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 m茅tissage (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, Qu茅bec nationalism, and the rise of the M茅tis 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鈥檚 early history as a way to question and reinterpret our complex colonial past.
