In 1541, French King Francis I commissioned Jean de la Rocque, Seigneur de Roberval, to lead an expedition to North America. De Roberval was under orders to “inhabit the aforesaid lands and countries and build there towns and fortresses, temples and churches, in order to impart our Holy Catholic Faith and Catholic Doctrine, to constitute and to establish law and peace, by officers of justice so that they … [the Aboriginal peoples] may live by reason and civility.”1 De Roberval arrived in Stadacona (near today’s Québec City) in 1542, but abandoned his settlement effort the next year. The settlement’s brief history was marked by hunger, internal disputes, and death. As a result, the settlers devoted little time to Christianizing and ‘civilizing’ the Aboriginal people they encountered. Indeed, in these encounters, the settlers were as likely to mistreat Aboriginal people as to attempt to convert them to Christianity.2
Canada was eventually colonized by traders and explorers armed with similar commissions that gave them the sole right to trade in lands they were claiming for the French Crown. In exchange for freedom from competition, these colonists were pledged to “provoke and rouse” the Aboriginal people “to the knowledge of God and to the light of the Christian faith and religion.” In other words, they were to convert them to Christianity. In addition, the Aboriginal people were to be brought to “civilization of manners, an ordered life, practice and intercourse with the French for the gain of their commerce; and finally their recognition of and submission to the authority and domination of the crown of France.”3 To Christianize and civilize were, in the European mind, intertwined tasks. And, to the French, to be civilized was to be French. The challenge was to find the best way to francize or Frenchify the Aboriginal people. In the early seventeenth century, Samuel de Champlain, the first commander of Québec, envisaged a North American colony that would be both Christian and French. The colony would, he expected, be populated largely by Aboriginal converts. To this end, he hoped that as Aboriginal people learned to speak French, “they may also acquire a French heart and spirit.”4
Christianizing and civilizing were formidable tasks for the small group of colonists, who had a greater interest in first eking out a living and then developing the fur trade—tasks that required considerable Aboriginal co-operation—than in converting Aboriginal people to Christianity.
The colony Champlain established in 1608 at what is now Québec City was the foundation of a permanent French colony in North America. With one brief interruption, the colony, which was given the formal name of New France in 1663, was the dominant European presence in what is now eastern Canada until the British conquest of New France in 1760. The boundaries of New France were never fixed. The colony was governed from what is now Québec City. At times, it laid claim to a territory that stretched from the Maritimes to the Rocky Mountains and from Hudson Bay to the Gulf of Mexico.5
Until the British conquest of New France in 1760, the Récollets, the Jesuits, Ursulines, and other Roman Catholic orders all attempted at various times to convert the Innu (“Montagnais,” as the French referred to them), Algonkian, and Iroquoian peoples of New France to Christianity and to the settled agricultural lifestyle they associated with civilized life.6 As distinct from the Spanish or English colonial empires in the Americas, the fur-trading French were largely able to achieve their economic goals without having to coerce Aboriginal labour or make extensive appropriations of Aboriginal land. The fur trade, unlike the mines in New Spain, depended on a skilled and independent workforce. It did not require the surrender of Aboriginal lands—indeed, it could be carried out only if Aboriginal people continued to occupy and use their lands as they had in the past. This meant that Aboriginal people maintained a high degree of autonomy and were, from the missionaries’ perspective, much more difficult to convert.7
The missionaries travelled to Aboriginal communities and sent a number of young Aboriginal children to be educated in France in the hopes that they would, upon return, provide educational leadership in their communities. They established reserves with day schools, and operated boarding schools for Aboriginal children in what is now Canada.8 For the most part, Aboriginal people resisted these efforts, while the missionary orders at times clashed with one another and with the colonial government. Each of the boarding schools of the French regime operated for only a few years and never had more than a handful of students. During their brief history, those schools were marked by the same conflicts and failings that eventually became the hallmark of the Canadian residential school system of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
In 1615, seven years after Champlain’s establishment of a trading post at Québec, four Récollet friars arrived in the colony. The Récollets were members of a branch of the Franciscan order, and were inspired by the intense Roman Catholic revival underway in France at that time.9 These early missionaries concluded that Aboriginal peoples had no religion and that conversion would be a simple matter. In the Spanish American empire, Franciscan missionaries baptized tens of thousands of Indigenous people and established hundreds of convents.10 But, after a series of strenuous journeys among the Huron and the Innu, the Récollets concluded they were not going to be able to repeat the Franciscan success in Canada.11 They also concluded that the cultural gap between French and Aboriginal people was so great that it would be necessary “to make them men before we go about to make them Christians.”12 In other words, the Récollets proposed turning Aboriginal people into Frenchmen first and only then Christianizing them. Initially, the Récollets sent six young Aboriginal people to France to undergo such a transformation. The experiment proved to be a failure. Four of the six students died, all were missed by their parents, and the two who returned had difficulty fitting into either the French or Aboriginal world—and did little to convert others to Christianity. One young man, Pastedechouan, studied in France for five years and worked with missionaries as a translator on his return. He never readjusted. He led a tumultuous personal life, never feeling comfortable in either colonial or Aboriginal society, and eventually succumbed to alcoholism and died in his mid-teens.13
In 1620, the Récollets opened a boarding school for Aboriginal students at Notre-Dame-des-Anges, near the Québec settlement. Although they referred to the school as a “seminary,” it was not a separate structure: the first nine students, six of whom were Aboriginal, lived and studied in the Récollets’ convent. The goals were simple: to teach the boys—and all the students were boys—their letters and their prayers. On return to their home communities, the Récollets hoped, the boys would lead others to Christianity.14
The Récollets were among the first of a long line of observers to speak of the love and affection that Aboriginal people had for their children and of the lack of restraint or discipline that characterized Aboriginal childhood.15 It was surprising to them that this affection was evident even in the case of children whom they viewed as illegitimate:
They love their children dearly, in spite of the doubt that they are really their own, and of the fact that they are for the most part very naughty children, paying little respect, and hardly more obedience; for unhappily, in these lands the young have no respect for the old, nor are children obedient to their parents, and moreover there is no punishment for any fault.16
French colonist Nicolas Denys used similar words to describe the bond between Aboriginal parent and child: “The father and mother draw the morsel from the mouth if the child asks for it. They love their children greatly.”17 One Jesuit wrote that the Aboriginal world was one in which people are “born, live, and die in a liberty without restraint; they do not know what is meant by bridle or bit.”18 For the Récollets and the other missionaries who followed them, religious education—the only type of education they were interested in providing—meant trading this world of apparent licence for one of hierarchy, order, and obedience.19
The boarding school’s prospects were limited from the start. Neither parents nor their children saw much to be gained from a European education. Attachment to Aboriginal spirituality was strong, and the children far preferred to be with their families—where, through the activities of daily living, they learned the skills and knowledge required to survive in and interpret their world—over being confined to the tedium and discipline of a classroom under the control of the missionaries. Those Aboriginal people who survived trips to France were unimpressed by the level of social inequality in European society and the high value placed on personal gain. One young Aboriginal man, Savignon, who travelled to Paris in 1611, said that while he had been well treated, he had no desire to return: the country was filled with beggars, and both the innocent and the guilty were subject to terrible punishments. Although Aboriginal people valued many of the goods they received through trade with Europeans, they did not see Europeans as possessing a superior civilization, and were often appalled by such aspects of missionary life as celibacy.20
Parents gave their children up to the boarding-school system under persistent pressure from missionaries and as part of furthering a political alliance.21 The Récollets had to refrain from imposing too severe a discipline for fear the boys would simply run away. In the words of one of the Récollets, the boys were “all for freedom.” Most of them did run off, and their school soon closed.22 The dispirited Récollets moved from speaking of the more settled Aboriginal people in admiring tones that referred to their charity, strength, and patience to referring to them as being savage, brutal, and barbarous.23
The Récollets closed their seminary in 1629, after just nine years of operation. In that same year, English forces captured Québec and the Récollets were sent back to France. When the Treaty that ended hostilities between France and England returned Québec to France three years later, the French government placed the colony under the control of the Company of New France (also known as the “Company of One Hundred Associates”). The company’s charter required it to settle the colony and to provide these settlers with cleared land, seeds, and priests. The relatively recent end to toleration for France’s large Protestant minority, or Huguenots, was reflected in the charter’s provision that only Roman Catholics were eligible to settle in the colony, a restriction on immigration to New France that continued in force throughout the remainder of the French regime in North America. This reflected the determination of the Crown and the church to make Québec, in terms of both its white and Aboriginal populations, an outpost of Roman Catholicism. Only practical considerations would force compromises in that regard with respect to Aboriginal peoples over time. One charter provision foreshadowed the future Canadian government policy of enfranchisement (described in a later chapter of this volume): Aboriginal people who converted to Catholicism were to be seen as having all the rights of Frenchmen. Since these included the right to buy firearms at better prices and to be granted more honours by the French in diplomacy and during trading, this provision can be seen as a financial inducement to convert.24
The French government also gave the Jesuits exclusive responsibility for missionary work in Québec, denying the Récollets the right to return to Québec.
The Jesuits soon encountered many of the problems that had frustrated the Récollets. In 1633, Jesuit Father Paul Le Jeune noted that Aboriginal parents “cannot punish a child, nor allow one to be chastised. How much trouble this will give us in carrying out our plans of teaching the young!”25 Since parents were likely to remove their children from school if they believed they were not being well treated, the Jesuits concluded it was best to educate children at a distance from their families. There was another political and economic benefit to residential schooling: traders and missionaries could operate without fear in the countryside if Aboriginal children were, in effect, ‘held hostage’ in a Jesuit seminary.26 With these considerations in mind—along with their own commitment to train and convert—in 1635, the Jesuits opened a seminary for Aboriginal boys at the site of the earlier Récollet seminary. A hopeful Le Jeune reported, “The Savages are beginning to open their eyes, and to recognize that children who are with us are well taught.”27 In the end, his earlier worries proved far more accurate.
It was expected that the first year’s enrolment at the seminary would include a dozen Aboriginal children, all of whom were to be transported from the Huron territory. However, in response to their mothers’ and grandmothers’ objections, most of the children originally promised to the school stayed home. Only three children joined the Jesuits on the long trip from the Huron country to school and, after the family of two of these boys changed their minds during the course of the journey, only one student, who was nearly a grown man, arrived in Québec. Three more students were recruited but quickly ran away, and two others died after fights with colonists.28
Given the Jesuit emphasis on conversion, it is not surprising that the Jesuit curriculum was largely religious. Schooling, which was conducted in both Latin and Aboriginal languages, was intended to turn the boys into Christians who would then assist the Jesuits in their missionary work. Like the Récollets before them, the Jesuits loosened their discipline in an effort to keep the boys from leaving the school, offering them traditional foods and opportunities to hunt and fish. For the Jesuits, among the most educated people in Europe at that time, education consisted of memory work, constant repetition, and examination. The boys rebelled against this rigid, hierarchical regime—which started at 4:00 a.m.—and often ran away. The school was judged to be a costly and ineffective experiment: the Jesuits complained that the boys were hard on their clothes and they ate too much, and that parents who surrendered their children to the school expected presents in return. By 1640, the school was used to educate only non-Aboriginal students. When the Jesuits eventually concluded that Aboriginal parents were not inclined to convert to Christianity at the urging of their children, they shifted their attention away from children and began to focus on the direct conversion of adults.29
To this end, they sought to establish what amounted to a reserve at Sillery, a few miles outside Québec City. There, they expected the Huron and Innu would abandon hunting and trapping—which the Europeans believed left far too much time for idleness—and take up farming. It was hoped too that, as they adopted a settled lifestyle, the Aboriginal people would also adopt the Catholic faith. One missionary, Father Louis Hennepin, recommended “it should be endeavour’d to fix the Barbarians to a certain dwelling Place, and introduce our Customs and Laws amongst them.” After an initial period of success, which was marked by harsh discipline and the opening of a day school, the Sillery reserve was largely deserted during the winter months, and French settlers began to occupy reserve lands. By 1663, few Aboriginal people remained there.30
Unlike the Récollets, the Jesuits made a point of learning Aboriginal languages and living among Aboriginal people, rather than attempting to convert them from the comparative security of a French trading post. At the same time that the Jesuits established the reserve at Sillery, they also took their missionary activities into Huron and Innu territory.31 Responses ranged from hospitality to hostility.32 In carrying out this work, although their commitment to conversion remained strong, the Jesuits came to question the wisdom of their attempt to turn Aboriginal people into Frenchmen.33 Much of the Jesuit work revolved around communities such as Cap-de-la-Madeleine, Lorette, Caughnawaga, and Oka, or around itinerant missionary work—sometimes referred to as “flying missions”—among the Innu. Although the reserve at Sillery had been located close to Québec City, the Jesuits made sure that future missions were at a distance from French settlers, many of whom were seen as only too willing to corrupt, cheat, and debauch Aboriginal people. A policy originally intended to francize now involved keeping Aboriginal people away from the society into which they were supposed to be integrated. This contradiction would not go unnoticed by the colonial government.34
The Jesuits oversaw the education of a limited number of Aboriginal girls. Initially, the girls boarded with colonists rather than living at the school residence. This changed in 1639 with the arrival in Québec of three Ursuline nuns, led by Sister Marie de l’Incarnation. The reports of the work the Jesuits were undertaking in North America inspired her to devote her fortune to the ‘missionizing’ of Aboriginal people there. When she fell seriously ill, she vowed that if her health was restored, she would travel to North America to open a convent and mission school. Upon her recovery, she devoted her life to educational work in Canada.35 The Ursulines started teaching Aboriginal girls soon after their arrival in 1639, but it was not until 1642 that they acquired a building that was to serve as a boarding school. The majority of students were non-Aboriginal, and the number of Aboriginal girls who lived at the school was never large: for example, there were only three in 1668 and nine in 1681. The intention was to train the girls to be Christian wives and mothers. However, for all the Iroquoian and Algonkian dictionaries and catechisms the Ursulines produced, Aboriginal girls never felt at home in the convent.36 In 1668, Sister de l’Incarnation could only lament:
It is however a very difficult thing, although not impossible, to francize or civilize them. We have had more experience in this than any others, and we have remarked that out of a hundred that have passed through our hands scarcely have we civilized one. We find docility and intelligence in them, but when we are least expecting it they climb over our enclosure and go to run in the woods with their relatives, where they find more pleasure than in all the amenities of our French houses. Savage nature is made that way; they cannot be constrained, and if they are they become melancholy and their melancholy makes them sick. Besides, the Savages love their children extraordinarily and when they know that they are sad they will do everything to get them back, and we have to give them back to them.37
Not all children were returned to their parents. In a 1646 letter, Sister de l’Incarnation mourned the death of five-and-a-half-year-old Charity Negaskoumat, who had died at the convent of a lung infection. Sister de l’Incarnation thought that, at best, she had francized about seven or eight women, who had subsequently married French men.38
In Montréal, which had been founded in 1642 as a colony dedicated to Catholic living, the Sulpicians and the Congregation of Notre Dame had responsibility for training Aboriginal boys and girls, respectively, and experienced the same frustrations and lack of success as the Récollets, Jesuits, and Ursulines. Indeed, when the French finance minister, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, presented the Sulpicians with a significant endowment for the school they supposedly were operating for Aboriginal students, they actually had no such children in attendance.39
Following the establishment of New France as a royal colony in 1663, the French civil authorities noted with disapproval that Jesuit policies appeared to be aimed at isolating the Aboriginal people from French society, rather than integrating them into it. The colonial officials, worried by the slow growth of the French population in the colony, believed the missionaries should not only be converting Aboriginal people, they also should be civilizing them and settling them alongside the French. To set an example, Governor Frontenac brought a handful of Iroquois children into his household, while depending on the Jesuits and Ursulines to educate them.40 Bishop François de Laval arranged accommodation at a seminary residence for Aboriginal students who were to attend a Jesuit day school. He too found difficulty in recruiting students, commenting:
This enterprise is not without difficulty, on the part of both the children and the parents; the latter have an extraordinary love for their children, and can scarcely make up their minds to be separated from them. Or, if they do permit this, it is very difficult to effect the separation for any length of time, for the reason that ordinarily the families of the Savages do not have many children, as do those of our French people—in which there are generally in this country, 8, 10, 12 and sometimes as many as 15 and 16 children. The Savages, on the contrary usually only two or three; and rarely do they exceed the number of four. As a result, they depend on their children, when they are somewhat advanced in years, for the support of their family. This can only be gained by the Chase, and by other labors for which the parents are no longer fit when their children have the years and ability to help them; to do so at that time, the Law of nature seems to constrain the children by necessity. Nevertheless, we shall spare no pains on our part, to make this blessed undertaking succeed, although its success seems to us very doubtful.41
He was correct. Only one boy stayed more than a year and five years later, none were left. By the beginning of the 1700s, the missionary experiment with residential schools for Aboriginal children in New France was over.42
All these efforts to educate a limited number of young Aboriginal people were at a time when the majority of Europeans had little experience of schooling. Most of the education that was provided in this period took place under the auspices of the churches. From the founding of the colony in the early seventeenth century to the British conquest in 1760, there was no official school system. Instead, in a rural and scattered community, the church established des petites écoles that provided a rudimentary education. These schools were mainly for boys. When girls were to be educated, care was to be taken to keep the sexes separate. The Jesuits established un collège in 1635 and un grand séminaire in 1663. Both were intended for the training of religious leaders. In 1668, un petit séminaire (residence) was established for students attending the grand séminaire.43
Throughout this period, families (both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal) assumed primary responsibility for educating their children: many communities had no schools and, as in France itself, there was no law requiring school attendance. Habitant farmers passed on the skills needed to work the land from one generation to the next. They also learned how to make a living off the land from the Aboriginal people with whom they were in contact.44
The French in Québec, always limited in numbers and bordered by hostile powers, were not in a position to dictate to the Aboriginal people or force them to send their children to school. Trade, military alliances, and support for all matters of daily living depended on the colonists’ maintaining good relations with Aboriginal peoples. Efforts to assimilate Aboriginal people had failed. Programs intended to insulate Aboriginal people from the worst elements of French culture continued with limited success. In reality, during this period, Aboriginal culture was much more attractive to young Frenchmen than French culture was to Aboriginal people. Keeping the commercial and political loyalty of Aboriginal nations became the primary goal of New France’s Aboriginal policy. This was evident in 1679 when, despite the long campaign of Bishop Laval to prevent the use of liquor as a trade commodity with Aboriginal people, France ruled that liquor could be traded within the French settlements.45 In the eighteenth century, as the profitability of the traditional fur trade fell, France sought to extend the fur trade through to the South, in order to prevent the expansion of Britain’s North American colonies. The policy included the creation of close trading and political relations with Aboriginal groups throughout the Ohio Valley.46 Any effort to impose European cultural and religious norms would have impeded this strategy. As long as this remained the case, the conversion and civilization of the members of those nations—particularly in the face of the opposition of Aboriginal parents and children and the settlers’ lack of interest in such a project—would remain a secondary concern. The British conquest of 1760 brought the period of French rule to an end. Another half-century would pass before the new British colonists felt politically and economically secure enough to embrace an assimilationist Aboriginal policy. Residential schools became a fundamental part of that strategy. Roman Catholic religious orders, which drew much of their funding and personnel from Québec, would play a central role in establishing and running those schools.