Postcolonial Perspectives on Early Modern Canada: Champlain’s Voyages de la Nouvelle France (1632)

The early modern dimension of francophone postcolonialism has yet to be fully explored. This paper adds historical depth to postcolonial studies by applying post-colonial theory to an early seventeenth-century French colonial text: Samuel de Champlain’s Voyages de la Nouvelle France (1632). A postcolonial reading of Champlain’s Voyages reveals the ambivalence latent in a text traditionally seen as a straightforward narrative of the coming of French civilization to the Americas. After evaluating the applicability of postcolonial theory to works such as Champlain’s Voyages, discussion focuses on an episode from the text in which, on the eve of a battle against the Iroquois, Champlain has a dream predicting the defeat of the enemy by his Huron allies. As the author had previously dismissed, with sceptical superiority, the Amerindian faith in portentous dreams, this apparent shift in cultural allegiance raises interesting questions. Postcolonialism’s insights into colonial power relations can shed new light on Champlain’s complex relationship with his Amerindian allies and on the identity issues faced by colonizers in ‘white settler’ colonies. This paper traces Champlain’s transformation from Frenchman in Canada to incipient French-Canadian, and ultimately tests the limits of taking a postcolonial perspective on the early modern.