"We shall be one people" : early modern French perceptions of the Amerindian body
Masarah Van Eyck (Auteur)
"This dissertation analyzes seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French perceptions of the bodies of Indians in New France and Louisiana. It reveals that all French authors who visited New France in the early seventeenth century believed that human differences were mutable and, with instruction and land cultivation, Indians would physically and culturally assimilate into French colonial society---if Europeans did not degenerate from life in the wilderness first. Beginning in the late seventeenth century, missionary disillusionment, colonial projections of order and later Enlightenment concepts of natural rights and systems of nature prompted authors to reformulate these early perceptions. As Indians appeared unwilling or unable to adopt civilized manners, some authors concluded that natives did not possess the reason needed to do so. By the late eighteenth century, some colonial officials and European naturalists suggested that the physique and morals of North American Indians were not mutable but, instead, that Indians in French North America were permanently and essentially incapable of "improving" either their bodies or their minds."-- Author's abstract
Mémoire, Thèse, English, 2001
McGill University Libraries, [Montreal], 2001