This course examines the history of Indigenous peoples and French colonists in North America from the sixteenth to early nineteenth century. Through our lectures and weekly readings, we will explore themes as diverse as French-Indigenous relations, sovereignty and possession, settler colonialism, warfare and slavery, the fur trade and métissage (cultural hybridity), religion and spirituality, women and gender, and property and dispossession. This class places the French colonial experience and its legacy in context and sets a foundation for understanding the English-French divide in contemporary Canada, Québec nationalism, and the rise of the Métis in Western Canada. Through this course, students will also understand contemporary Indigenous issues, their foundations, and their social and political impacts. This course will enable students to develop the tools to examine and analyze sources related to Canada’s early history as a way to question and reinterpret our complex colonial past.
