Lecture | Indigenous Montréal

The Société historique de Montréal presents the lecture :

Indigenous Montréal : Relations Between First Nations and Colonists in the 17th and 18th Centuries

This lecture will shine a new light on relations between First Nations and colonists in Montréal in the 17th and 18th centuries. Adopting the perspective of “ordinary folk” allows us to see that, in fact, in Montréal, the majority Indigenous people and French colonists saw each other every day, sharing the same places, the same harsh living conditions, and the same cognitive connivances.

All drank, ate, and engaged in wheeling-and-dealing together in an intimate way that—while it may not have suited the religious and political elites (the “people at the top”)—was a matter of course among the “everyday people” who made up the population of Montréal. Yet, throughout the French regime, it was members of these various Indigenous nations—living and making their way across the city and the island of Montréal—who dictated the terms of this acquaintance, by imposing their languages, their ways of being, and their means of trade—which, for practical reasons and often quite willingly, the French adopted, to the point of being accused of becoming “savages.”

Lecturer: A full professor in the Department of History at the Université de Montréal, Dominique Deslandres is interested in power dynamics under the old French regime. In addition to having written some one hundred articles and chapters, she has published Croire et faire croire. Les missions françaises au XVIIe siècle (Fayard 2003, Lionel Groulx Prize from the Institut d’histoire de l’Amérique française and John A. MacDonald Prize from the Canadian Historical Association), co-edited (with J. A. Dickinson and O. Hubert) Les Sulpiciens de Montréal: une histoire de pouvoir et de discrétion 1657-2007 (2007), and (with R. Brodeur and T. Nadeau-Lacour) Lecture inédite de la modernité aux origines de la Nouvelle France (2010). Her article on gender, religion, and the expansion of French sovereignty in the 17th century won an Award of Excellence from the Institut d’histoire de l’Amérique française (2013). Elected as a member of the Société des Dix in 2017, she has continued her research on the women (and their men) who shaped the history of Montréal in the 17th and 18th centuries—research that highlights the relationships of power at work in the patriarchal slave colony that was New France —while also leading the CRSH 2021-2024 partnership Donner le goût de l’archive à l’ère numérique: Production et partage de données historiques et archéologiques sur les peoples de Montréal au 17e siècle and the UdeM 2022-2023 partnership La fabrique de l’histoire montréalaise: de la trace historique et archéologique à la médiation culturelle.