Abstract
The authors present here one unit of a globalized early literature survey that juxtaposes European colonial writings about the Indigenous people of what is today Québec with Native American oral sources including age-old tales, contemporary testimonials, and dialogue with a local Penobscot historian and educator. The article highlights how the inclusion of previously ignored perspectives changes everything, calling on students to reflect on power dynamics in the French-speaking world and in relation to their own positionality and lived experience.
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Notes
- 1.
Bowdoin currently has just under 2000 students of which 35% are “students of color.” The class of 2025 includes 40% students of color. 48% of students receive financial aid and the average aid package (including grants and work-study) is approximately $57,000. https://www.bowdoin.edu/ir/data/index.html.
- 2.
All translations in this chapter are our own.
- 3.
For a more detailed presentation of the larger course structure, please see our “Globalizing the Early Literature Survey: Challenges and Rewards” (2019) and its accompanying online pedagogical dossier.
- 4.
Henceforth, we use the terms “Native American/s,” “First Nation/s,” as well as the adjectives “Indigenous” and “Native” to describe, in what are today the United States and Canada, those whose ancestors first inhabited these territories. See detailed discussion of these terms and others in Dickason (2009, xii–xiii).
- 5.
To prepare for in-class discussions of texts, students use Hypothesis for collaborative annotation, open-source software that encourages them to share their reactions, interpretations, and research with each other and to teach and learn from each other. The annotated texts then become archived collective knowledge they can draw from in their written and oral assignments: https://web.hypothes.is/
- 6.
Maine Wabanaki Reach: https://www.mainewabanakireach.org/
- 7.
We are grateful to Sara Melzer, Micah True, and Ellen Welch for recommending this text, sharing sources, and providing helpful suggestions regarding teaching the Relation.
- 8.
- 9.
Letter to his superior, Berthélémy Jacquinot (Le Jeune [1634] 1979, 538).
- 10.
Williard (2018) provides a helpful model for this approach to reading missionary texts in the context of the French Caribbean.
- 11.
Dickason notes that, rather than face this fact, Canadian historians have “found it much easier to ignore the earlier period; hence the blinkered view of Canada as a ‘young’ country” (2009, ix).
- 12.
In some ways, we are catching up at the university level with what has been happening at the elementary and secondary levels. Since 2001, a Wabanaki Studies curriculum has been mandated in all Maine schools (Feinberg 2019).
- 13.
As late as 2009, the offer for sale on the internet of Native American scalps and bones was investigated by the FBI (Erikson 2009).
- 14.
All the sources we draw on here are widely available online.
- 15.
Richard H. Pratt’s 1892 speech, quoted in Girouard (2015). One hundred and thirty such residential schools existed across Canada during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (“Les pensionnats” 2013). “Indian Schools” in the United States, that trace their origins to early seventeenth-century Jesuit missionaries, were even more numerous, with a few off-reservation schools still operating today.
- 16.
See also Patricia Yaeger (2002), and other essays assembled in Nancy K. Miller’s and Jason Tougaw’s 2002 volume.
- 17.
For a detailed account of the history of “Indian Schools” in Canada, see the first volume of The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada’s final report (2015).
- 18.
Emphasis in original.
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Daniels, C., Dauge-Roth, K. (2022). Honoring Native American Voices in the Francophone Studies Classroom: Restoring Oral Testimonies to Their Rightful Place in the Story of the Early Modern Americas. In: Bouamer, S., Bourdeau, L. (eds) Diversity and Decolonization in French Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-95357-7_7
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