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As North American plants took root in Parisian botanical gardens and regularly appeared in scientific texts in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, they retained their connections to networks of ecological and cultural exchange in colonial North America. In this dissertation I study the history of French botany and natural history as it became an Atlantic enterprise during this time, analyzing the production of knowledge about North American flora and the place of this knowledge in larger processes of colonialism and imperial expansion in the French Atlantic World. I focus particular attention on recovering the role of aboriginal peoples in the production of knowledge about colonial environments on both sides of the Atlantic. Rather than integrating aboriginal collectors, chefs and healers into traditional histories of western science, I integrate familiar histories of science into larger histories of cultural contact in an Atlantic World with multiple centres of knowledge production and exchange. This dissertation develops two closely related arguments. First, I argue that French encounters with American environments and Native cultures were inseparable. Jesuit missionaries, for example, called both a plant and a native culture “wild rice,” conflating descriptions of local ecological and morphological features of the Great Lakes plant with accounts of indigenous cultural and moral attributes. Second, “Plants and Peoples” also analyzes the process by which the Paris-based Académie Royale des Sciences expanded its reach into North America and argues that French colonial naturalists drew on a vibrant conversation between diverse colonial and indigenous communities. Yet indigenous participation and the knowledges they provided were progressively effaced over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This research therefore presents both a new understanding of the history of early modern and enlightenment botany and a lens through which to revisit and enrich familiar histories of cultural exchange in colonial North America.

La présente recherche se propose de retracer la vie et l’œuvre du père jésuite Jean Pierron (1631-1701), qui, venu de Lorraine, a contribué à la réouverture des missions iroquoises en Nouvelle-France. Arrivé dans la colonie en juin 1667, Pierron, se fit introduire auprès des populations autochtones par Jean Talon, après quoi il eut en charge un territoire d'environ une demi-douzaine de villages agniers de la vallée de l'Hudson. Après avoir livré ses premières impressions, le jésuite mit au point son programme apostolique, faisant appel à une méthode « audio-visuelle » fondée sur le dessin didactique. Mais le jésuite fut aussi un formidable voyageur, qui se rendit non seulement en Iroquoisie, mais aussi en Nouvelle-Angleterre. Il semble bien que ce soit grâce à de précieux réseaux de connaissances en dehors de ceux de la Compagnie de Jésus qu'il put entreprendre un tel voyage. La biographie de ce missionnaire-polyglotte, diplomate et peintre, souligne entre autre choses, l’importance du contexte stratégique et politique plus vaste des missions françaises en Amérique au XVIIe siècle. / The following study is devoted to the Jesuit father Jean Pierron (1631-1701). Arriving from Lorraine in 1667, Pierron participated in the Catholic mission to the Mohawk of the Hudson Valley, after being formally introduced to delegates of this nation by the intendant Jean Talon. Working in a half-dozen villages, Pierron designed an audiovisual method of conversion based upon didactic drawings and paintings. The missionary was also an energetic traveller, both within Mohawk territories and to the English colonies. These journeys point to Pierron’s earlier experiences and more precisely, to the network of contacts he seems to have developed in Europe. In sum, the life of this polyglot missionary, diplomat and painter underscores the importance of the broader strategic and political context of the Jesuit missions.

The Histoire de la Nouvelle-France (1609, 1611, 1612, 1617, 1618) by Marc Lescarbot (v. 1570--1641) is read as a symbolic foundation for the young colony of Port-Royal, Acadia (Annapolis, Nova Scotia), a construct which functions as a valid genesis for French America (thus, "New France" in the title refers specifically to this habitation as well as to the men who contributed to its making). Chapter I is devoted to a reading of the work's abundant paratext and identifies the topics at stake in the unfavourable rumours about the Acadian expeditions as well as about the lieutenant of Port-Royal, Jean de Biencourt, sieur de Poutrincourt. Moreover, this chapter explores the subjective marks, disseminated in the paratext, that build up the historian's ethos, which works as a proof of the validity of his object. This chapter investigates as well the metadiscursive comments on the writing of history and their incidence on the referentiality of the work. Chapter II compares the compilation of travel accounts contained in the Histoire with its sources. This comparison shows how the alteration of these accounts of travellers---who recorded themselves the result of their American expeditions---strengthens the division of the stereotyped dichotomy between the man of letters and the man of action, two functions respectively assigned to Lescarbot and Poutrincourt in the Histoire. The order of this compilation as well as the organisation of its various parts according to a diegetical logic shape specific places where a tension emerges between a reliable discourse, intended to a readership interested in the actual conditions of a colonial establishment, and the production of a textual "coating" aiming at attracting a courtly readership, to which the Jesuits, who challenged Poutrincourt's colonial project, addressed their requests. In chapter III, where are confronted the written and mapped representations of Port-Royal, this tension is even more manifest.

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This paper concentrates on the political, economic, and military policies of New France (French Canada) towards the Indian tribes inhabiting and bordering New France during the period 1672-1701. It was a period of intensive exploration coupled with the fur trade, principally beaver, both of which activities spurred France to compel its “province” of New France to make alliances with the Indians and to block penetration of the French-claimed area by the English colonists to the south (New York and New England) and to the north (Hudson’s Bay area). Any research must be concerned with many interacting and conflicting factors: the policies of the French and English monarchs combined with the personalities and interests of the governors and officials in their colonies. The involvement of merchants and coureurs de bois often conflicted with the civil authorities, the various Catholic orders (Often in conflict with each other), and with the English colonies. In the midst of these conflicts were the Indian tribes with their shifting interests and alliances among themselves and the European traders and missionaries intruding into their territories. The research had several problems that seemed almost insurmountable. The first was the anti-Indian bias exhibited by nearly all writers. Added to this difficulty was the fact of scholars taking sides according to their nationality, American, English, or French. With the exception of The Fur Trade in Canada by Harold Innis, originally published in 1930, there was not a good general account of the French fur trade. There seemed to be misleading information, even inaccuracies, in the location of French forts in modern maps of this period. The sequence of events had to be ferreted out and combined in a cohesive manner from many sources. The first term of Governor Frontenac (1672-82) had conflicting and fragmentary records, while most of his second term was adequately researched; however, there was not a single adequate account of King William’s War during Frontenac’s second term of office. The missionaries left adequate records (i.e., the Jesuits), but they looked upon the Indians solely for conversion to their form of Roman Catholicism and, at the same time, blackened the Iroquois (New France’s main Indian enemy) and the “illegal” coureurs de bois (French traders to the Indians). The latter opened vast areas of beaver trade territory with “new” Indian customers and, because of high monopoly prices, would trade with New France’s main trade enemy, the town of Albany in “English” New York. The major consensuses by historians are that Governor La Barre (1682-85) was incompetent and that Louis XIV neglected New France from 1674 to 1689. Information was obtained from the university libraries of Reed College and Portland State University, at the Multnomah County Library, and at the Oregon Historical Society Library. The last is valuable for primary sources and for scholarly articles concerning this period. The outcome of this research shows that the French expansion into the Great Lakes and Mississippi Valley regions changed the Indians’ lives during this period. The hostile Iroquois were neutralized from warfare against New France in case England and France went to war again, as the Indians’ culture became completely dependent on trade goods in a little over one generation. The horse-riding Sioux armed with guns nearly exterminated the Miamis, while the Fox and Mascoutin tribes defected from the French shortly after this period was concluded. Higher prices in trade goods that increased dependence, the increases in tribal warfare among tribes, and their loss of initiative and manual skills all deprived the Indians of real power.

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