communities as being superstitious or uninformed.1 Leroy Little Bear uses the expression

“jagged worldviews colliding” to capture the prickly interface between Aboriginal

epistemologies and positivistic scientific systems.2 Battiste’s assertion that postcolonial societies

have yet to come into existence3 is a sad truth. Even though Aboriginal communities have gained

some juridical ground in Canada with the landmark Delgamuukw v. British Columbia [1997]

case, where the Supreme Court of Canada declared definitively the nature of Aboriginal title in

Canada and mandated that Indigenous oral traditions be included in standards of evidence,

insidious and not so insidious forms of colonisation circulate within institutional discourses and

practices. For this reason Battiste uses the term postcolonial only aspirationally, as something to

which we must endeavour. And I use the clause “we must” very deliberately to undergird the

importance of a joint effort. Yes, Aboriginal peoples seeking true equality in their homelands are

naturally working toward this goal, but non-Aboriginals who care about parity and the creation

of truly postcolonial societies must interrogate the status quo because “the facts of colonial life

1 See Vine Deloria’s discussion of this point Red Earth, White Lies, 38. See also Bruno Latour, Science in Action (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1987) 228, for a discussion of the way science, which seems to transcend particularities of place, created “the notion of a Great Divide between our scientific cultures and all the others.” 2 Leroy Little Bear, “Jagged Worldviews Colliding,” Reclaiming Indigenous Voice and Vision, ed. Marie Battiste (Vancouver: UBC P, 2000) 77. 3 See Marie Battiste, introduction, “Unfolding the Lessons of Colonization,” Reclaiming Indigenous Voice and Vision, ed. Marie Battiste (Vancouver: UBC P, 2000) xvi-xxx.

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are not simply ideas, but the general effects of actual conditions. To refuse means either

withdrawing physically from those conditions or remaining to fight and change them.”1

In this age of environmental challenges postcolonial strivings take on added significance

for the exceptional understandings of the natural world encompassed by Indigenous knowledge

are at risk of appropriation in the service of the dominant culture, while Aboriginal people

continue to suffer some of the worst statistics in this country. It is the twenty-first century and we

still have not managed the art of respectful culture contact and truly democratic dialogue. From

the period of first contact to the present, the imperial presence in Canada has created a

relationship of privation, tension, and mistrust with Aboriginal peoples. “We have a duty

therefore to use every opportunity to disseminate efforts that counteract such moments of

divisiveness and retrogression.”2 Indeed, as Turner asserts, Canada has a “moral task…to

reconcile Canada’s colonial past with a richer renewed vision of Canadian society – a vision that

would return a voice to Aboriginal peoples and give that voice prominence.”3 It is my hope that

the case study analysis I have undertaken will make a small contribution toward this end.

1 Albert Memmi. The Colonizer and the Colonized (1969; Boston: Beacon Press, 1991) 19. 2 Wole Soyinka, Climate of Fear: The Reith Lectures 2004 (London: Profile, 2004) 85. 3 Dale Turner, This Is Not a Peace Pipe: Towards a Critical Indigenous Philosophy (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2006) 80.

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Chapter Five: Wendat and French Worldviews in the Early Seventeenth Century

I will tell you something about stories [he said]

They aren’t just about entertainment Don’t be fooled

They are all we have, you see all we have to fight off

illness and death

You don’t have anything if you don’t have the stories

Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony

Introduction

Because it can be confidently stated that the current global condition of the nonhuman

environment, which has been fittingly described as an environmental crisis, was not ineluctably

foreordained, my research is in part a history of the present. I am interested to learn how things

came to develop as they did and not in some other manner more favourable to continued human

and nonhuman life. This chapter investigates the way Wendat and French peoples in northeastern

North America in the early seventeenth century valued the nonhuman world because these

appraisals can serve as signposts anticipating the related management of, and relationship to, the

nonhuman geographic region the two groups inhabited. People reside not only in geophysical

places but also intellectual, ideological, and intuitive systems of understanding and inherited

knots of meaning. Both the material particularities of place and the cultural conceptualisations

and valuations of the nonhuman contribute to human interaction with their surrounds. This

chapter investigates how Wendat and French creation stories and notions of time, souls, human

wellness and morality function as entrées into aspects of their respective worldviews that are

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inextricably and fatefully linked to environmental matters. In many ways my thesis is about

endeavouring to understand an early period of the “story” describing the development of our

current environmental crisis, and this chapter elucidates the obvious connections between

thought and action, beliefs and behaviour, cultural values and the treatment of the nonhuman and

other humans.

Stories

In a chapter exploring the worldviews and philosophies of early seventeenth-century contact

Wendat and French cultural groups, I wish to begin with a discussion of stories. I choose the

word story carefully, distinguishing it from the term myth which is more popular in conventional

discourse but is typically pejoratively tagged as a fictional account lacking historicity. While

working with a group of First Nations adolescent girls involved in a self-directed, self-

empowerment documentary film project, I recall the uncomfortable tension when one girl

interested in ancestral stories asked a member of her community what she thought about the

“myths” and “legends” of their band. With an aggrieved and concerned expression the

respondent said, “They are not myths and legends,” and then she proceeded to share kindly how

the stories her parents had told her shaped her life and worldview in a manner that she was not

appreciably aware of until her late teenage years. All cultural groups and human societies

preserve their shared identity through a collection of stories some of which are explanatory,

others normative, and others still historical, marking important events. Unfortunately stories of

non-Western peoples have often been reduced to fantastic or facile narratives thought to stack up

poorly against imperial, in the case of the French this meant first Christian and later scientific,

narratives. In industrial nations possessing a profound scientific perspective, non-scientific

explanations for creation and anthropogenesis are classed as myths, while scientific hypotheses

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like the big bang are called theories. “When secular science defeated Christian fundamentalism,

in its victory it was able to promulgate the belief that all accounts of a creation … were

superstitions devised by ignorant peoples to explain the processes of the world around them.”1

During the period of this case study, however, science had not yet supplanted religion,

secularism did not yet hold sway, the influence of Copernicus, Newton, Bacon and Descartes

was not yet paramount, and French travellers to New France principally whether pursuing

commercial, investigative or missionary aspirations arrived with a mostly pre-scientific,

Christian worldview. The French as they appear in the primary sources, armed with their

Christian tradition, were nonetheless as dismissive of Wendat cosmological and cosmogonic

narratives as exponents of a scientific ethos were later to be. So although authors have striven to

reconnoitre and redefine the term myth, to remove its stigma and enlarge its scope, rendering it

more capacious and tolerable for contemporary discourse and sensibilities,2 story is my term of

choice, for we all operate using stories, personal, familial, cultural, societal, scientific and extra-

scientific.

Creation Stories

A good starting point for an examination of disparate worldviews belonging to distinct but

interacting groups is cosmogony. In the Christian monotheistic tradition a male God created the

earth out of formlessness, populated the earth with an “abundance of living creatures,” and made

1 Vine Deloria, Jr., Red Earth, White Lies: Native Americans and the Myth of Scientific Fact (New York: Scribner, 1995) 38. 2 See Paul Veyne, Did the Greeks Believe in Their Myths: An Essay on the Constitutive Imagination, trans. Paula Wissling (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1988) in which the author discusses how the content, not the form, of myths is generally what is queried. Veyne suggests mythical accounts occur in a depthless time but nonetheless represent actual events that have been coated with a multiplication of legends, pp. 60-74. Mircea Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return, trans. Willard R. Trask (1971; Princeton: Princeton UP, 2005) conceives a mythical epoch having a spatial-temporal realm in which revelation occurred, a realm outside of secular time. And C. Marius Barbeau in Huron and Wyandot Mythology, Memoir 80 (Ottawa: Department of Mines, Government Printing Bureau, 1915) differentiates myths from tales, the latter of which were acknowledged by the Wendat to be fictional, while the former were accounts that the Wendat used to believe, p. 1.

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“man in His image” giving to man “dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air,

and over the cattle, over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.” In

the alternate Christian creation account, after creating the “heavens and the earth” God “formed”

Adam the first man, and then from his rib He made a woman. In this second account God also

brings the various nonhuman animals before Adam, and “whatever Adam called each living

creature, that was its name.”1 This first act of naming in the biblical story could be seen to have a

genealogical link with the established practice of renaming, a kind of purposeful logomancy2

exercised by explorers of New France, whereby places and peoples were often assigned new

French names in the process of appropriation and hierarchical ordering. While it might be

tempting to wrest an inductive religio-political schematic for contact-period French society from

such facets of the Christian creation narrative, the disinterested critic will derive more gratifying

results from a systematic comparison of this creation story with that of the Wendat.

The Wendat, like the Haudenosaune, believed human beings lived on an island that came

into existence when their ancestor Aataentsic fell from the celestial world.3 As Aataentsic

plummeted from the sky to a watery world below consisting only of aquatic animals, Turtle saw

her falling, alerted the other animals and provided a landing for her on her back.4 After a

conference convened by the animals to determine how best to help Aataentsic, they decided to

1 All biblical citations for this section are from The Holy Bible, New King James Version (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2006). 2 This idea of logomancy as the act of magically seizing foreign territories belongs to the genius of Ronald Wright. See Stolen Continents (1992; New York: First Mariner, 2005) 125. 3 There are several different accounts of this cosmogonic narrative but certain key features are common: a woman falls from the world above, animals work together to save her, an island is built on a Turtle’s back, and Twins are born who grow to compete with one another. See Gabriel Sagard-Théodat, The Long Journey to the Country of the Hurons, ed. George M. Wrong, trans. H.H. Langton (1632; Toronto: Champlain Society, 1939) 169-170. See also Reuben Gold Thwaites, ed. The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents, 1600-1791. 73 vols., trans. Finlow Alexander et al., (Cleveland: Burrows Brothers, 1896-1901) 8: 17-19; 10: 27-29; hereafter the Jesuit Relations will be referenced as JR and the relevant citation comprising volume and page number. 4 JR 10: 127. In a later account told by a Wyandot (a descendent of the Wendat) and recorded in 1911, it was a pair of swans who first saw Aataentsic falling, and they chose to break her fall with a feathery landing. C.M. Barbeau Huron and Wyandot Mythology, 38.

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build an island for her on Turtle’s shell. After a number of animals died attempting to bring silt

from the sea floor with which to build the island for Aataentsic, it was the Toad who was able to

dive sufficiently deep and swim quickly enough to succeed at the task. Sioui rightly emphasises

the significance of this achievement because Toad was the “humblest of these animals,” but he

neglects to mention that the toad was also female.1 Already this is a cosmogonic narrative amply

different from the Christian story. To recapitulate in contrast with the Genesis account, a woman

ancestor, Aataentsic, falls to a watery world where animals pre-exist. In this world animals not

only possess agency but they are helpful to the Wendat ancestor, saving her life and providing

her a home. Further, not only are females not secondary to the narrative, being created by a male

god as an afterthought, but they are key figures both as progenitor of the Wendat (Aataentsic)

and as rescuer (the Toad).

However alluring may be a search for a one-to-one correspondence between these

creation stories and the social structure of the French and Wendat worlds to which they belong,

such analysis must be resisted for it obscures subtleties and creates unnecessarily of the two

cultures Manichean opposites. It does seem fair, nonetheless, to state that the patrifocal,

monotheistic Christian narrative is reflective of the patricentric societal model of the French,

while the matrifocal, biocentric Wendat creation story mirrors the matrilineal and matrilocal

social structure of Wendat peoples (which will be discussed further in the next chapter). The

stories become more complex when one ventures into the cosmological terrain of benevolent and

destructive forces, what the Christian tradition terms good and evil but the Wendat conceived as

complementary powers producing balance in a formerly chaotic universe. Although Wendat oral

1 It is interesting to note that the toad so central to the Wendat creation story as a rescuer is now commonly understood by environmentalists and biologists to be an indicator species, signalling the biological condition of an ecosystem and capable of serving as a warning sign that pollution has entered its habitat.

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tradition contains different versions of the creation narrative1 the principal elements are

consistent. The question of who birthed the twins Tawiscaron and Iouskeha is the main

difference surfacing in the cosmogonic story found in the primary source materials. Sagard’s

account of the Wendat creation story differs slightly but significantly from the information

recorded by the Jesuits Brébeuf and Le Jeune. In all reports Aataentsic is pregnant when she falls

from the sky, but in Sagard’s account she is the grandmother of the twin brothers2, in Brebeuf

and Le Jeune’s accounts Aataentsic gives birth to the twins herself.3 It was 1623 when Sagard

sojourned in Wendake, and Brebeuf and LeJeune’s Relations recorded events for the years 1635,

1636 and 1637. The difference in the accounts is salient because it may reflect incipient Wendat

cultural breakdown, specifically with respect to the imperative of matrilineal descent. As Tooker

astutely observes, “That the twins were the children of the daughter of the woman who fell from

the sky seems to emphasize matrilineal descent; that they are children of the woman who fell

does not.”4

The twin brothers, who were described as having an antagonistic relationship, have

tremendous symbolic significance in Wendat cosmological understanding. Iouskeha the twin

who creates a variety of beneficial species in the newly formed earth world is constantly

undermined by Tawiscaron who is determined to systematically diminish his brother’s useful

creations.5 The antipathy between the brothers eventually culminates in a fight where

Tawiscaron is killed, but as drops of his blood make contact with the ground they turn to flint,

1 See C.M. Barbeau’s Huron and Wyandot Mythology for a number of Wendat creation accounts. 2 Sagard, Long Journey, 169. 3 For Brebeuf’s recording of the Wendat creation story see JR 8: 116 and JR 10: 127-29. In Le Jeune’s 1637 Relation he describes Aataentsic as “the mother of him who made the earth,” that is, Iouskeha JR 14:9. 4 Elisabeth Tooker, An Ethnography of the Huron Indians, 1615-1649 (Washington: US Government Printing Office, 1964) 154. 5 Barbeau, Huron and Wyandot Mythology, 302. This account of the creation story was collected by H. Hale on Anderdon Reserve, Essex county, Ontario in the late nineteenth century.

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providing the Wendat an invaluable material for their survival.1 Historians and ethnographers

have sometimes understood the twins as symbols of good and evil, God and Satan refracted

through a Nadouek2 lens. And indeed some Wyandot people, descendents of the Wendat, after

centuries of Christian interference have come to view Iouskeha and Tawiscaron through a

Christian moral filter. For example, Catherine Johnson, a Wyandot woman whose version of the

Wendat creation narrative was documented in Wyandotte, Oklahoma in the early twentieth

century ends her oral narrative with the sentence, “The two brothers were God and the Devil.”3

When Tawiscaron was killed by Iouskeha, Aataentsic grieved the loss of the destructive

twin. Sagard’s account states Aataentsic “is spiteful, and she often spoils all the good her

grandson has done.”4 Similarly Brebeuf’s description depicts the destructive aspect of the

Wendat’s primordial grandmother, “Eataentsic has care of souls, and, because they believe that

she makes men die, they say that she is wicked,” but also includes her generative function, “They

say that a certain woman named Eataentsic is the one who made earth and men.”5 Some

historians only associate Aataentsic with Tawiscaron, claiming she possessed “an evil nature and

spent her time trying to undo Iouskeha’s good works.”6 In this interpretation of the creation

narrative Trigger sees an inversion of the customary roles assigned to women and men in

Wendat society. Women were affiliated with life-promoting processes such as child bearing and

crop growing, but Aataentsic is associated with destruction. Wendat men on the other hand were

responsible for hunting, warring and cutting down trees to clear the land and build houses, but

1 See Barbeau, Huron and Wyandot Mythology, 307 and compare with the story in JR. 2 Sioui proposes using the term Nadouek rather than Iroquoian. Nadouek was the word Algonkians used for many “Iroquoian” peoples. See Georges Sioui, Huron-Wendat: The Heritage of the Circle, trans. Jane Brierley (Vancouver: UBC P, 1999) xix. 3 Barbeau, Huron and Wyandot Mythology, 49. 4 Sagard, Long Journey, 170. 5 JR 8: 117. 6 Bruce Trigger, Children of Aataentsic: A History of the Huron People to 1660 (1976; Montreal: McGill-Queen’s UP, 1987) 77.

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Iouskeha protects human beings and makes crops grow. Trigger suggests intrinsic to the inverted

gender norms found in the Wendat creation story may be a narrative compensation for the role

limitations each sex experienced in Wendat society.1 Similarly, Anderson finds in the Wendat

cosmogony a “certain ambiguity towards women”2 because Aataentsic is at turns destructive and

protective, and based on this ostensible ambiguity Anderson advances the thesis that Jesuit

dogma and proselytizing efforts exacerbated a pre-existing fear Wendat men had of women in

their community, making Wendat women ready targets of redirected aggression. Anderson

believes the matrilineal structuring of Wendat society (a topic to be discussed further in chapter

six), which made men keenly aware of their reliance on women and the necessity of a wife for a

comfortable life, came with a congeries of negative emotions attached that was formerly

sublimated through culturally sanctioned systems of power balancing but was ultimately

displaced through Jesuit interference and cultural erosion.3

Like Sioui, I do not think either of these positions is satisfactory: to conceptualize

Aataentsic as being in league with Tawiscaron is to forget that she produced both of the twins,

either directly or indirectly, as mother or grandmother.4 While Aataentsic may alternately foster

life or sponsor death, this is primarily for the purpose of ensuring a balance between two

necessary forces in the cosmos. The Jesuits’ Christian tradition, revolving around the moral

conflict of good and evil, with the object that the former should triumph over and eradicate the

latter, proved an inadequate framework for understanding a cosmology reflecting the more

complex and cyclical processes of existence, life and death. It is conceivable that the Jesuits,

with their doctrinal morality and infinitely good male God who aims to stamp out evil,

1 Bruce Trigger, Children of Aataentsic, 78. 2 Karen Anderson, Chain Her by One Foot: The Subjugation of Native Women in Seventeenth-Century New France (New York: Routledge, 1991) 166. 3 Anderson, Chain Her by One Foot, 164. 4 See Sioui, Huron-Wendat, 18.

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interpreted Aataentsic poorly using their familiar Christian lens and misunderstood her true role.

Indeed Brebeuf wrote of Iouskeha’s murder of Tawiscaron, “judge if this does not relate in some

way to the murder of Abel.”1 The Jesuits, schooled in a system in which good and evil were

absolute and dichotomous values, could not fathom a figure such as Aetaentsic, both life-giving

and life-destroying, without casting her as “bad.” Sioui resists negative interpretations of

Aataentsic and asserts that Iouskeha, who elevates goodness to the height of an absolute, rather

than relative, value, upsets the balance of the two essential life forces and in this regard, from a

Wendat perspective, is no less “bad” than Tawiscaron. For those undisturbed by the polarized

moral interpretation of the twin brothers, the transmutation of Tawiscaron’s blood to flint is

viewed as unsurprising given his destructive disposition, for “stone was used to make

instruments of violence.”2 But Sioui instead associates flint with fire, a gift essential to

humankind, and sees the spilling of Tawiscaron’s blood as part of a sacrifice so that human

beings might thrive.3 Moreover, Sioui argues that because Tawiscaron and Aataentsic have

aspects that are associated with destruction, they are necessarily related to the development of

compassion and other virtues developed through successfully navigating adversity, qualities

essential to a healthy human society. “For Wendats, and for circular thinkers generally, life

triumphs without eliminating death. Tawiskaron does not die, despite being killed. The world is

supremely beautiful and good, but also harsh, mysterious, and dangerous.”4 The point is to live

intelligently with both forces. This investigation of Wendat and French cosmogonies is

important, for ideas of the nonhuman are articulated in these creation narratives which were then

1 JR 10: 128. 2 Trigger, Children of Aataentsic, 78. 3 Sioui, Huron-Wendat, 19. 4 Sioui, Huron-Wendat, 19.

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told and retold throughout generations defining and informing human understanding of the

nonhuman world, other species and other people.

Time

The philosophical conception of a circular worldview is connected to the Wendat understanding

of a polytheistic rather than monotheistic world. Wendat peoples believed creation to be the

result of multiple creators, but they also believed in an ultimate force or being who “existed

before this Universe.”1 Although the Wendat did not pray or offer propitiation to this being

because they felt incapable of making contact,2 they did pray to and propitiate a sky god when

seeking personal and community assistance,3 they prayed to a number of other spirits who

affected various aspects of their world and environment, and their torture of enemy captives

included a form of sacrifice to a sun god while also functioning as a therapeutic community

ritual.4 All of these forms of worship and spiritual practice took place within a paradigm of

circular time and thought, consistent with a notion of nonlinearity in which the Wendat

experience and conception of time (a conception shared by many Aboriginal peoples) is a

1 Gabriel Sagard Théodat, Histoire du Canada et Voyages que les Frères Mineurs Récollets y ont fait pour la Conversion des Infidèles depuis l’an 1615. Avec un Dictionnaire de la Langue Huronne, 4 vols. (1636; Paris: E Tross, 1866) 2: 543; see also JR 8:117 2 Sagard, Histoire du Canada, 2: 543; see also Baron de Lahontan, New Voyages to North America, 2 vols., ed. Reuben G. Thwaites (1703; New York: Burt Franklin, 1970) 2: 518-19, writing on this same matter over half a century later. But one must be careful using Lahontan as a source regarding Wendat culture. Lahontan is the only author who writes of a Wendat man named Adario with whom he had a discussion about Wendat philosophical and cultural views. R. Ouellet and M. Tremblay, “From the Good Savage to the Degenerate Indian: The Amerindian in the Accounts of Travel to America,” Decentring the Renaissance, 159-171, and Bruce Trigger, Natives and Newcomers: Canada’s ‘Heroic Age’ Reconsidered (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s UP, 1994) 22, believe Lahontan fabricated Adario to critique French values. 3 JR 10: 159. See also JR 10: 161 and JR 33: 225 for an example of the Wendat belief that it was wrong to deride the sky. 4 Both Anderson, Chain Her by One Foot, 169 and Sioui, Huron-Wendat, 173 emphasise the therapeutic aspect of torturing captives, while John Webster Grant, Moon in Wintertime: Missionaries and the Indians of Canada in Encounter since 1534 (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1984) 21, Trigger Children of Aataentsic, 73, and Roger Carpenter, The Renewed, the Destroyed and the Remade: The Three Thought Worlds of the Iroquois and the Huron, 1609-1650 (East Lansing: Michigan UP, 2004) 27 stress the religious significance of sacrificing the prisoner at sunrise. See also Olive Dickason, Canada’s First Nations: A History of Founding Peoples from Earliest Times (Toronto: McClelland, 1992) 47 in which she describes the sun becoming more central to Wendat ceremonies with the adoption of horticulture and the related importance of the sun for flourishing crops. She suggests becoming farmers caused the Wendat to elevate the sun to a deity.

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dimension of timelessness involving an infinite web of interrelationships.1 Eliade has argued

Indigenous ceremonies and rituals lifted participating peoples out of profane (or linear) time by

reiterating cosmogonic moments via “paradigmatic gestures,” and such periodic, ritualistic

regenerative acts abolished profane time making it sacred (or circular).2 Having both a highly-

developed ceremonial culture and a propensity to nest historical events within larger

metahistorical narratives formed a bulwark against linearity for Wendat societies.

This is not to suggest however some impossible antinomian dualism that could be

represented visually by a chart having adjacent but non-overlapping circles where the one

marked linear signifies the French and the other marked circular, the Wendat. While the western

tradition is often conceived as having a linear understanding of time, and Indigenous peoples are

thought to possess a circular understanding, doubtless all societies combine both to varying

degrees, and all individuals within these societies would have unique linear-circular time

configurations.3 Therefore this argument should not be pressed too far. To be sure the French

would have begun to view time more linearly during the seventeenth century when

progressivism as an ideal began to gain an ideological foothold as a result of historical and

geographical understandings, an emergent Western European movement toward nation states,

and optimistic projections about future human developments.4 However, the inexorable reality of

seasonal change suggests the French would surely experience and understand cyclical time, and

the progression of human life from youth to old age would be enough to mark linear time for

Wendat peoples.

1 See N. Scott Momaday, The Man Made of Words (New York: St. Martin’s, 1997) 158; see also Sioui Huron-Wendat, 51-52, and James (Sakej) Youngblood Henderson, “Ayukpachi: Empowering Aboriginal Thought,” Reclaiming Indigenous Voice and Vision, ed. M. Battiste (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2000) 259. 2 Eliade, Myth of the Eternal Return, 141. 3 See Deborah Doxtator, “Inclusive and Exclusive Perceptions of Difference: Native and Euro-based Concepts of Time, History and Change,” Decentring the Renaissance, 54. 4 See John Opie, Nature’s Nation: An Environmental History of the United States (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1998) in which the author identifies progress as the most powerful notion in Europe’s overseas expansionist project, 42.

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Eliade insightfully surmised linear time is especially palpable for Christians because it is

significantly tied to the notion of Redemption. “A straight line traces the course of humanity

from initial fall to final Redemption. And the meaning of this history is unique, because the

Incarnation is a unique fact.”1 The eschatology of the final Redemption is in many respects the

watershed concept producing profound differences between Wendat and Christian religious

expectations. The Christian world can be seen as temporary, a fallen-world way station where

believers prepare for the everlasting. Nowhere is this sentiment more plainly expressed in the

primary sources than in these words penned by Jean de Brebeuf (the renowned Jesuit missionary

who lived and died in Wendake) in his memoirs more than fifteen years before his death:

I feel in me a great desire to die, in order to enjoy God; I feel a great aversion for all things created, which it will be necessary to leave at death. It is in God alone that my heart rests; and, outside of him, all is naught to me, except for him.2 While Brebeuf’s desire is an extreme articulation that would not be shared by most of his lay

Christian contemporaries, it nonetheless points to a belief system and practice profoundly

oriented toward the transcendent, calling for personal penitence and preparation for the afterlife.

Some environmentalists fear the constellation of ecological reprisals associated with a religion

possessing an apocalyptic narrative in which the radical discontinuity represented by a “new

heaven and new earth” in the Book of Revelations, signals an ineluctable, even welcome, end to

the world by Millenarian Christian reckoning.3 The point is not to construct Christianity, or its

believers, as a monolithic bogeyman responsible for all our environmental woes. Members of all

religious faiths participate in present environmental activism and eco-justice activities just as

members of all sects and creeds contribute to environmental degradation. However, when a

1 Eliade, Myth of the Eternal Return, 143. 2 JR 34: 195. 3 Greg Garrard, Ecocriticism: The New Critical Idiom (New York: Routledge, 2004) 88. See also Lynn White Jr’s celebrated, if contested, essay “The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis” discussed earlier in chapter two.

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theological emissary of Christianity, which Brebeuf was in Wendake, discloses feeling “a great

aversion for all things created,” the contrast with the First Nations community in which he lived

is stark and invites interrogation. The Wendat inhabited a world of pre-given significance in

which they were not only embedded but also inherited the responsibility of maintaining a balance

with existing cosmic forces, symbolised in part by Iouskeha and Tawiscaron. Creation in Wendat

understanding was not a “chaos to be attacked and organised”1 and linearly improved upon, nor

was it something to be escaped in favour of a celestial paradise; rather it was a cosmos having

circularity with which one sought alignment.

Souls

Ideas about souls are essential to a study exploring conceptualisations of the nonhuman world

possessed by disparate cultures. Whether or not constituents of the nonhuman are understood as

having a soul can influence relations between the human and nonhuman, an ensouled world

being more likely to garner reverential relations than a world thought to comprise nothing more

than a storehouse of exploitable resources. Like the French, the Wendat had beliefs about an

afterlife. Their views however often puzzled and frustrated the missionaries among them, for the

Wendat afterlife was not transcendent in the Christian sense of being distinct from a lesser,

imperfect earthly realm. The Wendat “Village of the souls is in no respect unlike the Village of

the living,—they go hunting, fishing, and to the woods; axes, robes, and collars are as much

esteemed as among the living. In a word, everything is the same.”2 The Wendat believed they

had two souls coexisting within the body.3 The one soul was “sensitive” and remained with the

1 Sioui, Huron-Wendat, xviii. 2 JR 10: 147; see also Samuel de Champlain, The Works of Samuel de Champlain, ed. Henry P. Biggar, 6 vols. (Toronto: Champlain Society, 1922-36) 2: 163 and Sagard, Long Journey, 172. 3 I am taking this number from Sioui because he is a Wendat descendent. However, the Jesuit Relations have inconclusive information on this matter. For example, in JR 16: 191 Le Jeune states that the Wendat “distinguish several souls in one and the same body” and an “old man told us some time ago” some have “as many as two or three souls.” Brebeuf writes in JR 10: 287 that many Wendat believe “we have two souls.”

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body after death “unless someone bears it again as a child.”1 This description suggests a belief in

some form of metempsychosis which unfortunately is never further documented in the primary

sources, but the Wendat attributed the “perfect resemblance some have to persons deceased” to

this phenomenon. The sensitive soul was alarmingly “corporeal” for Jesuit sensibilities, having a

“body as large as that which it animates.”2 After querying the Wendat as to how it was possible

for a corporeal soul to exit the body, Brebeuf claims the question put the Wendat “in great

perplexity” causing them to “have no reply,” as if to imply the greater logical consistency of his

own belief.3 Most likely the Wendat were not at all perplexed but remained silent because

critiquing or challenging the values or beliefs of another group was not acceptable to Wendat

social sensibilities. “You have your ways…and we have ours, Oniondechanonkhron” the Wendat

frequently told the French, which Le Mercier parses to mean “our countries are different.”4 This

greater capacity for accepting cultural differences, what would be called in modern parlance

tolerance of diversity, perhaps even pluralism, was a culturally constituted and socially

reinforced strength possessed by Wendat nations, which will be discussed further in later

chapters on information exchange and international trade.

The other soul, associated with reason, could depart from the body when asleep or in an

altered state, leaving the sensitive soul to look after the body while the rational soul undertook

“wanderings and long journeys.”5 It could also separate permanently from the body while a

person was still living, particularly if someone had lost the will to live and wished instead to join

deceased kin already in the afterworld.6 This intellectual and ethereal soul was troublingly

complex for the Jesuits because it had different names corresponding to its various functions. 1 JR 10: 287; JR 15:183. 2 JR 8: 121; JR 10: 143. 3 JR 10: 143. 4 JR 13: 213. 5 JR 33: 191. 6 JR 16: 191.

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One name oki andaerandi patently refers to the innate and distinctive power of an individual, for

oki signifies “supernatural virtue” or any power an entity possesses whether positive or

negative.1 As discussed earlier, the Wendat cosmology does not contain a belief in absolute good

or evil, so it was possible, and logically consistent, for an oki to have either beneficial or harmful

powers and not be understood as “bad.” The title of oki was assigned to any seeming

supernatural entity exercising influence in the material world, including for example persons,

charms, and spirits residing in the earth or water. The Wendat considered some of the

missionaries to be okis because of their unfamiliar technologies and their seeming ability to stop

rain or droughts.2

Because the Christian missionaries and Christian French in general saw the world

through a dichotomous moral framework, the idea of an oki, with its moral ambiguity but

unquestionable power, was difficult to comprehend in anything but demonic terms. Moreover,

the confidence the French had in their imagined cultural superiority prohibited the disposition

necessary to surmount their ethnocentrism and approach with ideological openness the religio-

cultural incommensurability both cultures faced. The primary source authors therefore

customarily interpreted the Wendat term oki to mean demon. Brebeuf mistranslated oki

andaerandi, writing it was a soul “like a demon, counterfeiting a demon.”3 Champlain, two

decades earlier, had also believed okis were demonic. “When they see a man doing something

extraordinary, or cleverer than usual…they call him Oqui, as we should say, a great well-

informed mind or a great Devil.”4 Champlain was the first among the Wendat primary source

1 JR 33: 211; see also JR 39: 21 where Bressani describes an Oki as being like a “powerful” indwelling “genie” 2 JR 8: 113; JR 10: 41 3 For description of oki see JR 10: 49; for Brebeuf’s mistranslation see JR 10: 141. See also JR 15: 49 where Le Mercier complains, “They are forever talking about their Oki,--that is the great spirit they worship.” 4 Champlain, Works, 3: 143. See also Sagard, Long Journey, 171.

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authors to equate okis with the devil, and Sagard and the Jesuits were unthinkingly repeating the

same interpretation.

The chasm dividing the dissimilar cosmological understandings held by the Wendat and

the French, and Brebeuf’s unshakeable certitude in the reliability of his own doctrine also led

him to disparage Wendat oral tradition as used to teach beliefs about the soul and the afterworld

to the younger generation. They have “certain stories which the fathers tell their children, which

are so poorly put together that I am perfectly astounded to see how men believe them and accept

them as truth.”1 Brebeuf concludes that the spiritual ideas disseminated through Wendat oral

teachings are nothing but “ignorance and stupidity.” In contrast, when Brebeuf shares the

“mysteries” of the Catholic faith with the Wendat “although these are entirely new to their ears,

they yet do not gainsay them, or mock or scorn them; nay, rather they wonder, praise, and

approve.” But the Wendat simply respond, “Such is not our custom; your world is different from

ours; the God who created your world…did not create ours.”2 Surely this is not an expression of

praise but civility, a civility that acknowledges the possibility of two separate belief systems, two

different worlds. Brebeuf’s reflexive conversion of Wendat politeness into approval and his utter

devaluing of their spiritual system exemplify the concept of epistemic violence formulated by

Spivak where a multifaceted colonial project aims to obliterate the integrated meaning systems

and subjectivity of the Other in an attempt at radical transformation and redefinition in the

colonial image.3 Things could have developed differently with respect to land use practices and

human-nonhuman other relations, but the imposition of French assessments of the nonhuman

world devalued Wendat cultural and spiritual understandings and attempted to replace 1 JR 10: 147. 2 JR 11: 9. 3 See Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Postcolonial Studies Reader, ed. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin (1995; London: Routledge, 2003) 24-25. Although Spivak’s articulation of this concept includes both colonial and Indigenous exertion of epistemic power, what began in Wendake as strictly colonial manifestations of epistemic violence eventually became both colonial and Indigenous.

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particularised meaning systems and local knowledge with a totalising, superimposed and

unsurprisingly less relevant model. This effort to remake the Wendat is described in the language

of soul saving, but missionary objectives in New France were often pursued in tandem with

colonial mercantile aspirations. There were however French interest groups, primarily traders

uninterested in colonial imaginings and eager to maximize profits, who disdained the presence

and influence of missionaries in New France, viewing them as an impediment to the market

enterprise, a topic to be explored further in later chapters.

When a person died, the Wendat believed that the sensitive soul remained with the bones

of the deceased while the reasonable or sublime soul left the body and went to the village of the

souls. The connection between the sensitive soul and human bones is reflected in Wendat

etymology: This soul was called asken or esken and the word for bones was atisken.1 Wendat

beliefs associated with human souls reflect a different ontological understanding from the

French. Unlike the Christian faith in which the soul is transcendent but trapped temporarily in a

mortal casing, the Wendat’s two-soul belief reflects a world in which the vital principle is both

earthly and transcendent, spirit and matter literally interpenetrating. One soul remains with the

body at death, and the other soul departs to the Wendat afterlife village but not until the Feast of

the Souls2 had taken place. In the meantime the dead were taken to village cemeteries where they

were placed in bark tombs elevated on three-metre-high platforms.3 The deceased were usually

entombed with a few possessions, sometimes “a Porcelain collar is put around his neck, and near

1 JR 10: 287; see also note 11 in JR 20: 311 for a passage excerpted from Daniel G. Brinton, The Myths of the New World: A Treatise on the Symbolism and Mythology of the Red Race of America, 2nd ed. (New York: Holt, 1868) 257-261: “The Iroquois word for bone is esken—for soul, atisken, literally that which is within the bone. See also Sioui, Huron-Wendat, 233 endnote 172 in which the author states many “Circle societies identify the soul with bones”; see also John Steckley “The Soul Concepts of the Huron,” MA thesis, Memorial University, 1978. 2 This is customarily referred to as the Feast of the Dead in the secondary sources but Sioui suggests it is more accurately the Feast of the Souls. In Sagard’s Long Journey he writes “this feast is called Agochin atiskein, the feast of the souls” 205. 3 See JR 10: 269; Sagard, Long Journey, 207; and Champlain, Works, 3: 160.

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by a comb, a gourd full of oil, and two or three little loaves of bread,” but many presents were

reserved for living relatives of the deceased to provide consolation.1 This was the customary

handling of the dead, but some individuals were treated differently depending on age or kind of

death. For example, “little children who die less than a month or two old” are interred “on the

road,—in order that…if some woman passes that way, they may secretly enter her womb, and

that she may give them life again.”2 This practice further illustrates the Wendat belief in some

form of reincarnation. There were also special ways to handle a corpse if “one is drowned or dies

of cold,” as the Wendat, according to Brebeuf’s account, needed to “appease” with a “sacrifice”

the spirit of the Sky who is angered by such deaths.3 One glimpses an animate world in which

the Wendat were clearly embedded and obliged to participate so as to ensure sustained cosmic

order.

The souls of those who died violently or committed suicide were not entombed on raised

platforms but were buried immediately in the ground.4 This could explain the unusual instances

of ground burials that both Champlain and Sagard witnessed during their respective stays in

Wendake.5 Although Brebeuf writes that the Wendat feared the souls of those who died from

unnatural causes, Sioui suggests that these souls might have been the ones who sought quick

reincarnation and were given a separate ground burial for that reason.6 Deceased buried in this

manner were not included in the elaborate Feast of the Souls which was celebrated every eight,

1 For an entire description of Wendat village cemeteries see JR 10: 269-271. Food was placed in the tomb so that the “soul” of the food would feed the “soul” of the body. 2 JR 10: 273. 3 JR 10: 163. 4 JR 10: 145. 5 Sagard, Long Journey, 207: “I have seen in some places other bodies buried in the ground (very few however), and over them a hut or shrine of bark erected, and all around it in a circle a hedge made of stakes fixed into the ground.” See also Champlain, Works, 3: 161-62 for a similar description. 6 Sioui, Huron-Wendat, 145.

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ten, or twelve years.1 This feast was a ten-day ritual recognizing the unity of a Wendat nation

through a symbolic celebration of kinship bonds and the implicit wish for continued national

peace. The different Wendat villages contained within a Wendat nation2 would collect the

remains of their deceased relatives (either corpses or bones depending on degree of

decomposition) who had passed away since the last feast and bring them to a communal ossuary

where they were to be interred permanently.3 Non-Wendat nations were welcome to include their

dead in this most consecrated of ceremonies as a symbolic gesture of alliance with the Wendat.

The Wendat believed the souls of the deceased lingered, prior to the Feast of the Souls,

around the villages in which they had formerly lived. In this respect the Wendat did not share the

sharp Christian demarcation between this world and the hereafter, for the souls of all those who

had not died violent deaths could remain in the village for lengthy periods, sometimes up to

fifteen years.4 However, some stated afterlife differences may best be understood as doctrinal

rather than actual experiential dissimilarities. After Father Antoine Daniel was murdered,

religious persons reported seeing him in vision or apparition form,5 suggesting the divide

between life and death for French persons was vaguer than primary source authors

conventionally allowed. In part French missionaries deliberately ignored visions or distrusted

them for fear “lest the Devil should deceive” them.6 But the missionaries were also keen to

maintain a semblance of significant difference between them and the Wendat for the purpose of

1 Champlain, Works, 3: 161; Sagard, Long Journey, 211; JR 10: 143, 275; JR 39: 31. 2 Wendake comprised four (later five) nations in a confederacy. Each of these nations would include a number of different villages which would contain several clans. This will be discussed further in chapter seven. 3 See JR 10: 279-301 for a lengthy description of this ceremony. 4 This lingering of the dead around villages does not correspond in any way to Catholic purgatory, the special realm for punishment of Christians who died with unconfessed sins. 5 JR 52: 10; see also JR 33: 267. 6 JR 34: 177.

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substantiating their conversion efforts.1 Although Sioui proposes contact with the living was not

broken by death, and the dead “communicated with those they had temporarily left behind,” the

passage he cites from the Jesuit Relations simply states “by night, it [the soul] walks through the

villages and enters the Cabins, where it takes its part in the feasts, and eats what is left at evening

in the kettle.”2 Perhaps for Sioui his knowledge of Wendat communication between the living

and the dead is emic, gained through cultural understanding and oral tradition, but the primary

sources make no explicit mention of contact with dead relatives except in dream states. Trigger

asserts the Wendat “tended to fear the souls of the dead because they believed that most of them

resented not being able to behave as they had done while alive.”3 The refusal of many Wendat to

eat food that had been deliberately left in the longhouse kettles for the hungry village souls the

night before has been used to demonstrate the Wendat feared the dead.4 I however think such an

interpretation is unwarranted, for naturally the Wendat would not consume food that had been

gifted to their dead relatives the night before, as this would plainly be poor etiquette. Trigger

believes the impressive burial rituals, a highly developed aspect of Wendat ceremonial culture,

reveals an ambivalence and fear toward the dead. In contrast, Sagard’s interpretation accords

more with that of Sioui, stressing profound ancestor veneration. Sagard notes “the affection and

reverence they [the Hurons] feel for the bones of their relatives,” writing “if fire should break out

in their village and in their cemetery, they would first run to extinguish the fire in the cemetery

and then the fire in the village.”5 This passage, nonetheless, can be used to support either

1 This presentation of radical dissimilarity would be part of a strategy of epistemic violence articulated by Spivak. Said would argue it is part of a narrative of inequality where Wendat “savagery” and “primitivism” is overstressed to legitimate the French imperial and missionary project of cultural restructuring. See Said, Orientalism, 130. 2 JR 10: 143. 3 Bruce Trigger, Huron: Farmers of the North (1969; Chicago: Holt, 1990) 120. 4 Tooker, Ethnography of the Huron Indians, 1615-1649, 134. 5 Sagard, Long Journey, 209.

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position: evincing an exceptional reverence for the dead or alternatively a fear of reprisal should

the dead not be carefully managed and placated.

After the Feast of the Souls, immortal souls leave their body which has been interred in

the collective ossuary and go “at once to dance and rejoice in the presence of Yoscaha [Iouskeha]

and his grandmother Ataensiq, taking the route and way of the stars, which they call Atiskein

andahatey, the path of souls, and which we call the Milky Way.”1 In Wendat belief the only

souls that did not make this journey from the ossuary to the village of souls were those of old

people and little children, for they were not sufficiently strong for the voyage. “These remain in

the country where they have their own particular Villages.”2 Consistent with a worldview in

which life was not partitioned into a hierarchically dualistic world of good and evil “they [the

Wendat] make no mention either of punishment or reward, in the place to which souls go after

death. And so they do not make any distinction between the good and the bad, the virtuous and

the vicious.”3 Failing to distinguish good from bad, God from Satan, Wendat beliefs were not

thought by the French to be worthy of religious status and were usually described as nothing but

a collection of superstitions.4 In the French Christian model the immortal soul went to either

“Paradise or Hell, and that forever,” and “Paradise is a place abounding in blessings of all

kinds…Hell, a place where no blessing comes.”5 This for Wendat sensibilities was nonsensical

for it represented a fundamental break from their cosmological worldview in which forces are

neither absolutely good nor bad but powers to be understood, appeased, employed or deflected in

an ever-fluctuating cosmos. Even on their way to the afterlife, Wendat souls were not vouchsafed

a trial-free journey but had to contend with “Oscotarach, or ‘Pierce-head,’ who draws the brains

1 Sagard, Long Journey, 172. 2 JR 10: 143. 3 JR 8: 121. 4 JR 8: 121; JR 34: 21; JR 10. 5 JR 10: 29.

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out of the heads of the dead, and keeps them.”1 Steckley suggests the function of Oscotarach

may have been to erase the memory souls had of their former life or perhaps to eliminate the

yearning to rejoin the world of the living.2 On this journey the Wendat souls also faced a fierce

dog who caused many souls to fall into a river and drown while attempting a precarious crossing

involving a tree- trunk bridge.3 It is possible that these stories signify that the process of death

and transition to the afterlife for the Wendat is as complex, uncertain and circular as life on earth.

Human Well-being

The connection between my research question and this section on human health may not be

immediately comprehensible, but Wendat understanding of wellness was so inescapably bound

together with cosmology and their place in a larger geophysical-spiritual nexus that the

ceremonies and cultural practices associated with healing reveal much about human-nonhuman

relations. The Wendat conception of health and wellness was not restricted to physical factors,

and disease was not viewed as an individual phenomenon separate from the community or

collective experience. Just as the Wendat did not sharply separate the soul body from the

material body, they did not establish a marked divide between physical and mental states. Their

disease model distinguished three types of illness having specific treatments germane to each.4

Physical illness was “cured with natural remedies” such as plant medicines,5 poultices, sweat

1 JR 10: 147. 2 Steckley, “The Soul Concepts of the Huron” MA Thesis, Memorial U, 1978. 3 JR 10: 147. It is tempting for me to see in this description of the soul’s journey something akin to the Bardo states in Tibetan Buddhism. In the second state many people will experience unpleasant ordeals related to the state of their consciousness. In the First Nation community in which I worked, a much respected community member told me that Tibetan Buddhist monks really enjoyed the reserve’s powwows describing a religio-cultural compatibility not found with other traditions. The Tibetan Buddhists were particularly partial to beliefs surrounding the Feast of the Souls. 4 JR 39: 17; JR 33: 199. 5 Although the primary sources do not mention the expert knowledge Wendat peoples would have had of plants, it is certain that they would have possessed extensive plant knowledge medicinally and nutritionally. See Le Clerq writing on Mi’kmaq knowledge of plants: “They are all by nature physicians, apothecaries and doctors, by virtue of the knowledge and experience they have of certain herbs, which they use successfully to cure ills that seem to us incurable.” Chrestien Le Clercq, New Relation of Gaspesia, with the Customs and Religion of the Gaspesian Indians, ed. William F. Ganong (Toronto: Champlain Society, 1910) 296.

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baths, and blood letting. These sorts of remedies would have been common knowledge possessed

by almost everyone in the community, although women took the lead in physical healing. A

second kind of sickness resulted from unfulfilled “soul” yearnings and required that such desires

be discovered and satisfied.1 A third kind of illness the Wendat recognised was believed to be

caused by sorcerers, which necessitated “extracting the spell from the ailing man’s body.”2 A

likeness exists between the Wendat and French Catholic conceptions regarding these three

causes of illness. The French would have been using all the remedies the Wendat used for

physical illness with the exception of the sweats, a treatment foreign to them and thought by

some ineffectual.3 Instead of sweats Western Europeans customarily believed in the healing

effects of “cold and natural baths.”4 As to diseases caused by unfulfilled soul desires,

seventeenth-century French medical theories revolved around the concept of the four humours

responsible for human health. Being mirthful as opposed to melancholic was thought to promote

salubrity, which though not articulated in the language of an unfulfilled soul yearning

nonetheless makes a similar connection between physical health and state of mind (or soul).

Examples of demon possession occurring in seventeenth-century France are not dissimilar to

cases in which spells are cast by Wendat sorcerers in two main respects.5 Both conditions arise

1 A. Wallace, “Dreams and the Wishes of the Soul: A Type of Psychoanalytic Theory among the Seventeenth Century Iroquois,” Revitalizations and Mazeways: Essays on Culture Change, vol. 1 (Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2004) 189-267 suggests a prefiguring of Freud’s theory of the subconscious. While the soul yearnings of Wendat peoples do not strictly correspond to the subconscious in psychoanalytic theory there are parallels. See JR 39: 17-19. 2 JR 39: 17. 3 Le Mercier speaks pejoratively of the sweat JR 14: 65, and Champlain writes that should any person get well using this treatment it is “rather by happy accident and chance than by science” Works, 3: 153. But Sagard, Long Journey, 192, appraises sweats positively as a treatment from which the Wendat “get relief and prevent illness.” See also Anne Charlton, “An example of health education in the early 17th century,” Health Education Research 20.6 (2005): 656-664. 4 W. Vaughan, Directions for Health: Naturall and Artificiall, 7th ed. (London: Harper, 1633). 5 See Gregory Hanlon, “Folk Devotion and the Counter-Reformation,” Confession and Community in Seventeenth-Century France: Catholic and Protestant Coexistence in Aquitaine (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1993) 152-192.

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from outer inhospitable powers and both require expert spiritual specialists to remedy the

disturbance, priests in the Catholic tradition, arendiwane in the Wendat.1

In Wendat society the arendiwane comprised four types of specialists all of whom were

esteemed. There were those who were capable of regulating the wind and rain, those who were

able to prognosticate, those who could determine the whereabouts of lost objects, and those

skilled at healing ailments having a non-physical origin. Of these four categories of specialists,

those who healed were the most revered by Wendat peoples2 likely because they were deemed

most helpful to the community. The healing Arendiwane were called atetsens or ontetsens if they

were adept at extracting spells from sick persons “sometimes by means of emetics, sometimes by

sucking the diseased part,” or sometimes “with the point of a knife.”3 The term okata or saokata

was used for those who were skilled at discovering the underlying cause of illnesses “namely, by

Pyromancy, by Hydromancy, Necromancy, by feasts, dances, and songs.”4 Both these specialists

were identified at a young age as having special healing abilities and underwent a lengthy

apprenticeship with masterful medicine persons. The saokata were able to assist not only with

diseases caused by witchcraft but also those diseases originating from an unfulfilled soul desire.

Sometimes when a sick person’s soul desire was so concealed as to be impenetrable, the saokata

would be called upon to determine what the soul needed. However, individuals would often have

their soul desires, called ondinnonk, revealed to them in dreams which they believed were the

“voice of the soul.”5 Lalemant, the Jesuit priest reporting from Wendake for the year 1639-40,

repeats the same mistranslation of four years earlier. He asks a Wendat man “what is the cause of

the [soul] desire” and the man responds “ondays ihatonc oki haendaerandic.” Lalemant

1 JR 10: 197. 2 Trigger, The Huron: Farmers of the North, 134. 3 JR 33: 199; see also JR 17: 213 for a description of the Otetsens. 4 JR 8: 123; JR 17: 211; see also JR 33: 193 for a description of Saokata. 5 JR 39: 21. See also JR 33: 191; JR 17: 155, 163.

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mistranslates this as “the thing under the form of which my familiar Demon appeared to me,

gave me this advice.” Based on the discussion above, oki haendaerandic would refer to a

person’s supernatural or power soul. Lalemant’s description reveals that prolonged stays in

Wendake were no guarantee of cultural understanding, especially when the missionary arm of

the colonial machinery was bent on conversion not comprehension. For proselytising purposes

equating okis with the devil added necessity and urgency to the Jesuits’ work in Wendake and

certainly provided more colourful stories.

The final point to be made about Wendat illnesses is that they required a community

response. This represents perhaps the greatest asymmetry between Wendat and French human

disease and treatment models. Community members were expected to participate in their

kinsperson’s recovery through various healing ceremonies which typically involved curing

feasts, dances, and songs.1 Once an ill person’s soul desire had been ascertained, Chiefs would

“go about publishing the desires of the sick, or other persons who have dreamed, and when they

say it is the ondinonc of a certain person, each one immediately takes pains and applies himself

with all his might to give…satisfaction to that one to whom it belongs.”2 Because alleviation of

the ailment was thought to be possible through gifting to the sick person the object desired, the

expectation was that community members would give such an object freely.3 Sagard provides an

unusual account involving a cat brought to Wendake by the Recollets. A young woman is faced

with the impassable decision to part with her much cherished cat or risk being ostracised for

breaching social norms when a sick older woman dreams her health will be restored if she is

1 For curing feasts see JR 10: 177, 197, 325; JR 17: 155; JR 13: 239. For curing dances see JR 21: 151; JR 17: 171; JR 10: 183; JR 14: 59. 2 JR 17: 155. 3 JR 15: 179.

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given the cat.1 Sagard reports the loss of her cat left the young woman so grief stricken she died.

A similar tension between volition and obligation would surely have existed in France where

gifts were used not necessarily to heal the ailing but as a mechanism to assuage and order social

relations, facilitating human connections and helping to mark events or recognise status.2 To

restore health an arendiwane might also recommend a game such as lacrosse, dish, or straw be

played.3 On some occasions people dreamed their health would only be restored if competing

villages played lacrosse, but sometimes an arendiwane would divine “that the whole Country is

sick, and he asks a game of crosse to heal it.”4 All of these ceremonies, rituals and religious

practices constituted a profound dimension of Wendat culture which the Jesuits described as “the

prop and maintenance of their whole State,” and the Wendat referred to as “the ground…what

we call affairs of importance.”5

The difference in terms chosen by the Wendat and the French to denote this ceremonial

aspect of Wendat culture is significant. “Onderha” literally translates as “the ground.” The word

ground has several meanings two of which are “the solid surface of the earth” and “something

that serves as a foundation.” The word prop, on the other hand, is defined as “something that

props or sustains.” Referring to the ceremonies as a prop instead of the ground emblematically

expunges the earth-based significance of the ceremonies. Wendat thought stresses coherent

wholes and integrated or reciprocal patterns instead of contiguous but disconnected processes.

All ceremonies were designed to influence and honour earth-based spiritual forces, for the

Wendat temporal-spatial world was alive with spirit. Their philosophy was animistic, what Sioui

observes to be the spiritual heritage of all circular societies where social vision and moral values 1 Sagard, Long Journey, 118. 2 Natalie Zemon Davis, The Gift in Sixteenth-Century France (Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 2000). 3 See Tooker, Ethnography of the Huron Indians, 114. 4 JR 10: 187. Games were also a culturally sanctioned means for expressing competitive and aggressive feelings that were usually sublimated to the socially valued principles of cooperation and humility. 5 JR 17: 195-97.

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derive directly from a “capacity to perceive the soul (anima) inhabiting all beings and all things,

material or immaterial.”1 One of the clearest expressions of Wendat animism2 in the primary

sources is Brebeuf’s statement, “They address themselves to the Earth, to Rivers, to Lakes, to

dangerous Rocks, but above all, to the Sky; and believe that all these things are animate.”3 Often

Wendat interaction with the ensouled world involved making offerings to spirits usually in the

form of tobacco,4 but sometimes also through ritualised dog (and occasionally other animal)

sacrifices.5 Wendat peoples killed animals for food, utilitarian products, and sacrifices, but this

does not controvert the keen perception Wendat peoples had of animal groups as intelligent

knowledge-gathering nations possessing objectives and aspirations, and worthy of respect.

Indeed souls of dogs were thought to have their own path to the Wendat village of souls and all

animals were understood to possess immortal reasonable souls.6 The Jesuits at this time had not

adopted the Cartesian mechanistic view of animals as soulless, so they too believed animals had

animating spirits, just not of the immortal kind.7 The strict rules Wendat peoples had about the

handling of animal remains, for example, not throwing deer bones into a campfire, for this would

offend the Deer Nation, provide further evidence of a respect and reciprocity between humans

and nonhumans that was central to the Wendat worldview.8 Sagard’s marvellous description of

the “fish-preacher,” a Wendat specialist who “preached a sermon” to the fish each night after

dinner when the Wendat men were encamped at their temporary fish lodges is another example 1 Sioui, Huron-Wendat, 21. 2 Kirkpatrick Sale, The Conquest of Paradise: Christopher Columbus and the Columbian Legacy (New York: Knopf, 1990) argues that the term animism is problematic when used to describe the spiritual practices of Indigenous peoples because it “does not convey the complexities” and fails to reflect how human beings are simply “another species of equal but not superior stature in that web of life” p. 307. I use the term animism because it has been chosen by Sioui, the Wendat scholar, to describe the spirituality of his people. 3 JR 10: 159; see also Sagard, Long Journey, 171, 189. 4 JR 10: 159; JR 13: 260. 5 JR 17: 165; 197; JR 21: 163; JR 23: 159, 173. 6 JR 8: 121; JR 10: 169. See also Basil Johnston’s discussion of Ojibwa beliefs regarding nonhuman animals and human relationships with them in Ojibway Heritage (Toronto: McClelland, 1976) 49. 7 JR 6: 181. 8 Champlain, Works, 4: 175; see also Sagard, Long Journey, 187.

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of Wendat-nonhuman animal relations which reveals an understanding of the nonhuman that is

radically different from that of the French. The fish-preacher would lie on his back with all the

other fishermen lying prostrate around him, and he would speak to the fish because it was

believed he had “great power of attracting fish into their nets.”1 Although Sagard records this

practice for the sake of illustrating what he perceives to be Wendat “superstition” and “folly,” the

interspecies mutuality so central to Wendat understanding is patent. The respect Wendat people

had for other animal nations is also reflected in their oral tradition which includes many stories in

which animals adopt or assist human beings. In these narratives Wendat persons sometimes enter

into verbal contracts with nonhuman animals, the violation of which leads to death.2

Morality

As I stated in the Introduction, my research is propelled by a deep moral concern. Because we

are the only species to have inflicted such extensive damage on our environment and co-dwelling

nonhuman species, the responsibility we bear and the framing of all present and future actions

must be moral, for it is morality that connects our material selves with our land base, although

for many of us this connection, indeed dependency, is not readily apparent. Circular morality

emphasises the respect due to all creation, including those beings who appear less powerful.

Sometimes Wendat cosmology inverts the expected principle in which large equates with power,

underscoring instead the splendour or strength of small. Brebeuf states, “they recognize a sort of

war God; they imagine him as a little Dwarf,”3 and this was the message encrypted in Toad’s

success so central to the Wendat creation story. Not only was small size commonly associated

1 Sagard, Long Journey, 188. 2 An especially poignant example of this is “The Bear and the Hunter’s Step-son” in Barbeau, Huron and Wyandot Mythology, 116-25. 3 JR 10: 183; see also E.F. Schumacher, Small Is Beautiful: A Study of Economics as if People Mattered (London: Blond, 1973) for an example of sustainable economic thought and environmental practices, promoting the idea that small is perhaps the best scale for human activity.

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with power, but large size had nuances of iniquity.1 In many respects the stories contained in

Wendat oral tradition that address the issue of size and its relationship to power serve as a

reminder of the values cherished by Wendat society: cooperation, humility, reciprocity,

generosity and appreciation for the place of the individual and the collective within an

interdependent web of life. These were the basic principles of Wendat society and, as Sioui

suggests, they are the commonly shared values of animistic circular societies. Although the

Jesuits could not conceive of animism as a legitimate religious system, they nonetheless were

optimistic about “how easy it will be, with time and divine aid, to lead these Peoples to the

knowledge of their Creator, since they already honor so especially a creature which is so perfect

an image of him.”2 The missionary desire to convert Wendat belief from worship of Creation to

Creator represents the wish to replace animism with monotheism. Unaware of the extent to

which religious beliefs and practices truly were the ground of Wendat culture, informing social

formations, land use, international relations and politics, French Christian proselytizers

underestimated the conversion challenges they were to face in Wendake.

King suggests the differences between non-Aboriginal and Aboriginal cosmogony and

cosmology represent two different “choices: a world in which creation is a solitary, individual

act or a world in which creation is a shared activity; a world that begins in harmony and slides

toward chaos or a world that begins in chaos and moves toward harmony; a world marked by

competition or a world determined by co-operation.”3 Sioui would add to this inventory three

more important differences: the linear versus circular worldview; absolutism versus relativism;

1 See a variety of stories involving giants and dwarfs in Barbeau, Huron and Wyandot Mythology; see also Sioui, Huron-Wendat, 37. 2 JR 10: 161. 3 Thomas King, The Truth about Stories: A Native Narrative, CBC Massey Lectures (Toronto: House of Anansi, 2003) 24.

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and a doctrinal moral code versus an earth-based morality.1 The underlying cultural assumption

of Wendat cosmology is that human life is so utterly part of the nonhuman world that every

quotidian practice or experience be it hunting, dreaming or interpersonal exchanges was seen as

being imbued with cosmological significance. Even with these differences, the Wendat and

French still had shared religious elements. Both traditions believed in a supreme being, and both

used fasting, visioning and prayer as a means to spiritual communion. However differently

envisaged, these two religions included an afterlife. And central to each faith is a belief in

supernatural beings: for the Wendat these are the okis; for the French, angels and Satan. Grant

astutely argues there were enough seeming similarities between the religious beliefs and

practices of the two cultures, especially the emphasis on personal vision contained in both, that

they appeared partially intelligible to one another however artificially.2 Wendat understanding of

priests as okis and French mapping of Cain and Abel onto Iouskeha and Tawiscaron are

examples of this.

The deeper differences belonging to a moral monotheistic belief system having absolute

good and evil and a transcendent God as opposed to an animistic worldview where relative and

complementary cosmic forces are constantly at play are important. Because Catholic Christian

understanding contains a radical separation between spirit and matter, there existed a greater

tendency for the French to affix cultural discourse and practices to ideological frameworks that

devalue the material world conventionally denoted “nature.” Brebeuf s̀ expressed “aversion for

all things created” is an instance of this formulation taken to its logical extreme but it reflects

also a fundamental current in Catholic theology embodied in the phrase “corporal mortification.”

The oppositional construction of spirit versus matter is quite at odds with Wendat materialist

1 Sioui, Huron-Wendat, xviii. 2 Webster Grant, Moon of Wintertime, 23

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spirituality which does not place spirit outside of the material realm but experiences the earth as

richly spirited, and conversely, spirit, in the form of the asken, as decidedly material. The

Wendat religio-philosophical tradition was manifestly less doctrinal than spiritually quotidian.

As Youngblood Henderson states, “Rather than being an established system of rules and

principles, Aboriginal life is a highly integrated communion of values and processes.”1

Conclusion

Environmental thinkers have been making connections between human attitudes and

environmental conditions for some time. While there is no one right way to conceptualise the

nonhuman other or our relationship with the nonhuman, most environmental theorists and

activists agree human beings greatly need to reorient themselves toward earth-centeredness. This

is the message contained within Aldo Leopold’s “land ethic,” Arne Naess’s “deep ecology”

theory, Vandana Shiva’s “Prakriti” or life-force principle, Gary Snyder’s bioregional views, and

Joanna Macy’s “work that reconnects.”2 Zapf’s work which attempts to bring equal

consideration to the environment in the person-in-environment construct so important to

mainstream social work by reconfiguring the conception as “people as place” is significant.3 The

transformation of this construct begins the process of resituating ourselves in/as the living system

that is creation. These bio-oriented approaches aim to improve human-nonhuman, as well as

human-to-human, relations through reconceptualising our place in the world and our

responsibility to each other. In a sense each of these authors and activists is endeavouring to re-

story the world.

1 Youngblood Henderson, “Ayukpachi: Empowering Aboriginal Thought,” 272. 2 Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac: With Essays on Conservation from Round River (1966; New York: Ballantine, 1970); Arne Naess, “The Shallow and the Deep, Long-Range Ecology Movement,” Inquiry 16 (1973): 95-100; Vandana Shiva, Staying Alive: Women, Ecology and Development, 8th ed. (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Zed Books, 2002); Gary Snyder, The Practice of the Wild: Essays (San Francisco: North Point, 1990). 3 M. Kim Zapf, Social Work and the Environment: Understanding People and Place (Toronto: Canadian Scholar’s, 2009).

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In the spirit of circularity I would like to reiterate the focus of this chapter’s beginning:

stories. “It’s all a question of story,” writes Thomas Berry. “We are in trouble just now because

we do not have a good story.”1 A growing number of social workers have become aware in the

past few decades of the need for new stories, and consequently the social work narrative has

begun to change. Within the literature, at conferences and in classrooms, social work’s discursive

parameters are expanding to include a greater number of environmental social work voices and

concerns. One pursuit germane to environmental social workers, building on the scholarship of

community development researchers and practitioners, has been to facilitate the movement of

“traditional social work practice out of its preoccupation with personal development and toward

seeing individual well-being as embedded in community, which is itself embedded in Earth.”2

The Wendat and French had different stories: the one embodied and embedded, even to their

bones, the other figuratively disembodied but factually embedded for it is impossible to be

otherwise. The following chapter investigates how these beliefs are reflected in pre-contact3

resource consumption and land-use practices.

1 Thomas Berry, Dream of the Earth (San Francisco: Sierra Club, 1988) 123. 2 John Coates, Ecology and Social Work: Towards a New Paradigm (Halifax: Fernwood, 2003) 156. 3 By pre-contact I mean something very specific: the few years immediately preceding Wendat-French culture contact when the French were already in New France and had heard of the Wendat, the farmers in the interior, but had not yet met them.

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Chapter Six: Wendat and French Pre-Contact Land-Use Practices

The causes of [a culture’s] success must be sought…in the relationship between [humans] and [their] environment…. Europe1 wasted [its] space, and so even after the drop in population at the beginning of the fourteenth century [Europe] was short of space…. Europe’s most important [expansionist] motive, although often an unconscious one, was the need for space. Pierre Chaunu

Introduction

The exploration in chapter five revealed how our relationship with the nonhuman other is always

mediated through a set of cultural values, norms, interpretive frameworks, and related societal

rules. These cultural norms which become internalised psychological devices delimiting the

parameters of what is both possible and acceptable are reflected in material, social, and political

features of societies and often serve a restrictive purpose through the very act of defining the

world for community members. This chapter investigates how Wendat and French worldviews

influenced land-use practices in the pre-contact period of the very early seventeenth century, the

Wendat in Southern Ontario, and the French in what is now eastern Canada. There is evidence

that during this time some of the environmental issues we wrestle with today were challenging

the Wendat and French: the Wendat had to devise an innovative solution for managing a sudden

population increase; the French had to save themselves from a potential implosion caused by

competing interest groups2; and both French and Aboriginal peoples were faced with the

1 While I do not wish to reify Europe as a monolithic, undifferentiated geopolitical cultural unit, the response of the French, evident in the primary sources, to the vast space and abundant resources native to what is now Canada suggests a society straining to meet its needs due to a variety of factors including poor resource management, continental competition, and geographical and natural resources constraints. 2 For the French perhaps the most significant tension created by competing interest groups was that between the traders who wished only to amass wealth and the settlers who yearned to build a colony. This created conflicts over how resources, both nonhuman and human, should be deployed in New France. The present day tension between work and nature, often exemplified by the battle between loggers and environmentalists, though not an exact analogy, does suggest some interesting parallels regarding conflicts that arise over different ways of viewing the

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problem of scarce resources. The way in which the two cultures handled these challenges in

many respects reflects the expected divergence between a non-hierarchical and hierarchical

society, the latter societal structure being problematised by contemporary environmental

theorists.1 The Wendat employed strategies compatible with many social work principles, such

as mutuality, empowerment and an appreciation of diversity. The French on the other hand

tended to rely on the intensification and implementation of the pre-existing hierarchical order.

The purpose of this investigation is not to produce an artificial baseline measure from

which to contrast pre-contact and post-contact land use practices belonging to the Wendat and

French, but to get a sense of how these nations were evolving independently just prior to contact

with a view to integrate this understanding into the ongoing developments occurring after contact

had been made. Cronon has judiciously identified how contrasting a region before and after

European presence “obscures the actual processes of ecological and economic change.”2 Such a

two-point analysis creates an illusion of unicausality and rapid change because it neglects to

view cultures as systems that are mutating constantly over time through interaction with other

cultures and the environment. The pre-contact baseline approach is further problematic for it

would defectively but unavoidably position European arrival as the pre and post focal point

around which this case study analysis turns.3 The Wendat confederacy and the French colonial

project in New France were not static social or political entities but represent ever-changing

cultural systems with dynamic and wide-ranging socio-political interests. Nowhere is this more

land and valuing the nonhuman. See Richard White, “‘Are You an Environmentalist or Do You Work for a Living? Work and Nature,” Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature, ed. William Cronon (New York: Norton, 1996) 171-185. 1 See for example David Korten, The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community (San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler, 2005) and Joanna Macy, World As Lover, World As Self (Berkeley: Parallax, 1991). 2 Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists and the Ecology of New England (1983; New York: Hill, 2003) 161. 3 Cronon, Changes in the Land, p. 164.

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apparent than the relatively recent land tenure of each group in their respective territories: the

Wendat in Wendake and the French in New France.

The Pre-Contact Wendat in Wendake

When Champlain first met the Wendat as Algonkian allies in the 1609 battle against the

Mohawk, they were a confederacy of four nations living in Wendake. This relatively small but

highly populated region had roughly twenty-five villages in an area measuring approximately

550 square kilometres. Wendat territory was bordered on the west by Nottawasaga Bay, the north

by Matchedash Bay, and the east by Lake Simcoe. The alluvial basin of the Nottawasaga River

formed the southern border, which in the early seventeenth century was an extensive swampy

zone separating the Wendat from more southerly territories and providing geographic support for

their self-conception as island dwellers.1 The four nations comprising the Wendat confederacy at

the time of contact were the Attignawantan (the Bear Nation), the Attigneenongnahac (the Cord

Nation), the Arendahronon (the Rock Nation), and the Tahontaenrat (the Deer Nation). Some

consider the Ataronchronon to be a fifth nation in the Wendat confederacy, but Trigger suggests

they were a division of the Attignawantan, a very large but loosely incorporated nation.2 The two

largest and oldest nations of the confederacy, the Attignawantan and the Attigneenongnahac,

were reported by Lalemant in the Jesuit Relation of 1639 as having resided in Wendake for more

than two hundred years. Because of their shared history in Wendake, “These two nations term

1 See Conrad Heidenreich, Huronia: A History and Geography of the Huron Indians, 1600-1650 (Toronto: McClelland, 1971) 69 for a description of Wendake in the early seventeenth century. He establishes the region was an island in practical, if not literal terms. See also Sioui’s Huron-Wendat for a description of Wendake at the time of French contact and for a translation of the name Wendake “the island apart” p. 90. The confederacy name Wendat has been translated as “island dwellers” perhaps in reference to their geographic location, but also in reference to their cosmology because Aataentsic, their first ancestor, came to thrive on Turtle Island. It should be noted that the Wendat are only referred to using this collective name once in the Jesuit Relations (JR 16:227), and most likely prior to their dispersal they referred to themselves using their national names, rather than their confederate appellation. 2 Both Sioui Huron-Wendat and Heidenreich Huronia count five nations in the Wendat confederacy. In JR 16: 229 Jerome Lalemant writes the Attigneenongnahac and the Attignawantan both tended to adopt families that “retain the names and memories of their founders, they are still distinct little Nations in those where they have been adopted.” This could explain the relationship of the Ataronchronon.

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each other “brother” and “sister,” in the councils and assemblies.”1 The Arendahronons and the

Tahontaenrats joined the Wendat confederacy in 1590 and 1610 respectively, just shortly before

intentional and enduring contact with the French.

More important than the fact of their occupation in Wendake at the time of contact, is

how and why the constituent nations of the Wendat confederacy decided to settle in the territory

of what is now the Penetanguishene Peninsula. An examination of the archaeological record

reveals that like the French who chose to venture to New France for political, economic and

social reasons, the Wendat made a series of deliberate decisions using similar criteria but perhaps

having different objectives. The concurrence between these geographic movements, the

individual Wendat nations into the confederated Wendat territory and the French overseas into a

foreign land appropriated, if initially only titularly, as New France, and the worldviews reflected

and encrypted in both such migrations is quite informative. Because the written history about the

Wendat is non-existent until it erupts in ethnographic form in the primary sources, and here

usually in opposition to the French as the ideal standard, the prototype of human achievement, it

is difficult to ascertain in these writings Wendat vitality and complexity. The major task, then, is

to dislodge the authority of the ethnographic record, the primary source material, which tends,

partly through limited timeframe and partly through tendentiousness, to reinforce the notion of

Wendat peoples as a static culture being acted upon by a dynamic outside influence, the French.

From the discipline of ecology two key concepts have been brought into critical

discourse: the first, the idea of system fluctuation, debunks the earlier myth of perpetual system

equilibrium; the second is the inescapable actuality of hybridity. The political value of hybridity

conceived as a "theoretical metaconstruction of social order" resides in its innate potentiality for

1 JR 16: 229.

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destabilising binary categories.1 In terms of this Wendat-French case study, these two concepts

militate against any vestige of a belief in Wendat cultural stasis and the related imperial

conviction of French cultural distinctness and superiority so present in the primary sources. In

truth, despite the primary source authors’ depictions of two “pure” groups, either French or

Aboriginal, the slippage between cultures was incontrovertible, sometimes alarmingly so for

each party.2 An examination of the archaeological record brings the two main groups of this case

study closer together, not through an artificial reconfiguring but through recognizing similar

economic and socio-political strivings and disarticulations. Such an analysis facilitates an

understanding of the contact period that is based on the unexpected reality of human and national

interdependence where despite their differences the Wendat and French intersected one another

through non-hierarchical contact, cultural interpenetration, borrowings, adoptions, rejections, and

also, non-martial conflict. In short, using the archaeological record as a starting point to obtain an

understanding of the independent Wendat and French objectives and practices occurring into the

late pre-contact period is a way of approaching and integrating Zemon Davis’s idea of absolute

simultaneity.3 To compensate for the shortcomings of the ethnographic record, the

archaeological record is used to evidence the ways in which Wendat and French cultures were in

every respect equally, if differently, developed.

Shift to Mixed Horticultural Subsistence4

1 See Pnina Werbner, “Introduction: the Dialectics of Cultural Hybridity,” Debating Cultural Hybridity: Multi-cultural Identities in the Politics of Anti-racism, eds. Pnina Werbner and Tariq Modood (London: Zed, 1997) 1-26. 2 This will be explored further in chapters seven and eight, but to briefly sketch the issue, the French were alarmed by some of their traders “going native” and some Wendat were equally disturbed by some of their members adopting Christian beliefs and practices. 3 Natalie Zemon Davis, “Iroquois Women, European Women,” Feminist Postcolonial Theory, eds. Reina Lewis and Sara Mils (New York: Routledge, 2003) 135-160. 4 What I am describing as mixed horticultural subsistence here approximates what Slicher van Bath terms “direct agricultural consumption,” a system involving equal exchange with a non-agricultural population (for the Wendat this was the northern Algonkian peoples) that characterised western European farming practices from 500-1150 CE. Slicher van Bath deems post-1150 western European agriculture to be a period of “indirect agricultural consumption,” which describes our current system where most of us do not produce our own food. Many

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Although I have indicated that the Wendat were relatively new to Wendake, the longest period of

land tenure being approximately two hundred years, they had an extensive history of living in

southern Ontario. Formerly it was believed that the Wendat and other northern Nadouek1 peoples

arrived in the Lower Great Lakes region just a few centuries before European contact, migrating

originally from the southeastern United States.2 MacNeish was the first to posit an in situ

development theory for northern Nadouek groups, a theory that has remained virtually

uncontested.3 That northern Nadouek peoples inhabited and developed unique cultures for

centuries in what is now Ontario is important not only for the political cachet such lengthy

occupancy brings to Aboriginal rights discourse, especially with respect to land title disputes, but

also for the comprehensive ecological knowledge that would naturally accrue. In the period ca.

500-900 C.E. the Ontario Nadouek peoples chose to adopt cultigens and this decision had a

decided impact on societal development. This transition to horticulture among the Nadoueks in

southern Ontario cannot be explained by demographic demands, for Warrick has demonstrated

that the collective Nadouek population in south central Ontario would only have been exploiting

15-25% of its carrying capacity at this time.4

environmental thinkers now recognise a connection between growing one’s own food and establishing a deeper relationship with one’s land base; Wendell Berry, Barbara Kingsolver, and Nettie Wiebe are exemplars of this model. B.H. Slicher van Bath, The Agrarian History of Western Europe, A.D. 500-1850, trans. Olive Ordish (London: Arnold, 1963) 24. 1 I am choosing to use the term Nadouek instead of Iroquoian. Iroquoian refers to a distinct cultural and linguistic grouping that includes the Haudenosaune (Iroquois), Wendat (Huron), Tionontate (Tobacco or Petun) and the Attawandaronk (Neutral). I am following Sioui’s suggestion that an Aboriginal name be used for Aboriginal peoples instead of a French name. Because these groups did not have a collective name for themselves, Sioui suggests using the Algonkian name Nadouek for these peoples. 2 Arthur C. Parker was among the first to put this idea forward in his “The Origin of the Iroquois as Suggested by Their Archaeology,” American Anthropologist 18 (October-December, 1916): 479-507. 3 Richard S. MacNeish, Iroquois Pottery Types: A Technique for the Study of Iroquois Prehistory, Bulletin 124 (Ottawa: National Museum of Canada, 1952). MacNeish’s in situ theory was supported by James V. Wright’s work The Ontario Iroquois Tradition, Bulletin 210 (Ottawa: National Museum of Canada, 1966). 4 See Gary Warrick, A Population History of the Huron-Petun, AD 900-1650, diss., McGill University, 1990.

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Trigger suggests that one not presuppose the mere presence of cultigens adapted to a

shorter growing season would necessarily lead to the adoption of horticulture.1 Instead one must

consider all the relevant factors that could reasonably prompt a culture to incorporate such a

radical change. Indeed adopting cultigens marked a significant cultural adjustment for the

Nadouek peoples, creating a shift from a more peripatetic hunter-gatherer culture to greater

sedentarism. Sioui insists First Nations peoples naturally prefer the more healthful diet of wild

meat and fish to less nutrient-dense cultivated plant foods, both because of the higher protein-

caloric value and the inherent pleasure derived from hunting and fishing. Based on this belief

Sioui advances a demographic theory, arguing Nadouek peoples gradually adopted horticulture

because they were “weaker numerically (and therefore politically and territorially) than the

Algonkians, who were virtual masters of the Northeast.”2 Trigger’s argument, for its parsimony,

is most sound, requiring the least amount of speculation: “The main reason for adopting a

horticultural economy may have been to reduce and finally to eliminate the need to disperse in

small hunting groups during the winter.”3 Corn would have mitigated the risk of starvation

during wintertime, and its storability, adaptability and reliability would have made it a natural

choice for a culture already practising wild plant harvesting as part of its subsistence model.4

The cultural changes that occurred among Nadouek peoples as a result of shifting to a

mixed horticultural subsistence pattern were several. One of the most salient changes was a

dramatic increase in population size occurring in the early twelfth to early fourteenth century.5

This was due in part to the decreased incidence of late-winter famine, but also to the

1 Trigger, Children of Aataentsic, 131-32. 2 Sioui, Huron-Wendat, 62. 3 Trigger, Natives and Newcomers, 109. 4 Trigger, Natives and Newcomers, 85. 5 See Warrick, Population History, 1990, 343.

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considerable decline in infant and child mortality and the increase in female fertility.1 By the

early fourteenth century, the archaeological record shows a lengthening of longhouses, the

conventional domicile of Nadouek peoples, while simultaneously revealing a more organized

village layout.2 These two characteristics of this period in Nadouek village development are

thought to reflect the emergence of matrilineality and the establishment of more structured

village councils, together with increasing formalisation of clan systems.3 With the rising

population size, however, the Nadouek peoples began to strain local deer populations which

were not as important for meat as they were for hides. Warrick posits that a faction of the

Nadoueks, the Wendat and Tionontate,4 chose to relocate north of the Oak Ridges Moraine after

1300 C.E. in response to this problem of dwindling deer populations resulting from human

culling. The Wendat and Tionontate were limited geographically in their southern movement by

Lakes Ontario and Erie; a southern migration was also closed to them for beyond the lower Great

Lakes was the region of another Nadouek group, the Haudenosaune; and they could not move

eastward or westward, as both regions were already occupied by other Nadouek or Algonkian

peoples; they therefore needed to get beyond the moraine to reach uninhabited cultivable land

and gain access to a relatively unexploited deer population.5 While warfare, trade, and the Little

Ice Age6 have been proffered as explanations for this significant relocation across the moraine,

none of these hypotheses has been borne out by archaeological evidence, lending Warrick’s

resource theory the most plausibility.

Effects of Wendat Population Growth

1 Warrick, Population History, 1990, 345. 2 Warrick, Population History, 1990, 348. 3 See Trigger, Natives and Newcomers, 93. 4 The Tionontaté were a group of Nadouek peoples living to the west of the Wendat. 5 See Warrick’s discussion of this in his doctoral thesis A Population History of the Huron-Petun, 348-353. 6 The Little Ice Age is a term used to describe a period of climate cooling which seems to have begun in the sixteenth century.

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In the first century following the migration northward toward what is today the Simcoe County

region, the Wendat and Tionontate experienced what can only be described as a population

explosion, their collective population soaring from 11,000 to 29,000 in less than a century (1330-

1420 C.E.). Warrick accounts for this rapid population growth by identifying the joint effect of

an eight hundred year (500-1300 C.E.) “marked hiatus in human occupation” defining their

newly adopted territory, which would obviously increase the availability of animal and other

resources, together with the notable development of “true agricultural colonies.”1 But a

population of this size would quickly exhaust regional deer supplies and weaken the chance of

herd regeneration. By the mid-fifteenth century the Wendat-Tionontate population had stabilized

at approximately 30,000 people. It is during this mid-fifteenth century period that a number of

Wendat villages began to be established just below the southern boundary of the Canadian

Shield.2 The decision to develop village sites in such a northerly region has raised questions

because geographically this area represents the northernmost limit for a reasonable corn-growing

season,3 making this location appear a peculiar choice for committed horticulturalists. Historians

originally explained this development by applying an anachronistic reading of the primary

sources to this phenomenon, suggesting the Haudenosaune incursions of the mid-seventeenth

century were responsible for this trend of two centuries earlier. It was believed the Wendat had

retreated to the Penetanguishene Peninsula to escape being attacked by their enemies the

Haudenosaune who had become, in the 1640s, a genuine military threat. However, during the

fifteenth century this was not the case. While the archaeological record indicates some need for

defence among many fifteenth-century Nadouek peoples, denoted by the presence of village

palisades, there is no evidence of full-scale warfare or significant military incursions at this

1 Warrick, Population History, 1990, 354, 360. 2 Warrick, Population History, 1990, 372. 3 Heidenreich, Huronia, 56.

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time.1 Moreover, the Haudenosaune in the fifteenth century were neither militarily nor

numerically superior to the Wendat. Trigger suggests three principal reasons for Wendat

relocation to the Simcoe County region. First, despite the fact that the temperature was cooler

than the lower Great Lakes area, the soil was light allowing for easy cultivation. Second, as

described earlier, the territory of Wendake was bordered on three sides by rivers and lakes which

meant not only was year-round fishing possible but also the region was highly navigable. Third,

and most important, Wendake was situated at the edge of two ecological zones which invited a

complementary rather than competitive relationship between two distinct Aboriginal cultures.

The northern Algonkian hunters, living beyond Wendat territory came to trade furs, hides, and

dried meat and fish with their Wendat neighbours, who in turn traded tobacco, fishing nets, and

most importantly corn which would help sustain the Algonkians through the winter months.2

The decision to settle the land that lay beyond the moraine represents not only a

resourceful tactical move by the Wendat but also displays, almost from the start, an impressive

resiliency and talent for diplomacy. The Wendat executed an ideological vision based on the

application of centuries of ecological knowledge and the quotidian processes of cooperation both

within and without their ethnic grouping. At the physical level there was the transformation of

the environment through intensive horticulture and close proximity of Wendat village sites in the

small newly adopted territory, all of which required greater political and administrative

organizing. Internationally the Wendat exploited the micro-physics of difference, not imperially

but sensitively, exploiting the distinctions between Wendat and Algonkian cultures in a mutually

beneficial way, seeing egalitarian international relations as integral to successful life in

1 See Heidenreich’s discussion in Huronia (p. 142) of the effectiveness of Wendat palisades prior to the period when the Haudenosaune armies got larger and better organised,” which suggests the pre-1640 confrontations were more skirmishes than bona fide warfare. 2 Trigger The Huron: Farmers of the North, 5.

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Wendake.1 By choosing to embrace complementarity as a solution to their resource scarcity

rather than seeking to wrest territorial control from other Nadouek or Algonkian groups, the

Wendat displayed a problem-solving process incorporating both logico-deductive and culture-

based elements. Forming a symbiotic alliance with the more northerly Algonkians was logically

coherent because both groups stood to prosper. This logical decision was also culturally

sanctioned by the complementarity contained within Wendat cosmogonic narratives and

understanding, perhaps best depicted by Tawiscaron and Iouskeha. Through their exchange

processes with the Algonkian peoples, the Wendat made of Wendake a cultural, intellectual and

spiritual centre, while simultaneously creating the economic and political stability necessary for

the confederacy to thrive. Their finesse in political and international matters is commonly

understood to be the distinctive cultural genius of the Wendat.2

The Pre-Contact French and New France

In turning now to migratory movements of the French into the territory they came to call New

France, I am not constructing a false parallelism but attempting to demonstrate that both groups

of peoples, the Wendat and French, were in flux, albeit for different reasons. Initial French

contact with North America began ca. 1500 C.E. and represented only an extractive interest that

revolved largely around an international fishery, involving Breton, Norman, Portuguese, Basque,

and English fishermen in North Atlantic waters around the Grand Banks of Newfoundland and

Labrador.3 Exploration and colonisation efforts began in earnest under the rule of Francois I,

who dispatched Verrazzano and later Jacques Cartier to seek new lands and discover the

1 The Wendat decision to move toward a reciprocity model embracing diversity, difference and synergism is consistent with social work principles and is especially germane to social work with groups. See Julianne Wayne and Carol S. Cohen, “The Special Value of Social Group Work: Implications for Intervention,” Group Work Education in the Field (Alexandria, VA: Council on Social Work Education, 2001) 5-15. 2 See Trigger Natives and Newcomers; see also Sioui Huron-Wendat. 3 Cole Harris, “France in North America,” North America: The Historical Geography of a Changing Continent, 2nd ed., eds. Thomas F. McIlwraith and Edward K. Muller (Lanham, MD: Rowman, 2001) 65-88.

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Northwest Passage to Asia. After Cartier’s second voyage of 1535, Jean-Francois de la Roque de

Roberval was appointed lieutenant of New France and was assigned the responsibility of

developing a new colony in North America. Cartier established the first French settlement on

what came to be Canadian soil, naming it Charlesbourg-Royal (present day Cap Rouge). But this

third and final voyage of Cartier’s was to end in disgrace. When Roberval, Cartier’s superior,

arrived in the St Lawrence with supplies and colonists, Cartier left furtively for France in the

night. He disobeyed his superior who had told him to return to Charlesbourg-Royal because

Cartier believed he had collected gold and diamonds in the New World and was seeking the

anticipated glory of a triumphant reception in France.1 Sadly for Cartier, the diamonds were

quartz and the gold nothing but worthless iron pyrite, and he was never granted another seafaring

commission though he has long since been renowned for having been the first European to

penetrate the greatest waterway to the interior of North America.

France lagged behind other European powers with respect to New World expansion both

because it lacked a permanent naval fleet2 and also because France was consumed by civil and

foreign wars. The French Wars of Religion occurring between 1562 and 1598 effectively

hamstrung the nation with violent wrangling between French Catholics and Protestants

(Huguenots). The level of brutality characteristic of this civil infighting equalled all accounts the

French missionaries were later to record with respect to the ritual torture they observed in

Wendat culture,3 however unfamiliar and savage they made such acts appear to their French

social sensibilities. In support of the Catholic League, Philip II of Spain had placed troops in

1 See Jacques Cartier, The Voyages of Jacques Cartier, trans. and ed. H.P. Biggar (Ottawa: Acland, 1924) 265. 2 Bernard Barbiche, “Henri IV and the World Overseas: a Decisive Time in the History of New France.” Champlain: The Birth of French America, eds. Raymonde Litalien and Denis Vaugeois (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s UP, 2004) 24-32. 3 See Robert Charles Aitken, Undo the Myth Maker: A Comparison of Ritual Torture and Religious Transactions in Popular Religious Rioting during the French Wars of Religion, and the Huron Prisoner of War Execution Ceremony in North America during the end of the Sixteenth Century, MA thesis, McGill University, 2006.

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French territory. But when the French religious civil wars came to an end with Henri IV of

France issuing the Edict of Nantes in April 1598, which vouchsafed religious toleration to

Protestants, Philip II was obliged to withdraw his forces from France and sign the Treaty of

Vervins on May 2, 1598, concluding the war between France and Spain.

With these civil matters managed Henri IV began to focus on nation building and

commercial enterprise. In 1598 the king granted a monopoly on the fur trade to Troilus de

Mesgouez, Marquis de La Roche who was also given the decidedly political title of lieutenant.1

De La Roche founded a colony at Sable Island that endured until 1603, but in 1599 Henri IV

transferred La Roche’s monopoly to the Protestant Pierre Chauvin de Tonnetuit.2 Joined by

Francois Gravé, Seigneur du Pont, Chauvin established a trading post at Tadoussac near the

mouth of the St. Lawrence River in 1600. In 1603 Chauvin died and Henri IV chose Aymar de

Chaste, as his successor rather than La Roche, “not being convinced of the soundness of his

work.”3 Although Aymar de Chaste was to die in France before his fleet reached Tadoussac, his

role as the coordinator of the renowned 1603 voyage is important. De Chaste had appointed

Gravé du Pont as his envoy in the New World and Champlain joined this expedition, his first trip

to North America, as an observer. On this journey Champlain made a map of the St. Lawrence

River and upon his return to France published an account of the voyage.4

In 1604 Henry IV granted a fur trade monopoly to Pierre Dugua, Sieur de Monts, a

Protestant merchant and in the spring of this same year Dugua de Monts led an expedition to

New France which included Champlain, who was asked by Henry IV to continue his reportage

1 Champlain, Works, 6: 229; 3: 301-04. 2 Champlain, Works, 1: 229. 3 Marcel Trudel, The Beginnings of New France, 1524-1663 (Toronto: McClelland, 1973) 73. 4 See Champlain, Works, vol. 1 in which this first voyage account is included. Champlain titled the narrative Of Savages, or Voyage of Samuel Champlain of Brouage, made to New France, in the year 1603.

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on New World explorations and discoveries.1 Dugua de Monts and Champlain selected Saint

Croix Island in the Bay of Fundy as a settlement site, but after a severe winter where better than

half the settlers perished due to scurvy, the settlement was relocated in the spring of 1605 to Port

Royal, Nova Scotia.2 Champlain explored the regions that are now Nova Scotia and New

England, scouting for a future settlement prospect but conflicts with the Indigenous peoples of

the area discouraged this course.3 Champlain was to make a celebrated trip from Honfleur to

New France in the spring of 1608, in which he was the commander of one of three ships destined

for Tadoussac. Upon arrival, Champlain continued upriver in a small boat to Quebec, where on

July 3, 1608, he began building a settlement.4 Expanding Quebec from three initial buildings to a

well-developed fortified city and colony was to become one of Champlain’s enduring passions.

The point of this brief chronology is patently not to furnish a history of New France but

to sketch the lineaments of the growing interest France had in the North American Atlantic

region, from its inception to the founding of Quebec, to provide a timeline for a discussion

investigating shifting human-nonhuman identities and practices. Like the Wendat, French

colonial society was in an ongoing process of defining and redefining itself in connection with

newly explored and occupied geographic regions and its relationship to the first inhabitants of

these territories. Unlike the Wendat, the French explorers and colonists in New France were

beholden to a remote metropolitan centre that dictated the terms of their New World experience.

French exploratory, extractive, mercantile, and eventually missionary objectives created a sense

of place and a colonial character circumscribed by the inherent tension of the metropolitan-settler

connection, where responsible newcomers were expected to remake their environment in the

1 Champlain, Works, 1: 231-33. 2 Champlain, Works, 1: 256-59. 3 Champlain, Works, 1: 420-23. 4 Champlain, Works, 2: 24-25.

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semblance of their distant home country. Typically this involved the imposition of knowledge

and environmental understanding obtained over generations from experience in the country of

origin onto the recently encountered and adopted foreign land.

Naming

In the previous chapter the act of appropriating places through naming was discussed, but

naming and identifying were also ways of making a new land, its features and human and

nonhuman inhabitants, familiar to the observer and anticipated readers. Cartier’s voyage

accounts contain numerous instances of French names being assigned to the New World in an

unabashed process of arrogation,1 and alongside this practice was the habit of identifying and

listing various plant and animal species. Cartier was so keen to make the St Lawrence region

intelligible to his audience that he sometimes erred in species identification, two obvious

examples being his confusing bustards for Canada Geese and seahorses for walruses.2 This

process of cataloguing New World species is not dissimilar to the appropriative act of place

renaming astutely identified by Wright as having logomantic connotations, “as if a past could be

transferred” by this means “from one world to another.” 3 But the act of renaming and

cataloguing was also performed with the intention of managing and controlling things identified,

where taxonomy is the initial and requisite circumstance for the control and exploitation of a

collection of discrete entities.4 The method of documenting in travel writing is thought to have

1 See Jacques Cartier, The Voyages of Jacques Cartier, trans. H.P. Biggar, intr. Ramsay Cook (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1993) 15: “…which we named Cape Dauphin, as it is the beginning of the good land”; p. 16, “And pursuing our course we came in sight of what had looked to us like two islands, which was mainland, …named by us Cape Orleans”; and p. 23 “We named this bay, Chaleur Bay.” 2 Cartier, Voyages of Jacques Cartier, 1993, 74: “There are also great numbers of birds to wit: crane, bustards, swans…and other birds the same as in France.” See also p. 73 “At the mouths of these rivers we saw a large number of whales and sea horses.” 3 Ronald Wright Stolen Continents, 121 4 In Michel Foucault’s “Docile Bodies” in Discipline and Punish, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Pantheon, 1977) he discusses the relationship between detail and power, the more “ordering of a given multiplicity” the more susceptible it will be to control.

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been influenced by Pliny’s Natural History which “remained the starting point for New World

and Asiatic botany and zoology throughout the sixteenth century.”1 But the species lists

composed by Cartier, and later Champlain, function dually having both an enumerative and

incantatory quality, where the act of iterating in print the names of species observed invites a

sense of familiarity and understanding, possibly even a feeling of ownership, of things named, as

if to catalogue is to know. This form of encyclopaedic knowledge gathered and documented by

early explorers, and circulated among a distant readership, is unlike the in-depth knowledge

gained through lengthy residency in a particular locality, the kind of understanding possessed by

the Indigenous peoples of the lands European interlopers described.

French Land “Improvement”

Because the French did not have a long period of land tenure in the New World, and knowledge

acquired through describing and itemizing was inherently limited, they sought to recreate French

gardens and agriculture in their Laurentian and coastal colonisation efforts. Of course, the

impulse to plant French gardens was also part of the strategy discussed earlier in which

Europeans tried to distinguish themselves from Aboriginal peoples whom they called “savages.”

Cronon rightly observes that the struggle in the New World between Europeans and Aboriginal

peoples “was over two ways of living and using the seasons of the year” a struggle in which

French “fixity sought to replace Indian mobility.”2 Cartier’s Cap Rouge colony of 1541

represents the first recorded attempt in Canada to achieve French fixity. Plants and animals were

transported from France for the purpose of developing a permanent colony. The following

passage demonstrates the logistical challenges intrinsic to the sixteenth-century French

1 David Quinn, Explorers and Colonies: America, 1500-1625 (Roncevert, WV: Hambledon, 1990) 97. Even the title of Nicholas Denys’s 1672 publication of his travels in New France, The Description and Natural History of the Coasts of North America, reflects Pliny’s influence. See also Ramsay Cook, “1492 and All That: Making a Garden Out of a Wilderness,” Canada, Quebec and the Uses of Nationalism (Toronto: McClelland, 1986). 2 Cronon, Changes in the Land, 53.

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endeavour to initiate animal husbandry in the New World: “But the length of time which we

were in passing betweene Britayne and Newfoundland was the cause that we stood in great

neede of water, because of the cattell, as well Goates, Hogges, as other beastes which we carried

for breede in the Countrey, which wee were constrained to water with Sider and other drinke.”1

The transport of animals from Europe to North America remained risky well into the eighteenth

century because it was impossible to ensure an acceptable overseas voyage duration that would

permit the safe passage of animals between the two continents.2

French horticultural pursuits in Cap Rouge proved easier, since carrying seeds overseas

clearly would not pose the same difficulties as animal transport, and the land chosen for the

colony was “as good a Countrey to plow and manure as a man should find or desire.”3 The

colonists “sowed seedes here of our Countrey, as cabbages, Naveaus, Lettises, and others, which

grew and sprong up out of the ground in eight dayes.”4 Said insightfully argues imperialism,

involving usurpation of land and colonisation of peoples, is more than a contest over geography,

having concepts, forms, “images and imaginings”5 at the core of its multifaceted propulsion. A

central imagining for French settlers was the significance of cultivation to establishing a true

civilisation. Although Cartier did not write overtly of his desire to transform the wilderness into a

domesticated French garden at the Cap Rouge colony, transporting European farm animals and

seeds to the settlement demonstrates a partiality for traditional French sedentary practices, that is,

for fixity rather than mobility.

Lescarbot, writing in the early sixteenth century, gives clear expression to this bias when

he writes, “I shall always be of opinion that any man who goes into a country to possess it should 1 Cartier, Voyages of Jacques Cartier, 1993, 98. 2 R.M. Saunders, “The First Introduction of European Plants and Animals into Canada,” Canadian Historical Review 16 (1935): 388-406. 3 Cartier, Voyages of Jacques Cartier, 1993, 100. 4 Cartier, Voyages of Jacques Cartier, 1993, 100. 5 Said, Culture and Imperialism, 7.

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not settle down in islands to make himself a prisoner therein. For before everything else one

must set before oneself the tillage of the soil.”1 Tillage is not recommended as a mere practical

pursuit for the sake of producing necessary sustenance but has also an ideological significance in

which a “golden age” is to be recreated through declaring the “highest glory… [to be] a glory of

wheat, in order to invite everyone to till well his field, seeing that the land presents itself liberally

to them that have none.”2 Champlain, Lescarbot’s contemporary, was committed to the practice

of land cultivation for the entirety of his vocation in New France notwithstanding the resistance

of profit-motivated fur merchants. And although Cartier’s fledgling colonial enterprise of more

than half a century earlier failed largely due to scurvy and his failure to promote sanguine

relations with the St. Lawrence Nadoueks who occupied the region, transplanting European

species to North America became, after this prototypic project, standard French practice.

Crosby’s succinct term “portmanteau biota” used to refer collectively to the organisms brought

by Europeans to lands they colonised is helpful, for it captures the synergistic potency of these

foreign plants and animals (and pathogens, which will be discussed further in chapter eight) to

flourish in new lands and often supplant local species. The swiftness with which this foreign

aggregation of organisms transformed Aboriginal territories constitutes a ruinous facet of

European expansionism that Crosby terms “ecological imperialism in the Americas.”3

While Cartier was clearly anxious to establish an agricultural community, of note in his

voyage writings is an ostensible indifference to furs. In his first voyage account Cartier mentions

animal furs chiefly to describe the attire of Aboriginal people encountered at Gaspé Harbour.

1 Marc Lescarbot, The History of New France, 3 vols., trans. W.L. Grant (Toronto: The Champlain Society, 1907-14) 2: 241. This is also a pointed critique of Champlain and Sieur de Monts who attempted a settlement on Ste. Croix Island. Lescarbot and Champlain were to have an acrimonious relationship which neither disguised when documenting their overseas experiences. 2 Marc Lescarbot, History of New France, 2: 255-56. 3 Alfred Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900 (New York: Cambridge UP, 1986) 297.

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“They go quite naked, except for a small skin, with which they cover their privy parts, and for a

few old skins which they throw over their shoulders.”1 Later in this same document Cartier

reports he and his men “held up an axe” to an Aboriginal “captain, dressed in an old black bear-

skin….pretending we would barter it for his skin.” But this invitation to trade was simply a ploy

to entice the chief and some of his associates to “come on board our vessel.”2 Cartier writes of

animal furs in his second voyage in much the same manner. “The people wear the skins of these

animals for want of other apparel.”3 There is no indication that Cartier or his men considered

such furs to be readily convertible to profit values in overseas European markets. Indeed this lack

of interest impressed Lescarbot so completely he was to write in the early seventeenth century,

“[In] the time of Jacques Cartier, beavers were held in no esteem.”4 Instead, the desire to

discover the Northwest Passage to Asia, to exploit the mineral wealth of the fabled Saguenay

kingdom,5 and to develop a French colony in northeastern North America impelled French

exploration on Cartier’s second and third voyages, not an interest in pelts.

The Fur Trade

The inception of what came to be an extensive and highly profitable French fur trade in Canada

is often traced to the growing practice of cod fishermen and whalers in the Grand Banks and

Gulf of St. Lawrence area carrying furs back to Europe initially as rarities and personal luxuries.6

Trading European goods for Aboriginal furs in the early half of the sixteenth century was a

negligible activity, incidental to fishing. In time, as furs became more sumptuous and abundant,

1 Cartier, Voyages of Jacques Cartier, 1993, 24. 2 Cartier, Voyages of Jacques Cartier, 1993, 26. 3 Cartier, Voyages of Jacques Cartier, 1993, 74. 4 Lescarbot, History of New France, 2: 117. 5 The Stadaconan chief (a Laurentian Nadouek), Donnacona, who was kidnapped by Cartier in 1536 and taken to France, told stories about the Saguenay kingdom claiming it possessed vast mines of silver and gold. This kingdom is commonly thought to be a fabricated place used by Donnacona to trick the French or perhaps to secure him passage home. 6 See Trudel, Beginnings of New France, 57.

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and their demand in European markets grew, fishermen increasingly supplemented their cargoes

with furs. In 1581 a small Breton ship was the first to attempt a profitable voyage to the St.

Lawrence Valley based solely on furs. When news leaked that the secretive second voyage of

this outfit turned a “profit of 1400 to 1500 percent by selling furs to a Paris skinner,”1 the stage

was set for others to covet comparable capital success. The reason for the growing demand for

fur, especially beaver, in European markets was the popularity of the broad-brimmed beaver felt

hat, which became fashionable in the latter part of the sixteenth century. By this time the beaver

was extinct in western Europe, and France relied on Russia for supplies, but these could only be

obtained through Dutch or English middlemen despite French attempts to establish direct

access.2

Not knowing how to convert beaver furs to serviceable felt, the French did not

immediately view the Canadian beaver as a gainful alternative to procuring processed furs from

Russia. As Lahonton describes, “a Beaver has two lays [sic] of Hair; one is long and of a shining

black color, with a grain as big as that of Man’s Hair; the other is fine and smooth, and in Winter

fifteen lines long. In a word the last is the finest Down in the World.”3 It was the undercoat, with

barbs at the end of each strand of hair, which ensured fabric cohesion and superior wear that

made beaver fur the ideal material for hats. Only the Russians had discovered a method to

separate the woolly undercoat from the longer guard hairs and skin, and this involved a process

of combing which remained undisclosed to the rest of Europe for a generation. Denys was to

write in the early 1670s, “they have a secret in that country which we have not yet in France, that

1 David B. Quinn, North America from Earliest Discovery to First Settlements: The Norse Voyages to 1612 (New York: Harper, 1977) 467; see also Cole Harris, “Inland Expansion,” Historical Atlas of Canada, Vol. 1: From the Beginning to 1800, eds. Cole Harris and Geoffrey Matthews (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1987) 83-89. 2 William Fitzgerald, Chronology to Cultural Process: Lower Great Lakes Archaeology, 1500-1650. diss., McGill University, 1990, 66 3 Lahontan, New Voyages, 1: 173.

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of removing from a skin of Beaver all the down without injuring the long hair.”1 The French

resorted to cutting “the long hair…from the skin in order to obtain the down, and the long hair is

lost.”2 Through their combing process, the Russians were able to make two valuable products

where the French could only make one. The matted short hairs were used for felting while the

skin with intact long hairs was “highly prized for trimming garments and for wearing as a

‘natural’ fur.”3

As a substitute to the more expensive Russian beaver, the French began to seek furs

directly in northeastern North America. The interest in Canadian furs also increased as a result of

Sweden capturing in 1583 the Baltic port which customarily funnelled Russian furs to Western

Europe.4 Northern Aboriginal peoples prepared beaver pelts by scraping and rubbing them with

animal marrow.5 These processed pelts were then sewn together to be worn as robes, and the

sweat from human bodies not only made these pelts soft but also helped to loosen the

problematic guard hairs. Such pelts, called “coat beaver” were easily made into felt and fetched

higher prices in Europe than unworn beaver pelts.6 To obtain beaver furs the French began

trading vigorously with the northeastern Algonkian peoples in the last quarter of the sixteenth

century, and this exchange of material goods unavoidably involved cultural, ideological,

technological and religious contact. In the past it was customary to cast Aboriginal peoples as

irrational and unequal players in the exchange process, trading valuable furs for mere “trinkets

and baubles,”7 but this position is theoretically indefensible and historically inaccurate. Having

1 Nicholas Denys, The Description and Natural History of the Coasts of North America (Acadia), ed. W.F.Ganong (Toronto: The Champlain Society 1908) 362. 2 Denys, Description and Natural History of the Coasts of North America, 363. 3 E.E. Rich, “Russia and the Colonial Fur Trade,” Economic History Review 7.3 (1955): 312. 4 Olive P. Dickason, Canada’s First Nations (Toronto: McClelland, 1992) 103. 5 Harold Innis, The Fur Trade in Canada (1930; Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1999) 10 6 W.J. Eccles, The Canadian Frontier, 1534-1760 (1974; Albuquerque: U of New Mexico P, 1983) 20. 7 See for example Jerome Holgate, American Genealogy being a History of Some of the Early Settlers and Their Descendents (New York: Putnam, 1851) 10.

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learned of the enormous proceeds Europeans garnered in the fur trade, Aboriginal traders began

to employ shrewd exchange strategies, increasing the cost of their goods by waiting until several

ships arrived at Tadoussac (the established trading port) and forcing Europeans to compete with

one another.1 The goods for which Algonkian peoples bartered had either utilitarian value, such

as knives and kettles, or symbolic and ceremonial value, such as glass beads.2 In short they were

in no way trinkets. Each group may have considered its own bartered goods worthless but within

the foreign systems into which they were incorporated these items were greatly valued.3 For

example the “coat beaver” so prized by Europeans was considered second-hand refuse by

Algonkians, so the voracious demand for “greasy robes” was puzzling.4 For the French, the

importance Aboriginal peoples attached to glass beads that were inexpensively mass produced in

Europe and manufactured specifically to acquire low-cost furs was regarded as unreasonable.5

But understanding the adoption and diffusion of goods in culture contact involves a

consideration not only of economic interests but also ideological, political, cultural,

environmental, and metaphorical systems. As Brebeuf was to write in 1636, “Metaphor is largely

1 JR 6: 296-97. Europeans “have such a fondness for the skin of this animal [the beaver]” they will “fight to see who will give the most to these Barbarians, to get it.” See also Nicholas Denys’s The Description and Natural History of the Coasts of North America (Acadia), 446 in which he writes, “as soon as the Indians come out of the woods in the spring they hide all their best skins” as a strategy for greater bartering power. 2 See Neal Salisbury, “The Indian’s Old World: Native Americans and the Coming of the Europeans,” American Encounters eds. Peter Mancall and James Merrell, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2007); see also Christopher Miller and George Hamell, “A New Perspective on Indian-White Contact: Cultural Symbols and Colonial Trade,” The Journal of American History 73.2 (1986): 311-328. 3 See James Axtell, “English Colonial Impact on Indian Culture,” The European and the Indian: Essays in Ethnohistory of Colonial North America (New York: Oxford UP, 1981) 245-271; see also W.J. Eccles, Canadian Frontier. 4 An Innu man tells the Jesuit Le Jeune in 1633, JR 6: 297, “The Beaver does everything perfectly well, it makes kettles, hatchets, swords, knives, bread; and, in short, it makes everything.” He was making sport of us Europeans… [My] host said to me one day, showing me a very beautiful knife, “The English have no sense; they give us twenty knives like this for one Beaver skin.” See also JR 1: 173 in which Father Biard writes of the Algonkians having a low opinion of the French in part because of “the extreme covetousness and eagerness which our people display to obtain their beaver skins.” 5 See Lescarbot, History of New France, 2: 49. On this issue, Cartier showed more insight than those who came after him for he recognised “shells, of which they make a sort of bead” to have “the same use among them as gold and silver with us.” See also Cartier, Voyages of Jacques Cartier, 1993, 160.

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in use among these Peoples; unless you accustom yourself to it, you will understand nothing.”1

Naturally symbolic value was paramount in both cultures. The importance placed on gold in the

European market is an example of arbitrary significance attached to a mineral based on rarity and

aesthetic importance. This is not unlike the Aboriginal esteem for wampum, which also held

religious and historical significance because it was used in ceremonies and for summarizing and

recording important events in the form of wampum belts.

In the past it was commonly thought that European goods only entered Nadouek sites in

the lower Great Lakes region through direct trade with Europeans.2 But in the early twentieth

century, archaeological evidence began to suggest a network of Aboriginal international trade

that allowed for the movement of European goods from the St. Lawrence region into the

Canadian interior without commensurate European geographic penetration.3 However, prior to

the establishment of the late-sixteenth-century focused trade in furs, goods were customarily

exchanged in small quantities as part of ceremonial gift-giving processes to institute and cement

French-Aboriginal alliances. Such gifts would be distributed so thinly that only a negligible

amount would have entered the interior trade system. The question of when European goods

traded through Aboriginal networks first reached the inland Nadouek nations has been variously

handled. Some scholars argue European goods were entering inland Nadouek sites in the early

sixteenth century,4 but Fitzgerald contends not only would there need to exist an adequate supply

of coastal goods to warrant trading with interior nations but also the inland Aboriginal nations

would have to possess objects or materials desirable to coastal peoples that would serve as an

1 JR 10: 219. 2 See W. J. Wintemberg “The Sidey-Mackay Village Site,” American Antiquity 11 (1946): 154-182. 3 See A. C. Parker 1907 “Excavations in an Erie Indian Village and Burial Site at Ripley, Chatauqua County, New York,” American Anthropologist 18 (1916): 479-507. 4 See J.W. Bradley, The Onondaga Iroquois: 1500-1655. A Study in Acculturative Change and Its Consequences diss., Syracuse University, 1979; see also P.G. Ramsden, “An Hypothesis Concerning the Effects of Early European Trade among Some Ontario Iroquois,” Canadian Journal of Archaeology 2 (1978): 101-06.

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inducement to trade. “Thus it seems unlikely that there would have been any reason for extensive

trade during the early 16th century era of exploration and fishing, even though it is possible that

some European manufactured items reached the lower Great Lakes area through inter-tribal

exchange prior to the era of professional trade.”1

Although Innis2 and Heidenreich3 assert a small stream of European goods would have

entered the region in the early sixteenth century, Trigger argues, using ethnohistorical and

archaeological evidence, any such items reaching the area at this time would have been

extremely rare. Generally European goods entered southern Ontario in three broad stages with a

very small amount appearing between 1534 and 1550 C.E., and an even greater amount arriving

between 1550 and 1580 C.E. But not until after 1580 C.E., the inception of the commercial fur

trade and its unambiguous demand for beaver pelts, were European goods commonly found in

substantial quantities on Ontario Nadouek sites.4 The archaeological finding of a considerable

increase in European artefacts post-1580 C.E. corresponds to the growing and extensive St.

Lawrence fur trade occurring at this time. This trend is also reflected in Bordeaux notarial

accounts which were recorded between 1555 and 1614 but only show Gulf of St. Lawrence

activity beginning in the 1580s.5 Warrick detects in the archaeological record that coincidental

with the burgeoning St. Lawrence fur trade was the observable and rapid formation of the

Wendat confederacy signalled by regional narrowing and increased population density circa

1 William Fitzgerald, Chronology to Cultural Process: Lower Great Lakes Archaeology, 1500-1650, diss., McGill University, 1990, 44. 2 Innis, The Fur Trade in Canada. 3 Heidenreich, Huronia. 4 Bruce Trigger, “Sixteenth Century Ontario: History, Ethnohistory, and Archaeology,” Ontario History 71.4 (1979): 205-223; see also Champlain, Works, 2: 117 for a primary source reference to Basque whalers trading at Tadoussac as early as 1550. 5 William Fitzgerald, “Chronology to Cultural Process,” 56.

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1580-1600 C.E.1 This seems to suggest some kind of influence exerted by St. Lawrence

commercial activity on the inland Wendat.

Trade, a New Market and Wendat Changing Land-Use Practices

Lengthy and regular contact between French and Aboriginal peoples in the St. Lawrence region,

established through the cod fishery, assisted the swift expansion of the commercial fur trade once

it commenced, but how rapidly trade affected Aboriginal communities has been debated for

decades. Scholars used to maintain that the mere presence of European goods in Aboriginal

communities was sufficient to cause dramatic and immediate changes.2 Trigger insists that

marked changes in Wendat society only occurred following the epidemics of the 1630s, and prior

to this time, for a period greater than two decades, the Wendat maintained notable cultural

cohesion even while involved in the fur trade.3 Campbell’s study of faunal exploitation strategies

of the Wendat in the Kawartha Lakes area sheds light on changes in land-use practices among

this group as a result of indirect contact with Europeans.4 Deer were the most prevalent faunal

remains in pre-contact Kawartha Wendat sites, but as this confederate peoples became involved

indirectly in the fur trade the archaeological record registers a shift in faunal exploitation in

which deer remains declined while inversely dog remains increased. Campbell argues “beaver

exploitation played a pivotal role in this…realignment” as dogs came to be treated as a

domesticated food source that contributed mammalian protein to the Wendat mixed subsistence

diet at a time when a redirection from deer hunting to beaver hunting took place.5 Evidence

1 Warrick, Population History, 1990, 381. 2 See G. T. Hunt, The Wars of the Iroquois (Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1940); see also W.F. Finlayson and R. H. Pihl, “The Evidence for Culture Contact at the Draper Site, Pickering,” Arch. Notes 80.3 (1980): 5-14, and Ramsden, “An Hypothesis Concerning the Effects of Early European Trade Among Some Ontario Iroquois.” 3 Trigger, The Children of Aataentsic. This will be discussed further in chapter eight. 4 Jennifer Campbell, The Huron of the Kawartha Lakes: Faunal Exploitation Strategies as Indicators of Change During the Pre, Proto and Historic Periods, MA thesis, Memorial University, 2004. 5 Campbell, Huron of the Kawartha Lakes, p. 4

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suggests beaver were being commercially exploited by this Wendat group circa 1555 and

onward, as “they were being skinned off site with only select elements returning to the village.”1

The Wendat of the Kawartha Lakes region are of special interest because they were the

easternmost group to join eventually the Wendat confederacy. They are thought to correspond to

the Arendahronon nation who became part of the confederacy circa 1590. Pottery sherds

appearing in the archaeological record indicate members of St. Lawrence Nadoueks became

refugees among the Kawartha Wendat,2 and the increase in beaver exploitation seems to have

occurred together with the adoption of these refugee peoples. The St. Lawrence Nadoueks (i.e.,

the Stadaconans and Hochelagans) were the same nations who had been in contact with Cartier

in the 1530s and 1540s, but who had disappeared from the St. Lawrence region by the time of

Champlain’s voyages. It is entirely plausible that these refugees, who would have brought with

them knowledge of coastal trade, motivated the Kawartha Wendat to assume a greater role in

indirect trade.3 Moreover, the Attignawantan and Attigneenongnahac may have been especially

keen to include the Arendahronon in the Wendat confederacy in part because of the Stadaconan

and Hochelagan refugees among them. Wendat trade protocol held that the first nation to

establish trade relations with another nation had special trade privileges with that group and all

other nations were to honour this unique status.4 Because the St. Lawrence Nadoueks were

among the first to encounter the French, incorporating the Arendahronon into the Wendat

confederacy was likely a strategy employed for political and economic leverage, an attempt to be

more advantageously situated for trade.

1 Campbell, Huron of the Kawartha Lakes, p. 136 2 P.G. Ramsden, “Saint Lawrence Iroquoians in the Upper Trent Valley,” Man in the Northeast, 39 (1990): 87-95. 3 See Campbell, Huron of the Kawartha Lakes. 4 JR 10: 223-25

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As the archaeological record has showed, in the last two decades of the sixteenth century

the presence of European goods increased on Wendat sites, the Wendat coalesced in Wendake to

better exploit trade, and European manufactured glass beads began to appear. These glass beads

were initially white or indigo coloured, and their metrical uniformity suggests they were

designed specifically to mimic the greatly prized but difficult to procure shell beads from the

southeast.1 Fitzgerald observes Glass Bead Period I, representing an assemblage of white and

indigo beads found in excavated Wendat sites, corresponds rather neatly to the development of

the commercial fur trade.2 Lescarbot described the Aboriginal demand for ersatz wampum beads

in the St. Lawrence region in the first decade of the seventeenth century3 and Champlain’s

accounts contain multiple references to the significance of beads in general among the

Aboriginal peoples he encountered.4 French manufacture of glass beads was part of the fiscal

improvement initiated by Henri IV post-1598 civil and foreign stability, as a plan to position

France as a major economic power.5 Although an agriculturally independent country at this time,

France relied upon vast imports of manufactured goods and paid for these with raw materials.

Henri IV perceived in northeastern North America an opportunity to make France more

independent through an extractive overseas economy buttressed by a solid colonial base. In

Champlain, Henri IV found his ideal advocate for colonial development in New France.

1 The Narraganseet Indigenous peoples of what is now New England, and what used to be Acadia in the time of French explorations, were the first to make small, cylindrical beads commonly called wampum. Their word for these beads was “wompam,” which means white shell beads. They also made a deep violet bead called “sukauhock” again a descriptive term describing the colour and type of shell from which this bead was made. Europeans used the term wampum indiscriminately to refer to both these beads. See Lescarbot, History of New France, 3: 158, footnote 2, for a description of wampum. 2 William Fitzgerald, Chronology to Cultural Process: Lower Great Lakes Archaeology 1500-1650, diss., McGill University, 1990. 3 Lescarbot, History of New France, 3: 158. See also History of New France, 2: 322 in which Lescarbot describes how Poutrincourt who was trying to establish a colony in Acadia (now Nova Scotia) “made a treaty of friendship” with the Penobscot chief by giving “him presents of knives, hatchets, and matachiaz, i.e., scarves, necklaces and armlets made of chaplets or of tubes of white and blue glass, whereat he was well content.” 4 See Chamaplain, Works 1: 108, 179, 356, 411, 427, 428, 444; Works 2: 105; Works, 3: 41, 141, 397, 407. 5 Trudel, Beginnings of New France, 83.

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Trade, New Terrain and French Settlement

Both the archaeological and historical records demonstrate that an increase in the demand for

furs during the 1580s created circumstances favourable to a developing fur trade in Canada.

Allaire suggests “the success of a long-term colonial establishment was based on four essential

factors: political will, technical know-how, good knowledge of the land, and an economic basis

for the project.”1 The burgeoning fur trade certainly served the economic basis and once

stakeholder interest was mobilized, France found combined in Champlain someone holding the

remaining two factors forming this colonial quaternary. He possessed cartographical and nautical

expertise, and he was proactive in his incorporation of Aboriginal technologies (such as the

canoe2) to advance his explorations. Champlain also came to acquire through his travels,

investigations, interviews with Aboriginal people, and an innate talent for geographic

comprehension3 a notable familiarity with his new environs. In many ways Champlain proceeded

with the Plinian model used by his voyager predecessors. He describes in his writings the flora

and fauna he observes, making accessible to Europeans lands otherwise foreign,4 and he writes

of various French appellations he and his superior, the Sieur de Monts, apply to many of the

regions they survey.5 In History and Class Consciousness Lukács examines how the ascendency

of commodity fetishism alters human understanding and knowledge of surrounds, engendering a

1 Bernard Allaire, “The European Fur Trade and the Context of Champlain’s Arrival,” Champlain: The Birth of French America, eds. Raymonde Litalien and Denis Vaugeois (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s UP, 2004) 50-60. 2 See Champlain, Works, 2: 152 “it would be a matter of great toil and labour to be able to see and do by boat what a man might propose, except at great cost and expense, besides the risk of labouring in vain. But with the canoes of the savages [sic] one may travel freely and quickly throughout the country.” 3 Here I am thinking of Champlain’s uncanny ability to recognise in the Innu account that Aboriginals “from the north say that they are in sight of a sea which is salt” not the Northwest Passage but “some gulf of our sea,” assessing accurately the Hudson Bay. See Champlain, Works, 1: 124. 4 Works, 1: 129, 131, 145, 185 5 Champlain, Works. See for example, 1: 239, 243, 245, 250, 259, 260, 266, 281; 2: 20, 21, 67, 75. These are just some instances of places being named or renamed as part of expeditions Champlain participated in. Three important examples involve the naming of future French settlements: 1: 256 “I named Port Royal” and “This place was named by the Sieur de Monts the island of Ste. Croix.”; Vol. II, “This they [i.e., Cartier and his crew] called Ste. Croix because they arrived there on that day, but at the time of Cartier’s expedition it was called Stadaca. We now call it Quebec.”

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more quantitative experience. Champlain in many respects is an agent of the extractive economic

system in which minerals, fur and other commodities are sought, and his (and Cartier’s)

descriptions of the environs, the flora, the fauna, and even the various peoples encountered

reflect a consciousness and perceptual apparatus adjusted to the commodity paradigm. For

example, Champlain reports of the Innu (Montagnais) “All these peoples are well proportioned

in body, without any deformity; they are agile, and the women are well shapen, filled out and

plump, of a swarthy colour.”1 This description is not dissimilar to his observations of the region

of Ste. Croix, where Champlain and de Monts were to establish their first Canadian settlement,

“The country is fine and level, and the soil better than in any place I had seen, with extensive

woods, but very few fir-trees and cypresses. In these parts are found quantities of grapes, pears,

hazel-nuts, cherries, red and green currants, and certain small roots, the size of a small nut”2 or

his list of animals found near the Lachine Rapids “There are also many wild beasts such as

moose, stags, hinds, deer, bears, porcupines, hares, foxes, beavers, otters, muskrats and certain

other kinds of animals that I am unacquainted with, which are good to eat.”3 Documenting these

observations was consistent with a scientific method defined by a passion for cataloguing and

accumulating encyclopaedic knowledge of foreign species. But it must also be acknowledged

that there was at the same time an unquestionable interest in ensuring that the necessary staples

for survival were obtainable. Such descriptions reveal a world transformed from a dynamic,

interconnected configuration of biotic entities into a “delimited, quantifiable continuum, filled

with quantifiable ‘things.’”4

1 Champlain, Works, 2: 118. 2 Champlain, Works, 2: 131. 3 Champlain, Works, 1: 146. 4 Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, trans. Rodney Livingstone (1968; London: Merlin, 1999) 90.

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It appears quantifying ‘things’ for the purpose of conversion to market profits and the

continued pursuit of the elusive Northwest Passage were a driving force behind Champlain’s

explorations. Secondary was a stated desire to spread Christianity, and surely to this must be

added a yearning for personal renown. In a letter to the Queen Regent, Champlain praises

navigation as an art “exalted above all others” through which “we gain knowledge of different

countries, regions, and kingdoms; through it we attract and bring into our countries all kinds of

riches; through it the idolatry of paganism is overthrown.”1 But the most obvious indication of

the commodifying lens through which Champlain viewed New France is his letter to the

Gentlemen of the Chamber of Commerce. Here Champlain enumerates and assigns projected

monetary values to a number of “articles” he deems suitable for trade that are found in New

France: codfish, salmon, sea-sturgeon, eels, sardines, herrings, other fish, whale oils, whale-

bone, walrus tusks, seals, a variety of forest products, quantity of gum, ashes, pitch, tar, resin,

horticultural products, dyes, hemp, mines (silver, steel, lead, and copper), materials to make

cloths, cables, ropes and vessel riggings, furs, marble, other valuable stones, and cattle produce.2

This list clearly was not composed with survival staples in mind but rather enumerates the

material riches to be wrested from northeastern North America. In contrast with western Europe

where many of the resources were depleted and animals extinct the apparent wealth reported to

exist in New France was scintillating.

Lest one arrive at the mistaken conclusion that Champlain was only motivated by a desire

to increase the coffers of the French metropole, a review of his settlement efforts and gardening

endeavours reveal a man eager to create a viable satellite colony in the service of the French

Crown. Ile Ste Croix, established June 1604, was the first settlement initiative in North America

1 Champlain, Works, 1: 209. 2 Champlain, Works, 2: 339-345.

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with which Champlain was involved, and settlers immediately erected a barricade at this

temporary colony which “served as a platform for mounting our cannon.”1 Once security was

established the workmen began to build residential structures and a storehouse. Champlain writes

“all set to work to clear the island, to fetch wood, to cut timber, to carry earth, and other things

necessary for the construction of the buildings.”2 The purpose of clearing the island was not

simply the utilitarian procurement of wood for housing, cooking and eventual heating needs but

also a French preference for domestication and cultivation rather than the “horror and immensity

of woods [which] occupied everything.”3 The settlers of Ile Ste. Croix built an oven, a water

mill, and a hand mill for grinding wheat. Gardens were made on both the mainland and the

island, and Champlain reports the many kinds of grains that were sown thrived on the mainland

but did poorly on the island where the soil was too sandy.4

In the winter of 1605 almost half the men wintering over at the Ile Ste. Croix settlement

died from scurvy. The arrival of Grave Du Pont with forty men and fresh supplies was a relief.

The Sieur de Monts’s decision to move the colony to Port-Royal in the fall of 1605 was based on

a judgment that the “climate [would] be much more agreeable and temperate.”5 Here is an

example of the French using the same criterion as the Wendat for settlement location, that is, the

climate, or, more specifically, the number of frost-free days.6 At Port-Royal houses were built

1 Champlain, Works, 1: 274. 2 Champlain, Works, 1: 276. 3 Francois Du Creux, History of Canada or New France, 2 vols., trans. Percy J. Robinson (Toronto: The Champlain Society, 1951-52) 1: 15. See also Champlain, Works, 1: 303 where Champlain writes that the climate could be improved through human intervention, for the winter “lasts much longer than it would if the land were under cultivation”; see also Dickason’s discussion of negative impressions the French had of the woods in Myth of the Savages, 143. 4 Champlain, Works, 1: 278. 5 Champlain, Works, 1: 367. 6 Heidenreich, Huronia, 56; see also Susan Branster, Decision-making Processes in a Culture Contact Context: The Case of the Tionontaté Huron of the Upper Great Lakes, diss., Michigan State University, 1991.

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and the ground cleared, and before winter Champlain searched unsuccessfully for mines.1 At this

settlement Champlain also made a garden “surrounded with ditches full of water wherein I

placed some very fine trout.”2 To the east of the Port-Royal settlement Champlain built a

summer-house and there constructed a “small reservoir to hold salt-water fish, which we took out

as we required them.”3 Making ditches and reservoirs to contain fish exemplifies the French

preference for fixity over mobility which remained a difference between French and Aboriginal

relationships to the land even among a semi-sedentary group such as the Wendat.

In the winter of 1606-07, Champlain created the “Order of Good Cheer” as a safeguard

against scurvy. “This Order consisted of a chain which we used to place with certain little

ceremonies about the neck of one of our people, commissioning him for that day to go hunting.

The next day was conferred upon another, and so on in order. We did not come off badly, nor did

the Indians who were with us.” 4 Of interest for the purpose of this study are several facts related

to this Order. First, the collective nature, the sense of shared responsibility for wellness, militates

against the misguided yet nonetheless popular notion of an antinomian dualism between

European individualism versus Aboriginal collectivism. Second, the French had interestingly lost

the remedy for scurvy5 which they had been shown so generously by the Stadaconans in

Cartier’s time. This is of particular interest because Canadian dominant culture has had such

resistance to Aboriginal oral tradition, preferring instead the “legitimacy” and reliability of the

European text.6 The failure of the literate method to ensure information transmission about an

1 Champlain commonly asked Aboriginal peoples to describe local geography. Of particular interest were possible sea routes to Asia, descriptions of inland peoples, and whereabouts of valuable resources such as mines. See Champlain, Works, 1: 153, 162, 164, 182, 185, 279, and 375. 2 Champlain, Works, 1: 371. 3 Champlain, Works, 1: 372. 4 Champlain, Works, 1: 448; see also Lescarbot, History of New France, 2: 342. 5 Champlain, Works, 2: 62. Champlain reports after four bouts of scurvy at three different settlements that the French have “no knowledge” of the cure. 6 See Vine Deloria, Red Earth, White Lies; see also Dale Turner, This Is Not a Peace Pipe.

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issue as serious as scurvy, where human lives were at stake, is very important. This textual

oversight from four centuries ago supports the current academic trend in which the primacy of

the text is decentred and space is created for those discourses and information transmission

systems that were historically relegated to the margins, such as First Nations oral tradition.1

Third, the Order shows cordial relations between the French settlers and neighbouring

Aboriginal peoples, which is in marked contrast to French-Aboriginal relations during the mid-

sixteenth century.

Aboriginal-French Contact in the Early Seventeenth Century

The French in the first decade of the seventeenth century possessed a level of diplomacy wanting

in Cartier and his contemporaries, representing an improvement in French-Aboriginal

international relations but certainly not an effort by the French to achieve true equality. While

Cartier abducted Aboriginal persons to take home as trophies from the New World, an Innu chief

named Bechourat offered his son to Grave Du Pont to take to France. Of course the French

envoys of the early seventeenth century notwithstanding their diplomacy in matters of Aboriginal

relations were nonetheless convinced of their superiority. Champlain’s belief that the Algonkian

peoples needed to be shown “how to live” and taught “to till the ground, and other matters”

precludes a receptivity to cultural parity and deliberately evokes the stereotype of a society that

is not quite civilised for its ‘lack’ of plant cultivation.2 From this position only the slightest

rhetorical manoeuvrings are necessary to declare as Champlain does, “They are for the most part

a people that has no law, as far as I could see and learn.”3 When Champlain travels in the New

England area performing a reconnaissance and seeking an ideal settlement location, his approval 1 Clearly the now famous Delgamuukw decision makes the case for the validity of oral tradition, but to see a four-hundred-year-old example from the early seventeenth century where oral tradition proves more effective than the literate tradition remarkably underscores the value of oral tradition and the incredible Eurocentrism of the Canadian government. 2 Champlain, Works, 1: 110. 3 Champlain, Works, 1: 111.

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of “all the inhabitants of this place [who] are much given to agriculture” is apparent.1 Champlain

disparages those Algonkian peoples in the St. Lawrence region who do not practice horticulture

and raises the ‘laziness’ spectre when he suggests they would fare better “if they were willing to

take the trouble to sow Indian corn, as do all their neighbours, the Algonquins, Ochastaiguins

[Wendat], and Iroquois [Haudenosaune], who are free from such cruel attacks of famine because

they know how to ward them off by the care and foresight they show.”2

When Champlain arrived from France in Tadoussac on June 3, 1608 he discovered the

Basques refused to honour the King’s command granting Sieur de Monts a fur-trade monopoly in

New France. In the ensuing skirmish a Frenchman was killed on Grave Du Pont’s ship.

Champlain had documented Aboriginal infighting3 in his journal writings, but this is his first

account of fighting between European nations in New France. This illustrates that French and

Aboriginal cultures, however differently developed, were wrestling with some similar issues. In

this Basque-French contest it was a conflict connected to precious resources, an issue that may

have been central to early Algonkian-Nadouek struggles.4 Champlain writes, in Tadoussac “were

many Indians, who had come there for the fur-trade, several of whom came to our ship with their

canoes.”5 The fur trade has clearly, by this time, become important to both Aboriginals and

Europeans, each group seeking the other to engage in exchange.

Despite Champlain’s desire to explore the northern sea [Hudson Bay], he was “unable to

do so without the natives, who have been unwilling that I or any of our people should go with

1 Champlain, Works, 1: 410. A group of Indigenous horticulturalists eventually battled the French, scaring them sufficiently from attempting settlement there. 2 Champlain, Works, 2: 57. 3 See Champlain, Works, 1: 103 where Champlain reports Malecite, Algonquin and Innu peoples are celebrating a victory over the Haudenosaune; see also Works, 1: 178 in which Champlain records the Innu fought the Haudenosaune. 4 See Trigger, Natives and Newcomers; see also Sioui, Huron-Wendat. 5 Champlain, Works, 2: 14.

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them.”1 The Algonkian peoples who went to trade with the French were clearly keen at this time

to obtain the goods they sought, revealed by their journeying to Tadoussac and approaching

European ships, but they evidently did not feel beholden to the French and their yearning for

interior travel. This represents the period of trade when Aboriginal peoples were in a position to

negotiate favourably the terms of trade. Not being able to travel to the northern sea, Champlain

journeyed up the St. Lawrence River arriving at “Quebec, so called by the natives,” where he

founded a settlement and immediately built a “storehouse, to put our supplies under cover,” and

then ordered three buildings erected, surrounded by ditches and a palisade.2 Once Champlain had

handily defeated a conspirator and had him “hanged and strangled at Quebec and his head placed

on the end of a pike,”3 he directed the carpenters and sawyers to complete the construction of the

buildings and had gardens made within the settlement walls. Champlain describes sowing wheat

and rye and having some native vines planted “which prospered extremely well, but after I left

the settlement to come back to France, they were all ruined, for want of care, which distressed

me very much.”4 Apart from the unique case of the treasonous conspiracy attempt on

Champlain’s life, this admission represents the first recorded instance of different interest

groups, having competing concerns within a New France settlement. The value Champlain

placed on gardening, which not only provided sustenance but also symbolised cultural

achievement and the vanquishing of wilderness and everything that construct signified, was not

shared by his fellow Quebec settlers, who, it can be assumed were more intensely focused on

availing themselves of the profits to be made by the fur trade than they were on tending gardens.

Conclusion 1 Champlain, Works, 2: 19. 2 Champlian, Works, 2: 25. 3 Champlain, Works, 2: 34. In this incident we find evidence for a culture that is capable of acts as grisly as those of Aboriginal torture, the two cultures simply having different principles regarding when to employ such physical treatment. 4 Champlain, Works, 2: 52.

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In 1609, when acting as an ally to the Innu and Algonquins in a war against their long-standing

enemies, the Haudenosaune, Champlain was to meet the Wendat. In many respects the two

groups, the French and Wendat, were poised to meet for some time, obviously not in a

predestination sense but rather cultural, political and economic readiness. The two groups were

in a position where they were interested in forming an alliance of mutual exploitation, where

each stood to benefit from what the other had to offer. The Wendat could obtain highly useful

iron tools and glass beads which were both a currency and strongly resonant with symbolic

value. The French could acquire the much coveted furs, make advances in their search for the

Northwest Passage, and attempt a conversion project to rival the reductions in South America.

The Wendat had been recalibrating which resources to exploit and shifting from a deer to a

beaver economy, in which beaver were being extracted expressly for leverage in the fur trade.

But it must be stated, the Wendat were during this pre-contact period autonomous from overseas

market demands, engaging in trade only insofar as they desired, and negotiating the changes

introduced by the new market largely on their own terms. The Wendat were also showing

changes in longhouse size, village configuration and settlement pattern, especially with respect to

the regional contraction and demographic density seen in Wendake in the late sixteenth and early

seventeenth century and a shift to a primarily matrilineal societal ordering. Positioning

themselves as traders at the northernmost limit of the viable corn-growing zone, the Wendat

became highly skilled at finessing international relations. The French at the same time were

altering their economic and political strategy with regard to the New World. They were no longer

satisfied to make annual visits to the shores of eastern North America but were desirous of

establishing a colonial foothold. This required something more than itinerant traders and ushered

in a new human-nonhuman relationship in the ambition of pioneering a settler population.

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Clearly, the French and the Wendat were two groups in dynamic and evolving

relationships with the lands they inhabited. At this point Wendat egalitarianism applied to all

nations, human and nonhuman, versus French hierarchical orderings where not only nonhuman

species were positioned below human beings but lower-ranking humans were subordinate to

those higher, was probably the most striking difference between the two groups. The French

despite their delusions of cultural superiority were unable to dictate political or mercantile terms

being vastly outnumbered by Aboriginal peoples at this time. Although Champlain’s wishes to

travel to the interior were thwarted by shrewd and cautious Aboriginal groups, he like de Monts

was “influenced…by the hope of greater advantages in the interior, where the peoples are

civilised, and where it is easier to plant the Christian faith and to establish such order as is

necessary for the preservation of a country than along the sea-shore where the Indians usually

dwell.”1 The actual cultural and environmental impact of the two groups in contact, which

revolves around cultural slippages and misunderstandings as much as assured encounter, will be

explored in the next chapter.

1 Champlain, Works, 1: 232. The idea of “civilised” peoples in the interior is related to the positive value the French attached to cultivation and sedentarism. Of interest is Sioui’s argument in Huron-Wendat that the Wendat held the opposite view, believing “the nomadic life of the hunter” to be “closer to holy things and therefore an ideal human condition” p. xix.

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Chapter Seven: Wendat-French Culture Contact and Land-Use Practices, 1609-1629

But beginning in the seventeenth century and proceeding to the present, New World colonists have undertaken a massive effort to reinvent the whole earth in the image of the Garden of Eden. Aided by the Christian doctrine of redemption and the inventions of science, technology, and capitalism…the long-term goal of the recovery project has been to turn the earth itself into a vast cultivated garden. Carolyn Merchant

Introduction

This chapter explores Wendat-French relations and land use practices in the first two decades of

culture contact. Through examining settlement goals, patterns of fixity and mobility, land use

practices and competing interest groups, not only are disparate connections with the land base

visible between the two cultures, but also perceptible are the ways in which distinctive

worldviews regarding the human and nonhuman influence relationships between culturally

distinct nations. The ramifications of the topics investigated in this chapter are also highly

relevant to our current environmental challenges. Had a human-nonhuman model other than the

western European one prevailed globally the condition of the world environment would

necessarily be different. Environmental decline is commonly associated with the period of

industrialism, but the developments of the industrial era only provided the means for us to

despoil the environment on a scale that had not been possible before. The seeds of industrial era

destruction are foreshadowed in this period of early Wendat-French culture contact, as the

French are largely motivated by wealth accumulation and lack the constraints intrinsic to Wendat

cosmologic understandings where the world comprises innumerable spirits to be respected, and

each Wendat person (and Wendat people collectively) has her or his role to play in maintaining

the cosmological order. This has tremendous significance for environmental social work as

scholars of this discipline have pointed to the perils of the economic growth and consumer

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culture model (the French) and the necessity of replacing this with a needs-based, cooperation

model (the Wendat).1 The Wendat also display a keenly-developed sense of place during this

early contact period, possessing a land-based species lexicon and fluency that the French, as

interlopers, naturally lacked but also did not desire beyond their wealth-oriented ends. If

situating person in place is the unique mantle of social work, then there is much to be learned

from Wendat relationships with the nonhuman, especially with respect to the suggestion that our

contemporary environmental issues can be addressed in part by reconceptualising our

relationship to the land and our place in creation.

Examining conceptualisations different cultures possess about the nonhuman to gain an

appreciation of relationships and interactions with the natural world reveals much about cross-

cultural international relations. In the primary sources there is an overarching opinion that the

Wendat do not exist as a viable polity but as a collective to be cajoled and brought into the

service of, through their involvement with trade, the rise and development of French imperialism

and colonisation efforts in New France. Of course the Wendat had their own material and

political objectives which counter the application of a dominance-resistance model to French-

Wendat interactions, but of note is the strong imperial tone used by the French primary source

authors which prefigures the later wholesale attempts to colonise and assimilate (or eradicate)

Aboriginal peoples witnessed in Canadian history. The Wendat, though glimpsed through the

distorted lens of the French authors, seem to have approached their relations with the French in

the same way they did that of their Algonkian neighbours, seeking a mutually beneficial alliance.

Empire operates in much of the primary source writings as a systematised taken-for-granted,

seldom named presence creating a disquieting textual tension in which the people who sustain

1 See for example Fred Besthorn, “Human Behavior and the Natural Environment: The Community of the Earth,” Human Behavior and the Social Environment: Groups Communities, and Organizations, eds. Katherine van Wormer, Fred Besthorn and Thomas Keefe (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007).

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the burgeoning French fur economy are chronically cast as historically and culturally less

relevant than the French. This top-down hierarchical ordering of peoples whereby the French

believed themselves superior to the Wendat cannot be separated from beliefs regarding their

place in the world both human and nonhuman.

Contact and French Settlement

New World reconnaissance accounts facilitated a peculiar mingling of familiarity and

remoteness for prospective European colonists. Those recognisable elements named and

described in the voyage narratives fostered a sense of geographic fluency. The construction of

societal differences contained within these same accounts, however, tended to produce an

exaggerated and ineluctable cultural distance between Europeans and Indigenous peoples which

deliberately denied separate sovereignty to the latter. This of course formed part of the imperial

and colonial strategy which invidiously differentiates two peoples almost always for the purpose

of justifying the “superior” ruling or remaking the “inferior.”1 But imperial practises were not all

alike. Parkman, observing dissimilarities in colonisation approaches, wrote, “Spanish civilization

crushed the Indian; English civilization scorned and neglected him; French civilization embraced

and cherished him.”2 Despite the obvious hyperbole and patent inaccuracies of this assertion,

there were certain differences intrinsic to the French imperial project in New France that could

give the impression of benevolence. Indeed the 1611 Relation written by Jesuit Father Biard

recounts that the Algonkian peoples of Kinibequi (now Kennebec, Maine) preferred the French

to the English “because they knew we would not close our doors to the Savages as the English

did, and that we would not drive them from our table with blows from a club, nor set our dogs 1 See ecofeminist Val Plumwood’s argument regarding what she terms “the blindspots of centrism and human self-enclosure” in Environmental Culture: The Ecological Crisis of Reason (London: Routledge, 2002) 104: “Once the Other is marked in these ways as part of a radically separate and inferior group, there is a strong motivation to represent them as inessential.” 2 Francis Parkman, The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century (1908; New York: Cosimo Classics, 2005) 44.

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upon them.”1 These imperial distinctions tended to be grounded more in necessity than goodwill.

Although the French did wish to circumvent accusations of cruelty and usurpation commonly

made of the Spanish, they were simultaneously spurred by Spanish commercial success in the

New World and sought to achieve like fortune in lands not yet appropriated by them or other

Europeans.

In many respects Canada, having no pre-existing strongly established European territorial

claims, provided the first opportunity for France to manifest its New World imperial imaginings.

French colonial objectives in northeastern North America were to be achieved through a policy

of French-Aboriginal relations unlike anything in the English or Spanish imperial models. This

was due in part to the very real difficulties posed by the geography and climate of New France,

but legal principles also played a role. French law included the doctrine of consent which

required that colonists obtain permission from Aboriginal peoples before operating or settling in

their lands.2 While this law was never perfectly or consistently realised, consent typically

involved forming alliances with Aboriginal nations from which followed explicit, or sometimes

unstated, invitations for French settlement. Before the French settled in the region of Tadoussac

in 1603 they gained permission through a ceremony in which a French-Aboriginal alliance was

formed. The French were allowed to settle in the area and pursue further explorations in

exchange for pledging military assistance to their new Aboriginal allies: the Innu, Algonquin,

Malecite and Passamaquoddy peoples.3 But one should not conclude that the French were

especially enlightened humanists with regard to French-Aboriginal international affairs.

1 JR 3: 223. 2 See Olive P. Dickason, “The Sixteenth-Century French Vision of Empire: The Other Side of Self-Determination,” Decentring the Renaissance, 89. 3 See passage on this alliance in Champlain, Works 1: 98-101; See also Alain Beaulieu “The Birth of the Franco-American Alliance,” Champlain: The Birth of French America, 153-162 for a discussion of the Aboriginal groups involved in this alliance. Some scholars used to believe it was an agreement between the French and the Montagnais (Innu), but evidence suggests the alliance also involved the Algonquin and Etchemin (Malecite, Passamaquoddy).

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Lescarbot’s writing on the matter underscores the extent to which law constrained the more

menacing sort of colonial impulses observed in the English, and particularly the Spanish,

colonial endeavours. He reports that the French did not bathe “their hands in the blood of

[Aboriginal] people, for which they are neither to be praised nor blamed: for there is no law nor

pretext which permits us to kill anyone, whosoever he may be, and especially the persons whose

property we have seized.”1 Naturally, Lescarbot would not be representative of all French

persons, but his callous sentiment nonetheless belies the firm demarcation Parkman makes

between French and other European colonial praxis.

Fixity and Mobility

These imperfect but distinct French imperial diplomatic strivings concerning First Nations

peoples find their analogue in the unique human-land relationships that the French developed in

New France. In his excellent work Changes in the Land, Cronon identified the tension between

English fixity and Aboriginal mobility as the “central conflict in the ways Indians and colonists

interacted with their environments.”2 However true this may be for the human and environmental

history of New England, in New France a somewhat different pattern emerged. Primary source

authors repeatedly promulgate the necessity of French fixity, symbolized by the cultivation of

French gardens and agriculture, to establishing a proper colony, but an alternate voice surfaces in

the subtle plurivocality of the texts, a French voice possessing a momentous commitment to

mobility. The French merchants and their, most often illiterate, traders were generally exponents

of an extractive resource model which emphasised profit making often to the detriment of colony

building.3 Although there are no journals or records of their activities, and they do not appear

1 JR 1: 61. 2 William Cronon, Changes in the Land, 53. 3 See Harold Innis’s The Fur Trade in Canada in which he describes how the extractive economy centring on animal pelts, namely beaver furs, in the early seventeenth century linked Canada to overseas imperial centres.

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directly in the primary sources, voices of traders and merchants possessing almost unalloyed

mercantile ambitions, emerge in the recorded disappointments of the primary source authors,

making it possible to discern competing French interest groups in New France. The conflict

between fixity and mobility is as much an internal as external issue, that is, an ideal which both

Champlain in his lieutenancy capacity and the religious missionaries sought to impose on the

French colonists and Aboriginals alike.

But Champlain, the Recollets, and the Jesuits formed a minority in New France, being

vastly outnumbered by those who had come to the French colony with solely mercantile interests

and the desire to accumulate foreign wealth. What developed with respect to Wendat-French

culture contact in the case study investigated here remains a conflict arising from two different

ways of relating to the environment, but rather than a struggle primarily between fixity and

mobility the conflict in the context of New France can be traced in the early contact period to

two disparate kinds of mobility. Wendat mobility revolved around sustenance and sustainability,

having a periodicity associated with seasonal hunting, fishing, planting, and trading activities.

French mobility, on the other hand, was preoccupied not only with resource extraction, wealth

accumulation and territorial acquisition, but also religious conversion and the glory of the French

crown. These were the objectives that impelled French men to embark on a risky overseas

journey from France and to pursue even riskier travels to the interior of eastern North America.

This chapter explores how these two forms of mobility, two ways of engaging with the land,

developed during the first two decades of Wendat-French culture contact in the years 1609-1629.

French Survival in New France

One of the most significant challenges the French faced in the New France was surviving the

long winters and accompanying cold temperatures. The climate was sufficiently dissimilar to that

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of France that the Jesuit Biard suggested the following “causes for the difference between the

two countries, as to weather and seasons; one is that Canada has more Water, and the other that it

is uncultivated.”1 As discussed in the previous chapter, land cultivation was connected with

subduing the wilderness2 and was thought necessary to replace barbarism with civility. For the

early Jesuits in Acadia the primeval forest was frightening in both a literal and figurative sense.

The immensity of the “interminable forest” needed to be transformed through land clearance and

tillage.3 By overcoming the “wild and primitive condition of the land” and practicing cultivation,

“New France will be worth as much as France.”4 Indeed there “might be some profit made from

its vines.”5 Even the religious personages had brought with them to New France the prevailing

European mercantile model, in which various elements in their environs were perceived as and

translated into prospective profits through the filter of commodifying resources. But the “horrible

wilderness” was also where “Satan’s malevolence” was believed to reign, and it was therefore

imperative to “make a Garden out of the wilderness; where [Christ] would subjugate Satanic

monsters and would introduce the order and discipline of heaven upon earth.”6 It was this second

form of cultivation, the metaphorical garden and the associated “harvest of souls” that was to

consume the Jesuits in their work in Wendake, particularly once they began to settle in the region

more insistently after New France had been retroceded to the French.

Champlain’s cultivation concerns were considerably more secular but unquestionably

still contained the strong connotations connecting gardening with superior societal development

and civility, evidenced by his unconcealed preference for those Aboriginal nations employing

1 JR 3: 59. 2 Wilderness is a concept that did not exist in Wendat thought. The lands they inhabited and the various biota with whom they co-dwelled were all part of an integrated cosmological whole as discussed in chapter five. 3 JR 3: 41, 63. 4 JR 3: 67. 5 JR: 67. 6 JR 3: 33, 35.

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farming practices.1 Initially Champlain desired to have gardens made quickly at new settlements

as part of a survival strategy. French ignorance of local food sources and their consequent

inability to wrest satisfactory nourishment from their new environs was as much an inducement

to transport European flora and fauna to New France as was their ideological commitment to

French rather than Aboriginal land-use practices. Although the early French settlements in

northeastern North America were discussed in chapter six from an ideological perspective, here

they are considered briefly from the adjoined aspect of survival. At Ste. Croix, the first attempted

French colony in North America since Cartier’s time, land was cleared and gardens made with

Champlain himself sowing “a quantity of seeds” as part of an approach to produce an enduring

colony. When the French moved to Port-Royal because of the poor soil and lack of potable water

at Ste Croix, and the hardship of scurvy having “struck many of our people,”2 the land was

quickly cleared and cultivated and Champlain established the Order of Good Cheer in an effort

to prevent another incidence of scurvy and reduce risk of starvation. When developing the

settlement at Quebec3 in 1608, Champlain again promptly set men “to work clearing the

land…to make gardens in which to sow grains and seed.”4 Making gardens at these first few

settlements and creating the Order at Port-Royal represent, to a significant degree, the need to

fulfill a basic human need, sustenance, in a new and demanding environment.

For the French, who were not versed in Aboriginal ecological knowledge and lacked

woodland hunting and gathering skills, the country was “only a forest, without other

conveniences of life than those which will be brought from France, and what in time may be

1 Champlain, Works 1: 329, 410; 2: 57 2 Champlain, Works 1: 303 3 The 1603 Aboriginal-French alliance enabled the French to settle here without Aboriginal resistance. 4 Champlain, Works 2: 44

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obtained from the soil after it has been cultivated.”1 Agriculture was understood to be “the

occupation of prime importance, and most necessary to human life.”2 However, it was expected

that the early period of settlement would require bringing, and depending upon the continued

transportation of, supplies from the overseas metropole until agriculture in New France was

firmly established. “Just as a newborn baby needs support so does a new colony until it gets

underway.”3 Colonial development in New France in the first two decades was marked by

numerous periods when the colonists experienced adversity and worriedly anticipated provisions

from France to ward off starvation. Sympathetic Aboriginal persons occasionally brought “some

offering from the chase,”4 when aware of a French ordeal of scarcity. During an episode of

extreme rations at Port Royal in 1611 the French “heard of some roots which the Savages eat in

their time of need” and collecting these discovered they were “as good as Truffles.”5 This was

not part of a larger plan to adopt and integrate Aboriginal subsistence methods or products, but

rather a means to overcome an immediate crisis, death by starvation. Toward a similar goal

Poutrincourt, lieutenant-governor of Port-Royal, dispatched in 1611 some Frenchmen to live

“among the Savages…and without [their] assistance…I do not know but that they would all have

perished miserably.”6 Champlain so emphasised gardening not only because it was the custom of

his country and agriculture was thought to symbolise a more advanced cultural state,7 but also

because he recognised in food production a way to accelerate the path toward colonial self- 1 JR 1: 171-173. 2 JR 2: 165. 3 JR 3: 141; See also JR 2: 129 for a description of Poutrincourt’s ship when he is preparing to return to Acadia. The ship is loaded with “furniture, provisions, and munitions of war; and, indeed, so freighted…down that the sides were only two finger lengths out of the water.” 4 JR 3: 231. 5 JR 2: 169. 6 JR 3: 185. 7 This linear trajectory of subsistence patterns in which agriculture is ranked as a more advanced and civilised form of food production was developed further by Adam Smith in the late eighteenth century. In his four-stages theory societal development is characterised by manner of subsistence, progressing from hunting, pastoral, agricultural and commercial. See Martin Fitzpatrick, The Enlightenment World (New York: Routledge, 2004) 477; See also Sankar Muthu, Enlightenment against Empire (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2003) 181.

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sufficiency and ensure an ample supply of food through surplus production and storage.

Champlain’s devotion to a cultivator versus hunter hierarchical land-use binarism is probably

best exemplified by his planting “rose-bushes,”1 a nonutilitarian plant, at Quebec in 1611, which

reveals his commitment to practices that recreate the orderliness and aesthetics of a French

garden in the New France wilderness.

Competing Interest Groups

Most early French colonists however did not share Champlain’s colonisation objectives. They

were motivated largely by the profits to be made in the flourishing fur trade and had little interest

in gardening or activities associated with permanent settlement. Champlain had grains sowed and

vines planted at the Quebec colony in October 1608 but when he returned from France the

following year, he discovered that they “were all ruined, for want of care, which distressed me

very much.”2 It was not that Champlain himself was uninterested in the fur trade or the wealth to

be gathered in the vast country that was to become Canada. Surely Champlain chose to situate

the settlement at Quebec in part because the site was ideal for the installation of cannons which

would help control movement at the narrows3 of the St. Lawrence River and limit upstream

access to the Great Lakes, thereby funnelling more wealth through a French commercial

gateway. Champlain’s commitment to wealth extraction in New France, via fur trading, mining

and other commercial opportunities, was unmistakably no less than that of the merchants and

traders; however, the significance he placed on colony building was clearly greater. Lescarbot

had argued exuberantly in 1610, perhaps as an incentive to create a colonisation strategy for New

France, “If that country were settled, there are men…who would take pleasure in cultivating their

1 Champlain, Works, 2: 213. 2 Champlain, Works, 2: 52. 3 The name Quebec means “narrows” in the Mi’kmaq language, Champlain Works 1: 129, note 2: See also Champlain, Works 4: 32.

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land….Cultivating the soil is the most innocent of occupations and the most sure.”1 However, he

was to write in his Relation the following year people were instead “eager to get the Beaver-

skins of [New France]” and “go there for no other purpose.”2 Champlain complained repeatedly

that Frenchmen sought to exploit and profit from the reconnoitring, risks and hardships of

explorers and first settlers, without making any contribution to the colonisation of New France.

In his most bitter and personal expression of this frustration he pits his more elevated interest in

the “welfare, advantage, and glory of the French name” against the self-interest of the merchants

and traders who wished only “to gather the fruits of my labour without contributing to the cost

and to the large outlay necessary for the maintenance of the settlements which are required in

order to bring these projects to a successful end.”3 So indifferent were most French newcomers

to New France to land cultivation and colony building that Louis Hébert had to be recruited in

1617 as a contracted farmer who was obliged to sell his agricultural surplus to the trading

company. Settling in the area of Quebec he doubtlessly farmed land previously cleared by the

Stadaconans, a group of Laurentian Nadoueks who had disappeared from the St Lawrence Valley

region.4

Of course there was another significant interest group at this time in addition to the

French colonists and French mercantilists, and that was the various Aboriginal nations of

northeastern North America, with whom the French were trading, and who by no means

represented a monolithic assemblage having non-competing interests. Aboriginal initiative to

trade with Europeans was apparent on Cartier’s first voyage to Canada when Mi’kmaq men in

1 JR 1: 93. 2 JR 2: 127. 3 Champlain, Works, 2: 241-242. 4 See Champlain, Works, 2: 176 where he writes of Montreal, which was just being settled in 1611, that there “are more than sixty arpents of land, which have been cleared and are now like meadows, where one might sow grain and do gardening. Formerly Indians [Hochelagans] cultivated these lands, but they have abandoned them on account of the frequent wars they carried on there.”

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the Chaleur Bay region enticed the French, by waving furs on sticks, to come ashore and barter

goods. Cartier reports they “showed a marvellously great pleasure in possessing and

obtaining…iron wares and other commodities” in exchange for the furs offered.1 During

Champlain’s time, Aboriginal interest in iron goods persisted with more nations desiring direct

access to French items. In the autumn of 1608 Champlain told an Algonquin chief’s son, who

had come to visit Quebec, that he and Pont-Grave “wished to help them against their enemies”2

the Haudenosaune. The following July Champlain fulfilled his pledge and prepared to go to war

with his allies. “I had no other intention than to make war; for we had with us only arms and not

merchandise for barter, as they had been led to understand, and that my only desire was to

perform what I had promised them.”3 Clearly another Aboriginal group had been reporting to the

Algonquin that Champlain was interested only in trade not going to war. This most likely reflects

the interfering nation’s desire to maintain a monopoly over the trade, so as to retain their role as

intermediary purveyors of French goods to Aboriginal nations living farther inland and to remain

collectors, rather than trappers or processors, of Aboriginal goods to trade with the French. This

was a pattern that was to repeat as the French moved increasingly westward to the interior of the

continent. The Innu wished to prevent direct contact between the French and the westerly

Algonquin, but because the Innu were outnumbered by the Haudenosaune and relied on the

Algonquin as military allies, this was impossible. The Algonquin did not want the more interior

Wendat to develop direct trade with the French, and the Wendat, once having established direct

trade with the French, sought to obstruct their southwestern Attawandaronk neighbours from the

same. The Kichesipirini, and Algonquin nation, posed an ongoing problem for Wendat traders

1 Cartier, Voyages of Jacques Cartier, 1924, 53. The Mi’kmaq were primarily interested in obtaining knives and other iron goods. 2 Champlain, Works, 2: 69. 3 Champlain, Works, 2: 71.

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travelling through Kichesipirini territory along the Ottawa River. The Wendat were forced to

relinquish sizeable quantities of corn and to barter considerable furs as toll payments to achieve

passage to the St Lawrence.1 Each nation, experiencing sufficient benefit from an exclusive trade

partnership with the French, was anxious to preserve its monopoly.

Wendat and Champlain Meet

In 1609 Champlain met the Wendat (Ochasteguins)2 who had come to assist their Innu and

Algonquin allies in the battle against the Mohawk on the shore of Lake Champlain.3 Of interest

for this study is not the easy victory of the First Nations and their French allies over the

Mohawk. After all, the French had firearms and the Mohawk who had never before seen such

weapons had only bows and arrows. What is important is Champlain’s evaluation of Wendat

warfare, which he forms after the 1609 battle and expands following the 1610 battle against the

Haudenosaune and the 1615 war against a large Haudenosaune village.4 Champlain is troubled

by the torture of enemy prisoners. “I pointed out to them that we did not commit such cruelties,

but that we killed people outright, and that if they wished me to shoot him with the arquebus, I

should be glad to do so.”5 Champlain describes how he then killed the prisoner with one shot and

saved him from brutal treatment. But France was fully capable of enacting its own form of

brutality on human bodies, a state-sanctioned torture having both a legal and cultural

significance.6 The difference between the two cultures was not so much one of torture employed

but occasion for its use. Champlain’s disgust is an example of the extent to which custom

1 Champlain, Works, 5: 103; Sagard, Long Journey, 255-258. 2 Champlain, Works, 2: 68. 3 Champlain called this fight the “Battle of Lake Champlain” and describes it in detail in Works 2: 97-100 and Works 4: 97-99. 4 This would have been either an Onondaga or Oneida village. 5 Champlain, Works, 2: 103. 6 See Lisa Silverman, Tortured Subjects: Pain, Truth and the Body in Early Modern France (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2001). One must remember also the Quebec strangling, hanging and decapitation of the treasonous Jean du Val whose head was gruesomely placed on a spike at the Quebec fort as a reminder of state justice.

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“stupefies our senses,”1 making the Other incomprehensible through nonconformity to a foreign

set of values.

That the Wendat did not wish to annihilate the enemy also frustrated Champlain, who

explained this seeming failure by claiming, “[T]hey must be excused, for they are not warriors,

and moreover they will not submit to discipline nor to correction, and do only what they like.”2

Champlain’s textual musings have the effect of augmenting the tendentious system of knowledge

pertaining to the Wendat but through a filter which makes it possible for the produced, as

opposed to the actual, Wendat to enter European consciousness in an attenuated, distorted form.3

Undisciplined peoples, warriors or not, must by European reckoning be brought under

submission and in this service colonisation, Christianity and trade are to be put. The Wendat

offer of friendship to the French, though influenced by a desire for European metal goods to be

sure, appears to have been a sincere effort to create an important cross-cultural community

development where the differences between French and Wendat culture and social organisation

provided unique opportunities to surface for both parties, as the Wendat managed to achieve so

successfully with their northern Algonkian neighbours.4 The French tended to view the Wendat,

however, with instrumental eyes which did not allow them an intrinsic value separate from the

utility they might offer in the fur trade and exploration. Despite the irritation Champlain records

regarding Wendat military practices, which he had experienced both in 1609 and 1610, he agreed

to fight with the Wendat again in 1615 “both to engage them more to love us, and also to

produce the means of furthering my enterprises and explorations which apparently could only be

1 Michel de Montaigne, “Of Custom, and That We Should Not Easily Change a Law Received,” The Essays of Michel de Montaigne, trans. Charles Cotton (Sioux Falls, SD: NuVision, 2007) 7. 2 Champlain, Works, 3: 72. 3 See Edward Said, “Resistance and Opposition,” Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1994) 191-281 for a penetrating discussion of this process. 4 See Nancy Rodenburg and Nancy Huhyn’s excellent article on the factors promoting enduring, salubrious cross-cultural relations, “On Overcoming Segregation: Social Work and Intergroup Dialogue,” Social Work with Groups, 29.1 (2006): 27-44.

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carried out with their help and also because this would be to them a kind of pathway and

preparation of embracing Christianity.”1 Champlain determined the Wendat were in need of

proselytizing before ever having visited Wendake, using the Eurocentric, universalistic cultural

superiority model which renders all non-European cultures implicitly wanting.

The divergent military practices are important for this case study because in them can be

found associations with disparate human-land relationships belonging to the Wendat and French.

Trigger identifies three primary objectives in Wendat warfare: for young men to acquire status in

the community; to avenge past wrongs; and to maintain cosmological balance through ritual

torture.2 Using a warfare model having these elements, the Wendat were content to have

captured a few prisoners to torture and to return to their community with young warriors who

had earned greater prestige. In every respect the battles of 1609 and 1610 fulfilled these criteria

without necessitating obliteration of the enemy nation. The French had a different set of military

aspirations. At the time of contact with the Wendat, the French were in the gradual process of

shifting from a feudal to a capitalistic organisational structure centred on privatisation, wealth

accumulation and a mobile and independent labour supply. Prior to arriving at the political

structure of the modern state, there was an extended transition period of absolutism following the

decline of the decentralized feudal monarchy.3 For Champlain success in battle meant the

complete destruction of the Haudenosaune with the corresponding dividend of new territory

acquisition. It would be artificial to ascribe these differences entirely to the distinction often

observed between European ownership versus Aboriginal usufructuary land values, for these

discrepancies in military aims suggest more about the contrast between linear progressivism

1 Champlain, Works, 3: 31-32. 2 Trigger, Huron: Farmers of the North, 52. 3 William Biek, Absolutism and Society in Seventeenth-century France: State Power and Provincial Aristocracy in Languedoc (New York: Cambridge UP, 1985) 3.

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associated with incipient French capitalism and the reciprocal practices characterising Wendat

communalism; but the two groups did have different ways of relating to the land which

Champlain was to see when he wintered in Wendake in the year 1615.

Wendat Seek Direct Trade with the French

The Wendat likely joined their Algonquin trading partners in the 1609 war against the

Haudenosaune because they were motivated by a desire to trade directly with the French.

Naturally the Algonquin would resist the development of direct trade between these two groups,

but reliance on Wendat corn and lesser items, made guileless Algonquin opposition on this point

highly problematic, potentially jeopardising a long-cultivated, mutually beneficial international

relationship. After the 1609 war, both the Algonquin and the Wendat asked Champlain to “go to

their country, and aid them continually like a brother.”1 He unsurprisingly promised that he

would. In 1610 Champlain wrote confidently that he had “two strings to [his] bow,” for the Innu

had offered to take him “to explore the Three Rivers” the following year toward the “large sea,”

and the Algonquin and Wendat had promised to show him their country.2 The Innu, Algonquin

and Wendat all perceived Champlain to be different from those French traders who were

obviously mercenary and interested principally in furs. In the war of 1609 Champlain set out

with nine Frenchmen, but only two other than Champlain risked traversing dangerous rapids to

reach the battle destination. It was through fulfilling his promises and committing acts of

ostensible bravery that Champlain distinguished himself from other Frenchmen, and his

Aboriginal allies expressed their preference for him over those traders “who wish to make war

only upon our beavers.”3

1 Champlain, Works, 2: 105. 2 Champlain, Works, 2: 119. The large sea Champlain refers to is the Hudson Bay. 3 Champlain, Works, 2: 121; see also similar quotes in Champlain, Works, 2: 126, 201-202, 209.

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The Innu, Algonquin and Wendat all made interior travel offers to Champlain to secure

his continued friendship. However, they were simultaneously cautious about his motives and

protective of their territories, the Innu and Algonquin deferring these journeys for as long as

possible. The prudence and resistance Aboriginal groups showed was wise given the potential

dangers that could ensue once the French were permitted to gain familiarity with their territory.

To the extent that “organisms through their productive activities transform the environments to

which they subsequently adapt,”1 colonialists typically remake, through wealth accumulation

aims and irresponsibility to local objectives and values, the environments they seek to adopt and

appropriate for imperial ends. In this way Champlain’s movement through Aboriginal spaces

becomes an imposition of French colonial time, a movement of exploration inscribing the idea of

French progress while simultaneously documenting the “backwardness” of the peoples visited

and the necessity for enlightened Christian intervention.

In 1610 Champlain exploited his friendship with the Wendat and Algonquin by insisting

Etienne Brulé, a young Frenchman, be taken by these allies to their respective territories. Brulé

was to be deployed as a scout learning about the region including its peoples and resources.2

When the Algonquin Chief Iroquet refused, Champlain asked why his “friend, had refused to

take the youth with him” for “it was not like a brother or a friend to deny me a thing which he

had promised me.”3 The Algonquin relented and took Brulé but they were adamant that

Champlain should take one of their party. The young man exchanged in this bond of friendship

and international diplomacy was Savignon, a Wendat, whom the French took to France. While

the French used interpreters and priests, both Recollet and Jesuits, to encourage the Wendat to go

the St Lawrence to trade, the Wendat expected these same Frenchmen, to whom they had shown

1 David Harvey, Justice, Nature & the Geography of Difference (Malden: Blackwell, 1996) 66. 2 Champlain, Works, 2: 138. 3 Champlain, Works, 2: 140.

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hospitality in Wendake, to secure for them better prices for their furs.1 The number of

Frenchmen stationed in Wendake during the early contact period to ensure the continued

lubrication of the prosperous fur trade is unknown. Their purpose however is clear. They were

“to keep [the Wendat] steady in their friendship, and dispose them to come to us.”2 So apparent

was the link between religious and mercantile objectives that a French interpreter named Michel

insisted during the 1629 English takeover that the Jesuits assayed not so much to convert the

Wendat to Christianity but “rather, to convert the beavers.”3 Although contact was made in 1609,

Champlain himself did not travel to Wendake until 1615, as the Algonquin chiefs used a string of

pretexts which thwarted his efforts to travel up the Ottawa River until that time. When he did

make the journey it was on Aboriginal terms. He and the Algonquin had been invited by the

Wendat to unite in a retaliatory attack on the Haudenosaune. On this trip Champlain cemented

his alliance with the Wendat, facilitating future direct French-Wendat trade along the St.

Lawrence River, and the Algonquin though distressed by this political and commercial

reconfiguration had the slight solace of charging the Wendat tolls for travelling the Ottawa

River.4

The Wendat had long been involved in international trade with their Aboriginal trading

partners, and they were recognised as superlative middlepersons, honing their skills to this end

for two centuries. So central were they to the Aboriginal trade network that the Wendat language

was the lingua franca for the vast northern trade region delimited on the east by the Ottawa

1 Champlain, Works, 5: 108; Sagard, Long Journey, 77-78, 244-245. 2 Champlain, Works, 5: 101, 207; see also JR 4: 197, “Although there have been no Religious among these Tribes, the merchants have not failed to send Frenchmen there to gain the good will of the Savages, and to induce them to come yearly to the trading station.” 3 Champlain, Works, 6: 137. 4 See Sagard, Long Journey, 266, 268; Champlain, Works, 5: 103.

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Valley and on the west, Green Bay, Wisconsin.1 In a short time the Wendat redoubled their

efforts as skilled middlepersons and quickly became the primary trading partners of the French, a

partnership which drew the Wendat into an overseas international economy subject to the whims

and vicissitudes of a distant accumulation-oriented market. Champlain was aware that an alliance

with the Wendat would open up trade with a large number of Aboriginal groups yet unreached

by the French, and therefore would lead to a greater quantity of pelts being brought to the St.

Lawrence annually. Indeed the Wendat came to supply well over half this quantity yearly.2

Champlain also understood that traction within a semi-sedentary confederacy would facilitate

access to the interior of the country, would support the search for the Northwest Passage, and

would simplify the conventional colonial strivings of settlement, conversion, exploitation, and

state control. Unceasingly interested in the sedentarisation of the French newcomers with a view

to forming a legible and ordered colonial society in New France, Champlain found Wendat semi-

sedentarism especially appealing for its consistent and manageable metric which made possible a

synoptic perspective.3

Champlain in Wendake

Champlain went to Wendake in 1615 where he arrived in Toanché, an Attignawantan village, as

a military ally to the westernmost Wendat nation. Father Joseph Le Caron, a Recollet and the

first priest to sojourn in Wendake, preceded Champlain arriving slightly earlier the same year in

Carhagouha a village southeast of Toanché. Initially Champlain had shown indifference toward,

or at most negligible interest in, the conversion of Aboriginal peoples, but in 1615 his attitude

1 See Sagard, Long Journey, 86, The Huron “neither know nor learn any other language than their own, whether from indifference of because they have less need of their neighbours than their neighbours have of them.” See also Trigger, Children of Aataentsic, 65, and Olive P. Dickason, Canada’s First Nations, 70. 2 Heidenreich, Huronia, 250. 3 See James Scott’s very excellent examination of this topic in his Chapter titled “Nature and Space” where he discusses the modern versus the pre-modern state in Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven: Yale UP, 1998) 11-52.

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changed and he was impatient to bring the Aboriginal nations “to the knowledge of God. And to

attain this end I exerted myself to find some good friars.”1 Champlain claimed his prior neglect

of this goal was due to the prohibitive expense, but more likely his newly articulated desire to

bring Catholic priests to New France stemmed from a form of Counter-Reformation chauvinistic

Roman Catholicism, a personal awakening or the influence of his devout wife whom he had

recently wed.2 When Champlain returned to New France in 1615 he brought with him four

Recollet priests, one being Father Le Caron. Very soon after reaching New France, Le Caron

made the 1,100 km voyage to Wendake where he was sent to teach Catholicism. Thus began the

missionary venture among the Wendat, a momentous development as evangelisation was to have

eventually a deleterious impact on social cohesion.3 Le Caron assembled the first dictionary of

the Wendat language during his 1615-16 stay in Wendake, but it is not extant today. However,

this is the dictionary Gabriel Sagard, a Recollet lay brother, studied in France with the aspiration

of being invited to join the Wendat mission. When Le Caron returned to Wendake in 1623,

Sagard and Father Nicolas Viel joined him. Sagard recorded his detailed observations in the

Long Journey to the Country of the Hurons, and it is from his and Champlain’s journals that a

composite textual picture of the Wendat land-use practices and human-land relationship is

possible for the early contact period.

When Champlain first saw Wendake after having travelled through Algonkian territory

he reported “a great change in the country, this part being very fine, mostly cleared, with many

hills and several streams, which make it an agreeable district.”4 He further described it as “very

1 Champlain, Works, 3: 16 2 See Dominique Desladres, “Samuel de Champlain and Religion,” Champlain: The Birth of French America, 191-204. 3 This becomes much more readily apparent after 1632, but hints of Wendat social tension are present in the historical period preceding English takeover. 4 Champlain, Works, 3: 46.

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pleasant in contrast to such a bad country as that through which we had just come.”1 Similarly,

Sagard wrote, “It is a well-cleared country, pretty and pleasant, and crossed by streams which

empty into the great lake. There is no ugly surface of great rocks and barren mountains such as

one sees in many places in Canadian and Algonquin territory.”2 The association between

landscape and the inscape of national character made the civil and collective expression

encrypted in Wendat territory especially pleasing to Champlain and Sagard who, unlike French

traders living in these remote regions, were predisposed to settlement and cultivation. Because

the idea of nature is socially, historically and materially constructed, the French had an aesthetic

and affectational orientation more akin to the Wendat horticultural landscape than the more

rugged, rocky region of the Algonkian. Wendake on this basis of familiarity and similitude was

more highly valued by the French.3 The landscape of the neighbouring Algonkian peoples which

represented a distasteful but nonetheless contemporaneous spatial-temporal alternative brought

the “tamed” Wendat landscape into relief for Champlain and Sagard. But these two authors were

stuck in a fissure of untranslatability marking the transnational and teleological dimension of

land-use practices, especially with regard to spatial typology. That is, the incommensurability of

Algonkian non-horticultural practices caused Champlain and Sagard to categorise their territories

using the derogatory terms “bad” and “ugly.” Their interpretation forced the alternative highly

bioregionally adaptive land-use practices of the Algonkian peoples, whose territory was largely

incompatible with horticultural processes, to retreat in the face of French uniaxial, totalising

land-use philosophy.

Wendat Land-Use Practices

1 Champlain, Works, 47. 2 Sagard, Long Journey, 90. 3 See Karen Warrens’s discussion on the meanings of “nature” and the associated values assigned in Ecofeminist Philosophy: A Western Perspective on What It Is and Why It Matters (Lanham, MD: Rowman, 2000) 58.

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Where the Algonkian land-use practices were, to French sensibilities, virtually indecipherable in

any congenial manner, the Wendat methods were depicted as a lesser version of the French

agrarian tradition. This is, of course, to be expected in these travel narratives in which the

colonial French authoritative voice operates to ensure the exotic Wendat, their geography,

culture and land-use practices are never quite equal when compared with prevailing French

culture and traditions.1 In French reckoning this implicit and enunciated cultural superiority is

true despite having created a social hierarchy which ranks the Wendat favourably with respect to

other Aboriginal nations, but not so favourably when compared with European ones. “I consider

the Hurons and other sedentary tribes as the aristocracy, the Algonquin peoples the townspeople,

and the other savages nearer us, such as the Montagnais and Canadians, the villagers and poor

people of the country.”2 This is the impossible cultural and land-use dialectic surrounding

Wendat peoples who are depicted as at once superior to non-sedentary Aboriginal peoples but

predictably inferior to European peoples, wanting only in proper French instruction to overcome

their “wretched” life.3 When Champlain and Sagard describe Wendat villages and the activities

that support village life, they bring this bifocal ethnographic perspective to their accounts. An

example of this is Champlain’s opinion that Wendat horticultural land-use practices could be

improved through a supposed upgrade to agriculture once the Wendat were acquainted with

domesticated European animals, which Champlain was convinced the Wendat would readily

adopt and tend.4

1 See Said’s excellent chapter “Overlapping Territories, Intertwined Histories,” Culture and Imperialism, 3-61. 2 Sagard, Long Journey, 139. 3 Champlain, Works, 2: 125. 4 Champlain, Works, 3: 130. Champlain had observed how some Wendat nations kept and fattened caged bears which would later be used in important ceremonies. He mistakenly assumed the Wendat were only wanting in knowledge of domesticated animals and that captive bears evidenced a society ready to exploit cows, chickens and pigs if only they were given the opportunity.

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Wendat villages were more densely settled than villages of non-sedentary Aboriginal

nations. Champlain suggests a population of approximately 30,000 people in Wendake, and

Sagard estimates 30,000 to 40,000.1 These figures are interesting for a variety of socio-

demographic and political reasons, but for the purpose of this case study they hold particular

importance because they are relevant to Wendat resource use and the carrying capacity of the

2,331 square kilometres in which they lived,2 and they reflect strongly the vast numerical

superiority of the Wendat over the French in New France, which necessitated the French

tokenism of “befriending” their Wendat allies.3 In the early period of the Wendat-French alliance

and cultural interaction, the Wendat were directly involved in both an Aboriginal international

trade system and an overseas European market. Wendat labour pivoted around actions to

produce, survive, and create within a system whose primary economic activities and cultural

investments were directed toward the Wendat confederacy. In time, the combination of

epidemics and Christianity would change this, but in Champlain and Sagard’s respective

accounts it is possible to discern the Wendat cultural fluorescence Trigger described as resulting

from access to French goods.4 The most desired European items were metal goods which eased a

variety of labour activities. Evidence of this is found not only in the archaeological record but

also in the soubriquet the Wendat used for the French, Agnonha, which meant iron people.5 This

name signifies in part the novelty iron represented for the Wendat, but it also reflects the

importance of iron tools in Wendat society. Prior to European contact the Wendat used stone

1 Champlain, Works, 3: 122; Sagard, Long Journey, 92. 2 This figure for the area of Wendake is taken from Olive P. Dickason’s Canada’s First Nations, 70. 3 In 1627 there were only 107 French people in New France. See Trudel, The Beginnings of New France, 165. 4 Trigger, Children of Aataentsic, 425. 5 Sagard, Long Journey, 79.

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cutting tools, but once they were introduced to metal substitutes, these became choice trade

items.1

Metal axes would have been helpful for clearing fields designated for cultivation and for

the construction of houses, although field clearance was the more onerous task. The typical

Wendat dwelling was the longhouse which symbolised the Nadouek philosophy of collective

social and political life. Families lived together in an extended arrangement with some lodges

having “as many as eight, ten, or twelve fires, which means twenty-four families, others fewer,

according as they are long or short.”2 The longhouses reminded Champlain and Sagard of

“arcades” or “bowers,” and the design involved outer walls comprising a double row of carefully

placed sapling posts that were bent toward each other and tied together at the top. Over this

frame were placed sheets of bark like overlapping shingles.3 The larger more important villages

and many of those located on the frontier of Wendake had palisades surrounding them made of

several rows of staggered wooden poles bound together by bark and branches. It has been

estimated that the largest Wendat villages would have required as many as 24,000 poles for

fortification, while constructing one hundred longhouses “could take up roughly 50,000 posts

and 450,000 square feet of elm and cedar bark.”4 While these figures appear daunting, Wendat

villages could be built in three to five months provided an ample stand of second-growth trees

was nearby.5 Interestingly, Wendat land-use practices promoted the existence of precisely these

second-growth stands of trees because villages were relocated every ten to thirty years,6 and in

the abandoned residential and garden sections of former village sites, second-growth trees would

1 Trigger, Natives and Newcomers, 209. See Sagard, Long Journey, 183, where the author specifies Wendat appreciation for the following metal goods: “axes, knives, and kettles” among other items. 2 Sagard, Long Journey, 94. 3 Champlain, Works, 3: 123; Sagard, Long Journey, 93. 4 Heidenreich, Huronia, 154. 5 Heidenreich, Huronia, 155. The smaller diameter of second-growth trees made them easier to fell and more pliant for construction. 6 See Champlain Works, 3: 124; Sagard, Long Journey, 92.

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over a period of decades develop to a suitable size for new village developments. Wendat

villages usually relocated because they had exhausted local resources,1 grown to an

unmanageable population size,2 or combined with degradation of the local environment the posts

for longhouses were so decomposed that reinforcement was no longer tenable,3 but whatever the

reason, the net effect was a period of regeneration for previous residential lands.

The Wendat are commonly described as having practised a form of “slash and burn”

horticulture. The term is misleading because it evokes an environmentally damaging technique

often associated today with mismanaged tropical rain forests. Clearing fields for horticulture was

a demanding task4 requiring the transformation of forests to cultivable plots of land. Although

metal as opposed to stone axes would have mitigated the difficulty of this undertaking to some

extent,5 the practice was for Wendat men to cut down the smaller trees, but the larger trees were

only girdled and stripped of branches. These branches once dried would be burned at the base of

the girdled tree.6 Wendat women would then plant corn, beans, squash and sunflowers in small

hillocks they formed between the tree stumps, and the same land would be cultivated for the

duration of village settlement at the site. Although it was customary for the French to claim the

Wendat did not understand cultivation and consequently prematurely exhausted the soil,7

empirical data suggest Nadouek cornfields did not require conventional fallow periods because

intercropping nitrogen-fixing beans with maize made the soil indefinitely fertile.8 The French did

1 Sagard, Long Journey, 92-93. 2 Heidenreich, Huronia, 129. 3 Warrick, Population History, 1990, 290. 4 Champlain, Works, 3: 156. Champlain writes that the Wendat cleared the land “with great difficulty on account of not having proper tools for this purpose.” 5 In Children of Aataentsic Bruce Trigger describes how metal axes would have made this arduous task easier but not by the margin most would expect. The axes that the Wendat received were generally of poor quality, p. 412. 6 See Champlain, Works, 3: 156 and Sagard, Long Journey, 103 for a description of how Wendat men handled the larger trees. The smaller trees that were readily felled would have been used for construction purposes. 7 Sagard, Long Journey, 93. 8 Gary Warrick, A Population History of the Huron-Petun, A.D. 500-1650 (New York: Cambridge UP, 2008) 56.

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not recognise in the Wendat horticultural system a form of unusually long fallow periods through

the process of village relocation. This was partly because of their brief period of observation,

under a year for both Champlain and Sagard, but it was also because such a system was so

foreign to the French envisaged future of a transplanted colonial model where villages were

designed to be fixed and were of necessity circumscribed by colonial farms.1

Division of Labour

One feature of Wendat society that greatly intrigued both Champlain and Sagard was the division

of labour between the sexes. Champlain enumerated a lengthy list of all the chores belonging to

Wendat women, and then claimed “As to the men, they do nothing but hunt deer and other

animals, fish, build lodges and go on the war-path.”2 Sagard compiled a similar but slightly

longer list for men: “fishing, hunting, and war; going off to trade, making lodges and canoes, or

contriving the proper tools for doing so.”3 The Wendat mixed-subsistence horticultural economy

would have been difficult for these early chroniclers to understand because farming was

conventionally a responsibility of common French men, and hunting was a right reserved for the

aristocracy.4 Both authors neglect to mention that men cleared the fields, but neither fails to

suggest Wendat men are lazy. Champlain expresses the point most succinctly, labelling sleep the

“finest exertion” of Wendat men.5 Naturally this is consistent with the binary dualisms and

deprecating stereotypes commonly trafficked in early colonial voyage writings. If the French

authors are to be seen as the apogee of rational fortitude and industry, how better to underscore

the point than to cast the Wendat as indolent?

1 See Allan Greer, The People of New France (1997; Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003) 41. 2 Champlain, Works, 3: 137. 3 Sagard, Long Journey, 96. 4 Jean-Benoît Nadeau and Julie Barlow, Sixty Million Frenchmen Can’t Be Wrong: Why We Love France but Not the French (Naperville, IL: Sourcebooks, 2003). 5 Champlain, Works, 3: 137.

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While the women did have innumerable chores, certainly no more than the men, they also

had considerably more power than French women. Men had power in the public sphere where

they served as chiefs (either war or village), but women held sway in the household. The world

of food and clothing production, food preparation, crafts and longhouse matters was the female

world where women made the decisions. Village, national and international governance, and all

international matters such as trade or diplomatic concerns belonged to men. Wendat men were

chiefs and comprised councils. They were also hunters, traders and fishers, these responsibilities

typically taking them outside of their communities for many months of the year. The

archaeological record suggests that the adoption of cultigens and the consequent population

increase and reconfigured gender roles and responsibilities created a shift toward a matrilineal

and matrilocal society.1 Hereditary chiefs followed a matrilineal descent and husbands went to

live in the longhouse of their wives.2 An arresting example of the power Wendat women wielded

in their communities involves their successfully preventing a number of Wendat children from

being transported to Quebec, where they were to be educated by the Jesuits. In 1636, with a

desire to realize Champlain’s assimilative dream, Brébeuf urged the Wendat traders to “bring

some of their children next year, to be instructed at Kébec.”3 Some Wendat males, traders and

those holding positions of prominence, cooperated with these wishes for political and material

reasons. Twelve boys were identified who were to make the journey, but “when they were about

to depart, the mothers, and above all the grandmothers, would not allow their children to go

away for a distance of three hundred leagues, and to live with Strangers, quite different from

them in their habits and customs.”4

1 Susan Margaret Branstner, Decision-making Processes in a Culture Contact Context, 301. 2 Champlain, Works, 3: 140. 3 JR 10: 27. 4 JR 9: 283. See also JR 12: 39-41.

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The significance of this different-but-equal gender model in Wendat society is

paramount. In France the status of women was generally poor. Female gender was often

constructed by the church as intrinsically deficient, susceptible to infidelity and carnality. “With

increasing frequency, preachers and confessors treated women as agents of the Devil, and

warned male audiences against their wiles.”1 In contrast women in Wendat society exercised a

tremendous amount of power, to such an extent that the Jesuit missionaries, who arrived in

Wendake with considerable evangelical force in 1634, thought it necessary to reduce and restrain

women systematically.2 Although Zemon Davis identifies the political realm as reflecting the

greatest asymmetry between Wendat men and women,3 it could just as easily be stated the

domicile and hearth were the source of gender unevenness, for Wendat women truly ruled the

household. The point is that in Wendat society gender balance was achieved through an

understanding of complementarity, the relative ontological model discussed in chapter five, a

belief that both sexes were necessary to the balance of the cosmos and neither was greater or

lesser than the other. In this gender model the work of both sexes, though different, was equally

valued. Sagard’s observation that Wendat “women usually love their husbands better than the

women here” reflects the favourable influence of respect and gender parity in Wendat society.4

The distinction between how women were treated in each society is important in connection with

land use practices. Ecofeminists have long recognised vital associations between

anthropocentrism, androcentrism and Eurocentrism, where an ideology sanctioning the

domination of nature is oftentimes equally guilty of the concomitant oppression of women and

1 Elizabeth Rapley, The Daevotes: Women and Church in Seventeenth-Century France (Montreal: McGill-Queen UP, 1993) 4. 2 This is the central thesis of Karen Anderson’s work Chain Her by One Foot. 3 Natalie Zemon Davis, “Iroquois Women, European Women,” Feminist Postcolonial Theory, 135-60. 4 Sagard, Long Journey, 102

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non-Europeans.1 The French practiced each of these forms of subjugation which becomes more

apparent in the 1632-1649 pre-dispersal period of the Wendat confederacy, the era of French

coercive and directed colonial change with respect to the Wendat.

If women’s work was traditionally esteemed in Wendat society, its value only increased

during the first two decades of Wendat-French culture contact. Because the relatively dense

Wendat population resulted in deer and other animals being hunted to exhaustion in the

immediate vicinity of Wendake, the Wendat diet consisted primarily of maize and fish,

supplemented on rare occasions with meat.2 With Wendat men being drawn into international

overseas trade in furs through contact with the French, the Wendat productive economy was

affected in significant ways. Men not only hunted a greater number of beaver and other animals

for pelts, but also traded more items with their Algonkian neighbours to collect more furs for

trade with the French. So intensive was beaver hunting for trade purposes that Sagard wrote of

his voyage in 1623 that the beaver “has been the main inducement for many merchants of France

to cross the great Ocean….Such a quantity of them is brought every year that I cannot think but

that the end is in sight.”3 Wendat women, who already grew surpluses both for the purpose of

trade with Algonkians and to prevent starvation in times of drought,4 were most likely required

to grow more corn to satisfy burgeoning trade demands.5 Increased corn growing greatly added

to women’s work as the amount of time weeding and chasing away interested species to ensure a

1 See Karen Warren’s Ecofeminist Philosophy and Val Plumwood’s Environmental Culture. 2 See Champlain, Works, 3: 60-61, 82-82; Sagard, Long Journey, 82. 3 Sagard, Long Journey, 232. 4 See Champlain, Works, 3: 194 and Sagard, Long Journey, 103. 5 In Huronia Heidenreich suggests the Wendat would likely no longer grow a surplus of corn to save for lean years, but would instead trade any surplus entirely with their Algonkian neighbours leaving themselves vulnerable should there be a future food shortage.

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sound harvest was considerable.1 Birds were exceedingly detrimental to a hearty corn harvest

which is why the Wendat asked the Recollets how they could prevent this problem.2

Fishing was an important means of sustenance that was done during every season of the

year. Champlain describes winter fishing3 and both Champlain and Sagard were aware of autumn

fishing, Sagard having accompanied a Wendat community to their fishing camps.4 Because many

land animals had been hunted out of the immediate Wendake territory, fish provided an

important protein source which supplemented the vegetable proteins found in the Wendat staples

corn and beans. “Pound for pound, fish were more plentiful, easier to catch, and more predictable

in their habitat and habits. Moreover, fish could be dried and stored.”5 The most frequent

techniques used for catching fish involved nets, and here again is the complementarity between

the sexes. The men did the fishing, although women sometimes accompanied them to help with

the processing, but the women had a related and important role of gathering in “marshy damp

spots” a plant named Ononhasquara, which makes a very good hemp.”6 Wendat women would

role this plant fibre into twine from which the men would then make snares and fishing nets.

Traditional Ecological Knowledge

As the discussion of Wendat land-use practices shows, the knowledge, gathered over centuries,

that both Wendat women and men had regarding their surrounds was substantial, but the French

believing in their own cultural superiority and possessing a distinct preference for monocultural

fields often did not recognise in the less orderly intercropping system of the Wendat the

effectiveness of this horticultural approach. Sagard and Champlain disparaged Wendat gardening

practices because manure was not used and cornfields were presumed, therefore, to be 1 Sagard, Long Journey, 104, 220. 2 Sagard, Long Journey, 220. 3 Champlain, Works, 3: 166-168. 4 Champlain, Works, 3: 56-57; Sagard, Long Journey, 185-189. 5 Heidenreich, Huronia, 212. 6 Sagard, Long Journey, 240.

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improperly cultivated.1 Frequently Sagard suggests that the Wendat environment suffers from a

“lack of cultivation” and a “want of superior knowledge,” but many of the luxuriant berry

patches, the varieties of edible roots, the grapes the Recollet used for wine and other forms of

edible flora were most probably tended and protected plant species that the Wendat had been

cultivating for lengthy periods but the French mistakenly took for wild.2

Through intimacy with the land, oral transmission and instruction from a young age,

Wendat peoples were adroit at wresting from the environment the sustenance necessary for

continued human life.3 Women selected the best maize kernels to soak and germinate before

planting, and they knew how to maximize crop yields to produce enough food for a two- or

three- year surplus.4 In fact, Wendat crop management was so successful that Sagard, seeing the

enormous productivity of corn and being incapable of imagining the role played by sophisticated

Wendat horticultural practices, assumed corn naturally grew abundantly and proposed “that this

Indian corn should be sown in all the provinces in France for the support and food of the poor

that abound there.”5 Wendat women also knew a variety of ways to prepare corn not only to

satisfy gastronomic needs but also situational constraints. When Wendat men made the long

journey to trade with the French at Three Rivers or Quebec, they would carry with them

cornmeal that had been roasted and scorched in ashes.6 On their way to the French trading posts,

Wendat men cached cornmeal at various points along the journey so that they would have a 1 Sagard, Long Journey, 93; Champlain, Works, 4: 304. The fact that the Wendat did not have domesticated animals from which to derive manure did not seem to matter nor did the innovative use of intercropping beans and corn which provided a nutritionally balanced vegetable dietary base of carbohydrates and protein. 2 See M. Kat Anderson’s excellent work Tending the Wild: Native American Knowledge and the Management of California’s Natural Resources (Berkeley: U of California P, 2005) for a discussion the way California Indigenous peoples transformed roots, berries and shoots to make them more plentiful or palatable, acquiring an intimate knowledge gained over centuries of their environmental region that surpassed that of any botanist or ecologist. 3 Sagard, Long Journery, 132-33, describes how boys and girls played games from a young age designed to prepare them for their respective tasks as adults. For girls this training surely would have involved plant identification and cultivation. 4 Sagard, Long Journey, 103. 5 Sagard, Long Journey, 154. 6 Sagard, Long Journey, 153.

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reliable food supply for the journey home. “It astonished [Sagard] greatly how they could

identify so accurately all the places where they had hidden it, without making any mistake,

although sometimes it was far away from the trail.”1 Sagard’s surprise is frankly astonishing yet

predictable. The French authors writing early observations about the Wendat people seemed

incapable of recognising the expert knowledge they possessed of their land and its species.

Wendat men were able to make long overland journeys without carrying any provisions, bringing

only tobacco and steel, and their bow and arrow, rehydrating themselves using sap from beech

trees if not close to a ready water supply.2 These were clearly people who understood their

surrounds.

French Cultural Blindness

In 1615 when Champlain lived among the Wendat he accompanied some men on a deer-hunting

excursion. Overcome by a desire to chase and kill a “peculiar” bird, Champlain unsuspectingly

gets separated from the hunting party and lost in the woods. He regrets having “forgotten to

bring with [him] a little compass which would have about put [him] on the right track,” and

spends the night alone lost.3 Because Champlain was unfamiliar with the region, it is quite

understandable that he could lose his way, so it would be unfair to blame a European

overdependence on technology. A Wendat person in France might similarly become disoriented

in the woods. Although it is not unreasonable to think that the “special skill in tracking both men

and beasts” which the Wendat possessed might transfer readily to a more general ability to

navigate an environment familiar or not without going astray.4 But the point is not to argue the

case for Wendat superiority as regards spatial orientation but rather to underscore the marvellous

1 Sagard, Long Journey, 60. 2 Sagard, Long Journey, 98-99. 3 Champlain, Works, 3: 88-91. 4 Francois Du Creux, The History of Canada or New France, 2: 430.

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metaphor contained in this instance of the historical disorientation of the “Father of New France”

as he has been dubbed. This anecdote stimulates contemplation of the degree to which

Champlain was figuratively and culturally lost among the Wendat without a “diversity compass”

with which to successfully parse his contact experiences.

The extent to which French authors are unable to identify, examine and overcome their

taken-for-granted assumptions and comprehend Wendat cultural richness typically leads to

invidious comparisons where Wendat life is estimated to be wretched in comparison with the

French.1 But no sooner does Champlain arrive at this conclusion then he pronounces,

“Nevertheless with all their wretchedness I consider them happy, since they have no other

ambition than to live and to support themselves, and they are more secure than those who wander

through the forests like brute beasts.”2 This assertion is problematic, of course, for its denigration

of non-horticultural Aboriginal peoples and for its gross overstatement that the only ambition of

Wendat people is sustenance. However, Champlain is correct about the happiness the Wendat

found in material simplicity. Theirs was a society rich in social capital3 where all members were

intrinsically valued and experienced the wealth of affirmative extended family, clan and village

relations. I am reminded of an observation a First Nations elder once shared with me about

growing up in her community: “Even though we were poor in monetary terms, we were rich in

many ways.” She and Champlain were describing the same phenomenon, one identified by 1 See Champlain, Works, 3: 125; Sagard, Long Journey, 17. See David A. Hardcastle, Stanley Wencour and Patricia R. Powers, “Theories for Community Practice by Direct Service Practitioners,” Community Practice: Theories and Skills for Social Workers, ed. D. Hardcastle, S. Wencour and P. Powers (New York: Oxford UP, 1997) 37-57, for a discussion of how our assumptions and lenses mediate human interactions. See also Beth G. Reed, “Theorizing in Community Practice,” The Handbook for Community Practice, ed. Marie O. Weil (New York: Sage, 2004) 84-102, for a discussion of postmodernism’s utility in the process of unearthing unrecognised underlying assumptions. 2 Champlain, Works, 3: 131. 3 See Marie Weil, “Social Planning with Communities,” The Handbook of Community Practice, 215-43; see also R. Chaskin, “Building Community Capacity: A Definitional Framework and Case Studies from a Comprehensive Community Initiative,” Urban Affairs Review, 36.3 (2001): 291-323, and Robert D. Putnam and Kristin A. Goss, “Introduction,” Democracies in Flux: The Evolution of Social Capital in Contemporary Society, ed. R. Putnam (New York: Oxford UP, 2002) for discussions of the relationship between culture, government and the presence of social capital.

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Sahlins in his thesis regarding bilateral routes to affluence. “Wants may be ‘easily satisfied’

either by producing much or desiring little.”1 Wendat society was not acquisitive in the European

sense. Community members sought material items that would facilitate ease of quotidian tasks or

items that could be generously redistributed, for wealth was measured and status achieved in

Wendat culture not by material objects accrued but by the ability to gift items to others.2 There

are numerous examples in the works of both Champlain and Sagard to evidence considerable

Wendat generosity,3 and there are also examples of Wendat displeasure over French

unfriendliness and general stinginess.4

Whether through inability or disinterest the French did not perceive Wendat cultural

wealth, and they desired instead to impose their own social, political, religious and agricultural

models on Wendat society. Champlain and Sagard were never satisfied with the inordinately

productive and sufficiently nutritious horticultural practices of the Wendat. They envisaged in

the Canadian interior a French garden complemented by European animal husbandry that would

supplant the Wendat mode of life.5 But the Wendat were not seeking a cultural transformation

and certainly not one that would reduce them from social affluence to an engineered meanness.

The difference between Wendat societal abundance and the paucity experienced by the average

French person is best illustrated by land ownership. In France the feudal system defined society

largely on the basis of agricultural surpluses produced by the peasantry in a structure of extra-

economic oppression. Aristocratic agrarian landholders increased their individual wealth through

coercion of poor workers who laboured arduously to keep up with dues levied.6 In Wendat

1 Marshall Sahlins, Stone Age Economics (New York: Aldine, 1972) 1. 2 See Sioui, Huron-Wendat, 138-40 for a discussion of the generosity of Wendat peoples. 3 See Champlain, Works, 3: 52, 81, 156; Sagard, Long Journey, 58, 70, 72, 79, 89; JR 4: 197. 4 See Champlain, Works, 2: 193; see also Sagard, Long Journey, 89 for a passage in which the Wendat express their disapproval of French neglect of one another. 5 Champlain, Works, 3: 130-31. 6 See Biek, Absolutism and Society in Seventeenth-century France, 30.

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society each household had access to as much land as it needed, and provided a family cleared

and continued to use the land incontestable usufructuary rights applied.1 The Wendat did not

connect land with property rights or the marketplace. Nor did Wendat culture allow, or

necessarily conceive of, land acquisition for capital accumulation because they were without an

institutionalised economic system based on abstract wealth. Given the relative freedom enjoyed

in Wendat society, and Aboriginal cultures in general, it is not surprising that a tendency

developed among European newcomers to North America to adopt Aboriginal customs and

affiliate more with Aboriginal nations than the developing European colonies.2 The French were

trying to “civilise” the Wendat, to absorb them into the more legible and administrable French

society where the Wendat population and its production capacity could be arranged to be more

readily subordinate to colonial control and more easily put to the service of the French Crown.

The Wendat, unlike the French, had developed a sophisticated society based on principles of

equality (not only among humans but inter-species also) and healthy interrelations that are

commonly understood today to be essential to thriving communities.3

The French, despite the highly-developed horticultural, cultural, societal, national and

international Wendat accomplishments and traditions, proceeded with the ill-advised decision to

attempt colonisation in Wendake. While Champlain is convinced that it is necessary to bring

knowledge of God to the Wendat and Sagard sees a need to “establish colonies of good virtuous

Catholics in all these savage countries,”4 neither author seems to properly estimate Wendat

indifference to these objectives or the very real challenge that factionalism among French

newcomers would pose. Sagard recounts French sailors aboard the ship carrying him and the 1 See Champlain, Works, 3: 155-56; See also Sagard, Long Journey, 103. 2 See James Axtell, “The White Indians of Colonial North America,” The European and the Indian: Essays in the Ethnohistory of Colonial North America (Toronto: Oxford UP, 1981) 168-207. 3 See David G. Gil, Confronting Injustice and Oppression: Concepts and Strategies for Social Workers (New York: Columbia UP, 1988) 4 Sagard, Long Journey, 176; For Champlain’s thoughts on colonisation, see Works, 2: 333-38.

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Recollet Fathers to New France openly mocked their religious rites.1 This antipathy evokes the

1611 resistance of the French merchants in Honfleur who did not want to bring Jesuit Priests to

New France.2 While some of this resistance must certainly be ascribed to Huguenot-Catholic ill

feeling, there was also the added layer of religious conversion plans interfering with mercantile

objectives. It seems that French merchants and Wendat peoples, typically traders, had in

common a dislike of religious representatives, whether Recollet or Jesuit. A more extreme

example of Wendat contempt for Catholic Fathers is the assault on Father Joseph Le Caron when

he was staying in Wendake. He was hit with a stick by a Wendat man,3 which represents a

significant contravention of a societal propriety that demands generosity and courtesy be shown

to guests. It is also believed that Father Nicolas Viel was “viciously” thrown into the river and

drowned by three Wendat men at the last rapid above Montreal en route to French posts.4 If Viel

was truly killed, much can be gleaned from Viel’s death. In Wendat society the act of murder

outside the Nadouek rules of warfare was reserved for those suspected to be sorcerers. That one

Recollet Father was killed and an attempted assault occurred with another suggests an enormous

resentment on the part of Wendat peoples and a belief that these religious persons, like sorcerers,

had malevolent intent toward Wendat nations and therefore could be dispatched accordingly.

Either cultural misunderstandings or deliberate misrepresentations led Champlain to

suggest the Wendat were eager to learn French ways.5 Sagard naively believes that the Wendat

robustly desired the continuation of the friendship because they appreciated French “prayer and

advice.”6 It is true that the Recollets appeared to successfully stop two different bouts of

1 Sagard, Long Journey, 41. 2 JR 3: 176; Champlain, Works, 4: 6. 3 Sagard, Long Journey, 164. 4 JR 4: 261. 5 Champlain, Works, 3: 146-47. 6 Sagard, Long Journey, 245.

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incessant, crop-ruining rains through prayer,1 and certainly the Wendat would find this service

invaluable given their dependence on corn for sustenance, important trade goods, and vital trade

relations. However, the most obvious reason why the Wendat tolerated these strangely robed,

celibate, non-hunting men among them was their interest in maintaining trade relations with the

French. As previously discussed, the Wendat called their new allies Agnonha, a term which

largely describes the significance and purpose of their alliance with the French.2 In truth the

Wendat generally held the French in low esteem and thought they had “no sense.”3 But both the

Recollet and the Wendat tried to preserve congenial relations with French traders, the Wendat

because they desired metal goods, the Recollets because they were judicious enough to recognise

their missionary goals depended upon independent mercantile support.4

Wendat and French Land-Use Practices During Early Contact—A Summary Comparison

The relationship the Wendat peoples had to their land base was arguably more complex than that

of Algonkian peoples if only for the mixed subsistence aspects. Wendat land-use practices were

not as dissimilar to French methods as French cultural assumptions made it appear. Both groups

used cultigens, the primary differences being French monoculture versus Wendat intercropping

and the division of labour in which farmers in French society were customarily male but in

Wendat culture they were female. In both groups food surpluses were produced which enabled

the growth and sustenance of denser populations. The French wanted to establish contact with

the sedentary Wendat and discovered them to be semi-sedentary, the men spending lengthy

periods away from the villages for hunting, fishing, trading and warring. The Wendat also

1 Sagard, Long Journey, 78, 178-81. These are peculiar occurrences and it is impossible to be certain as to their accuracy, but nonetheless Sagard reports being asked by the Wendat to pray for the rain to cease and on both occasions Sagard describes the rain stopping shortly after the Recollets begin their procession through the village. 2 Sagard, Long Journey, 80. 3 Sagard, Long Journey, 138. 4 Sagard, Long Journey, 77-78, 244. The Wendat and the Recollets both had complaints about the behaviour of French traders in Wendake. The Wendat generally denounced their avarice, the Recollet their putative slack morality.

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relocated entire villages as required which diminished latent pressures on specific ecosystems

and increased the carrying capacity of the land while simultaneously circumscribing the general

human burden.

Both the French and the Wendat would have been in a process of determining which

resources to exploit. Naturally, this activity would be ongoing but it would have been especially

imperative during the early contact period. The Wendat were reassessing resources to be

exploited and the manner in which to exploit them.1 The French, too, were determining which

new resources would be of value and how best to convert them to fiscal gain.2 The temporal-

spatial aspects of resource use and their management were different for the two groups. The

Wendat employed a seasonal periodicity that took them across considerable tracts of land, while

the French ideal was the adjacent garden with penned-in domesticated animals. Understandably,

resource management followed a pattern reflective of the divergent temporal-spatiality of the two

groups. The Wendat operated cooperatively, without any person have the power to command

another, whereas the French generally employed a stratified approach where certain

responsibilities belonged to subordinate groups and obvious privileges belonging to landowners

in a coercive, hierarchical system. The land-use practices of both groups were influenced by

belief systems. As discussed in chapter five, the Wendat inhabited a world necessitating

propitiation of various spirits and the continued harmonising of cosmic forces, while the French

typically conceived of the nonhuman other as inanimate, instrumental and sometimes aesthetic.

While the French considered themselves to have a more advanced relationship to the land

because of their agricultural fixity, at this time in New France fixity was no more than an

1 For example, this is observable in the Wendat decision to shift from a deer economy to a beaver economy which was discussed in the previous chapter. 2 An example of this was Champlain’s experimenting with making ashes at his “factory” in Quebec which he found to produce good but costly ashes and therefore not a viable commodity, Works, 3: 204.

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aspirational practice. Wendat-French culture contact from 1609-1629 is marked by crisscrossings

of mutual mobility. French traders, explorers, interpreters, evangelisers travelled in and out of

Wendake, to and from Quebec, and back and forth between France and New France at a dizzying

rate. And the Wendat whose mixed-subsistence horticultural practices and centrality in systems

of international trade, both Aboriginal and European, involved a segment of the adult male

population in seasonal cycles of hunting, fishing and warring movement, annual trade trips to

Quebec, and occasional village relocations, were equally if differently mobile. Despite the

distasteful theme of centre and periphery in the primary source narrative that constructs the

French and Wendat as an irreconcilable polarity and promotes prejudice and injustice, this

investigation has found that both groups engaged in practices and activities that were suitable to

their social, cultural and societal objectives. Mobility, however similar and dissimilar, was

essential to both.

Interruption of French Presence in Northeastern North America

Wendat-French culture contact was interrupted by the war between France and England which

began in 1627. In this year Cardinal Richelieu organised and personally commanded a military

siege on La Rochelle, a Huguenot stronghold in France, for the purpose of unifying and

catholicising the country’s power. The King of England, Charles I, supported the Huguenots and

declared war on France, which legitimised the English attempt in North America, under the

direction of Captain Kirke, to force the French from the St. Lawrence, capture the Quebec fort,

and seize the fur trade. Champlain surrendered Quebec in 1629 and the Recollets and Jesuits

were recalled to France.1 Although the war was short lived and New France was officially

retroceded to France in 1632, it was affiliated with changes that were to have a significant and

detrimental impact on Wendat and northeastern North American Aboriginal peoples. Prior to the 1 See Champlain, Works, 6: 64-69.

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1627 war there had been a movement among the French Catholic elite to improve the

administration of New France by creating a Catholic merchant company and suspending the

largely Huguenot Compagnie de Caen. When the French regained New France in 1632, the

official policy was to exclude all Huguenots from participation in trade and to deny them entry to

the new colony even as settlers. New France was to be a Catholic colony and the impact of this

new regime with the concomitant religious monopoly granted to the Society of Jesus was to have

a decided effect on Wendat-French culture contact and related changes in land-use patterns. This

topic will be explored in detail in the following chapter.

Conclusion

As the Wendat got drawn into an overseas economy, a pulsating process of environmental

change was initiated. The French altered northeastern North America through their extractive-

economic model seeking to accumulate wealth, primarily in the form of beaver pelts, without

regard for the toll this exacted on the land or its peoples. The Wendat began to shift their

economy to acquire desired European goods but did so on their own terms during the early

contact period and within the parameters of a cosmological understanding, involving interspecies

reciprocity, which limited environmental damage. Both the respect shown to nonhuman species

and the indifference to wealth accumulation, which was anathema to the Wendat egalitarian

redistribution model, were environmental protective factors. Because the social work profession

has long been concerned with social and economic inequities, and environmental social workers

(and environmentalists in general) recognise the need for reduced human consumption to avert

global social and environmental collapse, there is much to be learned from Wendat-nonhuman

relations.

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Chapter Eight: Wendat-French Culture Contact and Land-Use Practices, 1632-1649

The history of religious colonialism, including the genocide perpetrated by the Catholic Church…is a wound from which Native communities have not yet healed. The notion that non-Christian spiritual practices could have validity was entirely ignored or actively suppressed for centuries. Winona LaDuke

Introduction

This chapter investigates evolving and interacting conceptualisations of the nonhuman other as

observed in the land-use practices of the French and Wendat for the period 1632-1649. I have

chosen 1649 as the end date for this case study because it marks the dispersal of the Wendat from

their homelands in Wendake. Although remnant Wendat populations went to live as refugees

among other nations sometimes acquiring new and adaptive ways to interact with the land, the

scope of this study is to investigate Wendat and French conceptualisations of the nonhuman

other before and during contact with a view to examine how these conceptualisations influenced

interactions with the environment, nonhuman species, and other peoples. Because Wendat beliefs

about the nonhuman world were strongly connected to the land base they inhabited, this chapter

which examines the Jesuit monopoly, epidemics, trade, new French settlements and language

does not consider events beyond 1649 when the Wendat were militarily forced by the

Haudenosaune to evacuate their territory. Two prominent and recurring themes promulgated by

environmental social workers are the need for our profession to rethink its person-in-place

construct and the importance of establishing a deeper ecological self-other relationship. During

this late period of Wendat-French culture contact, as a result of epidemics and the Jesuit

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ideological assault, the Wendat people-as-place1 imbrication, where human beings were

understood to be part of and continuous with a multilayered creation, begins to break down and

land-use practices formerly highly sustainable start to strain ecological feasibility. French

insistence on their cultural superiority, though not new, creates culture-unravelling effects among

the Wendat primarily because of the devastation wrought by epidemics. This case study holds

tremendous significance for our profession because social work has a long history of providing

services to Aboriginal communities but has been slow to include or invite Aboriginal

understandings, insisting instead on our profession’s foundational beliefs and falling short of true

multicultural practice.2 This chapter underscores what was lost in a climate of French

ethnocentrism and reveals how absolutely essential an appreciation of early Canadian history is

to environmental concerns and contemporary environmental social work practice. But equally

important is the relevance of this chapter to Aboriginal-non-Aboriginal relations in this country.

When peoples are subjected to systematic attempts to divest them of their cultural practices,

seeds of contempt are sown. Social work has a role to play in both environmental and

Aboriginal-non-Aboriginal matters.

Retrocession of New France and the New Regime

In 1632 the King of England signed the Treaty of Saint-Germain-en-Laye which restored Quebec

to France. Cardinal Richelieu granted Guillaume de Caen the fur-trade monopoly in Quebec for

the year as compensation for the losses he had incurred through his abortive 1631 Quebec

venture and the forced suspension of his own monopoly, Compagnie de Caen. New France was

recovered, the English departed, and the program devised in 1627 for the Company of New

1 See M. Kim Zapf’s chapter titled “People as Place” in his work Social Work and the Environment where he discusses how a lived understanding of ourselves as place promotes wise environmental stewardship. This is the sort of philosophical and experiential standpoint the Wendat possessed. 2 See John Coates, Mel Gray and Tiani Hetherington, “An ‘Ecospiritual’ Perspective: Finally a Place for Indigenous Approaches,” British Journal of Social Work 36 (2006): 381-399.

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France could now be implemented. As evidenced in the previous chapter relations between

Aboriginal peoples, missionaries and French traders were rarely uncomplicated. The religious

antipathy between Roman Catholic missionaries and the largely Huguenot traders explains some

of the difficulty, but as this chapter will reveal the crucial problem, though exacerbated by

religious tensions, was really an essential difference of objectives. French traders esteemed the

Wendat for their skill at accumulating and transporting pelts to St. Lawrence trade centres, but

the missionaries perceived the Wendat as a confederation of souls in need of saving. At times

these disparate goals were irreconcilable.1

The Company of New France, composed solely of wealthy Catholic traders, commenced

its tripartite role in business, colonisation and missionary efforts. The new company officially

and effectively blocked Huguenots from trade in New France. When selecting a missionary

order, Cardinal Richelieu turned to the Society of Jesus, an affluent order with ample resources,

and invited the Jesuits, not the mendicant Recollets, to resume their missionary work in New

France.2 This decision marked the beginning of a Jesuit monopoly in the St. Lawrence region

that was to last until 1657. In 1633 Champlain was appointed Commander of New France, and

when he returned to Quebec in the spring of that year political and social affairs were more

overtly religious.3 The Wendat-French alliance was at first subtly but nonetheless fatefully

transformed when Champlain stipulated that Jesuit presence in Wendake was now a requisite of

the trade relationship. The period of Wendat-French contact examined in this chapter is

1 See John Webster Grant’s excellent discussion of these incompatible goals in his chapter “Transatlantic Encounter,” Moon of Wintertime (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1984) 3-25. 2 See Du Creux History of Canada, 1: 134. The exclusion at this time from the mission work in New France greatly grieved the Recollets and Sagard’s Long Journey was an attempt to publicise the important work done in New France by his order. 3 JR 6: 103. Le Jeune writes that Champlain keeps the fort “like a well-ordered Academy” in which “each one makes an examination of his conscience in his own chamber, and prayers follow, which are repeated kneeling.”

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characterised by a complex religio-political mercantile strategy that is obviously interventionist,1

preoccupied with directed change both in terms of land use and First Nations. The impact of this

interventionist apparatus on the Wendat nations is detectable throughout the primary source

documents, but nowhere are its effects more patent than in the dissolution of the confederacy.

Jesuit Monopoly

In a section exploring the effects of the Jesuit monopoly on Wendat peoples with respect to land

use practices, human-nonhuman relationships and interrelations between human beings the

centrality of gardens in the Jesuits Relations is significant. References to literal gardens exist in

the texts in the context of Jesuit and Wendat horticulture, but gardens appear more insistently as

a leitmotif symbolising the conversion of “pagans” to Christianity. In 1636 Brebeuf wrote

expectantly of the Jesuit mission to Wendake, “I will merely say that we have good hope of some

day reaping a large harvest of souls at this mission.”2 Brebeuf explained his confidence was due

to a combination of three factors: his previous acquaintance with the Wendat, their “affection”

for him, and their former exposure to Christianity.3 Brebeuf neglected to mention in this passage

that his elevated hopes for conversion were also because of Wendat land cultivation and their

related semi-sedentary economies. The Wendat “live in towns, not wandering about after the

manner of wild animals, or even like many other savages.”4 For the Jesuits, being semi-sedentary

not only provided an opportunity to promulgate their faith to a more stationary audience, but also

reflected a higher human development than that of non-sedentary peoples. This however did not

grant the Wendat the same status as “the Chinese, Japanese, and other Nations perfectly

1 I am deliberately avoiding the term “colonialist” because there was no official colonial state in New France at this time. 2 JR 11: 7; see also JR 11: 19; JR 10: 9, 39; JR 14: 59. References to the Jesuits’ yearning for a “harvest of souls” are too numerous to list here in their entirety. 3 JR 8: 101. 4 JR 11: 7.

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civilized; but only put them above the condition of beasts, to which the opinion of some has

reduced them.”1

As discussed in chapter six the Jesuits judged northeastern North America a wilderness.

Its inhabitants were pejoratively and symbolically fused with the landscape, characterised as

similarly wild and in need of cultivation. White traces the devaluing of human beings who

occupy disagreeable landscapes to the biblical idea of the “Wild Man” who makes his home in

the wilderness, any region that had not been meaningfully transformed by obvious forms of

domestication.2 In her essay “Creation” Linda Hogan the Chickasaw author, writes “the face of

the land is our face, and that of all its creatures,” articulating a more accurate melding of

Aboriginal self and the surrounds but also simultaneously reclaiming the important Aboriginal-

land base connection and subverting the negative stereotypic association promulgated by early

Europeans.3 One of the clearest statements revealing Jesuit disapproval of Aboriginal land use

was Le Jeune’s assertion that “New France will some day be a terrestrial Paradise,” but this

required the “first inhabitants [to] do to it what Adam was commanded to do in that one which he

lost by his own fault. God had placed him there to fertilize it by his own work and to preserve it

by his vigilance, and not to stay there and do nothing.”4

Le Jeune, like many Europeans when among First Nations peoples who neither practiced

agriculture nor animal husbandry, evaluated the land they inhabited to be not simply unused but

improperly used.5 Hunting and gathering was not an acceptable relationship for human beings to

have with their environment. Although the Wendat were cultivators, a status that incited Jesuit

1 JR 10: 211. 2 Hayden White, “The Forms of Wildness: Archaeology of an Idea,” The Wild Man Within: An Image in Western Thought from the Renaissance to Romanticism, eds. Edward Dudley and Maximillian E. Novak (Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 1972) 3-38. 3 Linda Hogan, “Creations,” Dwellings: A Spiritual History of the Living World (New York: Touchstone, 1995) 77-98. 4 JR 9: 191. 5 JR 6: 149, 259; JR 11: 143, 195.

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missionary and conversion zeal, they were not ranked civilised by the Jesuits. Blackburn traced

this seeming inconsistency to the greater strength and physicality that Jesuits generally observed

in Aboriginal peoples which itself was associated with savagery. The Jesuits, on the other hand,

identified intellectual attainment and knowledge of God as their own excellences and considered

these to be the hallmarks of civilisation.1 This dichotomous thinking is redolent of the mind-body

binarism of the Jesuits discussed in chapter five. Brebeuf expressed this dualism hierarchically

when referring to Jesuits as belonging to a “highly civilized community” while the Wendat are

“barbarous people.”2 He then made the distasteful but anticipated oppressive assertion

correlating Wendat with nonhuman animals, first swine then pack mules, to suggest the Wendat

peoples are not quite human. In a system where the nonhuman is constructed as resource, labour

and incidental backdrop, and the Aboriginal Other is linked with the subordinated nonhuman, a

hyper-separation is reinscribed between civilised and primitive cultures.3 The Jesuits exploited

this separation to justify their missionary work, always carefully constructing the Wendat as

sufficiently Other (pagan, savage, barbaric) to necessitate religious intervention but also

adequately human to be responsive to Jesuit ministrations. Ragueneau wrote the “Savages are not

so savage as is supposed in France….It is true that their manner of expression is different from

1 Carole Blackburn, Harvest of Souls: The Jesuit Missions and Colonialism in North America (2000; Montreal: McGill-Queen’s UP, 2004) 57. 2 JR 12: 123. 3 See ecofeminist Val Plumwood’s excellent chapter on problematic Eurocentric and anthropocentric models that hamper mutualistic and communicative understandings between and among human and interspecies interactions titled “The Blindspots of Centrism and Human Self-enclosure” in Environmental Culture, 97-122. See also JR 7: 7 where Le Jeune writes of Aristotle’s three-tiered system and claims the Jesuits exemplify the third and highest stage belonging to “men of intellect” who give “themselves up to the contemplation of natural objects and to scientific researches” whereas Innu peoples (but Le Jeune eventually refers to all Aboriginal peoples) are only at the first stage in which “their only thought is to live, they eat so as not to die; they cover themselves to keep off the cold, and not for the sake of appearance. Grace politeness, the knowledge of the arts, natural sciences, and much less supernatural truths, have as yet no place in this hemisphere, or at least in these countries.” This thinking explains clearly why the Wendat, regardless of their horticultural practices, are still thought “savage.”

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ours; but, since the word of the heart is the same in all men, one cannot doubt that their tongue

has also its beauties and graces….Although they live in the woods, they are none the less men.”1

The influence of the Jesuits on Wendat culture and human-land relationships was

extensive. They returned to New France having been granted a religious monopoly and

possessed more authority than any mission program had before. Eager to circumvent the schisms

that had arisen between Recollets and traders, the Jesuits acknowledged the function of

mercantile operations, and more specifically Aboriginal-French alliances, to their continued

missionary presence in New France. In the 1636 Relation Le Jeune elucidated the relationship

between the Jesuit mission, the fledgling colony and New France mercantilism: “the power of

this honourable Company is the support of the Country. If their resources are taken away, we

shall all be undone; if we all contribute to their prosperity, we shall build up and strengthen our

own.”2 Based on this understanding, the Jesuits, unlike the Recollet, considered mercantile goals

and company needs when developing their missionary policies and strategies. But harmonisation

with company objectives was not tantamount to submissively approving questionable behaviour

of French traders. This is apparent in the Jesuit mission to Wendake. During the period 1634-

1649 the Jesuits endeavoured to regulate closely the movement of non-Aboriginal persons in

Wendake for the sake of safeguarding their progress in converting Wendat persons.

Jesuit success at instituting a Catholic-fashioned panopticon with which to surveil the

Wendat, French laymen, and themselves in Wendake produced a veritable social engineering

laboratory.3 Unlike the Recollet who had desired to settle French families among the Wendat as a

1 JR 29: 281-283. 2 JR 9: 171. See also JR 7: 241-45. 3 See Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish where Bentham’s architectural panopticon is used as a metaphor for “disciplinary” cultures predisposed to observe, regulate and normalise.

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means of first Gallicising then Christianizing them,1 the Jesuits chose to isolate the Wendat from

non-Aboriginal people to eliminate or greatly reduce what they deemed to be the corrupting

influence of unscrupulous, avaricious French traders.2 The Jesuits also carefully selected and

monitored the French workmen who came to live and labour in Wendake, and later they

established a new class of lay assistant called the donné. The donné was by civil contract a

“Domestic Servant” who worked for “food and clothing” but no wages, renounced all personal

possessions, agreed to follow Jesuit orders, and observed chastity.3 Because the primary

objective of the Jesuits was conversion rather than Gallicisation, they sought to gain expertise in

the language and customs of Wendat peoples and then apply this knowledge to proselytising the

Wendat. Having developed this approach, which was consistent with the “flexible, not rigid”

constitutive elements of the Jesuit “way”4 their policy in Wendake was to engage with Wendat

culture as it was, eradicating only those practices at variance with Christian principles. This

stated policy has every appearance of flexibility; in its implementation, however, it was

devastatingly rigid, fraying the Wendat cultural fabric after the confederacy was ravaged by a

series of epidemics which reduced the population by half.

The post-1632 period of Wendat-French culture contact is in marked contrast to that

examined in the former chapter. The French were resolute in their desire to establish a lasting

colony in New France, and the Jesuits were working in concert to achieve this, as well as

mercantile and religious ends. In Wendake the Jesuits became potent and disruptive ideologues

forcefully propagating a value system that did not accord with the Wendat earth-based

worldview, a philosophy that penetrated every aspect of Wendat culture. When disease struck

1 Sagard, Long Journey, 165. 2 See Trigger, Children of Aataentsic, 470. 3 JR 21: 303-307. The donné will be discussed further in the section on fixity. 4 See John W. O’Malley, The First Jesuits (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1993) 371.

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and drastically reduced Wendat populations, the Jesuits pursued their goals more aggressively

undermining cultural cohesion, worldviews and ultimately relationships to the land. Epidemics

will be considered in the next section, but before continuing, and because they constitute the only

primary source for this chapter, the multilayered nature of the Jesuit Relations warrants

reiteration. The Jesuits present their writings as straightforward descriptions of their missionary

work with the Aboriginal peoples they encountered. As well the Jesuits intentionally use their

annual documents both directly and indirectly to raise money for their efforts in New France and

to recruit people to the colony.1 But the Relations are also complicated colonial texts that

homogenise Aboriginal peoples producing an alterity which hinges on a series of binary

hierarchical oppositions: civilised versus savage, advanced versus primitive, orderly versus

dissolute, intellectual versus sensual, Christian versus pagan, and cultivated versus wild.2 It is

important these dualisms be held in mind, for they oppress and disparage the Wendat, even when

the Wendat are cast in a putatively positive light, and they bolster the Jesuits, but never allow for

unfiltered, unmediated cultural representation.

Epidemics

A consideration of epidemics is imperative to this study because pathogens are a component of

the global ecology. When trying to understand how Wendat and French conceptualisations about

the nonhuman other were altered as a result of contact, the enormously disruptive consequences

of pathogens are vital. Certain diseases when unwittingly introduced into the New World in the

seventeenth century had catastrophic effects on Aboriginal populations sometimes decimating

entire villages or leaving only remnant groups. In Wendake, as in all Aboriginal communities 1 See JR 7: 3; JR 20: 127. 2 See Betty Wells and Danielle Wirth “Remediating Development through an Ecofeminist Lens,” Women, Culture, Nature, ed. Karen J. Warren (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1997) 300-313, for a discussion of the pernicious effects of hierarchical dualisms and the way they circulate and are deployed in society to oppress both people and nonhuman others. See also JR 12: 63 for a lengthy passage written by Father Le Jeune in which many of these dualisms are contained in a single paragraph.

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devastated by Old World diseases, the losses injured economic and cultural customs, disrupted

land-use practices and challenged Wendat-French relations. Crosby popularised the now

celebrated term “ecological imperialism” to describe how the European “portmanteau biota,” the

combination of purposeful and unsuspecting plants, animals and diseases carried by Europeans,

radically affected peoples and transformed existing ecosystems in temperate zones, “lands of the

demographic takeover.”1 The French were imperialists not only because they were changing the

local habitat, drawing Aboriginal peoples into a market economy having unequal exchange,

beginning to transform landscapes into simulacra of Old World gardens, and exerting religious

power most potently in Wendake but also for their pathogenic influence.

Unfortunately the Jesuits’ return to Wendake in 1634, their first trip to the territory after

the 1629 English takeover of Quebec, coincided with an “Epidemic…which has even been

communicated to the French…it is a sort of measles, and an oppression of the stomach.”2 This

epidemic which has been identified by most historians as measles3 doubtless infected many

Wendat people. It is possible that the ships arriving from France earlier that year, carrying a

small number of French families and their children brought the childhood disease.4 Brebeuf

wrote “It has been so universal among the Savages (Wendat) of our acquaintance that I do not

know if one has escaped its attacks.”5 Brebeuf at this time was staying in Ihonatiria, an

Attignawantan village, and it is estimated the mortality rate was approximately twenty percent.

Trigger describes this epidemic as the “least lethal of the epidemics that were to afflict the

1 Alfred Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900. 2 JR 7: 221. 3 See Heidenreich, Huronia; Trigger, Children of Aataentsic; and Gary Warrick, A Population History of the Huron-Petun, A.D. 500-1650 (New York: Cambridge UP, 2008). 4 See Trudel, The Beginnings of New France, 184-85, for a detailed description of the families who immigrated to New France with their children. See also Warrick, Population History, 2008, 210-242; and Trigger, Children of Aataentsic, 300. 5 JR 8: 87.

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[Wendat] in the course of the next six years.”1 The second epidemic began in early September

1636 and continued through the winter infecting the Wendat until the spring of 1637. In his 1637

letter to the Father General of the Society of Jesus in Rome, Brebeuf wrote that there “was a

pestilence, of unknown origin, which eight months ago spread through several villages, and

caused the death of many.”2 This epidemic was assumed to have been influenza because of the

“fever” and “attacks” and because it did not spare the French.3 However because the illness

lasted throughout the winter and recurred in Wendat villages in the spring, influenza seems

unlikely. The more probable diagnosis is a rare strain of scarlet fever or bacterial pneumonia.4

Again the Attignawantan were the most badly affected.5

Between the summer and autumn of 1637 a third epidemic struck the Wendat. The Jesuits

did not record the symptoms of the disease but only reported, “[O]ften some one was taken sick

and carried away in less than two days.”6 Unlike the preceding outbreak of disease no

Frenchmen were infected in Wendake or the Three Rivers trading area. “I have observed that this

contagion or Epidemic, which slaughters so many Hurons, has not been communicated to the

French at the 3 Rivers, although they have had negotiations and intercourse with these people.”7

This suggests the virus was a childhood disease for which French adults had acquired immunity,

but the Wendat, due to lack of previous exposure, had not. The Jesuit Father Joseph le Mercier

reports that Chief Aenons, head of an Attignawantan village, believed the disease travelled

northward through an intermediary nation from the Susquehannock “a nation in the direction of

1 Trigger, Children of Aataentsic, 501. 2 JR 11: 13. 3 Trigger, Children of Aataentsic, 526-27; JR 13: 95-101. 4 See Warrick’s discussion of this second epidemic in Population History, 2008, 223-24. 5 See Trigger, Children of Aataentsic, 528. 6 JR 15: 69 7 JR 12: 261. See also Le Jeune’s statement that the “great epidemic…has slain nearly all these peoples, without getting any hold upon the French” JR 14: 229.

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Virginia” who had experienced an unidentified illness earlier in 1637.1 Aenons’ analysis is

plausible because Virginia was a colony that had a mushrooming settler population with young

children having 4,800 emigrants in 1625 and 8,000 by 1640.2 Trigger suggests a ten percent

mortality rate for this disease, which is higher than that of the first epidemic to strike the

Wendat.3 Warrick calculates the combined impact of the first three epidemics between 1634 and

1637 resulted in a twenty percent reduction in the Wendat population.4

The final and most deadly epidemic to ravage the Wendat was smallpox in early autumn

1639 and the following spring of 1640. On the basis of the ethnographic record the outbreak

likely began in New England and spread to the St Lawrence and inland regions through

Aboriginal traders, for Le Jeune wrote, “Some Savages of the Island [the Kichesipirini], on their

return from the country of the Abnaquiois [Abenaki], brought here a very contagious epidemic of

smallpox.”5 Based on smallpox depopulation rates with other populations in similar contexts,

Warrick assumes a reduction rate of forty to sixty percent for the Wendat.6 With the 1633

Wendat population estimated to have been about 21,000 people,7 the cumulative effect of the

four epidemics left a remaining population of approximately 9,000.8 A population decimation of

this magnitude is staggering and would necessarily affect every aspect of Wendat culture. Most

often the segments of the Wendat population who succumbed to the epidemics were the young

1 JR 14: 9. 2 Denys Delage, Bitter Feast: Amerindians and Europeans in Northeastern North America, trans. Jane Brierley (Vancouver: UBC Press, 1993) 244. 3 Trigger, Children of Aataentsic, 528. 4 Warrick, Population History, 2008, 225. 5 JR 16: 101. See also Trigger, Children of Aataentsic, 588. 6 Warrick, Population History, 2008, 226. 7 See Heidenreich, Huronia, 98, and Trigger, Children of Aataentsic, 31-32. See also JR 6: 59; JR 7: 225; JR 8: 115 where the Jesuits indicate the population is 30,000 but they were following the generally accepted estimate based on Champlain, Works, 3: 122 which is probably a combined population of the Wendat and their closest neighbours the Tionontaté, the Wendat population comprising approximately two thirds of this figure. 8 JR 17: 223; JR 19: 127. The post-epidemic figures recorded in the Relations were based on a census conducted by the Jesuits in the winter of 1639-40. In note 7 of JR 19 A.F. Hunter indicates the ten to twelve thousand population count represents the combined Wendat-Tionontaté population.

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and old. This had the twofold effect of dramatically reducing the number of elders, the primary

transmitters of Wendat teachings,1 while simultaneously decreasing the number of future child

bearers and warriors2 who were to become even more essential to Wendat survival in the period

of intensified Haudenosaune incursions. Trigger rightly remarks that epidemics caused general

depopulation through the St Lawrence and Ottawa Valleys, and because the Wendat and

Haudenosaune had approximately equal pre-epidemic populations, it would be logical that the

two confederacies would have experienced roughly the same fifty percent population declines by

1640, which would give neither confederacy the military advantage.3 However, the Wendat may

have been struck harder by the epidemics being more densely populated and therefore more

susceptible to crowd diseases than the Haudenosaune.4

Little is written in the Relations regarding the effect epidemics had on the ability of

Wendat persons and communities to harvest food or perform any aspect of their subsistence

cycle. Following the first wave of epidemics can be found the most relevant information in the

Relations. In May 1635 Brebeuf reported, “All these poor people have been much

inconvenienced by [the epidemic], particularly during the Autumn, as much in their fishing as in

their harvesting. Many crops are lying beneath the snow.”5 Unfortunately, as the first epidemic

was waning, the region of Wendake experienced the worst drought it was to have for the period

1600-1650,6 which is supported by Brebeuf’s description that “Spring has been extremely clear

1 JR 8: 145-147; see also JR 19: 127 where it was reported that the epidemics left “very few old men, very few persons of skill and management.” 2 The Jesuits themselves had this concern. Jerome Lalemant wrote in 1640, “[I]f in the past, when their numbers were great, they were unable to resist their enemies, what can we expect for them in the future?” JR 17: 223. 3 Trigger, Children of Aataentsic, 602. 4 Robert Larocque, “Secret Invaders: Pathogenic Agents and The Aboriginals in Champlain’s Time,” Champlain: The Birth of French America, 266-77. Larocque also makes the important distinction between acquired immunity and hereditary immunity to dispel any ideas of Europeans having innately superior immune systems. 5 JR 8: 87-89. 6 See William Hurley and Conrad Heidenreich, “Maurice and Robitaille Sites: Environmental Analysis,” Palaeoecology and Ontario Prehistory, 1 (1969): 112-54.

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and dry; the crops are beginning to suffer for want of rain.”1 With the crops not harvested the

autumn before, a drought the following spring could have meant famine for the Wendat but

providentially the rains came and they instead enjoyed a plentiful harvest. For the remaining

three epidemics the Jesuits did not directly address how the Wendat managed their resources to

procure sustenance. The Jesuits recorded in the late spring after the second epidemic that

Ihonatiria, one of the principal Attignawantan villages, was “almost entirely ruined.”2

If the data from two of the less lethal epidemics is used to extrapolate the combined effect

of all four epidemics, including the fourth and most deadly, the picture is inconceivably bleak.

There would have been the obvious difficulties sowing and harvesting crops, fishing, hunting,

and gathering nearby edibles. This in turn would have formed a negative feedback loop causing

an exacerbation of the various maladies through the immune-weakening effects of

malnourishment. By 1640 it was not uncommon for a village to be so reduced in numbers that

the remnant communities decided to relocate prematurely. The existing site would still have been

viable in terms of soil fertility, fuel supply, and the structural condition of dwellings, but

oversized for the remaining population and impracticable as a result.3 Moving to a new site was

labour intensive despite the smaller village size, as land clearance and housing construction

would be required. These epidemic-induced relocations must have greatly taxed the already

beleaguered Wendat. The successive waves of epidemics in Wendake were unprecedented and

have often been termed “virgin soil” epidemics to signify how European diseases were especially

pernicious among at-risk populations which had no prior contact with the pathogens, making

them immunologically vulnerable. But Jones correctly reminds us that virgin soil epidemics

cannot be understood from an exclusively pathogenic perspective but must also take into

1 JR 8: 155. 2 JR 13: 165. 3 JR 21: 159.

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consideration the impact of other factors such as malnutrition and environmental stress.1 In

Wendake lack of proper nutrition during periods of disease outbreak, especially the devastating

smallpox epidemic, must have greatly amplified the disease burden.

Cultural Disruption

In chapter five the different worldviews belonging to the French and Wendat were discussed and

the Wendat concept of the Onderha comprising their ceremonies and observances known as “the

ground” what the village chiefs called “affairs of importance” was introduced. In a study

investigating how conceptualisations about the nonhuman changed as a result of culture contact,

the shock and devastation of the epidemics combined with the inexorable Jesuit attacks2 on

Wendat spiritual understandings undermined and confused the populace, causing some

individuals to question received cultural wisdom and seek alternatives in pursuit of survival. By

destabilizing the Onderha, undermining relations of reciprocity and generosity, the Jesuits were

effectively altering Wendat relations to the land, to nonhumans, to other humans. Three

examples will be examined briefly to illustrate the extent of the changes.

In 1635 when the Wendat experienced their worst drought in over three decades and were

recovering from their first demoralising outbreak of disease the excessive aridity made houses

and entire villages susceptible to conflagrations and crops were failing terribly.3 The Wendat

confederacy solicited help from respected arendiwane (shamans) to bring rain and protect

against a winter famine. Tehorenhaegnon, a most famous arendiwane, used dreaming, feasting

and dancing to bring rain but did not succeed. When Brebeuf was enlisted for the job of

1 David S. Jones, “Virgin Soils Revisited,” American Encounters: Natives and Newcomers from European Contact to Indian Removal, 1500-1850, 2nd ed., eds. Peter C. Mancall and James H. Merrell (New York: Routledge, 2007) 52-83. 2 The word “attacks” sounds strong but in Vimont’s Relation of 1643-1644, a letter written by a Jesuit in Wendake, specific author unknown, claims, “We are entering more and more into the possession of the goods which we come to buy in this end of the world at the price of our blood and our lives: I see stronger tendencies than ever toward the total conversion of these peoples, whom we are attacking among the first…” [my emphasis] JR 25: 27 3 JR 8: 105; JR 10: 35.

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rainmaking, “it happened that, exactly as the novena was completed…we could not finish the

Procession on account of the rain, which followed very abundantly…with a great improvement

and growth of the fruits of the earth.”1 The Jesuits did not believe they personally possessed the

power to command the elements, but believed it possible that God in wanting to gather more

souls to the faith would intervene. The seeming Jesuit “success” at rainmaking was inopportune.

During a time of ecological harm and uncertainty caused by the coalescence of pathogenic ruin

and climatic threat the perceived Jesuit achievement damaged the reputation of the Wendat

spiritual specialist while enhancing that of the Jesuits.2 Similar events occurred surrounding

physical healing. The Wendat long had a sophisticated healing system and a complex botanical

pharmacopeia that was multifaceted and used differentially to suit the needs of unique cases.

When faced with the severity of epidemics, the Wendat learned their conventional treatments

were largely ineffectual against the new forms of disease, but occasionally after a baptism

someone would make a coincidental and unexpected recovery producing a belief among some

that baptism was a curing ritual3 which further increased the shamanic status of the Jesuits.

Many Wendat then sought baptism to save their physical selves, but found themselves

propelled into the nucleus of a belief system that could potentially separate them from family and

clan. Because the Jesuits emphasised so strongly the separation of Christians from non-

Christians in burial and in the afterlife, some Wendat persons wanted baptism for the assurance

of joining already deceased baptised relatives, while others regretted having been baptised

fearing they would be prohibited from a shared afterlife with family members who died non-

1 See JR 10: 35-45. Oddly this happened twice during the summer of 1635 and Brebeuf recounts how the Jesuits had similarly “successfully” prayed for rain in 1628. 2 However Wendat pragmatism in the appraisal of shamans involved a process of careful monitoring that would have prevented the wholesale transfer of faith in their own specialists to foreigners. See JR 13: 243. 3 JR 8: 135-37; JR 10: 13, 67, 69, 311; JR 20: 23-27. Others observed people died after baptism and thought it was a ritual that killed people, so they shunned it.

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Christians.1 The most powerful example of the Jesuit-imposed divide between Christians and

non-Christians after death is found in Brebeuf’s 1636 account of the Feast of the Souls. When

Chief Aenons of the Attignawantan nation approached the Jesuits to invite them to bury the

bones of “two Frenchmen who died in this part of the Country…in the common grave with

[Wendat] dead”2 their reflexive response was negative. However, the Jesuits quickly “added,

nevertheless…we would be pleased to raise their bones if they would grant us permission to put

them into a private grave, along with the bones of all those we had baptized in the Country.” The

Wendat not pleased with the suggestion capitulated to the idea of two distinct graves. The Jesuits

who recognised this ceremony to be the most solemn pledge of friendship and alliance took

advantage of Wendat acquiescence and effectively distorted the unifying purpose of the sacred

ritual “making it appear thereby that we desired to love them as our brothers,” but actually being

desirous of “separating, with the consent of the whole Country, the bodies of Christians from

those of Unbelievers.”3 The Jesuit division of the world into hierarchical dualisms, in which

Jesuit customs were always superior to those of the Wendat, created impossible culture contact

schisms that revolved primarily around the salvation of souls, and the sharp demarcation between

spirit and matter, which in turn infiltrated countless quotidian practices. During the first and

second epidemics there are examples of the Jesuits attending to the physical needs of ailing

Wendat,4 but more often the Jesuits are consumed with baptising, sometimes surreptitiously,

those who appear to be dying, “to impart life to the soul, and not the body.”5 The Jesuit

dedication to the primacy of the spirit reaches its most macabre apogee in their jubilant

1 See JR 8: 137-139, 141. 2 JR 10: 305. 3 JR 10: 305-307. 4 JR 8: 149; JR 13: 113-115. 5 JR 10: 13; JR 13: 189. The Jesuits baptised children secretly when the parents would not allow baptism. These were parents who had come to see the ritual as causing death or were contemptuous of Christianity. See JR 13: 167; JR 14: 7-9, 41, 67-69.

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expressions that souls are being won for the “church triumphant” when the Wendat are in actual

fact being ravaged by disease or routed by the Haudenosaune.1 An appalling example of Jesuit

imperialism is Ragueneau’s assertion that the Haudenosaune had done “almost more good than

harm,” which warrants being cited at length.

They have delivered many souls from the fires of Hell, while burning their bodies in an elemental fire. For it is true that they have converted many persons, and that they are the instruments which God has used for deriving the sweet from the bitter, life from death, glory from ignominy, an eternity of pleasure from a moment of suffering, severe indeed but recompensed a hundredfold. When the Hurons were in affluence…they mocked at the Gospel, and tried to murder those who proclaimed it in their country, accusing them of being sorcerers, who made them lose their lives by secret means, spoiled their grain, and caused drouths and inclement weather; and regarding them as traitors, who held communication with their enemies for the purpose of selling their country.2

Although this passage today would be read with due revulsion, at the time of publication it was

part of an official narrative holding political, religious and social purchase, detachedly reporting

the reasonable demise of people who were substandard in French estimation. Indeed Biard’s

description elucidates well the similar but lesser status Jesuits assigned to Aboriginal peoples

who were “companions of our own species, and almost the same quality as we.”3 These

representational deformations existing in the Relations result from an imperial lens and

ideological framework. The attendant hierarchical dualisms which comprised the Jesuit world,

civilised versus savage, good versus evil, transcendence versus immanence, prevented them not

only from seeing the Wendat as they were, but also their own immorality.

Not surprisingly the Jesuits came to be regarded as sorcerers at several periods during

their mission work in Wendake. Persons in Wendat society could be judged sorcerers for any

manner of antisocial behaviour: not participating in ceremonies, living apart, and being

excessively solitary. Jesuit practices fitted all these categories so when the wave of lethal

1 See for example JR 19: 123, 197; JR 34: 103; JR 21: 13. 2 JR 38: 45; see also JR 8: 89. 3 JR 4: 117.

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epidemics began it was understandable that men who were odd and had unusual behaviours,

according to Wendat sensibilities, would be suspect. The Jesuits refused to participate in

important ceremonies and curing rituals, they shut their cabin to the Wendat to perform their

spiritual exercises, and they generally disregarded the life-promoting customs of the country

instead speaking incessantly of conversion, souls and salvation.1 When asked to provide a piece

of red material to help cure a sick person, the Jesuits declined and remarked their “continual

refusals cause them often to threaten to split our heads, attributing to us the cause of their

diseases, saying that, since they believe, they have sickness among them.”2 So why were the

Jesuits not killed in keeping with the customary fate for sorcerers in Wendat society? Part of the

answer can be traced to Wendat dependency on French trade by 1636.3 The fear of losing items

that had become necessities forced the Wendat to tolerate the Jesuits whom they perceived as

essential to the continued alliance with the French. The Wendat governmental system which was

egalitarian, noncoercive and used consensus-based decision making processes would be a second

reason. Though a highly successful political structure for Wendat reciprocity-oriented cultural

values, once epidemics more than halved the Wendat population they became more vulnerable to

the top-down, hierarchical organisational model that facilitated Jesuit interference.

At a confederacy council meeting held in 1640 the Wendat village chiefs from all of

Wendake deliberated for an entire evening about the Jesuit problem. Most of the chiefs present

wanted to kill the Jesuits but one “nation resisted, showing the consequences of this resolution

which tended to the ruin of the country.”4 Jerome Lalemant did not identify which nation refused

but the inability to reach consensus and the fear that the nation responsible for the murders would

1 JR 17: 171-89; JR 15: 33, 59. 2 JR 15: 181. 3 JR 13: 215. 4 JR 19: 177.

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be alienated from French trading while the other Wendat nations would continue to prosper led

the council to abandon the initiative.1 This is the only instance in the historic record of the

Wendat practicing confederacy-wide community organising to contest the ethnic prejudices of

the Jesuits.2 The individual Wendat nations were trying to solve collectively the demographic,

social and economic challenges associated with having Jesuits among them. Although they

elected not to extirpate the Jesuits from their territory had they known how important the

Wendat-French trade alliance was to the French they surely would have acted differently

securing a different future for themselves. French concern to preserve their alliance with the

Wendat is evidenced by their official policy regarding the hypothetical murder of a Jesuit. If by

conspiracy the Wendat confederacy murdered the Jesuits, the French would terminate the

alliance; however, if Jesuits were murdered by “individuals” then the “innocent ones” were to be

assured of the “friendship of the French.”3 Toward the end of the epidemic period when

Wendake was execrably depopulated, the Jesuits began to implement aggressively a stricter

conversion policy, emphasising in particular the torments of hell and more severely censuring

lapsing Christians. In Vimont’s Relation of 1643-1644 a letter written by an unidentified Jesuit

author4 in Wendake stated, “We are entering more and more into the possession of the goods

which we come to buy in this end of the world at the price of our blood and our lives: I see

stronger tendencies than ever toward the total conversion of these peoples, whom we are

1 JR 19: 179. 2 For a discussion of the skills involved in community organising see Herbert Rubin and Irene Rubin, “The Practice of Community Organizing,” The Handbook of Community Practice, eds., Marie O. Weil (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2005) 189-203. Of particular interest is the extent to which the Wendat had highly-developed community-organising and collectivist-oriented skills as a result of their egalitarian societal model. 3 JR 14: 243-45. 4 This Relation was written by Vimont the superior of the Society of Jesus in New France at this time. It contains a collection of letters interspersed throughout the text. Though the authorship of each missive is unknown, all were written by Jesuits who were living among the Wendat.

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attacking among the first, and whom we are undertaking to carry away.”1 The language used

here and throughout numerous Relations passages elucidates the extent to which the Jesuits,

despite their putative intellectual achievements, inhabited an antinomian world in which they

were on the side of God in a battle against Satan.

From 1640 onward Wendat persons who were contemptuous of Christianity threatened

but did not murder Jesuits.2 The prohibition the Wendat felt about harming the Jesuits did not,

however, apply to their own people. Wendat persons who had become Christian were instructed

by the Jesuits not to participate in most community feasts and ceremonies which were

dogmatically associated with the devil. This proscription placed Wendat Christians outside of

cultural and community norms, making them targets of sorcery suspicions, death threats and

murder.3 In one case a renowned shaman from the Attignawantan nation ordered that no one

should gather hemp (to be made into twine and used for fishing nets), cautioning that anyone

who failed to obey would cause a crop failure. By remorseless inculcation the Jesuits had

convinced a number of Christian converts that the devil prevailed over such prognostications.

Two Christian sisters, who had planned to gather hemp, defied the shaman’s orders not wanting

to “offer sacrifices to the Devil, being resolved to die of hunger rather than to do so.”4

Community members complained to their village chiefs and it was generally accepted that a poor

harvest and famine would result, and “the Faith was the ruin of the Country.”5 The Jesuits

reported happily that “most of the corn did not ripen, especially that belonging to those who had

1 JR 25: 27; italics mine. 2 JR 23: 39; JR 30: 101. 3 See JR 30: 19-21 for an example of a wealthy convert, Ignace Oiiakonchiaronk, living in the village of St. Ignace who was threatened with death for accumulating wealth and refusing to engage in culturally sanctioned redistribution rituals. See also the murder of Joseph Chihwatenha which appears to have been committed by his own people on the basis that his practice of Christianity resembled sorcery JR: 79, 95; JR: 23: 195. 4 JR 23: 55. 5 JR 23: 57.

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sacrificed to the Devil, while our Christians gathered a fair crop.”1 This example shows not only

the divisive factionalism that had developed between Christian and non-Christian Wendat but

also the extent to which the idea of a circular relativistic universe having a dynamic interplay of

productive, destructive, but ultimately regenerative forces, was being assaulted by a binary moral

universe based on gestures directed toward the transcendent rather than earthly realm. The Jesuit

belief system had a transcendent God who rewarded Christians and punished all others, and the

Christian Wendat were being aggressively indoctrinated into this tradition. For Wendat peoples

ecological contexts had always been essential to a sound relationship with their surrounds and

others. Today Aboriginal elders “urge Aboriginal people to re-establish a relationship with their

local ecological order” to “understand the meaning of life.”2 The Jesuits instead superimposed a

foreign meaning structure onto the Wendat worldview, a structure alien to, and having no place

for, their local ecology. This section on cultural disruption is essential to understanding how the

coalescence of epidemics, an increasingly vigorous Jesuit policy, and the dependency on trade

affected community and cultural developments.

Trade

A chapter on Wendat-French culture contact investigating conceptualisations about the

nonhuman other and how they manifested in human relationships with the land, nonhumans and

other human beings would be incomplete without examining trade. Trade is the single factor

which brought the two nations3 together, serving essentially as the epicentre of politics, ecology,

1 JR 23: 57. 2 James Youngblood-Henderson, “Ayukpachi: Empowering Aboriginal Thought,” Reclaiming Indigenous Voice and Vision, 256. 3 The word “nations” is used loosely as the Wendat were technically a confederacy of nations, while the French were a nation-state in the making but not yet successfully unified. See Hobsbawm’s deft enquiry into the “national question” in which he identifies how nations and nationalisms are shifting and evolving ethnocultural and political entities, and that the term “nation” as understood in the modern vernacular is “historically very young.” Eric Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990). See also Wallerstein’s excellent discussion of the mutable quality of nation-states and empires, and the impact of the

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technology and social transformation. While the Jesuits insisted on their role as religious

emissaries bringing the gospel to an “infidel” nation, they were in the main functionaries of the

French crown lending legitimacy to mercantile operations and colony building. When New

France was ceded back to the French in 1632 and Champlain became Commander in 1633, after

the fulfillment of de Caen’s one-year monopoly, the new quasi-religious administration was

more explicitly committed to colony building with a strong interest in Aboriginal conversion.

The egalitarianism of Wendat society together with its clan organisation, local non-centralised

government and matrilineal descent was at odds with French social organisation and values. As

noted in chapter seven the freedom belonging to each individual and the nonexistence of

coercive power among chiefs in Wendat culture often frustratingly contradicted the regulative,

repressive, authoritarian French religio-political system. In this period when New France was

regained, the administrative powers attempted to contain Wendat liberty and transform

independence and free thinking into obedience.1

Toward the end of July 1633 approximately six hundred Wendat traders came to Quebec

bringing goods to exchange with the French.2 Champlain deliberately used the language of

kinship during a Wendat-initiated council meeting to persuade them to renew their trade alliance.

Champlain “told them he had always loved them, that he wished very much to have them as his

brothers, and, having been sent in behalf of our great King to protect them, he would do it

willingly.”3 He also clearly stipulated that the renewal of the alliance depended on the Wendat

“physical environment—climate, epidemiology, soil conditions” on the fate of geopolitical territories. Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century (New York: Academic, 1974) 31-33; See also Hanna Arendt’s examination of the arbitrariness and looseness surrounding the use of the term “nation” in “The Nation,” Essays in Understanding, 1930-1954: Formation, Exile and Totalitarianism (New York: Schocken, 1994) 206-211. 1 JR 12: 45-47; JR 20: 229. 2 JR 5: 239; See also JR 5: 211 where Champlain put forward his intermarriage proposal stating, “When that great house shall be built, then our young men will marry your daughters, and we shall be one people.” 3 JR 5: 247-249.

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accepting Jesuits into their country. At this time different Wendat villages were vying to have a

Jesuit stationed among them and arguing over who would be entrusted with transporting the

Jesuits to Wendake, obviously reflecting the wish of each village to have greater access to

French material, not spiritual, wares.1 In addition to using kinship as a strategy to facilitate trade

with the Wendat Champlain also employed their custom of reciprocity to his commercial

advantage. In 1633 when the exchange between French and Wendat was complete, Champlain

“made his presents, which corresponded in value to those that the Hurons had made him. To

accept presents from the Savages is to bind oneself to return an equivalent.”2 Champlain ended

the process of exchange on a note of generosity which in Wendat custom made them more

obliged to return the following year.3 The effective exploitation of the institution of gift giving

was a transgressive diversionary manoeuvre that drew the Wendat into a profit economy under

the guise of gift exchange, but the French deliberately designed the exchange to benefit

themselves, not the Wendat.4

In the previous chapter it was noted that corn, fishing nets, and other items (some French

objects) were traded with the northern Algonkian nations for fish, meat and animal skins.

According to Jesuit observations these trade relations continued throughout this period up until

the time of Wendat dispersal.5 Brebeuf in 1636 described Wendake as “the granary of most of

the Algonquains,” signalling the importance of corn production to the Wendat economy.6 As the

Wendat grew more corn to collect pelts not just for their own use but for the purpose of trade

with the French, Wendat women would have been dedicating considerably more time to food

1 JR 5: 259-263. 2 JR 6: 7. 3 See Delage, Bitter Feast, 98 for a further discussion of this point. 4 See Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 26-27. 5 JR 13: 249; JR 27; 27; JR 31: 209; JR 33: 67. Ragueneau’s Relation, Vol. 33, for 1648-49 describes the Wendat going north of Wendake to “trade for Furs and Beavers, which are found there in abundance.” 6 JR 8: 115; see also JR 11: 7; JR 13: 249.

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production, men would have been clearing more fields, and children would have been busier

with their mothers chasing birds away from the crops. If the relationship the Wendat had with the

land changed during this period it was a change of increased intensity. Living as they were in a

relatively small geographic region the potentiality for augmented horticultural production would

have been limited.1 As discussed in chapter six, the Wendat had shifted from a deer to a beaver

economy but by 1636 Le Jeune wrote the Wendat “have not a single Beaver,” and have to go

“elsewhere to buy the skins they bring to the storehouse of these gentlemen.”2 Scholars have

questioned what mechanisms led to the overhunting of animals by Aboriginal peoples. Martin’s

ill-substantiated thesis that the eastern Algonkian peoples believed their epidemics were caused

by zoonotic infection which incited them to destroy their “wildlife tormentors” by engaging in “a

war of revenge, a war which soon became transformed into the historic fur trade” 3 is awkward

and implausible. Though he suggests this thesis might serve to explain the extinction of the

beaver in the interior, which would include Wendake, there is no evidence in the primary sources

that the Wendat entered into a human-beaver battle.

Trigger’s explanation is much more credible and better supported by the archaeological

and ethnographic record.4 Wendat involvement in the fur trade developed over a century of

contact with the French, first circuitously through Aboriginal trade networks and then directly

when a formal alliance was formed in 1616.5 Wendat nations enjoyed the utility of certain

classes of French items, largely metal goods, which eased their labours and increased community

1 See Heidenreich, Huronia, 198, for his calculations of Wendat land needs where he suggests the Wendat were approaching their maximum carrying capacity at this time. 2 JR 8: 57. 3 Calvin Martin, Keepers of the Game: Indian-Animal Relationships and the Fur Trade (Berkeley: U of California P, 1982) 146. 4 Bruce Trigger in his article “Ontario Native People and the Epidemics of 1634-1640,” Indians, Animals and the Fur Trade: A Critique of Keepers of the Game, ed. Shepard Krech (Athens, GA: U of Georgia P, 1984) 21-41, uses both the archaeological and ethnographic records to refute Martin’s claims. 5 JR 20: 35; JR 23: 167.

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security, which is observable in the material items they sought through trade. Wendat people

primarily wanted tools having high technological value such as metal cutting tools or kettles

from which they could later rework into cutting tools once the kettle had worn out. It was the

allure of utilitarian not novelty items that originally enticed Wendat to trade. As Trigger argues,

the “greater leisure resulting from the possession of metal cutting tools provided the economic

basis for a cultural floresence among the tribes of eastern Canada in the seventeenth century.”1

The more complex material and ritual culture of the Wendat after acquiring French goods,

especially apparent in the embellished Feast of the Souls, is evidence of this. The question of

why the Wendat overhunted beaver to the point of extinction in their territory is most readily

explained by the material advantages of being involved with European trade and the political

vulnerability of remaining outside this market.

Although the Wendat strove to obtain maximum return for their goods when trading with

the French, this process was never one of equal exchange, which prohibited the possibility of a

conservationist hunting strategy working constructively to meet demands. The Wendat had

hunted the beaver to extinction in their territory prior to the epidemics, suggesting this was a

consequence of their new involvement in a global wealth-oriented, rather than barter or

reciprocal, economy. Why did the Wendat overhunt beaver? The answer is partly that they

desired to remain a viable political and economic entity during the time of European overseas

mercantile expansion, but the answer could also be that the Wendat may not have had clearly

articulated dictates surrounding overhunting. None are mentioned in the ethnographic record,

which could of course simply be a function of the recognised incompleteness of historical

ethnographic texts. If however the absence of textual references to overhunting reflects a cultural

unconcern at this time because the Wendat had not previously encountered the unrelenting and 1 Bruce Trigger, “Ontario Native People and the Epidemics of 1634-1640,” 25.

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insatiable demands of a redistributive market divorced from its ecological base, then it is

possible that the Wendat were acting entirely consistent with their philosophy, not contravening

established belief systems, hunting as many beaver as necessary to satisfy their changing societal

needs, providing they continued to handle the remains as culturally prescribed. As discussed in

chapter five, the stipulations documented in the ethnographic record were not associated with

quotas but rather emphasised proper disposal of animal remains so as not to anger their spirits.

During the period following French reclamation of New France much changed for the

Wendat, primarily as a result of the deadly and successive epidemics which led to a dependency

on European goods. In 1636 Chief Aenons warned Attignawantan villagers to discuss

eliminating the Jesuits from their midst was to speak “of a very dangerous matter, namely, of the

destruction and ruin of the country; that if they should remain two years without going down to

Kebec to trade, they would find themselves reduced to such extremities.”1 Prior to the epidemics

the Wendat had been much more autonomous. They continued to manufacture their own tools

while augmenting their store by acquiring French items, but when unprecedented numbers of

community members died the loss of a range of traditional ecological and production knowledge

increased material and economic dependency on the French. Soon after entering into trade

relations with the French, the Wendat made clear they desired to learn how to produce French

goods themselves.2 Champlain, well aware of this Wendat interest in manufacturing European

technologies, exploited their aspiration to build knowledge in a paternalistic speech he made in

1635, which clearly displays the strong intertwining of religion and commerce. If the Wendat

“wished to preserve and strengthen their friendship with the French, they must receive our belief

1 JR 13: 215-217. 2 See Sagard, Long Journey, 183.

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and worship the God that we worshiped.”1 Champlain also informed the Wendat, “the French

will go in goodly numbers to their Country; that they will marry their daughters when they

become Christians; that they will teach all their people to make hatchets, knives, and other things

which are very necessary to them.”2 Given the rapidly changing economy, the Wendat naturally

would have wanted to avoid marginalisation in the new system and welcomed the material

benefits of such an arrangement. The security of increased military support assumed to be a

function of the French living among them would also have been inviting, as the Wendat had

always desired a military as well as trade alliance with the French. Sadly the Wendat were never

taught how to make European metal items, for the French objective was always to engage the

Wendat in a process of unequal exchange designed to accumulate and transfer wealth from the

social and economic margin to the centre.3 And the men who lived primarily among the Wendat

were not military soldiers, but soldiers of Christ. Throughout the epidemic period, 1634-1640,

the Wendat traded annually with the French. Because the children and elders were more

vulnerable to the infectious diseases, the Wendat still had enough adult males, despite the

epidemics, fit enough to make the arduous journey,4 but the impetus to mobilise labour power to

this end at a time of immense societal upheaval was surely a function of need not want.

From 1641-1649 the Wendat made successful journeys to French trade centres only four

of the nine years. The Haudenosaune were increasingly attacking the trade routes and Wendat

villages in an effort to create a viable economic foothold and resist their own marginalisation in

foreign market system directed away from Aboriginal localism and progressively toward world

1 JR 8: 49. 2 JR 8: 49. The French at this time thought of Aboriginal peoples as being different in faith and customs but not race, making intermarriage an acceptable way to build the colony. This, together with the exoticism-oriented nature of travelogues, partly explains the various passages dedicated to Aboriginal skin colour found in the primary sources. See for example Sagard, Long Journey, 136; see also Champlain, Works, 1: 118, Works, 2: 48, Works, 4: 53. 3 See Delage’s excellent work Bitter Feast for a thorough examination of this subject. 4 JR 8: 75-79; JR 10: 89; JR 15: 151, 161; JR 16: 227-231; JR 18: 11, 15-17.

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commerce. Regardless of the danger the Haudenosaune posed during the years without peace

treaties, the Wendat still endeavoured certain years to make the journey because of their need for

goods. In 1648 Bressani reported, the Wendat “did not come down last year to the French

through fear of the enemies, who on the one hand threatened the country, and on the other beset

all the roads. But the necessity of obtaining hatchets and other French goods compelled them to

expose themselves to all those dangers.”1 Although the Wendat population had been halved by

the epidemics, the number of furs traded with the French between 1640 and 1649 did not drop.2

In fact there was an inverse relationship between the number of Wendat persons and the number

of furs the French procured. Proportional to the population decline, there was a greater number

of Wendat adult males involved in the fur trade during the post-epidemic period, which

necessitated changes in Wendat organisational and land-use patterns, and allowed less time for

certain activities such as summer warfare and manufacture of products using local materials.

Wintertime rituals and ceremonies, the time of greatest cultural cohesion as the men were not

away warring, trading, fishing, or hunting, were likely fewer as this time came to be used to

grind increasing amounts of corn and produce more nets for trade with northern Algonkians.3

A decrease in frequency of cultural practices would constitute a weakening of protective

factors for the Wendat. The Wendat identified the onderha, their ceremonies and rituals, as the

ground of their nation. Without the sturdiness of these customs the Wendat were potentially

more susceptible to the ideological offensive of the Jesuits. The Jesuits plied Wendat eagerness

for metal goods as means to gain more converts to the church by arranging with the Company of

New France to use a differential pricing policy favouring Christian Wendat with a greater

1 JR 32: 179. 2 Trigger, Children of Aataentsic, 603. 3 Trigger, Children of Aataentsic, 603.

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volume of goods in return for their pelts.1 As a result of this policy, many Wendat professed to

be Christian simply to obtain the better rates, and later guns which were only given to Christians,

their faith often being no more than nominal. In a letter included in the 1642-1644 Relations a

Jesuit2 in Wendake wrote, “The use of arquebuses, refused to the Infidels by Monsieur the

Governor, and granted to the Christian Neophytes, is a powerful attraction to win them: it seems

that our Lord intends to use this means in order to render Christianity acceptable in these

regions.”3 The idea of a supreme being orchestrating the conveyance of guns into Wendat hands

as part of a proselytising process seems absurd from a contemporary perspective, but in the logic

of battling against demons, whether non-Christian Wendat or Haudenosaune enemies, guns were

esteemed an accepted item used to lubricate the conversion machinery.

In this second phase of the Wendat-French alliance, the earlier French desire to cooperate

with the Wendat, so as to wrest the greatest profits from the peoples, their alliances and their

territory, gave way to a muscular insistence on French directed cultural change. As Wendat

involvement in the fur trade grew, their labours increased irrespective of their acquisition of

metal goods. The Wendat were brought into a cycle of unequal exchange that excluded them

from knowledge of production of the goods they sought, keeping them dependent on the distant

trade posts, and the even more distant French metropole. This process led to altered relationships

with the land and other species which made sense given the demands of the newly introduced

European market and its effect on Aboriginal international relations. The beaver were hunted to

extinction within Wendat territory and increased corn production was pushing the limit of

carrying capacity. The concept of globalisation, popular today in modern discourse, can be seen

in this early case study. Proponents of globalisation generally highlight how economic

1 See also Bruce Trigger, Children of Aataentsic, 613, 628. 2 See page 11, note 4 supra. 3 JR 25: 27.

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integration can benefit peoples globally. This study shows these effects in the early stages of

Wendat involvement in European trade through the cultural florescence identified by Trigger.

But the study also reveals what detractors of the phenomenon identify as the tensions between

globalisation and localisation and the myriad ways disadvantaged peoples are negatively

impacted regionally.1 As this study shows, the later period of the Wendat-French alliance

became a narrative of eventual marginalisation, where inclusion in an alienating international

system of trade (globalisation) injured the Wendat socially, culturally, politically and

demographically.

Visible in this period are the lineaments of Scott’s combination of the four elements

necessary to “tragic episodes of state-initiated social engineering.”2 Scott identifies the

“administrative ordering of nature and society” as the first element. In Wendat-French relations

the nonhuman was in a sense ordered administratively through the singular emphasis on fur,

which had a transformative ecological and social impact. The second element “a high-modernist

ideology,” while not an exact fit, when modified to a category termed doctrinaire ideology is

applicable in that it prevented the French from seeing the Wendat as other than “savage.” Scott’s

third element is “an authoritarian state” not adverse to coercion. During the Wendat-French

alliance New France could not correctly be called a state, but in the post-1632 period under the

direction of Champlain and then Montmagny, a form of psychological coercion was used

repeatedly to exact compliance from the Wendat, the threat of discontinuing trade with an

economically dependent people. Scott’s fourth element is “a prostrate civil society that lacks the

capacity to resist these plans.” Again, not a precise match for the Wendat who were certainly not

prostrate, but between 1634 and 1640 they were struck by a series of devastating epidemics that

1 Jim Ife, “Localized needs and a globalized economy: Bridging the gap with social work practice,” Social Work and Globalization, Special Issue (2000): 50-64. 2 See James Scott, Seeing Like a State, 4-5 for this discussion.

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were incalculably culturally, socially, and economically disruptive. Sadly, had the Wendat

known just how dependent the French were on them during this period, they probably would

have resolved to eliminate the Jesuits from Wendake and the history of Wendat-French relations

would be other than it is. The failure of French social engineering attempts with the Wendat,

given the presence of variants of Scott’s four elements, is a testament to the strength and

resilience of the confederacy. Although historians commonly write that the Wendat succumbed

to the Haudenosaune, it is more accurate to blame a foreign system of trade and administration

without genuine interest in Aboriginal culture or welfare, epidemic diseases, and the unrelenting

ideological assaults of the missionaries. That some Wendat elected to go and live among the

Haudenosaune after they had militarily routed the Wendat from their villages, suggests even the

Wendat did not identify them as the lead cause of their downfall.1

Fixity and Mobility

The last chapter ended with a discussion of Wendat and French mobility. The French were

depicted as being more mobile and the Wendat a little less sedentary than either group is

sometimes conceived. During this period the French ideal of fixity, which was an aspirational

practice in New France prior to the English takeover, is better realised. From 1632 to 1649 the

French became modestly more fixed in the New World, with growing settlements along the St

Lawrence River. In this respect their land-use practices came to resemble their Wendat trade

partners slightly more, although the similarities are largely superficial. For the French the

primary staple was fur, for the Wendat corn. The French were developing a settler colony to

support an extractive economy having a distant, wealth accumulation-oriented centre. The

Wendat engaged in a foreign market to enhance their local economy. The new 1632

1 Certainly some Wendat would have chosen to live among the Haudenosaune because family members had already been captured and were being assimilated into Haudenosaune society, but others joined this former enemy confederacy because their culture and values were more alike than those of the French and Wendat.

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administration brought significant changes from the 1608 founding of Quebec when, apart from

Champlain, there was no commitment to creating a colony. At that time the objective was to

accrue the highest possible profits from the fur trade, with the buildings serving as trade and

storage centres, secured within well fortified walls.

Before the Quebec fort was captured by the English in 1629, there were fewer than one

hundred settlers in New France. There had been plans to enlarge the settlement by transporting

four hundred settlers in 1628 but British pirates intercepted the vessels. Once New France was

retroceded in 1632, the French resumed their former colony-building initiative. Immigration to

New France was negligible during these early years with sixty-four families, composed of 356

individuals, arriving before 1640,1 and approximately another thousand between 1640 and 1659.2

The Jesuit Relations were used as recruiting documents providing information and advice for

those contemplating emigration. Le Jeune speaks to “those who desire to come and increase this

Colony” both poor and rich. He suggests that men with poor families should come to New

France alone initially, join together with three or four other men to clear the land, and in time

“from the lands they have cleared…the little profits they can make in the Country, would be

enough to keep them, and to pay after the first or second year for half the tools they will use in

clearing and in tilling the land.”3 Le Jeune advised wealthy persons, “to obtain from the

Gentlemen of the Company a place to build a house in the town which has been laid out, and also

a few arpents of land near the town, capable of sustaining their families. In addition to this, a

grant of some fine locality which they will choose in the course of time.”4 The taken-for-granted

assumptions about rights to land and the stratified hierarchical social system are of interest and

1 W.J. Eccles, “The Role of the Church in New France,” Essays on New France (Toronto: Oxford UP, 1987) 28. 2 Delage, Bitter Feast, 247. 3 JR 9: 185-87. 4 JR 9: 189.

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stand in sharp contrast to Wendat land values and social organisation. As mentioned above, the

Wendat had a system of usufructuary rights entitling them to land they were actively using, but

this was within their own territory. When they passed through other territories they often had to

pay tolls in recognition of the other nation’s sovereign rights.1 The French settlers along the

banks of the St Lawrence, rich or poor were part of a transplanted seigneurial system which

attempted to reproduce in full the Old World system but lacked a pool of ready workers, creating

therefore an attenuated version. Colony building in New France was a slow process because of

“the remoteness of help from Europe, the scarcity of laborers, difficulties of trade, and the long

Winter,” but Vimont reported in the Relation of 1643 that the “work is well started…it makes

notable progress. Moreover in every household you will see little children comely and of good

wit.”2

In 1634 a fort was built and a settlement begun at Three Rivers, and in 1642 Montreal

was founded as a new colony.3 Between these two dates another settlement developed in

Wendake, and this was the missionary settlement of Ste Marie, built in 1639. It is this colony, a

peculiar imperial and religious enclave in the heart of the Wendat confederacy, which will be

examined briefly here. Although the Jesuits began to settle in Wendake in 1634, it was not until

1639 that an elaborate fortified missionary settlement was built on the banks of the Isaraqui

(Wye) River. Lalemant had obtained permission from the Ataronchronon, to whom this land

belonged, to build at this site,4 and in 1640 he wrote that a residence was being built for the

Jesuits at this site.5 By 1642 the French had erected a Wendat-style longhouse for Christian

Wendat who visited Ste Marie for devotional purposes, a hospital built a distance from the 1 JR 9: 275. 2 JR 23: 271 3 It was not uncommon for the French to encourage the Wendat to bring some families and settle at French colonies. See JR 12: 255-57. 4 JR 19: 135. 5 JR 19: 135.

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Jesuits’ lodgings to provide aid for men and women, a cemetery, and a church for Wendat

Christians that was separate from the missionaries’ private chapel.1 The Relations also indicate

Ste Marie was a fortified mission centre.2 In many ways Ste Marie represents an extension of all

the French yearnings to recreate an Old World garden in the New World “wilderness.” The site

was selected specifically with corn growing in mind because the Jesuits lacked oxen and horses

to pull a plough, making maize a more practicable horticultural crop than wheat. The Jesuits

grew enough maize to feed themselves and visitors, and have a supply for difficult years.3 In

their efforts to replicate the products of a French-style farm, the Jesuits had pigs, and calves

transported to Wendake,4 a difficult task given the many navigational challenges of the water

route.5

The entire Ste Marie mission centre was propped up by indentured workers. This was a

significant difference between Wendat and French society. In Wendat society all men would

have been equally capable of performing tasks and producing materials and products that fell

within the male realm of labour. In French society there were strong stratifications, authoritative

specialists and a hierarchical ordering. The Jesuits themselves were incapable of providing the

material culture to which they were accustomed in France, and to transplant the French garden

and farm model to Ste Marie required a team of workers. In 1639 the Jesuits developed a new

category of worker, the donné who committed themselves to the mission for life. Robert le Coq

was the first to register and the document he signed read in part, “I, the undersigned, declare that

of my individual and free will I have given myself to the Society of Jesus, to serve and assist

with all my power and diligence the Fathers of the Society of Jesus…particularly those who are

1 JR 21: 141; 23: 21; JR 26: 201-203. 2 JR 23: 205; JR 33: 255. 3 JR 27: 65-67. 4 JR 28: 187, 229-31; JR 32: 99. 5 JR 7: 221.

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employed in the conversion…among the Hurons.”1 This social stratification was unquestioned

and Lalemant when discussing the need for assistants made clear that the role of these indentured

persons was to perform manual labour for the Jesuits, and to hunt and protect them. He stated he

preferred a “lay helper [who] can do everything that a Brother can do, but a Brother cannot do

what a layman can do, such as carrying heavy loads and using a gun.”2 The Jesuits mistakenly

perceived Wendat women as “pack mules” wrongly assessing the division of labour to come

down unfairly on their shoulders. The Jesuits’ society actually did require submissive labourers

(pack mules) to realise the dream of a transplanted French farm system in Wendake.

The layout of Ste Marie itself was designed using a stratified, hierarchically segregating

model. The Jesuits were assigned the best quarters, next the donnés, followed by the Christian

Wendat, with the non-Christian Wendat having an allotted space outside the compound proper.3

From an ecofeminist point of view this intersection of oppressions expressed by the domination

of nature (observed in a system encouraging the extinction of species, introduction of foreign

species without due regard to regional species, and failure to act wisely within existing

ecosystems), racism and social inequalities, is unsurprising from an imperial culture structured

around hierarchical dualisms which reify and reinforce alterity in relationships. Rather than

learning from the Wendat how to interact with the land base intelligently using local resources,

the Jesuits transplanted an entirely different model and grafted it onto the Wendat bioregion. The

Jesuits in seeking to establish a durable settlement, a project consistent with the territorial

possession objective of the New France colony in general for this period, were integrating Ste

Marie into the external and distant metropole. They created a particular kind of environment and

1 JR 21: 305. 2 JR 21: 293. 3 See Delage’s discussion of this in Bitter Feast, 174.

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social space that replicated human-nonhuman and inter-human relationships of the French

metropolitan centre, inequalities intact, in their new environment.

It seems the Jesuits had succeeded at establishing French material culture and security in

Wendake. By 1649 Ragueneau reported

Verily, there is not one of our brethren who does not feel in this respect great relief from those distresses which were in former years very burdensome, and seemed insurmountable. For we have larger supplies from fishing and hunting than formerly; and we have not merely fish and eggs, but also pork, and milk products, and even cattle, from which we hope for great addition to our store.1

But their success was short lived. Ste Marie began as the work of thirteen priests and fourteen

French helpers, and by 1649 it had become a settlement with eighteen priests and forty-six

helpers. In its ninth year the Jesuit project of fixity ended in a conflagration. In 1649, when

Haudenosaune incursion was immanent, the Jesuits burned their cherished missionary to the

ground to prevent their foes from appropriating it to use as a fort. Unlike the other French

settlements of this period which typically increased in size while Aboriginal populations

declined, Ste Marie was sufficiently removed from the military security of the clustered New

France settlements to prohibit Jesuits in Wendake from experiencing this safeguard.

Language

I want to end this chapter with a brief discussion of language. While the connection with this

thesis may not be readily apparent, there are significant associations. My thesis focuses on

human conceptualisations of the nonhuman and how these thoughts shape interactions with the

nonhuman world and other human beings. One of the challenges of this thesis has been the

linguistic limitations. Most of my understanding of Wendat conceptualisations of the nonhuman

world, with the exception of the occasional Wendat word contained in the primary sources, has

been through a French filter then refracted through an English translation. Extensive knowledge 1 JR 33: 257.

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of the nonhuman world, especially in preindustrial societies, is contained in languages spoken by

populations who have lived in profound connection with their land base for long periods. In this

sense language is a window to perceiving a peoples’ symbolic and experiential understanding of

the flora, fauna and other elements of their environs and their relationships both to these

constituents and their land base as a whole.

Following the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development the

term biodiversity was popularised and began to seep into contemporary discourse. Biodiversity is

sometimes used to replace the word nature or wilderness but its importance for this case study

consists in linking environmental issues formerly viewed as separate, such as species

endangerment, resource management and sustainability.1 This term begins to make connections

between human exploitation and treatment of the nonhuman world and the health of planetary

species, including ourselves. In 1996 the World Conference of Linguistic Rights was held in

Barcelona having the approval of a universal declaration of language rights, a resolution intended

to complement that of human rights, as the primary objective. This is particularly interesting for

my case study because many Indigenous languages have been eradicated through cultural

imperialism and appropriation of traditional homelands. The link between language and

geophysical place has been strong historically, a fact evidenced in my research by the Wendat

and Haudenosaune, both Nadouek peoples speaking Nadouek languages, having their own verbal

expression, their own system of representation, articulation and meaning making relevant to the

particularities of their surrounds. With today’s era of globalisation where vast cultural and

terrestrial swatches are threatened with sweeping transformation and reconfiguration in the

semblance of the western European and North American cultural-capitalistic model, a high

1 See Stephen Bocking, “Encountering Biodiversity: Ecology, Ideas, Action,” Biodiversity in Canada: Ecology, Ideas and Action, ed. Stephen Bocking (Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 2000) ix-xxv.

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percentage of Indigenous homelands, comprising some of the most biologically and linguistically

diverse regions remaining on earth, are under attack.1 I have discussed hierarchical dualisms

throughout this thesis as part of the ecofeminist theoretical framework I have used, and there can

be found in the geopolitics of culture and globalisation another hierarchy of dominance, a

linguistic one, where English is irrefutably the lingua franca, the most widely used second

language for international affairs.2 Scholars from a variety of disciplines have begun to observe

strong correlations between regions having a high degree of biodiversity and those with rich

linguistic diversity, leading some to speak of biolinguistic diversity3 or biocultural diversity.4

These scholars reveal the injustices of diminished linguistic and cultural diversity, which for

Indigenous peoples usually results from loss of traditional lands, imposed linguistic and cultural

assimilation, and the consequent loss of traditional ecological knowledge, while simultaneously

identifying the impact on biodiversity.

Sadly, the Wendat language disappeared for many of the same reasons that minority

languages are at risk today.5 As I have argued earlier in this thesis, globalisation today is

connected to Western European expansion which began in the sixteenth century. When the

Wendat met the French in the early seventeenth century they were drawn into an incipient global

1 See Jerry Mander, “Introduction: Globalization and Assault on Indigenous Resources,” Paradigm Wars: Indigenous Peoples’ Resistance to Globalization, eds. Jerry Mander and Victoria Tauli-Corpuz (San Francisco: Sierra, 2006) 3-12. 2 See John Tomlinson, Globalization and Culture (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1999) 78. 3 See, for example, Daniel Nettle and Suzanne Romaine, Vanishing Voices: The Extinction of the World’s Languages (New York: Oxford UP, 2000). 4 See Luisa Maffi, ed., On Biocultural Diversity: Linking Language, Culture and the Environment (Washington, DC: Smithsonian, 2001) for a collection of essays addressing linguistics, ethnology and biology from an integrated perspective. 5 See John Goddard, “Scholar Sole Speaker of Huron Language,” The Toronto Star 24 Dec 2007 for an article about John Steckley, a non-Aboriginal Wendat scholar who is the only living fluent speaker of the Wendat language today. See also B. Jacques and M. Gros-Louis, “On the presence of /�/ in the Huron language” in which the authors indicate that the last speakers of Wendat as a first language died in the early twentieth century, 29 May 2009 <http://www.agondachia.com/langue2.html>.

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economic system1 that, in time, had a marked impact on their culture. More than the new world

system, however, it was French ethnocentrism, reflected in the notion mission civilisatrice,

which proceeded with the assumption that First Nations peoples and their societies had to be

saved from barbarism through a “civilising” process2 that was to have the graver impact.

Eventually, in the Canadian context, this process would lead to various assimilation practices and

policies,3 but before prohibiting First Nations peoples from speaking their languages, if the

objective was to “civilise” them, as well as wrest as much wealth as possibly imaginable from

their territories, then it was necessary first to learn their languages. Before leaving France,

Sagard had begun studying the Wendat language using rudimentary lexicons assembled by a

number of authors but mostly that produced by Le Caron who had lived among the Wendat in

1615. When Sagard’s Long Journey was published in 1632, it included a dictionary of the

Wendat language which must be attributed to combined efforts of Sagard, Le Caron and Brulé,

the interpreter who had lived among the Wendat for several years and probably helped the early

missionaries acquire their initial familiarity with the language.

If the Recollet missionaries had been eager to learn the Wendat language for conversion

purposes, their zeal was surely matched by that of the Jesuits. Champlain wrote in 1626 “Fathers

La Nouë and Brébeuf…formed the purpose of going and wintering with the Hurons, to see the

country, learn the language, and consider what aid and means could be hoped for towards

bringing those tribes to our faith.”4 Father Charles Lallemant, Superior of the Missions of

Canada, Society of Jesus, for the period 1625 until the English takeover, wrote in 1626 that the

1 See Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World Economy in the Sixteenth Century (New York: Academic, 1976). 2 See Norbert Elias’s remarkable historical sociological work The Civilizing Process: Sociogenetic and Psychogenetic Explanations (1994; Oxford: Blackwell, 2000). 3 Assimilation of First Nations peoples is most pronounced in Canada in the residential school system which had its beginnings in Jesuit efforts in New France. See JR 4: 235; JR 5: 145, 217; JR 9: 105, 177, 283; JR 11: 11, 49. 4 Champlain, Works, 5: 207.

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Jesuits had “devoted ourselves almost entirely to learning the dialect of the savages, excepting a

month or two spent in cultivating the soil, in order to obtain such slight means of subsistence as

we could.”1 This Relation also contains the first mention of Brébeuf’s special facility for the

Wendat language, as Lallemant recorded Brébeuf spent “the sharp winter season among the

savages, acquiring a very considerable knowledge of this strange tongue.”2 The importance of

learning the Wendat language for Jesuit missionary goals cannot be underestimated, for Father

Anne de Nouë, after earnest and repeated attempts, never managed to learn Wendat, or any other

First Nations language, and therefore was stationed for the rest of his life at the French

settlements along the St Lawrence to minister to the moribund and instruct French colonists.3

One obstacle to swifter progress with First Nations language acquisition that the missionaries

faced was the unwillingness of French interpreters to “communicate their knowledge.”4 Here

again is the issue of competing French interest groups discussed earlier, where the interpreters’

concerns were largely mercantile, and Catholic proselytizing objectives would have been

conceived in the main as being irrelevant to trade goals. Moreover, many traders prior to the

1632 retrocession were Huguenots and it can only be assumed some interpreters were also

Huguenots, which would understandably render designs to convert First Nations to Catholicism

disagreeable.

The Jesuits were delighted when they had a Christian Wendat named Amantacha, or as

they called him, Louis de Sainte Foy who spent the winter among the French in Quebec

resuming “attendance upon the Sacraments, and the habit of prayer”5 no doubt to greater endear

him to the French and to advance his trade status with them. The Jesuits were also pleased that

1 JR 4: 177. 2 JR 4: 179; see also JR 4: 221 and Champlain, Works, 6: 47. 3 JR 4: 266, note 31. 4 JR 4: 179, 211. 5 JR 10: 31-33.

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Amantacha “served as Interpreter, and has translated several things into the Huron language for

us, wherein we admired the facility with which he understood our language.”1 This is not to be

mistaken for White’s middle ground2 because the two groups had not carved out a place of

accommodation and common meaning, a mutually comprehensible world, but instead each was

trying to obtain from the other what was useful to its own society. For the Wendat wealth

accumulation served one purpose: the redistribution of gifts among one’s community which was

a way to gain status. If learning French religious practices placed Amantacha in a favourable

position among the French, giving him leverage in the obtaining of desirable material goods,

then this would help him to increase his status within his community. For the Jesuits, the very

success of their mission efforts depended upon unlocking the Wendat language and Amantacha,

unlike the early French interpreters, had a vested interest in facilitating this process. So difficult

was the Wendat language for the missionaries that Brébeuf wrote, “You will have accomplished

much, if, at the end of a considerable time, you begin to stammer a little.”3 Any help from

willing interpreters was welcomed.

In Brébeuf’s Relation of 1636 he describes some attributes and peculiarities of the

Wendat language. What I find most striking is his description of relative nouns in the Wendat

language which always include “the meaning of one of the three persons of the possessive

pronoun, so that they can not say simply, Father, Son, Master, Valet, but are obliged to say one

of the three, my father, thy father, his father.”4 This suggests the strongly relational world the

Wendat inhabited where there are no autonomous entities but only subjects situated relationally

in the context of other subjects. So thorough was this understanding that the Jesuits could not

1 JR 10: 33. 2 See Richard White, Middle Ground: Indians, empires, and republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1991). 3 JR 10: 91. 4 JR 10: 119.

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have the Wendat say in their language, “In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the

holy Ghost,” but had to ask of their superior whether it would be acceptable to substitute, “In the

name of our Father, and of his Son, and of their holy Ghost.”1 What Brébeuf himself found

“most extraordinary is that there is a feminine conjugation, at least in the third person both of the

singular and of the plural” which he ascribes to a linguistic contrivance designed to teach

Wendat women to be gentle and demure.2 However, this feminine conjugation most likely

reflects the equal but different valuing of women in Wendat culture, where they are not simply

subsumed under a masculine conjugation.

The most obvious indication of the significance of learning the Wendat language to the

progress of Jesuit missionary efforts is how centrally the dictionary figures in the Jesuits’

preservation strategy when their lives are threatened in Wendake. When the Wendat were

deliberating on the fate of the Jesuits in 1637 whom they believe to be sorcerers because of the

outbreak of deadly contagious diseases, Brébeuf advised the Fathers and domestics to take up

residence with those they regarded as trustworthy friends, and he “charged them to carry to the

house of Pierre, our first Christian, all that belongs to the Sacristy,—above all, to be especially

careful to put our Dictionary, and all that we have of the language, in a place of safety.”3 Brébeuf

of course is solicitous to preserve the dictionary because it is both the culmination of years of

arduous study directed toward religious conversion, the greatest proselytising tool the Jesuits had

developed in Wendake to date, and a linguistic gateway to diplomatic and missionary objectives

among other nations who spoke the Wendat language as a lingua franca. Brébeuf wrote, “I am

rejoiced to find that this language is common to some twelve other Nations, all settled and

1 JR 10: 119. 2 JR 10: 123. 3 JR 15: 65.

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numerous….The Hurons are friends of all these people.”1 Lamentably, after the Wendat were

militarily routed by the Haudenosaune and relegated to a kind of political irrelevance clearly

illustrated by French reluctance to harbour Christian Wendat near Quebec following the 1649

dispersal, interest in preserving Wendat lexicons waned.

What can be gleaned from the primary sources, however, corresponds to findings of

contemporary scholars regarding associations between linguistic diversity and biodiversity. “The

greatest biolinguistic diversity is found in areas inhabited by indigenous peoples, who represent

around 4 percent of the world’s population, but speak at least 60 percent of the world’s

languages.”2 As Charles Lallemant observed in 1626, “the languages are multiplied with the

number of the tribes; and this land, extending so far in every direction, is inhabited by at least

fifty different tribes.”3 In this early period of contact before Western Europeans had succeeded at

ecological imperialism and the mapping of monocultural foreign land-use practices onto Wendat,

and other First Nations, territories bursting with biodiversity there were as many languages as

there were ways of relating to the land. What has been lost with each defunct language is not

only the heart of the corresponding culture but also a rich trove of ecological knowledge, where

environmental information and human relationships with the nonhuman were actually encoded in

the diction, grammar and syntax.

Conclusion

If Ste Marie stands as the apogee of French cultural achievement in the early seventeenth century

in Wendake, the missionary settlement also represents a failure to understand the land and its

peoples. The French lens cast uncultivated lands as wilderness, the place where demonic forces

dwelt. The solution was land clearance and cultivation, the use of cultigens and the import of

1 JR 8: 115; see also Sagard, Long Journey, 9, in which he makes the same point. 2 Nettle and Romaine, Vanishing Voices, ix. 3 JR 4: 179.

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domestic animals. To the French mind, Aboriginal peoples too needed taming. Although the

Wendat were categorised as superior to non-sedentary First Nations peoples, they were never

accepted on their own terms but were instead viewed as a society ready for Christian conversion.

Increasingly during the latter period of Wendat-French culture contact, the French imposed their

categories and hierarchies on the Wendat through a variety of means while simultaneously

transforming their homelands. Had the French been amenable to, or indeed capable of, a

mutually respectful form of culture contact things could have developed differently with respect

to Wendat-French relations and human-nonhuman interactions, and a form of land-use practices

may have emerged that represented a true middle ground, not the incomplete kind, exemplified

by French maize growing, born of necessity. Instead this case study shows the groundwork was

laid for a land-use model which promoted replacing, where possible, Aboriginal practices with

European approaches. I am not suggesting that the Wendat were receptive to or overpowered by

the French land-use practices, for each of these frameworks, whether the persuasive or the

dominance-resistance model, as applied to understanding Wendat-French culture contact, falsely

assumes Wendat susceptibility to French cultural and ideological penetration and wrongly

ignores their interpretive, selective and symbolic incorporation of French material culture. My

point is simply that once the Wendat confederacy had been ravaged by devastating diseases that

depopulated villages by fifty to ninety percent, the French land-use model began to take root, not

among the Wendat but within the bounds of Wendake. In the French human-nonhuman

paradigm, as found in this case study, fixity was the goal, nonhuman species were instrumental

(either resources or of aesthetic value), and “civilised” human beings were situated (impossibly

but ideologically) outside the biotic realm. Individually each of these positions poses inevitable

challenges, but collectively they point rather surely to the kinds of issues we face today, where

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our relationship with the nonhuman world is so fractured that our (and other species’) continued

existence—given global heating, potable water shortages, increasing air pollution, and topsoil

erosion—is uncertain.

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Chapter Nine: Conclusion

In a time of such destruction, our lives depend on this listening. It may be that the earth speaks its symptoms to us. Linda Hogan, “A Different Yield”

Review of Findings

The early half of the seventeenth century in Wendake and New France was a complex period in

environmental and sociocultural history, for a group of French envoys, both political and

religious, outwardly “befriended” the Wendat in a variety of ways but intended from the

beginning to assail the very foundations of their culture. I set out to investigate the relationship

between human conceptualisations of the nonhuman other and human relationships with this said

other by studying changing ecosystems and culture contact primarily in one relatively contained

district, Wendake, and of necessity the related St Lawrence region including Quebec City. In my

exploration I pursued two discrete but related purposes. I sought to present descriptively to some

degree the ecological, sociocultural and governmental climate of French settlements and Wendat

villages, but I also analysed the collective effects of worldviews, politics and mercantile strivings

on the land, the peoples, and the changing vectors of culture contact. I wanted to know what

constellation of beliefs, concepts, philosophical assumptions and traditions brought forth the

created ecosystems characteristic of the Wendat and French. When the Wendat first settled the

region of Wendake in the fifteenth century and the French began lasting settlements along the St

Lawrence in the early seventeenth century, both groups not only adapted to their environments

but also constructed them, transforming their surrounds into something new reflecting social

processes, biological and economic necessities and the worldviews that produced them.1

1 See David Harvey, “What’s Green and Makes the Environment Go Round?” The Cultures of Globalization, eds. Fredric Jameson and Masao Miyoshi (Durham: Duke UP, 1998) 327-355; see also Richard C. Lewontin, “Organism

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Through the course of Wendat-French culture contact, social and economic processes changed as

did ecological systems, when the two groups entered into a transitional phase complicated by

power relations and the consequences of the French top-down hierarchical societal model

knocking against the egalitarianism of the Wendat. My intention was to decentre received

categories and resist antinomian dualisms, centres and peripheries, but unfortunately because the

primary source documents were written by French religious personages and officials, a view of

the actual multilayered and diverse French presence was difficult to glimpse. The “French” in

this thesis therefore is a limited term referring to those figures who interacted with the Wendat in

both Wendake and Quebec and recorded accounts of these relations. These French persons held

unusual power and are certainly not representative of the larger social body.

Eric Wolf famously asserted “human populations construct their cultures in interaction

with one another, and not in isolation.”1 While it is certainly true that comprehension of the

forces that steer societies is only possible through an interactional analysis, paying close

attention to existing and evolving power hierarchies is necessary to do this form of investigation

justice. For several reasons the idea of cultural co-construction is especially complex with

respect to this case study. First, the French arrived in northeastern North America with such a

robust belief in their own cultural superiority that their social imaginary of the Wendat cast them

as discontiguous in almost every respect with western European civility, making for the French a

contact realm having a geographic, ideological, philosophical and sociological movement toward

but simultaneously against alterity. This phenomenon is especially marked in the primary source

documents where there is no compelling evidence that the Wendat and French ever established a

and Environment,” Learning, Development and Culture: Essays in Evolutionary Epistemology, ed. Harold Plotkin (New York: Wiley, 1982) 151-172. 1 Eric R. Wolf, Europe and the People without History (1982; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997) xv.

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true middle ground of cultural innovation and accommodation.1 Perhaps had the interpreters and

traders who resided among the Wendat left documents of their experiences, a narrative

suggesting hybridisation of Wendat and French social conventions, a syncretic middle ground

would have emerged. Instead one finds religious and political personages who superficially and

mercenarily adopt select Wendat customs and technologies to gain wealth, access to the interior

and converted souls but not to co-construct a middle ground of mutual meaning. This is

unsurprising as economic relationships are usually not about deliberate hybridisation but rather

hybridisation occurs as a consequence of contact. The only glimpse one gets of such a hybridised

space is darkly through the reproach vented by Champlain, the Recollets and the Jesuits

regarding interracial sex between unwed French and Wendat persons. For this reason the primary

sources read very much as “a hermeneutics of the other,”2 which masks the formations of new

cultural meanings and systems that surely developed between French traders, interpreters and the

Wendat. Second, it may have been possible for a middle ground to develop between French and

northeastern Aboriginal peoples in general in the early 1600s but devastating epidemics which

decimated Aboriginal populations and moved from the coast to the interior, following the

movement of Europeans, increasingly gave the French a political and tactical advantage. Once

the Wendat were ravaged by European diseases and became dependent on European goods, the

French showed less interest in accommodating the ceremonial aspects of Wendat trade

negotiations and began implementing more aggressive and directed practices aimed at Wendat

cultural change. The sociocultural slippages that had formed part of the early Wendat-French

1 See Richard White, The Middle Ground. 2 Michel de Certeau, The Writing of History, trans. Tom Conley (New York: Columbia UP, 1988) 221.

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relations, expressed religiously, economically, and politically, were infrequent, because less

necessary, once epidemic-induced cultural fragmentation afflicted the Wendat.1

Third, a point related to the former two, the combination of a false belief in cultural

superiority and finding themselves in lands where the original inhabitants had become

significantly fewer created a hubristic folly among the French that was to mark both social and

ecological relationships. The French were further convinced of their innate supremacy and with

lands greatly depopulated by disease “profited from the accumulated benefits” of traditional

ecological knowledge and respectful human-nonhuman relationships “practiced by [Aboriginal]

populations over past millennia.”2 The French in Wendake, possessed a false belief that the

beauty and abundance of the territory was naturally occurring, the only change made by the

Wendat being their horticultural practices, planting corn, beans and squash, which the French

were persuaded they could have done better. The French consequently did not feel a need to

learn from Wendat social and ecological processes, but were instead keen to map their own

social formations and land-use practices onto the infiltrated territory. To some extent this can be

explained as a preference for familiar customs and practices, but it was too a reflection of their

lower estimation of the Wendat. Last, it was because the Wendat got drawn into a transatlantic

economic system that relations with the French commenced. The Wendat had long established

their role as superlative traders among surrounding First Nations, but navigating cross-cultural

understandings where cultural and linguistic differences were more pronounced made the

achievement of a hybridised, mutual space more difficult, especially when French displays of

diplomacy were empty of genuine respect. Though Wallerstein posits a world-system theory,

where all nations are connected by a variable network of economic exchange relationships, the

1 de Certeau, The Writing of History, 147-148. 2 Denys Delage, Bitter Feast: Amerindians and Europeans in Northeastern North America, 1600-64, trans. Jane Brierley (Vancouver: UBC Press, 1993) 250.

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difficulty with his theory as applied to this case study is his emphasis on determining and

categorising stages of societal development, an approach I have outright rejected and replaced

with the concept of absolute simultaneity.1 It can be argued that there was one world system in

which both Wendat and French peoples coalesced to exchange goods, but the layers of failed

understandings and disarticulations that occurred within this system were considerable, and the

resistance of the primary source authors, among the higher-ranked representatives of French

society, to actual social parity prevented the emergence of forceful evidence of an authentic

middle ground in the primary source documents.

What does emerge from the textual analysis I have undertaken, however, is a striking

dissimilarity between the worldviews of the Wendat and French. As discussed in chapter five,

Wendat society was built on principles of cooperation, humility, reciprocity and generosity, and

the peoples saw themselves as part of an existing interdependent biotic collective. This non-

separation from the nonhuman world is reflected linguistically among “most Aboriginal peoples,

for example the Mi’kmaq on the Atlantic coast, have no sound for nature. The best translation of

their natural context is ‘space’ or ‘place of creation.’”2 There is no record of the Wendat using

the word nature in the primary source documents, and Steckley’s English-Wendat dictionary

defines nature as “-hentet-” or “-8ten-” which means “to be bad-natured” or “to be of such a

nature” but does not pertain to the nonhuman world.3 French society on the other hand was

characterised by competition, nested power hierarchies and a belief in the separation of

humankind from the rest of creation, which represents the difference between French

monotheism and religious colonialism as depicted in the primary source documents and Wendat 1 See Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century (New York: Academic, 1974) 2-11. 2 James (Sakej) Youngblood Henderson, “Ayukpachi: Empowering Aboriginal Thought,” Reclaiming Indigenous Voice and Vision, 257. 3 John Steckley, A Huron-English/English-Huron Dictionary (Listing Both Words and Noun and Verb Roots) (Lewiston, New York: Mellen, 2007) 357.

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animism, between a doctrinal and an earth-centred morality. Although there are similarities

between the cosmological understandings possessed by each group—for example, beliefs in a

supreme being and supernatural beings, and the use of fasting, visioning and prayer to achieve

spiritual union—the difference between the monotheistic Christian perspective positing a

dualistic world fraught with absolute good and evil, and an animistic, circular worldview

containing relative and complementary cosmic forces is the guiding determinant in land-use

practices employed by each group. Champlain and Sagard scoffed at Wendat traditions designed

to respect the spirit of animals harvested, approaches such as speaking to the fish, honouring the

bones of animals killed, ceremonially and figuratively marrying girls to fishing nets, because the

French saw themselves as outside of the nonhuman realm and unequivocally above fish, beaver,

deer and other nonhuman species as explicated in the great chain of being.1

The investigation in chapter six, where the two cultures are examined just prior to contact

reveals how the dissimilar Wendat and French worldviews affected human-nonhuman relations.

The Wendat, who had adopted cultigens and experienced a population explosion, chose to move

northward into the region that is now the Penetanguishene Peninsula. This decision marks an

implementation of their non-hierarchical worldview, where the northern Algonkians were

envisaged as groups with whom collaboration was deemed an ideal opportunity, a tactical avenue

with countless advantages that would not have been so readily perceptible to a more dominance-

oriented society. And even as the Wendat resolved to make an adjustment to their economic

base, shifting from deer to beaver, this did not involve a loss of requisite, culturally sanctioned

respect shown to either animal. Irrespective of fluctuations in market systems, Wendat

cosmological understanding led to an equal valuing of, if an unequal need for, different species.

1 See Arthur O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1936), especially the chapter titled “The Principle of Plenitude and the New Cosmography,” 99-143.

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The French during this same period were seeking to establish a permanent foothold along the St

Lawrence with ambitions of making inroads into the interior region. The entire attempted-

settlement process is characterised by naming, categorising and amassing encyclopaedic

knowledge without properly gaining entrenched experiential knowledge of the region and its

floral and faunal constituents, as the debacle of the forgotten cure for scurvy demonstrates.

Certainly the French would have had a curiosity to know the “other,” perhaps even a distorted

interest issuing from a fear that some Aboriginal groups would be more powerful than they.

Nonetheless, the French unquestioningly located themselves morally above the Aboriginal

peoples they encountered, using knowledge of their Christian God as the leverage which

rendered them civil and Aboriginal peoples barbaric, with reports of anthropophagia, a Wendat

war practice, being counted the worst of barbarous acts. During this late pre-contact era Wendat

egalitarianism encompassed all human and nonhuman nations whereas the French hierarchical

practices situated nonhuman species and non-Christian humans categorically beneath the French.

Of course these two worldviews as applied by each group with their respective

involvement in the growing fur trade would yield different environmental results. This topic,

examined in chapter seven, which covered the period 1609-1629, revealed the French as poised

to dramatically alter northeastern North America by initiating shifts in Aboriginal economies,

shifts that would serve commercial interests, largely of a distant metropole, rather than needs of

local communities and their bioregions. The extractive, wealth-accumulation economic model of

the French, paired with an unshakable hierarchical social system and a belief in the instrumental,

rather than intrinsic, value of nonhuman beings, could have led to a dramatic transformation of

the immediate and surrounding area of New France. However, the Wendat worldview, their deep

ecological understanding of their territory and its species, and their profound sense of being

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situated in, indeed defined by, place, helped to restrain the environmental damage that French

material yearnings could have wrought. Unlike the French, the Wendat were largely uninterested

in acquiring European goods for any reason beyond utility, symbolic meaning, or the pleasure

and status experienced through wealth distribution in their communities. The Wendat only

engaged in Wendat-French trade for the purpose of meeting these objectives, but they could not,

despite French inducements, be persuaded to become more heavily involved in the fur trade

because the French model of abstract wealth accumulation and an economy based on wants

rather than needs was disagreeable to them. The French despite a desire to establish permanent

settlements, were somewhat hamstrung in these efforts, their small labour force was stretched

between two unevenly disciplined strengths, trading and settling, the former requiring incessant

movement and itinerant deployment, the latter requiring some reluctant members to remain

stationary and commit to building settlements. Wendat economic autonomy at this time meant

the Wendat were concerned only with meeting their national economic and social objectives, not

those of the French. The Wendat experienced a cultural florescence and French requests for

greater involvement in the trade fell on deaf ears.

The environmental protective factors produced by Wendat indifference to wealth

accumulation and a cosmological belief in the necessity of interspecies reciprocity, were severely

harmed, as liveable principles, by the events explored in chapter eight, the period covering 1632-

1649. With the Wendat ravaged by disease and reduced to a remnant population, they were no

longer able to exercise the same autonomy in the fur trade, and their relations with the French

began to change markedly. Here the Jesuit conversion efforts take hold, not because the Wendat

are newly won over by Christianity but because they are now dependent on French goods and

nothing increased Wendat access to French material items like an avowal of faith in the Christian

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God. Ever since the French first arrived in northeastern North America they had labelled

uncultivated lands as wilderness areas inhabited by demonic forces. Lands and Aboriginal

peoples, by French reckoning, needed taming. In the first two decades of contact the French were

powerless to effect such changes because they were vastly outnumbered by the Wendat. In post-

epidemic Wendake matters changed irrevocably and the strong irreconcilable differences

between the conceptualisations the two groups held regarding the nonhuman other became

paramount with significant implications for the land and its original peoples. The French built

Ste Marie and created a French compound replete with edible plants and domesticated animals

transported from France, and living quarters that reflected an implicit hierarchy. Replacing, or at

best desiring to improve (e.g., maize), the Wendat land-use model had been a strategy of the

French since the beginning. Such a plan not only defies any understanding of the importance of

place or knowledge of the dynamic interplay of ecosystems, but also reflects the hubristic view

that the nonhuman world is to be dominated, a thesis under attack today.1 The French got their

project underway in Wendake but before it had a chance to cause lasting or widespread

transformations to the territory, the Wendat, and indeed the French among them, were routed by

the Haudenosaune. My findings reveal that the French and the Wendat mobilised by a

burgeoning transatlantic market into convergent activities altered their environments, in the

ongoing evolution and dialectic of human adaptation to and construction of their surrounds, but

the Wendat did so in a way more compatible with ecological systems.

Linking Past and Present

My research has asked what difference conceptualisations of the nonhuman other make to our

understanding of the world and our human-nonhuman relationships. If we understood better how

our ideas about the nonhuman affected our actions involving the nonhuman other and other 1 See William Leiss, The Domination of Nature (1972; Montreal: McGill-Queen’s UP, 1998).

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humans would we be better situated to make sense of our contemporary environmental

challenges? If we took seriously Zapf’s admonition to think of ourselves as place,1 ontologically

continuous with our surroundings, would we not see the inescapable connectedness of ideation

and activities? As I untangled beliefs about the nonhuman for both the Wendat and the French as

they appear in the primary sources, we saw how they extended beyond the ideational and

linguistic realms, having concrete effects on land-use practices, treatment of nonhuman animals,

and international relations. These findings are consistent with the primary tenets of ecofeminism,

namely that there are “important connections among the dominations of women, other

subordinated human groups, and nonhuman nature.”2 The French impulse to dominate the

nonhuman world, women and other human groups was evident in their expressed urgency to

tame wildernesses, their impulse to subdue female autonomy,3 and their insistence on Gallicising

and Christianising Wendat peoples.

Demonstrating the salient interconnections between conceptualisations and the

constellation of human activities and cultural structures, represented by social, political,

economic, and ecological processes is one task. Explaining the relevance these findings have for

the global environmental predicament we face today is another. My findings are pertinent to

contemporary challenges for several reasons. First, I chose to examine how conceptualisations

influence actions. While I recognise the historical contingency and therefore inherent instability

of human constructs and ideational formations all human beings have conceptualisations of

themselves and their surrounds and these are typically aggregated into larger cultural systems of

meaning and then instantiated in the environs. What are the common beliefs about the human-

1 M. Kim Zapf, Social Work and the Environment: Understanding People and Place (Toronto: Canadian Scholars’, 2009) 179-194. 2 Karen Warren, Ecofeminist Philosophy, 21. 3 Karen Anderson’s Chain Her by One Foot is an excellent thesis examining how Jesuit proselytising efforts among Wendat and Innu communities aimed to subordinate women to men, upsetting the former sexual equality.

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nonhuman circulating in dominant culture today? What are the innumerable enduring and

evolving conceptualisations belonging to Indigenous communities around the world? What do

these understandings mean for resource management, protected areas and biodiversity

conservation, social development, education, environmental assessment and ethics? Is it

necessary to change our conceptualisations, and if so, how might we develop new

understandings that would lead to the co-construction of human-nonhuman relationships and

environments that are more salubrious to all species?

Second, a principal focus of my thesis was an investigation of the land-use practices

belonging to the Wendat and French in the early seventeenth century. Again, such a study is

immensely relevant to the issues of today, for a defining feature of all living organisms is a need

to procure sufficient life nourishing materials to survive, and human beings are no exception.

Although the particulars of the environmental challenges the Wendat and French faced were

different from those we grapple with today, there are striking similarities. For example, both the

Wendat and French at different periods during their four-decade relations were concerned about

food shortages. The French response was to rely on trusted practices from their home country,

transposing French agriculture onto foreign lands with the twin objectives of producing civility

and sustenance. The Wendat response to a growing population concern and potential food and

clothing shortages was to shift their ecological and economic practices and move north to engage

in a viable symbiotic exchange relationship with the northern Algonkians. Today we as a species

face global food shortages, and I outlined in the first chapter some of the related issues of soil

erosion, desertification, water shortages and hot stains. One solution to global food shortages was

the development of the “Green Revolution,” a form of scientific agriculture which Shiva decries

as “a western patriarchal anti-nature model of agriculture, which shifts the control of food

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systems from women and peasants to food and agri-business multinationals and disrupts natural

processes.”1 In this system monocultures of rice and wheat that were planted to create high grain

yields replaced existing intercropping, biodiverse practices and used heavy chemical pesticides

that killed pollinators, bees and butterflies, causing local trees to stop bearing fruit: clearly not a

sustainable practice in the long term.

Using genetically modified organisms (GMOs) to amplify food production is similarly

problematic because of its tendency to integrate seeds and chemicals, as many GMOs are

designed to be herbicide and pesticide resistant. These herbicides and pesticides cause damage to

ecosystem health, killing and poisoning a variety of species including human beings as many of

these chemicals are known carcinogens. The links between my case study and the present partly

consist in stimulating thought about our defective land-use practices and finding our way as a

species, theoretically and practically, to environmental solutions that are truly sustainable and

renewable. What would it look like if we were to disaggregate the nonhuman world from global

market trends, multinational corporate interests, and the misguided belief in instrumentalism?

How might we treat the nonhuman, extract and manage natural resources, if we valued it

differently? Wendat success at sustainably inhabiting and managing their environs was a

combination of respect for the nonhuman, a perception of being inseparable from the nonhuman,

and a non-accumulative egalitarian model that had intrinsic safeguards against rampant

consumerism. What might we learn from this coalescence of factors so conducive to continued

environmental health? How might the dominant culture gain the kind of respect for the

nonhuman environment that would lead to measurable changes in our treatment of it? How can

1 Vandana Shiva, Staying Alive: Women, Ecology and Development (1989; Toronto: Zed Books, 2002) 97. See also Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life (New York: HarperCollins, 2007) 51, for a discussion of how, “Six companies “Monsanto, Syngenta, DuPont, Mitsui, Aventis, and Dow—now control 98 percent of the world’s seed sales” through terminator technology and other means.

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we as a consumer society incorporate lessons from the Wendat societal model that would render

the “reduce, reuse, recycle” slogan more meaningful?

Third, and last, my thesis focuses jointly on culture contact and ensuing power relations

among two selected Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal nations. The French and Wendat were

distinct cultural groups that from all historical accounts had not been in contact with each other

prior to the seventeenth century. Although the Wendat were eventually forced out of Wendake

by the Haudenosaune in 1649, they had already been culturally and environmentally devastated

by the French, first by the introduction of new and deadly pathogens, then by the aggressive

missionary foothold the Jesuits were able to establish in the wake of the depopulating epidemics.

Wendat egalitarianism and French hierarchicalism produced distinct and unsurprising effects on

land-use practices and cross-cultural relations. Based solely on the parameters of this case study,

my findings reveal the French were determined to reify hierarchical structures in New France

and the surrounding regions, an obvious example being the ranked living quarters of Ste Marie,

described in chapter eight. The French also saw the nonhuman world as a force to be cultivated

and overcome. As we have seen the Wendat entered into complex relations of reciprocity not

only with the northern Algonkians but also the various species native to their surrounds. Even the

ongoing skirmishes with the Haudenosaune prior to the 1640s, which are described in the

primary sources as commonly involving grisly torture of male captives, were not the product of

expansionist objectives or cultural chauvinism but were executed on the basis of a different

cultural and ontological understanding. Wendat men gained an opportunity to achieve valour as

warriors, and it was believed the ritualised sacrifice of male captives contributed to the ongoing

balance of cosmic forces. Haudenosaune captives, though tortured, were esteemed by the

Wendat if they were deemed to have died with courage.

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In my analysis I considered how French and Wendat understandings of other peoples, the

nonhuman other, and cosmology engendered or impeded pro-environmental, benevolent human-

land relationships and peaceful mutually beneficial international relations. My findings suggest

the Wendat approach yielded better results. I want to repeat here that I am strenuously opposed

to constructing Manichean dualisms, and remind the reader that within each cultural grouping,

that is the Wendat and the French, there would have been members whose beliefs were not

uniform with the sentiments of the collective. Moreover, substantially different findings may

have emerged had primary source texts been composed by Wendat scholars and political

personages or French traders and interpreters. However, with the texts available it was evident

that power circulated throughout Wendat-French culture contact. Initially the Wendat with their

numerical supremacy wielded tremendous power, and the French if they wanted to accomplish

any of the goals for which they had gone to New France, had to show appropriate respect. In the

post-epidemic era this had changed and the French sought to enforce their model of universalism

on an irreducible plurality of peoples, social forms, sexual mores, and land-use practices. So how

is all of this relevant to today? Well one answer is that we are a country that has “the First

Nations, the Métis and the Inuit at its core. We have to learn how to express that reality, the

reality of our history.”1 By going back to the early history of what is now Canada, we can begin

to think our way through, with Aboriginal peoples of course, our strained Aboriginal-non-

Aboriginal relations in this country. This case study provides but one example of the subjugative,

imperial practices used by non-Aboriginal peoples with Aboriginal communities. The legacy of

this history is apparent today and returning to and knowing the history of this country, of

Ontario, is necessary to the process of developing a strategy for carving out a desirable future

that would redress, to the extent that it is possible, colonial wrongs. 1 John Ralston Saul, A Fair Country: Telling Truths about Canada (Toronto: Viking, 2008) 35.

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The investigation of culture contact and power relations in my case study is also germane

to the contemporary trends in globalisation. We see today in many respects a reiteration of the

late-period French-Wendat power relations played out on a global scale. Corporations largely

based in the more industrially developed global north enter foreign nations with the extractive,

wealth-accumulation attitude that the French brought to New France, in the same manner that

other western European nations brought to their imperial endeavours. The putative economic

utopia that was to result from the commingling of national economies into an international

system of trade and capital flows is yet to be actualised. “Unfortunately, the twenty years since

the model became dominant have not brought prosperity; instead they have greatly increased the

separation between wealthy and poor within nations and among them.”1 Many of the desired

resources in the global market exist today on Indigenous lands creating conflict between

corporate interests and indigenous communities.2 This problem is not new and the seeds of the

conflict can be found in my case study: cultural chauvinism, belief in universalism, failure to

connect with or experience rootedness in place, an accumulative economic model with ceaseless

exponential growth, and a flawed valuing of the nonhuman other. An unbroken line can be traced

from the French with their dualistic spirit-matter beliefs creating a hyper-separation from the

land and their arrogant relations with the Wendat to the global corporate plunder of nonhuman

spaces today, the infringement on Indigenous lands, and the concatenation of associated

environmentally racist and unjust events. My thesis has considerable ramifications for

environmental challenges today because many revolve around the centuries-old problem of

chauvinistic self-interest (whether the French then or global corporate powers now) that devalues

1 Jerry Mander, Introduction. “Globalization and the Assault on Indigenous Resources,” Paradigm Wars: Indigenous Peoples’ Resistance to Globalization, eds. J. Mander and V. Tauli Corpuz (San Francisco: Sierra, 2006) 8. 2 Jerry Mander, Introduction. “Globalization and the Assault on Indigenous Resouces,” 4.

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pluralism, diversity and democratic ideals subordinating these to an accumulation agenda for the

few and the imperative of technical efficiency. By interrogating and problematising these issues,

by recognising through historical understanding the redundancy of the social, political,

ecological and economic patterns, internationally and globally, we can begin not only to ask how

things could have developed differently, but also how might we co-create internationally an

equitable, renewable, earth-friendly resource use and exchange model now?

Jacobs observed, “A culture is unsalvageable if stabilizing forces themselves become

ruined and irrelevant.”1 Though unsalvageable is too strong a word to apply in the case of the

seventeenth-century Wendat, they certainly were culturally unravelled by the destabilising

influences of French presence, pathogenically and ideologically, in their territories. The Wendat

language (language often considered a critical marker for cultural thriving) is technically dead

today.2 Various scholars and theorists have begun to speculate on the potentiality for a global

collapse, viewing our era as unprecedented for we, the human species, could make the earth

uninhabitable for us and countless other species.3 But ironically as Eagleton notes, just as

we have begun to think small, history has begun to act big. ‘Act locally, think globally’ has become a familiar leftist slogan; but we live in a world where the political right acts globally and the postmodern left thinks locally. As the grand narrative of capitalist globalization, and the destructive reaction which it brings in its wake, unfurls across the planet, it catches these intellectuals at a time when many of them have almost ceased to think in political terms at all.4

Globalisation threatens to overpower important local interests, interests that often preserve much

needed biodiversity, and we are witnessing in affluent nations a retreat into the self and the cult

of consumerism. We cannot count on government or science or any other authority to solve the

environmental crisis. The onus is on each of us to change our thinking and habits, to relearn a

1 Jane Jacobs, Dark Age Ahead (Toronto: Random House, 2004) 24. 2 John Steckley, A Huron-English/English-Huron Dictionary, 3. 3 See Jared Diamond, Collapse, 521; see also Eban Goodstein, Fighting for Love in a Century of Extinction, 145. 4 Terry Eagleton, After Theory (New York: Basic, 2003) 72.

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way to be in the world that does not consist of exploitation of land and others but respectful

interactions with both. Any model based on human management of ecosystems is errant because

we can no more manage an ecosystem than we can consciously regulate “the beating of our

heart, the flows of hormones, the cellular repair processes.”1 Wilson makes a similar point,

suggesting that lost ecosystems are lost forever. Even if scientists were able to preserve cultures

of all the disappearing species of an ecosystem, trying to recreate their former ecological unit and

biodynamic assemblage would be like “unscrambling an egg with a pair of spoons.”2 After

witnessing our optimistic project of progress and modernity (buttressed by the oppression of so

many Indigenous and non-European others together with their lands) go terribly awry where do

we go from here? David Orr would counsel us to avoid equally marinating in pessimism or

optimism because both can lead to inaction. His recommendation is to adopt hope, and he

describes hope as “a verb with its sleeves rolled up.”3 This kind of hope demands

acknowledgement of the very serious problems we face environmentally, but simultaneously

demands courageous, unremitting and thoughtful action. This is the kind of action social work

with its various proficiencies and unique scholarship is poised to do.

Relevance of Findings to Environmental Social Work

In chapter one I introduced some of the environmental social work scholarship that has been

emerging in the past two decades, scholarship exploring the importance of environmental

considerations to our profession’s practice, education, and theoretical and philosophical

foundations. This section is designed to knit together the seams of my historical textual analysis

involving a case study from four centuries ago and the mounting environmental and social issues

1 Mike Whitfield quoted in Thomas Homer Dixon, The Ingenuity Gap: Can We Solve the Problems of the Future? (Toronto: Vintage, 2000) 47. 2 Edward O. Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (New York: Vintage, 1999) 296. 3 David Orr made this statement during his keynote presentation at the International Conference on Ecology and Professional Helping, Calgary, May 8, 2009.

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we face today in the early twenty-first century. I choose carefully the metaphor of knitting seams

to suggest that I am conjoining something that has come apart, the past and the present, but in

many respects only appears to be separate for the past informs the present in incalculable ways

and an understanding of this past is necessary to developing thoughtful responses to Aboriginal-

non-Aboriginal issues and environmental challenges today, and certainly has much to offer the

burgeoning field of environmental social work. Diamond is right to suggest that wise decision-

making in this precarious time depends “on the courage to practice long-term thinking,”1 and I

would add that it is imperative that the notion of long-term be bidirectional looking both into the

past and the future. History has much to teach us about social, ecological and political processes,

what worked, what failed, how power circulated and to what ends, why things developed as they

did, how they might have been different, and learning from our past mistakes is invaluable to

moving forward intelligently. Gramsci famously asserted, “The starting point of critical

elaboration is the consciousness of what one really is, and is ‘knowing thyself’ as a product of

the historical process to date, which has deposited in you an infinity of traces, without leaving an

inventory.”2 Said adds that in the Italian text Gramsci finishes this statement by concluding

“therefore it is imperative at the outset to compile such an inventory.”3 This case study has

contributed in small part to the compilation of such an inventory, an inventory that is meant to

help us know ourselves better in the context of social and environmental, as well as community

and political, matters.

Social work is in an exceptional position to respond as an academic discipline and as a

professional practice to our environmental crisis. If the goal regarding our contemporary

1 Diamond, Collapse, 522. 2 Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, trans. and eds. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International, 1971) 324. 3 Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Random House, 1994) 3.

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environmental challenges is to effect an environmental and sociocultural transformation, then it

is imperative that theory be profoundly connected to practice to achieve this end. Fortunately,

social work meets this criterion, for it is a scholarly discipline having an approach to research

and theorising that surpasses the limits of both, being always grounded in the realm of praxis. In

the social work field it is possible for scholars to emerge who approximate the Gramscian

organic intellectual ideal, an intellectual who is deeply connected and responsive to her/his

community and environment, not the traditional intellectual who believes in autonomy and

separation from social and environmental struggles.1 The foundational metaphor of our

profession is person-in-environment and as problematic and unrealised as this concept may be, it

still represents a great starting place to launch thought and discussion about theory, practice,

persons, communities, justice, and politics in a way that considers the importance of place.

Our profession does not yet possess a broad environmental understanding, but over time

social work has begun to consider and adopt some environmental views. Much of the existing

environmental social work literature has explored the relevance of environmental theories to our

profession, two theories in particular: deep ecology and ecofeminism. Selecting to focus on these

two theories makes a lot of sense because of our profession’s foundational person-in-

environment metaphor and social justice principles. Both theories consider the well being of

persons and attempt a reconfiguration of the “self” construct, a new definition of self cognisant

of our ecological aspects. Ecofeminism, which interrogates intersecting systems of oppression

analysing gender, race, class, nonhuman, and other minority location dynamics within a social

and environmental justice framework, corresponds well to traditional social work aims and

1 Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks; see also Stuart Hall, “Cultural Studies and Its Theoretical Legacies,” Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, eds. David Morley and Kuan Hsing-Chen (London: Routledge, 1996) 267, for a discussion of the difficulty with the term organic intellectual because it is inextricably linked to an emerging historical movement, and determining the emergence of such a phenomenon is always tricky.

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environmental social work objectives.1 Deep ecology, as described by Naess, the Norwegian

philosopher who coined the term, rejects the belief pervasive in dominant culture that human

beings are separate from the nonhuman world, arguing all life forms are interdependent “knots in

the biospherical net or field of intrinsic relations.”2 While this may sound esoteric and not

directly relevant to social work practice, both Besthorn and Ungar have observed the importance

of this theory for rethinking our limited conception of self, having implications for social work

practice in terms of how we engage with clients, how we situate our professional selves and how

we experience the nonhuman.3 Not surprisingly Ungar recommends looking to critical feminist

perspectives to inform the application of deep ecological theory to social work because, I

believe, deep ecology theory is intrinsically decidedly contemplative and risks philosophical

retreatism.4

My case study can broaden the theoretical dimension of environmental social work

discourse by bringing detailed description and analysis to the appreciation of what it means to

have a deep ecological understanding of self and other, and to conceiving how respectful and

equitable interpersonal, international and human-nonhuman other relations might look. While the

Wendat certainly did not think of themselves as deep ecologists or ecofeminists, their cultural

and quotidian practices were strongly resonant with tenets of deep ecology and ecofeminism

today. That various scholars within both these contemporary environmental streams borrowed

1 See Fred Besthorn and Diane Pearson-McMillen, “The Oppression of Women and Nature: Ecofeminism as a Framework for an Expanded Ecological Social Work,” Families in Society: The Journal of Contemporary Human Services 83.3(2002): 221-232. 2 Arne Naess, “The Shallow and the Deep, Long-Range Ecology Movements: Summary,” Deep Ecology for the 21st Century: Readings on the Philosophy and Practice of the New Environmentalism, ed. George Sessions (Boston: Shambhala, 1995) 151. 3 See Fred Besthorn, “Radical Environmentalism and the Ecological Self,” Journal of Progressive Human Services 13.1 (2002): 53-72; see Michael Ungar, “A Deeper, More Social Ecological Social Work Practice,” The Social Service Review 76.3 (2002): 480-497. 4 See Ungar, “A Deeper, More Social Ecological Social Work Practice,” 494; see also Fred Besthorn, “Radical Environmentalism and the Ecological Self.”

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from and explored Indigenous teachings and cultural ways explains much of this similarity.

Having an opportunity to glimpse, however imperfectly because of the inescapable cultural

refraction resulting from the French imperial gaze, an example of people, citizens of the Wendat

confederacy, living nondualistically, without separation from the nonhuman other provides

further avenues for considering alternate constructions of the self and the human-nonhuman

interdependency.1 The Wendat had a profound sense of place, which by all determinants would

have exceeded the knowledge base and understanding of contemporary bioregionalists who seek

to re-establish connections with place but lack the advantage of thousands of years of land

tenure. This case study, and others of its kind, can help environmental social work, which has

begun incorporating deep ecology and ecofeminist ideas into its theoretical base and reworking

the concept of place, through the example of a rich culture that lived these principles deeply.

Historical knowledge of this kind combined with knowledge of the present can stimulate robust

human responses to our contemporary environmental challenges and can enhance environmental

social work theoretical discourse.

An examination of environmental health literature elucidates the need for social workers

to incorporate environmental issues into direct practice, for environmental toxins are negatively

impacting human health, affecting individuals, families and communities, the very social entities

we serve.2 Lovell and Johnson sensibly identify the need for social work to develop practice

modalities, assessment and intervention strategies that will prepare social workers in direct

1 M. Kim Zapf’s suggestion that the person-in-environment construct be retired and replaced with person-as-environment was strongly influenced by his long-standing involvement with Aboriginal communities. See Social Work and the Environment. 2 See for example J.M. Samet and R.H. White, “Urban Air Pollution, Health and Equity,” Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health 58 (2004): 3-5; John Eyles, “A Political Ecology of Environmental Contamination?” Unhealthy Times: Political Economy Perspectives on Health and Care in Canada, eds. Pat Armstrong, Hugh Armstrong and David Coburn (Toronto: Oxford UP, 2001) 171-194; and Maude Barlow and Elizabeth May, Frederick Street: Life and Death on Canada’s Love Canal (Toronto: HarperCollins, 2000).

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practice to address the psychosocial implications of environmental challenges.1 My findings are

of considerable value to direct practice involving environment-related illnesses because the

Wendat not only had a highly developed sense of place but also a system of healing and

ceremonial practices that were solidly connected to place, considered the “Onderha,” the

“ground” of the culture. Nabigon and Mawhiney use Cree oral teachings involving the medicine

wheel to demonstrate how healing in the Cree tradition resides in recreating harmony and

wholeness within individuals and their surrounds.2 In chapter five I discussed how the Wendat

viewed all their activities as contributing to the ongoing cosmological balance, for the world that

they experienced emerged out of chaos and balance was maintained through human

participation. When our relations with our surrounds are fractured and we are trying to address

biopsychosocial issues and illnesses that have environmental origins, looking to cultures that

have long conceptualised healing and intervention as implicitly necessitating improving our

relationship to our land base makes a lot of sense. I am not recommending cultural appropriation

but rather by enlarging our professional understanding of earth-based healing approaches we can

begin to think through the practice challenges that environmental illnesses pose, perhaps leading

to new modalities and interventions that are suited to our time and culture.

For example, if direct-service social work practitioners were to reconsider and

reconceptualise place in a manner similar to the Wendat, whose very confederate identity was

contingent upon their bioregion, not merely as a theoretical alembic but a deeply felt and

experienced commitment and connection to their land base, this would have far-reaching

implications for practice. In our profession the dominance of the social over the geographic has

1 Madeline Lovell and Douglas Johnson, “The Environmental Crisis and Direct Social Work Practice,” The Global Environmental Crisis, eds. Marie Hoff and John McNutt (1994; Aldershot, Eng.: Ashgate, 1998) 199-218. 2 Herb Nabigon and Anne-Marie Mawhiney, “Aboriginal Theory: A Cree Medicine Wheel Guide for Healing First Nations,” Social Work Treatment: Interlocking Theoretical Approaches, 4th ed., ed. Francis J. Turner (New York: Free Press, 1996) 18-38.

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tended largely to obscure the ways biospheric features act upon individuals and society. When

social work practitioners become anchored in place, or come to see themselves as place as Zapf

suggests, then the ability to foster a critical consciousness among individuals and families

regarding environmental concerns increases as does the possibility of reconnecting individuals,

families, and children to their land base. In the past it was argued that “[w]ilderness programs

help clients form deep committed relationships with the land,”1 but Ungar astutely observes how

this approach reinforces the urban-rural divide, dichotomizing built and natural environments,

providing little in the way of resiliency for at-risk youth living in urban regions.2 If we developed

urban place-oriented programs as well, programs that engaged clients in a process of

understanding what sustains them, its quality and its source, then this could be the site of an

empowering place-based practice. This process of environmental consciousness-raising could

lead to persons making choices that support and sustain, rather than exploit and destroy, the land

bases they actually inhabit rather than places to which they might retreat. Through critiquing the

incessant growth model of global capitalism and the pernicious effects of unchecked

consumerism, a different narrative could surface in which meaning consists not in wealth

accumulation but in relationships, empathic connections with others, human and nonhuman, and

the very land base on which we depend, making unmitigated objectification, management, and

domination of the nonhuman untenable.3 The possibility for an empathic human-nonhuman

relationship of this kind has been exemplified by the Wendat in this case study.

Direct-service social work practitioners could also bring to their practice, both at the

assessment and intervention level, an expanded biopsychosocial-spiritual perspective that 1 Katherine McMain Park, “The Personal Is Ecological: Environmentalism of Social Work,” Social Work 41.3 (1996): 320-323. 2 Michael Ungar, “Deep Ecology and the Roots of Resilience: The Importance of Setting in Outdoor Experienced-based Programming for At-risk Children,” Critical Social Work 4.1 (2003). 3 See also Thomas Keefe, “The Bio-Psycho-Social-Spiritual Origins of Environmental Justice,” Critical Social Work 4.1 (2003).

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includes the physical environment wherein the physical, mental, social, and spiritual experiences

and phenomena occur. This would be a geo-biopsychosocial-spiritual model in which the

nonhuman natural environment would figure prominently in assessment and intervention. This

approach could expand our profession’s multilevel intervention strategy, addressing explicitly

the interactional nature of the human and environmental. The Wendat wellness model, involving

a cosmological understanding of species interdependencies and human-nonhuman

interpenetration, had an earth- and place-based component that was relevant to everyday

practices in terms of promoting social, community and bioregional harmony, and relevant to

health recovery. As anxiety and grief mount due to actual and anticipated losses,1 for example

experiencing diminished health as a result of poor air quality or choosing not to have children

because of apprehensions about the world the next generation will inhabit, social work

practitioners by using the geo-biopsychosocial-spiritual model can begin to invite, identify, and

assess these issues and then provide relevant supports and interventions.

The environmental social work literature has not yet extended into group work

scholarship, and this is surprising given the convivial fit between the two. I recently presented at

a conference where I outlined the links between group work, environmental social work and

some key findings from this case study.2 Group work has sharing, mutuality, appreciating

diversity, empowerment and accomplishing undertakings as key values at the core of its theory

and practice,3 and these are principles that are related to varying degrees to prominent

environmental theories such as bioregionalism, ecofeminism, and environmental justice. For

1 John Coates, Ecology and Social Work: Toward a New Paradigm (Halifax: Fernwood, 2003) 131. 2 Arielle Dylan, “Think Green, Act Group: Weaving Environmental Theory into Social Work with Groups,” International Conference on Ecology and Professional Helping, Calgary, May 8, 2009. 3 See for example Roselle Kurland and Robert Salmon, Teaching with Groups: Teaching a Methods Course in Social work with Groups (Alexandria, VA: Council on Social Work Education, 1999); see also Ronald Toseland and Robert Rivas, “Value and Ethics in Group Work Practice,” Introduction to Group Work Practice, 6th ed. (Boston: Allyn, 2008) 5-9.

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example sharing, mutuality and celebrating diversity, of an interpersonal, cross-cultural, and

interspecies kind, are essential to bioregionalism, ecofeminism and environmental justice.

Because ecofeminism and environmental justice have well-developed activist dimensions, there

is a strong association with the empowerment and goal-oriented focus of group work. The

Wendat-French case study I investigated showed group values to be prevalent among the

Wendat: decisions were made consensually honouring all members in the process; the substantial

ethic of sharing among the Wendat made the idea of beggars on the streets in France

incomprehensible and offensive to Wendat sensibilities; mutuality was the norm among Wendat

people, as their social relations hinged on reciprocity and their economy was based on equal

exchange; the Wendat not only appreciated diversity but welcomed it; and Wendat society was

an empowerment culture in which no member could fathom subordinating her or his freedom to

another, making the French hierarchical social structure especially foreign.

Along with possessing values which today are central to group work practice, the Wendat

considered themselves “dwellers on a peninsula,” which brings to mind Sale’s “dweller’s in the

land” phrase,1 having a strong connection with their land base and a deep knowledge of

nonhuman species with whom they shared their territory. The Wendat also had strong

collectivist-oriented social relations; particularly striking were their egalitarian gender and

international relations, evoking the precepts and objectives of ecofeminist and environmental

justice praxis of today. Wendat beliefs, values and cultural practices, which were strikingly

similar to core group work principles and eminent environmental theories, enabled the Wendat to

exist on the land in a way that the imperial French, with their top-down, hierarchical ordering,

their faulty conception of the human-nonhuman realm, and their imperial discriminatory

imaginings, could not. In the European imperial paradigm geography becomes another object to 1 Kirkpatrick Sale, Dwellers in the Land: The Bioregional Vision (Athens: U of Georgia P, 1991).

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be known, overtaken and absorbed into foreign rule. With such a model it is difficult to have any

true appreciation for the integrity of the land and its biotic members. The environmental

challenges we face today, locally and globally, can be traced in part to this faulty understanding

of human interconnectedness with the world and others both human and nonhuman. Conversely,

the successful model that Wendat society provides of a confederated peoples living sustainably

in their territory and having equitable social and international relations is full of learning

opportunities for a culture that has lost its way. Again, this is not to suggest that the dominant

culture should haphazardly and disrespectfully adopt Wendat practices, but having examples of

societies who got things right helps those societies that are flailing envisage alternate

possibilities. Because there are certain aspects of Wendat cultural values and land-use practices

that are similar to group work values and environmental theories already discussed in the

environmental social work literature, this case study supports infusing environmental thought

into group work practice and makes a case for exploring further the practices of societies, both

historical and contemporary, where successful international and human-nonhuman relations have

been achieved. One reason to incorporate environmental content into group work practice is not

only the fit with respect to theoretical values but also the inevitability that group members’ lives

are affected in some way, wittingly or not, by nonhuman environmental factors such as climate

change, long-range transboundary air pollution, and industrial and agricultural toxins. Our

profession needs to continue to think about how these issues are impacting individuals, families,

and groups and to develop helpful interventions.

Recently Dessel et al. have advanced an “intergroup dialogue approach” as a public

process for examining and confronting difficult political, racial, religious, and cultural issues

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with the aim of promoting social change.1 The empowerment aspect of group work has

ramifications for community practice, as “self-help group participation” has been shown to be

“strongly correlated with civic responsibility and political efficacy. Group members found

themselves able to push for government policy changes and to engage in public education.”2

Community organising has long been recognised by environmental social workers as an

important strategic arm of our profession helping citizens to resist interlinked community threats

such as poverty, oppression, and environmental and public health concerns.3 Community practice

is also essential to the process of transitioning from an unsustainable economic model to a viable

society having environmentally sound practices.4 “The social worker who opts for

change….knows that all attempts at making a radical transformation of society require a

conscious organisation of the oppressed and that this calls for a lucid vanguard.”5 Increasingly

with greater access to information and the help of influential political, academic and artistic

figures6 a growing consciousness of environmental issues has penetrated mainstream culture.

This has created to some degree a “lucid vanguard,” to use Freire’s term, ready for community

organising. Given the widening gap between rich and poor, and the way race and poverty work

as determining factors in environmental toxic exposure, the need for environmental social

workers to operate at the community level is considerable. Assisting communities to combat

environmental racism and injustice and helping revitalisation efforts of post-disaster

1 Adrienne Dessel, Mary E. Rogge, and Sarah B. Garlington, “Using Intergroup Dialogue to Promote Social Justice and Change,” Social Work 51.4 (2006): 303-315. 2 Bong-Ho Mok, “Organizing Self-Help Groups for Empowerment and Social Change: Findings and Insights from an Empirical Study in Hong Kong,” Journal of Community Practice 13.1 (2005): 50-51. 3 See Stephen Kauffman, “Citizen Participation in Environmental Decisions: Policy, Reality, and Considerations for Community Organizing,” The Global Environmental Crisis, 219-239; see also Jan Gallagher Shubert, “Case Studies in Community Organizing around Environmental Threats,” The Global Environmental Crisis, 240-257. 4 See Dorothy Gamble and Marie D. Hoff, “Sustainable Community Development,” The Handbook for Community Practice, ed. Marie O. Weil (New York: Sage, 2004) 169-188. 5 Paolo Freire, “The Social Worker’s Role in the Process of Change,” The Politics of Education: Culture, Power and Liberation, trans. Donald Macedo (Santa Barbara: Greenwood, 1985) 41. 6 I am thinking here of persons such as Al Gore, David Orr, Joanna Macy, Leonardo DiCaprio, etc.

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communities in recovery are two examples of the way community social workers can apply their

well-honed skills to environmental social work concerns.1

The case study I examined has numerous examples of the Wendat, who had a sustainable

economic-ecological model, engaging in various forms of community practice. When fires

burned down several village longhouses, community members coordinated a post-disaster

recovery project and quickly rebuilt homes, collaboratively leveraging existing human power for

neighbourhood redevelopment. When epidemics ravaged Wendat societies, communities

organised to resist French presence among them, believing the French were responsible for the

disease. And, prior to epidemics, when Wendat persons were ill, village members would

mobilise to effect a community-based cure. While the French had some collective practices, for

example the building of French structures in New France and Wendake, these were not true

collectivist practices for they had a hierarchical rather than egalitarian base. In many ways the

Wendat-French case study reveals possibilities and barriers for community building under

egalitarian and non-egalitarian conditions. Wendat society was inherently community oriented,

and this was reflected in their consensus based decision-making practices and the expectation

that all village members were to participate in community events.2 The Wendat example

demonstrates the potentialities for both a politically oppositional community practice and a basic

1 See Loretta Pyles, “Community Organising for Post-Disaster Social Development,” International Social Work 50.3 (2007) 321-333; see also Janet L. Finn, “La Victoria: Claiming Memory, History and Justice in a Santiago Población,” Journal of Community Practice 13.3 (2005): 9-31, and Mary E. Rogge, Kimberly Davis, Deborah Maddox and Milton Jackson, “Leveraging Environmental, Social and Economic Justice at Chattanooga Creek: A Case Study,” Journal of Community Practice 13.3 (2005): 33-53. 2 See Richard Hoefer, “Highly Effective Human Services Interest Groups,” Journal of Community Practice 9.2 (2001): 1-13 for a discussion of the key practices that make groups effective. The Wendat possessed several of these.

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community-wellness model, and lessons can be drawn from this case study that have application

to contemporary environmental social justice and transformation aims.1

I see community practice as a significant part of a sound environmental social work

model because communities, being the context of all our professional practices, more than any

other social unit, embody the expression of environment. The consideration of persons in context

and the circulation of power within these relationships constitute the core of our professional

social justice orientation. It is at the community level in which the woes of the individual

aggregate with those of other community members that social injustices are most manifest.

Communities beset by environmental contamination, such as the historic Love Canal case and

the contemporary Aamjiwnaang First Nation ordeal, illustrate the way market, economic,

political, and social forces contribute to the disproportionality of environmental burdens. Coates

suggests the development of caring communities attentive to the common good and engaged in

active citizen participation is essential in this time of environmental crisis.2 He recommends

special attention be paid to environmental injustice and community health and that decentralized

polities be developed which “reduce the impact of decisions being made by people who are

detached physically, and often emotionally, from the community.”3 Here the Wendat-French

case study provides an example of a successful local, eco-centric political structure guided by

bioregional parameters and a barter economy being dramatically altered by involvement in a

global market economy and the influence of a removed ideology and polity that had not evolved

organically in place, namely the French in New France and, more specifically, in Wendake. This

case study has value not only for the process of developing decentralized political structures but

1 See James DeFilippis, Robert Fisher, and Eric Shragge, “What’s Left in the Community? Oppositional Politics in Contemporary Practice,” Community Development Journal 44.1 (2009): 38-52. 2 John Coates, Ecology and Social Work, 111-120. 3 John Coates, Ecology and Social Work, 121.

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also for linking political, economic, social and environmental factors in coalition building and

community development activities. Social workers can look to the Wendat societal model,

among other models, and learn community organization methods that promote community

systems that differ from those typical of the neoliberal global economy, resist the tendency to

polarize urban and rural communities (often with the rural community absorbing a toxic debt for

the urban centre),1 and seek to rectify the disparity between the global north and south by

diminishing a community’s ecological footprint in the development process.

In many respects what I am suggesting is that environmental social work builds on

existing community practices and values such as development, organizing, planning and

progressive change.2 By adopting a community-as-place model, community-oriented

environmental social work could add to its social and economic justice agenda an environmental

justice and environmental health concern. The commitment to basic human rights for all

community members would be enlarged to include a consideration of rights for nonhuman

others, as well as a deliberation of the rights belonging to place. The focus community practice

has historically had on capacity building for disadvantaged populations and racialized

communities would include in an environmental social work model, an analysis of and

participatory response to the disproportionate toxic burden borne by these communities. In this

model activities that promote political and civic participation to right social and economic

wrongs would necessarily include environmental concerns, environmental justice aims,

sustainable approaches, and environmental empowerment strategies both at the local community

and global multinational levels. Environmental social workers committed to community practice

1 See Mick Hillman, “Environmental justice: A crucial link between environmentalism and community development?” Community Development Journal 37.4 (2002): 349-360. 2 These four points are identified by Mary Weil, “Introduction: Contexts and challenges for 21st-century communities,” The Handbook of Community Practice, ed. Marie Weil (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2005) 9.

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could also develop an evolving inventory of sound local practice examples of programs

successfully integrating sustainability with community development so that persons engaged in

participatory action can use these cases as inspiration and models when determining strategies

and actions for their own communities. The community serves to a great extent as the site for an

environmental identity, a new place-based eco-awareness, through which to develop a collective

solidarity in resistance to unsustainable or toxic practices, and the environmental social worker

skilled in community practice has a tremendous role to play.

Many policy recommendations put forward by environmental social workers are

confluent with Wendat societal structuring and social values. McNutt proposes a model for a

sustainable social welfare system that hinges on a commitment to localism, foregrounding social

justice, and valuing participation both as an ethical good and a practical necessity.1 Coates’s

policy views reinforce and amplify some of these same concerns, emphasising “local self-

reliance,” care that we not exceed our carrying capacity, and resource use that causes the least

environmental destruction while promoting the most social good.2 Mary argues for an

“ecological social democratic economy” and a need to replace the predominant anthropocentric

ethic with an earth-centred model that makes ideological and ecological room for all species to

thrive.3 All of these recommendations advanced by contemporary environmental social workers

were implicit policies and understandings contained within Wendat society. I will not here

demonstrate a one-to-one correspondence between each of these points and Wendat society, but

will provide two illustrative reminders. The people of the Wendat confederacy did practice local

self-reliance, assembling their sustenance locally, primarily through farming and fishing but also

1 See John McNutt, “Social Welfare Policy and the Environmental Crisis: It’s Time to Rethink Our Traditional Models,” The Global Environmental Crisis, eds. Hoff and McNutt (1994; Aldershot, Eng.: Ashgate, 1998) 36-52. 2 See John Coates, Ecology and Social Work¸ 149. 3 See Nancy Mary, Social Work in a Sustainable World, 166-171.

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hunting and gathering. For those required goods that were extrinsic to their local resource base,

they entered into mutually beneficial trade relations with other nations also practicing local self-

reliance, their negotiations in the early seventeenth century with the French, who were not living

within the limits of their own resource base, being a departure from this model. The Wendat also

had an earth-centred model, which I discussed at length in chapter five, where an earth-based

morality and an understanding that nonhuman animal species comprised nations influenced

treatment of the nonhuman.

Today social and governmental policies must reflect a truly sustainable social ecological

model if we are to have any chance of surviving our contemporary environmental challenges.

Like my discussion of persons and communities, public policies that seek to address

environmental and social wellness, must develop in the context of place. It is impossible to

develop policies that prevent ecosystem destruction and promote environmental and social

wellness without their being tied to bioregional realities. This would necessitate a multiplicity of

policy constructions geared toward the exigencies of specific localities and fostering greater

community control over local resources. While larger environmental policy themes about the

human right to clean air, potable water, uncontaminated habitable lands, and basic environmental

protections are easy to articulate (less easy to implement, however), the issue of alternate models

with decentralized themes where social, economic, and environmental responsibilities are

divested to a locality or bioregion are more difficult to delineate as trepidation surrounds how

best to accomplish this shift without slouching into some brand of anarchy. Alternative

environmental policy models emphasizing local responsibility need to be further developed

before they can be operational. If “policy means choice” as Lightman suggests,1 then one choice

that environmental social workers could advance for the public, beyond the right to a clean 1 Ernie Lightman, Social Policy in Canada (Don Mills, ON: Oxford UP, 2003) 259.

319

environment, is an array of livelihoods that do not force individuals into the impossible position

of having to choose between jobs and the environment, the age-old debate that unfortunately pits

environmentalists against the working class in a false dichotomy that obscures the fact that both

factions depend equally on the nonhuman realm. Environmental social workers advocating for

policy change could labour to ensure that loggers and fisherpeople and others who choose to

preserve dying or endangered species and threatened ecosystems have the safety net of

alternative (preferably green) employment or, at minimum, income assistance with a plan of

employment training and workforce re-entry. In short, environmental social workers would

create, contribute to, and support those policies designed to meet basic human needs

multigenerationally, renewably, and sustainably. We need to include these policy aims, while we

continue to advocate for human and community rights in the context of environmental justice

(with a special focus on racialised and low-income groups, and children), ecosystems and species

protection, environmental contaminant and pollution regulation, and global heating abatement.

A discussion of community practice and policy issues leads, for me, invariably to a

consideration of international concerns. We live in a world where activities in a specific locality

can have wide-ranging impacts globally. Again one need only remember the example of long-

range transboundary air pollution. But we also live in a world where the continued rush toward

globalisation can have crushing effects on communities wanting to practice traditional ways of

relating to the land, rather than the approach of the dominant society. We witness in many

respects a repeat of history on a global scale: “Whereas colonization favored the Christian god,

today’s globalization model favors the gods of money and technology. It is a logic equally

distant from reality, brutally imposed by one group of self-proclaimed monarchs.”1 Moxley et al.

1 Winona LaDuke, “The People Belong to the Land,” Paradigm Wars: Indigenous Peoples’ Resistance to Globalization, eds. Jerry Mander and Victoria Tauli-Corpuz (San Francisco: Sierra, 2006) 24.

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have used the term “glocal,” borrowed from the intentional community at Camphill Copake, to

describe the need to combine local with global sustainability practices, which represents a “new

way of thinking about social work and community practice,” where a dialectic between global

issues and local consequences, and global issues and local initiatives occurs the world over.1 As

the globalisation trend continues and the nation state gives way to a growing neoliberal economic

order, we need to think about local rights and local needs of peoples and nonhuman others. We

need to develop a new global ethics2 that addresses the multilayered effects of globalisation,

socially, environmentally and politically, for my case study revealed the potential devastation

that can be wrought once a foreign culture with an oppressive paradigm gains power. So we must

tackle the challenges of the new global power politics and find a way to dislodge the authority of

hegemonic multinational corporations by using a sophisticated political approach that employs

social and environmental justice strengths at several scales. Environmental social work is able to

do this because we have a history of established proficiencies at individual, family, group,

community, and policy levels. These proficiencies can be put, through a variety of means, in the

service of professional acts of resistance to those practices of global capitalism that are

environmentally and culturally destructive.

Not to be ignored in this environmental social work section is a discussion of Aboriginal-

non-Aboriginal issues. My case study showed the devastating impact of French cultural

imperialism on the Wendat peoples in the post-epidemic era. Those of us who are non-

Aboriginal need to visit and revisit this nation’s colonial past to gain a context, to learn about

power and multiple recurring and shifting sites of oppression existing from the time of contact

1 David P. Moxley, Ann Rosegrant Alvarez, Alice K. Johnson, and Lorraine M. Gutiérrez, “Appreciating the Glocal in Community Practice: Camphill, Vaiotas and Intentional Community,” Journal of Community Practice 13.3 (2005): 1-7. 2 See Karen Smith Rotabi, Denise Gammonley, Dorothy N. Gamble and Marie O. Weil, “Integrating Globalization into the Social Work Curriculum,” Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare 34.2 (2007): 165-185.

321

through today, so that we can be responsible citizens and so that we can respond meaningfully

and respectfully to Aboriginal-non-Aboriginal issues of our time. Because many Indigenous

communities are at risk of plunder by the agendas and activities of multinational corporations

and the global world-systems perspective,1 there is an explicit need for environmental social

workers to have knowledge and examples of what culture contact relations involving two groups

with contradictory economic models (in my case study, for example the egalitarian and local

versus the hierarchical and inchoately nation state) looked like in the past. Learning this history

not only produces better social workers of every kind, whether working with Aboriginal

communities or not, but also makes us better citizens of this nation now called Canada.

As Battiste has asserted, a postcolonial reality currently exists only as an aspirational

practice. Through glimpsing early cultural imperialism between French and Wendat society, and

persistent colonial forces acting on Aboriginal peoples today, environmental social workers

involved with Aboriginal communities are better able to assist with self-determination objectives

and reclamation of traditional land bases. To this end, this thesis can be used as facilitative work

linking past and present, linking the historical case study under examination with the

investigating subject, producing through the mediated understanding of Aboriginal self-

determinative decolonization aims in the geopolitical region now Canada and ecofeminist

environmental social justice principles possibilities for historically rooted and politically sound

cross-cultural practices. Moreover, from history we learn how the multifaceted interplay of

social, political, economic and ideological structures in culture-contact situations having a strong

colonial aspect relates to neoconservative financial institutions and international economic

agreements in this era of globalization, undermining Indigenous rights to sovereignty and self-

1 See Jerry Mander and Victoria Tauli-Corpuz, eds. Paradigm Wars: Indigenous Peoples’ Resistance to Globalization.

322

determination around the world. With this knowledge we can become better international social

workers, coalition building with Indigenous groups endeavouring to protect their lands and

bioregional practices from corporate plunder.

The burgeoning area of Aboriginal social work scholarship has made excellent

contributions to child welfare, research, treatment approaches and ecospirituality, but has yet to

enter the domain of environmental social work literature.1 The growing number of Aboriginal

peoples taking control of social research pertaining to their lives, cultures and communities

represents an expanding anticolonial practice that is important and exciting. Because many non-

Aboriginal peoples have turned to Aboriginal cultural practices to develop environmental

thought and because, as my case study reveals, the Wendat (like other Aboriginal groups) clearly

had a relationship to their land base that promoted biodiversity, and renewable and sustainable

practices, that is, they possessed human-nonhuman land relationships only possible after many

centuries of intergenerational ecological knowledge transmission, the lack of Aboriginal voices

in the environmental social work literature is a glaring gap. Respectful international and human-

nonhuman other relations form part of the excellence and expertise of Aboriginal peoples, and

the shift toward biocentrism and an ecological self so central to environmental social work

discourse could be greatly enhanced by case studies of the kind I have undertaken and

contemporary Aboriginal scholarship about environmental practices and ecological

understandings.2 Just as Coates et al. have argued ecospiritual social work created a new avenue

for Aboriginal approaches to helping and healing within our profession and body of literature,

1 See for example, Cindy Blackstock, Nico Trocmé, and Marlyn Bennett, “Child Maltreatment Investigations among Aboriginal and Non-Aboriginal Families in Canada,” Violence Against Women 10.8 (2004): 901-916; Cindy Baskin, “Storytelling Circles: Reflections of Aboriginal Protocols in Research,” Canadian Social Work Review 22.2 (2005): 171-187; see the entire issue of Journal of Sociology and Social Welfare 29.1 (2002). 2 See, for example, Laurence J. Kirmayer, Chirstopher Fletcher, and Robert Watt, “Locating the Ecocentric Self: Inuit Concepts of Mental Health Illness,” Healing Traditions: The Mental Health of Aboriginal Peoples in Canada, eds. Laurence J. Kirmayer and Gail Guthrie Valaskakis (Vancouver, BC: UBC Press, 2009) 289-314.

323

perhaps in time environmental social work will provide a similar gateway for Aboriginal

perspectives on human-nonhuman concerns.1 It behooves us to ensure these voices are

welcomed.

For environmental social work issues to gain prominence in our profession and be

adequately addressed by social work practitioners and policy makers, the curriculum in academic

social work programs needs to include environmental social work content. This argument has

been made for over a decade now,2 but only relatively recently has environmental social work

begun to gain momentum. The inclusion of environmental content in the professional curriculum

can help students think critically about place, social-environmental interactions, and

environmental justice issues employing both micro and macro analyses to effect progressive

social change rooted in place. Bartlett provides an example of a course linking environmentalism

and social justice that underscores environmental threats and the need for a personal, collective,

and professional response.3 Lysack shares an illustration of the teach-in model of learning from

his public education experience as part of a university event combating global warming.4 I, too,

as a concerned citizen, environmental social worker, and educator recognize the necessity of

education in this time of environmental crisis. Because I see a strong human-land-base

relationship as essential to our continued existence, the importance of place figures prominently

in my conceptualization of environmental social work. The environmental social work and social

justice course that I have developed has a strong person-place focus and an emphasis on

1 See John Coates, Mel Gray, and Tiani Hetherington, “An ‘Ecospiritual’ Perspective: Finally a Place for Indigenous Approaches,” British Journal of Social Work 36 (2006): 381-389. 2 See Stephen E. Kauffman, Carolyn Ambler Walter, Jan Nissly and Jean Walker, “Putting the Environment into the Human Behavior and the Social Environment curriculum,” The Global Environmental Crisis, eds. M. Hoff and J. McNutt (1994; Aldershot, Eng.: Ashgate, 1998); see also M. Kahn and S. Scher, “Infusing Content on the Physical Environment into the BSW Curriculum,” The Journal of Baccalaureate Social Work Education 7.2 (2002): 1-14 3 Maria Bartlett, “Two Movements That Have Shaped a Nation: A Course in the Convergence of Professional Values and Environmental Struggles,” Critical Social Work, 4.1 (2003). 4 Mishka Lysack, “The Teach-In on Global Warming Solutions and Vygotsky: Fostering Ecological Action and Environmental Citizenship,” McGill Journal of Education 44.1 (2009): 119-134.

324

ecoliteracy, so that students will come to realize and understand “the earth is inscribed in us, we

are of the earth.”1 Zapf’s recommendation that we reconceptualise our foundational metaphor

person-in-environment as person-as-place, I feel, represents a starting place for each

environmental social work practitioner. This could be, however, a rather precarious starting place

considering “the person-in-environment perspective has played a small role in core social work

journals over the last decade,”2 which may reflect limited use in professional practice.

Nonetheless, if each of us interested in working at the intersection of the environmental and the

social sees oneself as place in a profound sense, then we can begin to see others, through a

mutually empathic process, as place as well. From this position we can recognize individuals,

families, small groups, and communities as place because they are all products of constant

transactions with the natural nonhuman environments on which they depend: All our

professional research and practice would then reflect this place-based ethos. Policy, too, to be

relevant and ecologically sound, must be reconceptualised as place based if we are to move

toward a progressive and equitable social, economic, environmental model that is sustainable and

tackles globalization, commodification, and the relationship between social ills and geography.

The model shown in Figure 1 represents my conception of an integrative environmental social

work approach that would address these concerns. In this model the as-place orientation of the

practitioner becomes the hub around which all environmental social work practice revolves,

changing every facet of social work practice and theorizing, and, in turn being affected by every

scholarly and practice dimension of our profession. The ecological as-place perspective makes

possible deep understanding of environmental concerns articulated by individuals, families and

1 David W. Orr, Earth in Mind: On Education, Environment, and the Human Prospect (Washington, DC: Island, 1994) 204. 2 Mary E. Rogge and Mary Ellen Cox, “The Person-in-Environment Perspective in Social Work Journals: A Computer-Assisted Content Analysis,” Journal of Social Service Research 28.2 (2001): 66.

325

groups. Being attentive to one’s own bioregional self means being aware of the way local

environmental factors are impacting

326

Figure 1: Integrative Model for Environmental Social Work Practice and Research

individual and community health. In this manner, the as-place perspective better situates the

environmental social work practitioner to engage in advocacy, coalition building, community

action, and policy making, bringing an explicitly bioregional structural analysis and strategic

planning to social and environmental injustices. The Wendat would not have conceived of

education, the transmission of teachings to the younger generations, as anything other than place

based. They understood themselves to be in relations of mutuality and reciprocity with their

Individuals, Families &

Groups as Place

Place-based Education

Place-based Policy

Community as Place

Place-based Theory & Research

Practitioner as Place

327

environs, and this necessitated learning intimately about their surrounds and the nonhuman

species with whom they shared a bioregion. We need to incorporate some of this approach into

our education, theory, and research, asking always about the relationship to place and being

suspicious of those teachings, conceptual frameworks, and research projects that represent

disembedded social work thought and practice.

Future Directions

In chapter one I presented evidence of human transformation of the nonhuman world pointing to

some of the global (e.g., climate change) and local (e.g., desertification) issues with which we

contend as a species, but in many ways separating the local from the global concerns, though

useful for immediate local responses, is artificial because we inhabit one world with finite

resources. More and more we see that seemingly local problems have implications globally, the

destruction of tropical rainforests sometimes dubbed the “lungs of the earth” in environmental

circles being a case in point. Just as we must in an increasingly globalised world hold in our

minds, often simultaneously, local and global responsibilities, we need to have models of

practice and intervention that can operate at both levels. Fortunately we do. In the previous

section I illustrated some of the many proficiencies that make social work an ideal discipline to

undertake environmental issues at every level of our profession. This Wendat-French case study

can help us learn from our past mistakes, both environmentally and in terms of social justice and

international relations. There is also much to be done in the way of environmental social work

education. Globalisation is propelling us into a further despatialised conception of reality and

what it means to be human, and we need education that counters this momentum and anchors us

in place. As professionals working always within the interdependent realms of the social and

environmental, we need social work education and scholarship that teaches us how to include

328

both realms in every facet of our theory and practice. Some of this work has been begun as the

literature discussed here attests, but much remains to be done. This thesis proposes that the many

avenues for social workers to operate environmentally must be assumed and exercised

concurrently and in concert to advance social justice goals, promote healthy environments

locally and globally, and aid displaced and marginalised populations now and in the coming

decades. Ungar suggests that we replace the term “social worker” with “social ecologist” and

reorient our profession around true egalitarianism, the intrinsic value of all community members,

and an appreciation of mutuality, these three tenets advancing and supporting “theoretically

sound ecological human services.”1 As this Wendat-French case study has showed these very

principles constituted the foundation of Wendat society. History with its inbuilt teachings, its

examples of human-nonhuman relations that succeeded or failed, is absolutely vital to the

immensity of the environmental social work project.

This is no time for Carlylean heroes,2 this era of globalisation and environmental

destruction. It is time for each and every one of us to do our part and resist falling into apolitical

cynicism because human and nonhuman life and the health of the planet depend on us. We must

adopt David Orr’s version of hope. I have heard ecophilosopher and Buddhist scholar Joanna

Macy speak a few times now, and she has five suggestions for us in this age of environmental

change: “come from gratitude; don’t be afraid of the dark; dare to vision; roll up your sleeves;

and, act your age.” Every time I hear these recommendations I think of the Wendat because they

practiced each of them. Wendat gratitude is evident in the way ceremonial practices marked

every aspect of Wendat culture from hunting to trading. Their absence of fear of darkness was

1 Michael Ungar, “The Professional Social Ecologist,” Canadian Social Work Review 20.1 (2003): 15. 2 See Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History (Lincoln, NE: U of Nebraska P, 1966). Carlyle writes, “No nobler feeling than this of admiration for one higher than himself dwells in the breast of man. It is to this hour, and at all hours, the vivifying influence in man’s life” p. 11. In this era it is not enough that we venerate Al Gore, Wangari Maathai, Rachel Carson, and others of their standing. We must ourselves act.

329

part of their cosmological understanding that embraced both dark and light, destruction and

creation as necessary cosmic forces. Their visioning was abundantly apparent in the repeated

Jesuit complaints about Wendat peoples’ dreams and revealed knowledge. Their willingness to

roll up their sleeves is manifest in their full participation in all aspects of community life. And

the Wendat acted their age, in the sense that Macy intends, by having a deep understanding of

their ancestral and cosmological selves. So much depends upon this kind of practice and

understanding now. As Maathai said, “In the course of history, there comes a time when

humanity is called to shift to a new level of consciousness, to reach a higher moral ground. A

time when we have to shed our fear and give hope to each other. That time is now.”1

1 Wangari Maathai, Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech, City Hall, Oslo, Norway 10 Dec. 2004.

330

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