The term sauvage—as a noun—referred to the aboriginal communities of North America in the seventeenth century. The American sauvage, explains historian Olive Dickason, blended “the well-known Renaissance folkloric figure of the Wild Man; early Christian perceptions of monkeys, apes, and baboons; and the classical Greek and Roman tradition of the noble savage.”142 Aboriginal communities, as sauvages, were said to blur the line between civilization and savagery so that they lived in a perpetual state of wildness, more non-human than human in their customs and relationships with the natural world. If it did not carry many of the pejorative connotations of unrestrained violence that the English translation of “savage” does today, the characterization of aboriginal peoples as sauvage encouraged and justified the establishment of a French presence throughout North America as a project to reclaim and rehabilitate a degenerate people. It was a term therefore that could equally be applied to the human and non-human world and that suggested a deviation from the norms that defined the civilized French world.
It was a complex term that, already by the end of the sixteenth century, rejected a neat teleology or morality.143 By the time of the colonization of Acadia and the Saint Lawrence, the term embodied some of the tension that would come to the fore as visions of the “noble savage” were articulated in eighteenth century. The author of a Jesuit journal, for example, wrote that “it is true that one lives in these countries in a great innocence.”144 Passages such as these seem to hint at the continuation of sixteenth-century discourses that evoked respect for the rustic and simple lives of indigenous peoples.145 Famously, Michel de Montaigne wrote that “they are sauvages, just as we call sauvages the fruits, that nature, in itself and its ordinary progress, has produced: although, in truth, it is those that we have altered by our artifice, and turned away from the common order, that we should rather call sauvages. In the former are alive and vigorous the true and most useful and natural properties, which we have bastardized in the latter, and have accommodated them only to the pleasure of our corrupted tastes.”146 The use of the term sauvage therefore mapped closely onto debates about the distinction between the artificial and the natural and, more broadly still, about whether the natural world could be fundamentally improved upon.147 Ultimately, however, one finds little of this sophistication in colonial texts that instead saw sauvage places and peoples as less than their French counterparts.
The ideology of the sauvage, as it was framed in New France, was ambivalent about any claims that the sauvage state of North America made it naturally superior to the culture that the French could introduce.148 Instead, authors who named the aboriginal peoples of French North America sauvage encouraged treating them in a similar fashion to the wild grapevines that, one explorer wrote, were “lacking only a little culture.”149 If the implication of this language was a sense that aboriginal cultures were not irreconcilably different or inferior, it suggested that, under the right conditions, they too could be “cultivated” through their encounters with French missionaries and colonists.
Yet in practice colonial authors frequently recognized indigenous improvement of American environments. Sites with histories of indigenous occupation were often sought out for colonial settlement even where indigenous ecological knowledge was otherwise marginalized and dismissed. Studying the environment for hints of its habitability meant observing the ways in which indigenous cultures had lived with them and implicitly recognizing the merits of indigenous technologies and ecological practice. It is likely that early explorers were particularly attracted to land that had, in the preceding century, been home to indigenous communities.150 One of the first farms established as the settlement at Québec grew, for example, has a documented history of aboriginal occupation that stretched back millennia and that had only declined with the broader disappearance of Iroquoian agriculture in the area during the sixteenth century.151 Perhaps not surprisingly, in an era that regularly saw starvation threaten colonial settlements throughout the Americas, early explorers also focused a great deal of attention on the native foods of the region when they investigated Native cultures.152 Observation of edible plants was intimately associated with French experience of indigenous peoples and their cultures. In the fields of the Iroquoian Wendat in what is now Ontario, for example, French efforts to ascertain the civility of the people meant studying the botanical company that they kept and carefully cataloguing the cultivation, preservation, and consumption of food crops.153
Indigenous ecological knowledge was both foregrounded and critiqued within accounts that drew upon the sylvan symbolism of the term sauvage. Missionary and colonial sources were clear that these sauvage people were unable to properly use sauvage plants to better themselves; they languished together. Lescarbot complained about the resistance of Mi’kmaq with whom he interacted to appreciate the evident superiority of French practice. “We showed them,” he wrote, “in pressing grapes in a glass, that this was how we made the wine that we drank. We wanted to make them eat the grapes, but having them in their mouths they spit them out, and thought (as Ammianus Marcellinus recounts of our old Gauls) that it was poison, such are these people ignorant of the best thing that God has given to man, after bread.”154 These were critiques that therefore slipped readily between accusations of cultural and moral inferiority and that rendered discussions of indigenous practices evidence of the need for spiritual reform and civilization. Even if “the forest serves” the indigenous peoples of New France, as one Jesuit explained, it was because “they know better the ways of these vast and dreadful forests than do the wild beasts, whose dwelling they are; the French did not lightly venture to entangle themselves in these dense woods.”155
Indigenous people in these accounts seemed both part of and subject to the natural environments of New France. Champlain, for example, framed his struggles to traverse “thick woods” while “loaded down with a pikeman’s corselet” and attacked by “hosts of mosquitoes, a strange sight, which were so thick that they hardly allowed us to draw our breath,” as a brutal episode saved only by two aboriginal people who were simply “traversing the woods.”156 Elsewhere he described a waterfall that his guides crossed easily without getting wet.157 The Jesuit Paul Le Jeune was astonished that even as he experienced a cold “so violent that we heard the trees split in the woods,” he was visited by indigenous peoples “sometimes half-naked, without complaining of the cold.”158 Perhaps this was because, as Le Jeune later related, these Innu peoples conceived of the seasons as non-human beings with whom they could interact; Pipounoukhe (winter) and Nipinoukhe (spring and summer) each shared the world and could be heard “talking or rustling, especially at their coming.”159 Accounts such as these did not represent indigenous knowledge as the product of skillful adaptations to harsh environments. Instead, colonial authors marginalized complex technologies and skills as unlearned and unrefined reactions of sauvage cultures.
As often as they seemed to remain above the material constraints