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Get Les Sauvages Americains: Representations of Native Americans PDF

By Gordon M. Sayre

ISBN-10: 0807823465

ISBN-13: 9780807823460

ISBN-10: 080786434X

ISBN-13: 9780807864340

Algonquian and Iroquois natives of the yank Northeast have been defined in nice aspect via colonial explorers who ventured into the area within the 17th and eighteenth centuries. starting with the writings of John Smith and Samuel de Champlain, Gordon Sayre analyzes French and English money owed of local american citizens to bare the rhetorical codes through which their cultures have been represented and the impact that those photographs of Indians had on colonial and glossy American society. via emphasizing the paintings of Pierre Fran?ois-Xavier Charlevoix, Joseph-Fran?ois Lafitau, and Baron de Lahontan, between others, Sayre highlights the $64000 contribution that French explorers and ethnographers made to colonial literature. Sayre's interdisciplinary process attracts on anthropology, cultural experiences, and literary methodologies. He cautions opposed to disregarding those colonial texts as purveyors of ethnocentric stereotypes, saying that they give insights into local American cultures. in addition, early bills of yank Indians display Europeans' severe exam in their personal customs and values: Sayre demonstrates how encounters with natives' wampum belts, tattoos, and pelt clothing, for instance, compelled colonists to query the character of cash, writing, and garments; and the way the Indians' concepts of battle and perform of adopting prisoners resulted in new ideas of cultural identification and encouraged key topics within the eu enlightenment and American individualism.

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Extra info for Les Sauvages Americains: Representations of Native Americans in French and English Colonial Literature

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The Indians had developed long-distance trading networks before European contact, and those around the Gulf of St. Lawrence had engaged in trade with seasonal Portuguese, Breton, and West England fishermen for at least a quarter century before French settlers arrived. The customs of trade were therefore well established before Champlain, and he immediately traveled inland to seek new markets. Fur trading and alliances were facilitated by truchements, boys left with the Indians to learn their language and serve as interpreters to later explorers.

The volumes of the Fifteenth, Sixteenth, and Seventeenth Centuries, which lie so near on the shelf, are rarely opened, are effectually forgotten and not implied by our literature and newspapers. (Thoreau, Journal, March 16, 1852, 3:352-53) Thoreau often wished to create the impression that he spent more time in the woods than in the library, and perhaps it is because the opposite was true that he characterizes these obscure works as a forest, a surrogate wilderness. Indeed, reading narratives of exploration is fascinating for the hiker or paddler, the lover of wilderness who would like Page 2 to have seen Niagara Falls or Detroit in its pristine state, or to have met Indians in their villages nearby.

If we can generalize from observations of this naming strategy in two very different cultures, ethnocentrism and prejudice against the Other would paradoxically be itself a universal principle. However, we know this anecdote only from Bacqueville de La Potherie, who was Page xi not present, and we are not given a transliteration of the word as it was spoken to Perrot in the Miami tribe's language that day around 1690. This report of a strategy of ethnocentric differentiation common to both Europeans and Amerindians is available only in translation.

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


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