Moogk, Peter N.

English

Histoire sociale / Social History (E-Journal, York University)

110 Histoire sociale / Social Historycontinuing importance of Desrosierss work as significant scholarship, and Vaugeoishimself concludes that, as literature, Iroquoisie is detailed to a fault and the narrativemoves at a snails pace. Despite the latter assessment, one is left with the impressionthat this work is aimed at the non-specialist audience. For example, in place ofscholarly apparatus, Vaugeois has added numerous illustrations that soutiennent letexte et en rendent la lecture encore plus agréable (p. x). General readers mightappreciate the sketches of native scenes for their representations of exotic other-ness, yet most scholars of Native people might express some concern over the factthat the illustrations lack captions explaining what is shown or their relevance, thattheir placement often pays no regard to chronology, and that Vaugeois mixes histor-ical representations with sketches taken from works of fiction (for example, in vol.4, p. 87, the picture of Tecumseh, who lived over 100 years after the events Desro-siers chronicles, and on p. 99, the scene taken from James Fenimore Coopers novelLast of the Mohicans). Indeed, even the general reader might wonder at the value ofuntitled and undated maps reproduced in part or poorly and in such small size as torender them unreadable (for example, vol. 2, p. 188, and vol. 4, p. 259).Desrosiers was certainly an important figure in Quebec intellectual life, and pos-sibly that alone merits the publication of his writing. For those interested in the sub-ject, Iroquoisie makes enjoyable reading, and it is the work of a skilled writer andstudent of history. But the reading public deserved a more thoughtful treatment ofthis work and its place in the historiography of its subject to better appreciate Desro-siers and his contribution to scholarship.José António BrandaoWestern Michigan UniversityGordon M. Sayre  Les Sauvages Américains: Representations of Native Ameri-cans in French and English Colonial Literature. Chapel Hill and London: Univer-sity of North Carolina Press, 1997. Pp. 321.Gordon Sayres study began as a dissertation in the Program in Comparative Liter-ature at the State University of New York at Buffalo (p. xxi). He describes his bookas a broad study of how Indians have been represented in literature in two languagesacross more than two hundred years and the eastern third of the continent of NorthAmerica (p. xviii). More precisely, his sources are published travel narratives withdescriptive accounts of the aboriginal peoples written by European visitors in theseventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The combination of the authors own experi-ences as an eyewitness with a general ethnography of the Indian was the dominantmode for these accounts. French texts dominate because the fur trade and Christianmissionary work  which were of less interest to English-speakers  called for anunderstanding of and cooperation with Native peoples. English-language works,describing Native life, were more likely to be captives narratives, which emphasizedthe resistance of the prisoner to French popery and Native savagery while awaitingdeliverance. This was an unsympathetic perspective for recording aboriginal life.Comptes rendus / Book Reviews 111Sayre wants to reawaken American scholars to the value of the French-languageworks of writers such as Bacqueville de la Potherie or Joseph-François Lafiteau.The author states, I have treated the texts of colonial exploration and culturalencounter as literature ... the style and rhetoric of each author and the historical con-text at the time of publication are important (p. xix). It is the patterns of Europeanrepresentations of the sauvages that are my topic, the codes of perception andexpression in colonial writing about Native Americans (p. 46). According to Sayre,the narratives relied on the tropes of negation (emphasizing the absence of famil-iar features of European life), substitution (likening aborigines to known Old Worldpeoples), and premier temps (analogies to the Europeans imagined past).  Expo-sure to Native life forced the outsiders to question their own categories and values:Was the beaver pelt money or clothing? Was wampum currency, document, or orna-ment? For Amerindians, these functional distinctions were not so rigid or exclusive.The romantic conception of the Amerindian as virtuous natural man, egalitarian,meritocratic, and a free, consenting member of his nation was said to have beenincorporated into the American political tradition as the continents indigenous heri-tage. It might be added that this romantic conception also has shaped the aboriginalpeoples current perception of themselves.The popularity of accounts of les sauvages américains in Old Regime Europe andthe writers desire to attract readers meant that authors followed certain conventionsestablished by successful publications. The commonest format was a combination ofthe travellers own experiences with a moeurs des sauvages essay, which describeda generalized, timeless, universal Indian. Cultural differences and Native individual-ity were suppressed. When faced with the option of either adding an appendix todescribe the new and different customs of a recently contacted nation, or simplysuppressing these differences to make the new nation fit the conventional pattern ofthe sauvage, most authors chose the latter (p. 122). Details were plagiarized fromearlier books to satisfy the readers appetite for the exotic and the sensational. Read-ers expected to hear about the vengeful, man-eating and lascivious natives and anaccount of the torture of captives would be provided, even when the writer had notwitnessed this event. The result was a blend of experience and preconceptions. Herewas the origin of the noble red man who, paradoxically, could also be the ignoblesavage. These were the contradictory aspects of the same legendary being. Unpub-lished manuscripts were not composed to appeal to a public audience, and Sayre hastherefore excluded these from his study.Sayre is right to object to historians and anthropologists who pluck facts aboutthe American Indians from explorer-ethnographers texts without examining theinteractions that each writer had with the Indians and the new perspectives on Euro-pean culture that each drew from the experience (p. 321). Yet, only the life of onewriter, Louis-Armand de Lom, Baron de Lahontan, is discussed in detail. Concedinghis points about the influence of the writers personal interests, current events, andliterary conventions, it is obvious that composite accounts of Native life before1800, constructed out of extracts from different works, are not accurate pictures oflife among the Eastern Woodlands peoples. Combining a quotation from the Baronde Lahontan with, say, the earlier observations of the Jesuit Paul Le Jeune, without112 Histoire sociale / Social Historyregard for each mans differing interests, origins, and purposes, results in an inco-herent and questionable portrait. This should be an obvious truth; yet such literarypastiches are commonplace. Think of T. C. McLuhans Touch the Earth: A Self-Por-trait of Indian Existence, which quotes Lahontans rhetorical Huron Adario alongwith other, more authentic, aboriginal spokesmen.Pan-Indianism among North Americas Native peoples means that writers ofEuropean origin are not the sole propagators of the notion of the universal Indian.Aboriginal people have constructed their own eclectic syntheses from variousrecorded Native practices. In todays British Columbia, Shuswap Indians of the inte-rior perform the Sun Dance, borrowed from peoples of the Great Plains, and a Salishlitigant demanded a smudging ceremony, appropriated from the Southwest, duringcourt proceedings here. Sayre, however, is more conscious of European cultural arro-gance and an urge to dominate than of fashionable practices among modern Nativepeoples, and he often digresses about Eurocentric views and delights in pointing outparadoxes and contradictions. He states, The self-righteous denunciations of bar-barism shared by all Western cultures were hypocritical given the techniques andprevalence of state and church-sponsored torture in Europe (p. 303), and the insen-sitivity of the sauvages to pain was one of the most powerful elements of the popularstereotype, a notion that helped rationalize the inflicting of great pain on the Indians(p. 173). Sayre also claims that white authors emphasized Native exoticism to dis-tance themselves from their subject, although Jesuit missionaries said much aboutthe shared human nature of those they sought to convert to Christianity.Sayres partisanship is evident when he argues that Amerindians had semioticsystems or symbolic forms of communication that resisted the duplicity of Euro-pean phonological writing (p. 320). According to Sayre, aboriginal visual recordswere not only equal to European writing (p. 202), but were morally superior. Nativemnemonic devices were not precise, oral traditions were mutable, and aboriginalspeakers could be ambiguous and noncommittal. Sayres relaxed standard for Nativeaccounts is evident in a deferential reference to Black Hawk, the Sauk native leaderfamous for his defiance of U.S. troops in Illinois territory in 183132, [who]recounts a history of the encounter of his ancestors with a French explorer in thelower St. Lawrence who, though unnamed, could well be Champlain (p. 64).C. Marius Barbeaus record of Wyandot traditions at the beginning of this centuryindicates that Native oral traditions are a very unreliable guide to events thatoccurred more than a hundred years earlier. To see an account of Champlainsarrival during the first decades of the seventeenth century in the 1882 autobiographyof a chief whose people lived south of Lake Superior requires more faith than thisreviewer possesses. Nor was I persuaded to accept Sayres claim that the exchangeeconomy of the fur trade was forced on the Indians by the Europeans (pp. 265266). On the other hand, his observations about how European settlers had to adoptmany Native ways to succeed were apt, as was his comment about the Americancolonist who internalizes the Indian he demonizes (p. 129).Sayre failed to apply the same critical rigour, exercised in dealing with his pri-mary sources, to twentieth-century theoretical works. In chapter 3, Travel Narra-tive and Ethnography, the theories of J. M. Coetzee, Hayden White, Roy HarveyComptes rendus / Book Reviews 113Pearce, Tzvetan Todorov, and others are recited, even when in disagreement, with-out resolution or evaluation by the author. On page 239, we read that James Axtellbelieves and that Richard White disagrees, followed by a comment that present-ing beaver hunting as a traditional part of Native life evidently put modern scholarsin conflict. On page 142, Sayre acknowledges the overuse of the concept of theOther in literary and cultural history, yet he proceeds to apply it liberally to Euro-pean-Amerindian relations. The notion of the Other, as defined by Edward Said,does not work for white-aboriginal relations in North America. The French, in par-ticular, saw Amerindians as potential Europeans with admirable virtues as well asvices. The sauvage américain was not an important reference point in the Europe-ans definition of themselves, although this figure shook the faith of some eigh-teenth-century European intellectuals in their own institutions.Gordon Sayres Les Sauvages Américains is an intelligent, stimulating, and sug-gestive work. His observations in chapter 5 on the anthropomorphic portrayal of bea-vers as disciplined and intelligent builders, guided by their own architects and projectsupervisors, raise questions about the authors purposes. He suggests that the indus-trious manlike beaver was a foil for aboriginal failings and a model of the idealFrench colonist. Sayres discussion of the social significance of the tattooing ofFrenchmen, after the Native fashion, is lively, well informed, and fascinating. Heeffectively conveys the Europeans puzzlement over Native clothing that did not pro-claim the wearers rank, over the mutability of Amerindian personal names, andabout the willingness of adopted captives to assume the name and role of a dead per-son, even to go to war against their former countrymen. Balanced against these vir-tues are the writers moralistic digressions and a propensity to treat his ownspeculation as a logical, reasoned conclusion from the evidence. For example, onpage 188, Sayre notes the exchange of gifts, including furs, in treaty negotiations, andthen suggests a materialistic motive for diplomatic exchanges because the process ofconcluding peace could bring a wealth of pelts to the European soldiers and traders.Examples of other, far-fetched deductions can be found on pages 178, 226, and 228.The conclusion, titled Epilogue  Border: Niagara, 1763, which deals with thesignificance of todays international border, the increasingly romantic conception ofthe Noble Savage among the French after they had lost their North American pos-sessions, and a greater interest in the Indians among Anglo-Americans, is looselyconnected to the rest of the work. The proximity of Buffalo, New York  the site ofthe writers alma mater  to the Niagara River was one explanation for the consid-eration given to that river on pages 306 to 309. Here, the author might have reined inhis discursive inclinations and drawn some broad observations from the precedingchapters. Like canoeists on the upper Niagara River, readers are in for an excitingand entertaining ride, but they should keep their paddles handy and not allow them-selves to be caught in shoreline eddies or be swept away by the authors emotiverhetoric. Otherwise, they will find themselves shooting past Goat Island and overthe brink of an unscholarly Niagara Falls.Peter N. MoogkThe University of British Columbia

Gordon M. Sayre — Les Sauvages Américains: Representations of Native Americans in French and English Colonial Literature

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Gordon M. Sayre — Les Sauvages Américains: Representations of Native Americans in French and English Colonial Literature

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