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Offers a new reading of the history of the colonization of North America and the dispossession of its indigenous peoples.
Allan Greer examines the processes by which forms of land tenure emerged and natives were dispossessed from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries in New France (Canada), New Spain (Mexico), and New England. By focusing on land, territory, and property, he deploys the concept of 'property formation' to consider the ways in which Europeans and their Euro-American descendants remade New World space as they laid claim to the continent's resources, extended the reach of empire, and established states and jurisdictions for themselves. Challenging long-held, binary assumptions of property as a single entity, which various groups did or did not possess, Greer highlights the diversity of indigenous and Euro-American property systems in the early modern period. The book's geographic scope, comparative dimension, and placement of indigenous people on an equal plane with Europeans makes it unlike any previous study of early colonization and contact in the Americas.
A brief overview of French colonial society before the British conquest of 1759-60. The primary focus is on what is now called Quebec, but there are also chapters on Louisiana and the West, as well as on the Atlantic colonies of Acadia and Ile Royal.
Mohawk Saint is the story of Catherine Tekakwitha, a Mohawk woman born at a time of cataclysmic change, as Native Americans of the northeast experienced the effects of European contact and colonization. A convert to Catholicism in the 1670s, she embarked on a physically and mentally grueling program of self-denial, aiming to capture the spiritual power of the newcomers from across the sea. Her story intersects with that of Claude Chauchetiere, a French Jesuit who became convinced that Tekakwitha was a genuine saint. Today Tekakwitha is considered the first Native American saint and has a wide following in the Americas.
The Lower Canadian Rebellion of 1837 has been called the most important event in pre-Confederation history. Previously, it has been explained as a response to economic distress or as the result of manipulation by middle-class politicians. Lord Durham believed it was an expression of racial conflict. The Patriots and the People is a fundamental reinterpretation of the Rebellion. Allan Greer argues that far being passive victims of events, the habitants were actively responding to democratic appeals because the language of popular sovereignty was in harmony with their experience and outlook. He finds that a certain form of popular republicanism, with roots deep in the French-Canadian past, dro...
Native Christians reflects on the modes and effects of Christianity among indigenous peoples of the Americas drawing on comparative analysis of ethnographic and historical cases. Christianity in this region has been part of the process of conquest and domination, through the association usually made between civilizing and converting. While Catholic missions have emphasized the 'civilizing' process, teaching the Indians the skills which they were expected to exercise within the context of a new societal model, the Protestants have centered their work on promoting a deep internal change, or 'conversion', based on the recognition of God's existence.Various ethnologists and scholars of indigenou...
Rural life in pre-industrial Quebec was essentially organized around a feudal society. Allan Greer takes a close look at the at society and its economy in three parishes in Lower Richelieu valley Sorel, St Ours, and St Denis from 1740 to 1840. He finds a pronounced pattern of household self-sufficiency; as in other peasant societies, the habitants lived mainly from produce grown throught their own efforts on their own lands. How the family-based economy operated and how the household was reproduced over the generations through marriage, birth, inheritance, and colonization, together form a major focus of this study.
Long before Confederation created a nation-state in northern North America, Indigenous people were establishing vast networks and trade routes. Volcanic eruptions pushed the ancestors of the Dene to undertake a trek from the present-day Northwest Territories to Arizona. Inuit migrated across the Arctic from Siberia, reaching Southern Labrador, where they met Basque fishers from northern Spain. As early as the fifteenth century, fishing ships from western Europe were coming to Newfoundland for cod, creating the greatest transatlantic maritime link in the early modern world. Later, fur traders would take capitalism across the continent, using cheap rum to lubricate their transactions. The contributors to Before Canada reveal the latest findings of archaeological and historical research on this fascinating period. Along the way, they reframe the story of the Canadian past, extending its limits across time and space and challenging us to reconsider our assumptions about this supposedly young country. Innovative and multidisciplinary, Before Canada inspires interest in the deep history of northern North America.
This book surveys the social history of New France. For more than a century, until the British conquest of 1759-60, France held sway over a major portion of the North American continent. In this vast territory several unique colonial societies emerged, societies which in many respects mirrored ancien regime France, but which also incorporated a major Aboriginal component. Whereas earlier works in this field presented pre-conquest Canada as completely white and Catholic, The People of New France looks closely at other members of society as well: black slaves, English captives and Christian Iroquois of the mission villages near Montreal. The artisans and soldiers, the merchants, nobles, and pr...
From the cult of Saint Anne to the devotees of the Virgin of Guadalupe, from Saint Anthony who competed with Christ for popularity in Brazil, to Jesuits who mixed freely with shamans that talked with the gods, this exciting new anthology examines the conversion of the colonized. The essays examine how New World spirits transformed into Old World saints - for example, the spirit of love transfigured into the Virgin Mary - as well as the implications of the canonization of the first American saint. Colonial Saints illustrates the complex and intimate connections among confessional life writing, canonization, and the practices of the Inquisition. There was a dynamic exchange involving local agendas, the courts in Spain and France, and, of course, Rome. This bold collection clearly shows the interplay between slavery and spirituality, conversion and control, and the links between the sacred and the political.