Natives and Newcomers: Canada's "Heroic Age" Reconsidered

by Bruce G. Trigger

Natives and Newcomers discredits that myth. In a spirited and critical re-examination of relations between the French and the Iroquoian-speaking inhabitants of the St Lawrence lowlands, from the incursions of Jacques Cartier through the explorations of Samuel de Champlain and the Jesuit missions into the early years of the royal regime, Natives and Newcomers argues that native people have played a significant role in shaping the development of Canada. Trigger also shows that the largely ignored French traders and their employees established relations with native people that were indispensable for founding a viable European colony on the St Lawrence. The brisk narrative of this period is complemented by a detailed survey of the stereotypes about native people that have influenced the development of Canadian history and anthropology and by candid discussions of how historical, ethnographical, and archaeological approaches can and cannot be combined to produce a more rounded and accurate understanding of the past.

Genres: History, Canada

448 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1985

About the author

Bruce Graham Trigger, OC OQ FRSC was a Canadian archaeologist, anthropologist, and ethnohistorian.

He received a doctorate in archaeology from Yale University in 1964. His research interests at that time included the history of archaeological research and the comparative study of early cultures. He spent the following year teaching at Northwestern University and then took a position with the Department of Anthropology at McGill University in Montreal, and remained there for the rest of his career.

Reviews

[Robert Jeens · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is ambitious. Trigger proposed “a reexamination of the framework within which the whole of Canadian history must be considered.” Using an approach labeled “ethnohistory”, he used history, archaeology and social anthropology to more fully understand the role played by native peoples in Canadian history. He succeeds in demonstrating that what historians have referred to as prehistory, that is, the human past before written records, can sometimes be incorporated into history, that is, what we know about the human past through written records, using the findings of archaeology. This allows us to see "each culture in its specific historical context", resulting in the "loss of comfortable illusions". The book was written in 1985 and was so successful that although some of the facts have been updated because new archaeological findings have been made, the method remains the standard for historians in the field today.
Trigger asserts that although native Canadian and European societies were "unequal in terms of their technology, their capacity to mobilize and direct human resources, and their ability to pursue specific goals," natives generally had much more agency in Canadian history than people have given them credit for. I think that is generally true, but it depends upon the questions one asks. For 16th and 17th century Canada, that is true, but if your question examines, for example, the experience of women in Toronto in the 1930s, then maybe not so much. I find other of his assertions and findings more agreeable. We need to be careful not to replace old negative stereotypes with more positive ones, but rather try to be as objective as possible. And he rightly emphasizes the importance of change in native cultures. They were not static but rather adaptable. They did not just learn from others but also through internal development.
For those looking for a pithy narrative, you will be disappointed. The book is mostly analysis, which is why geeks like me will like it so much. Trigger writes about methodology and ideology for the first two chapters. Chapter one is historiography while chapter two is about the evolution of archaeological ideas regarding North American natives in general and the Iroquoian peoples in particular. The first chapter “The Indian Image in Canadian History” looks at how mistaken past interpretations of native societies have been and why, He compares historical interpretations in American, English Canadian and French Canadian histories. Chapter two compares how European archaeologists viewed their past versus how North American archaeologists viewed native cultures and how these came to coalesce. I ate this stuff up as an undergraduate.
The framework forces us to reexamine the roles played by very famous historical actors in Canadian history. Jacques Cartier was completely responsible for the failure of both his colonization scheme, and that of Roberval who followed. Similarly, Champlain is given credit for his successful efforts, but he too made mistakes. He alienated the Montagnais and certain French traders so that they aided the English privateer David Kirke when he took over Quebec in 1629. If not for imperial bargaining between the French and British crowns, that would have been the end of the French colongy. The Jesuits in Huronia caused strife and weakened the Hurons in the face of their Iroquois enemies.
While he made the Heroic Age a little less heroic by investigating the contributions of both native groups and lower-class French, he also emphasized reality. His interdisciplinary methods of investigation can be more fruitful than those that are strictly narrow. Trigger is an archaeologist by training, so it is no accident that he thought that archaeology could contribute greatly to our understanding of the past. The reason the book doesn’t get five stars is that Trigger takes so long to get to the point, although in some ways I really like that. He was a revolutionary thinker, but he was not an exciting writer.

[Patricia · Rating 5 out of 5]

My copy of this book is a 'keeper', and has many pages marked for future reference where Bruce Trigger's words encapsulated so succinctly the even now-current status of understanding and racism in Canada and the USA of the civilizations that were encroached upon and over-run by sheer numbers and not by greater intelligence or understanding and certainly not by a better civilization. I will miss this man for a long time to come.

[Marc · Rating 4 out of 5]

Cultural scholarship by anthropological archaeologists often contains a few anachronisms when read 30 years later, but none cause the reader to shudder in this case; modern students may fail to grasp how ground-breaking this book was for the mid-1980s