that featured on Champlain’s 1613 map.129
The use of indigenous names did not, however, universally imply a respect for indigenous knowledge or a lasting connection to specific indigenous communities. Atoca (cranberry), for example, was known by variants on this Wendat name after it was first described by Gabriel Sagard, but the name became generalized and lost its association to any specific community.130 This missionary first transcribed the name as “toca” and wrote that with “neither pit nor seed, the Hurons [Wendat] eat it raw, and also put it in their little loaves,” demonstrating the interwoven nature of botanical and cultural exchange.131 The Jesuit Paul Le Jeune also recorded the fruit among the Haudenosaunee. He explained to his readers that “the young people went to gather it in the neighboring meadows, and, although it is neither palatable nor substantial, hunger made us find it excellent. It is almost of the color and size of a small cherry.”132 It was not just the French who appreciated the fruit. Le Jeune’s confrère Louis Nicolas wrote that English colonists used the plant in place of verjuice, which was normally produced from unripe grapes.133 Over time these references to the indigenous peoples who harvested this plant would decline, but the name, standardized as Atoca, remained the same.134 The engineer Gédéon de Catalogne wrote that it was used to make preserves in 1712.135 Antoine-Denis Raudot added that it was useful against dysentery, and the Jesuit Pierre-François-Xavier de Charlevoix suggested its use for digestive ailments.136 Orthography, descriptions of morphology, and the expected effects of the plants became fixed as names such as Atoca became part of a French Atlantic taxonomy. Linguistically, plants such as this retained their linkage to American soils, but, like the originally indigenous words “barbecue” and “canoe,” their connection to any specific indigenous language was severed.137
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Among multiple strategies for naming the simultaneous familiarity and foreignness of plants and places, describing the nature of New France as sauvage became a particularly powerful tool that both affirmed similarity and stigmatized difference. In many cases, morphological differences between European and American species of plants were considered red herrings, more apparent than real. When colonial authors described various American plants such as lemons, cherries, and oats as sauvage, they implicitly suggested that American flora was an imperfect or degraded version of that which existed in France. A common refrain that emerged as early as the writing of Champlain was that French agricultural techniques had brought a full expression of botanical essences in French plants that were only latent in their American kin. In studying grapevines, for instance, authors such as Champlain understood that the grapes that produced bitter and unremarkable wines from Louisiana to Acadia were a product of aboriginal neglect.138 In his 1603 Sauvages, Champlain wrote that Québec contained “wild fruit trees, and vines: in my opinion, if they were cultivated they would be as good as ours.”139 In 1668, Jacques Bruyas wrote similarly about the vines near his mission among the Haudenosaunee at Saint François-Xavier (Kahnawake): “I believe that, if they were pruned two years in succession, the grapes would be as good as those of France.”140 The authors who described the sauvage plants of French North America focused on these subtle differences and diagnosed a lack of cultivation—of an unmet and unexplored potential in American plants. Where, throughout Louis Nicolas’s Histoire naturelle and the Jesuit Relations, plants such as cherry trees or vines are identified as sauvage, they were speaking to this sense of an inferiority less innate than accidental.141 Champlain, Bruyas, and Nicolas each claimed that the observable differences of American plants were mutable and credited them to the influence of the local North American environments and aboriginal ecological practice.
The term sauvage—as a noun—referred to the aboriginal communities of North America in the seventeenth century. The American sauvage, explains historian Olive Dickason, blended “the well-known Renaissance folkloric figure of the Wild Man; early Christian perceptions of monkeys, apes, and baboons; and the classical Greek and Roman tradition of the noble savage.”142 Aboriginal communities, as sauvages, were said to blur the line between civilization and savagery so that they lived in a perpetual state of wildness, more non-human than human in their customs and relationships with the natural world. If it did not carry many of the pejorative connotations of unrestrained violence that the English translation of “savage” does today, the characterization of aboriginal peoples as sauvage encouraged and justified the establishment of a French presence throughout North America as a project to reclaim and rehabilitate a degenerate people. It was a term therefore that could equally be applied to the human and non-human world and that suggested a deviation from the norms that defined the civilized French world.
It was a complex term that, already by the end of the sixteenth century, rejected a neat teleology or morality.143 By the time of the colonization of Acadia and the Saint Lawrence, the term embodied some of the tension that would come to the fore as visions of the “noble savage” were articulated in eighteenth century. The author of a Jesuit journal, for example, wrote that “it is true that one lives in these countries in a great innocence.”144 Passages such as these seem to hint at the continuation of sixteenth-century discourses that evoked respect for the rustic and simple lives of indigenous peoples.145 Famously, Michel de Montaigne wrote that “they are sauvages, just as we call sauvages the fruits, that nature, in itself and its ordinary progress, has produced: although, in truth, it is those that we have altered by our artifice, and turned away from the common order, that we should rather call sauvages. In the former are alive and vigorous the true and most useful and natural properties, which we have bastardized in the latter, and have accommodated them only to the pleasure of our corrupted tastes.”146 The use of the term sauvage therefore mapped closely onto debates about the distinction between the artificial and the natural and, more broadly still, about whether the natural world could be fundamentally improved upon.147 Ultimately, however, one finds little of this sophistication in colonial texts that instead saw sauvage places and peoples as less than their French counterparts.
The ideology of the sauvage, as it was framed in New France, was ambivalent about any claims that the sauvage state of North America made it naturally superior to the culture that the French could introduce.148 Instead, authors who named the aboriginal peoples of French North America sauvage encouraged treating them in a similar fashion to the wild grapevines that, one explorer wrote, were “lacking only a little culture.”149 If the implication of this language was a sense that aboriginal cultures were not irreconcilably different or inferior, it suggested that, under the right conditions, they too could be “cultivated” through their encounters with French missionaries and colonists.
Yet in practice colonial authors frequently recognized indigenous improvement of American environments. Sites with histories of indigenous occupation were often sought out for colonial settlement even where indigenous ecological knowledge was otherwise marginalized and dismissed. Studying the environment for hints of its habitability meant observing the ways in which indigenous cultures had lived with them and implicitly recognizing the merits of indigenous technologies and ecological practice. It is likely that early explorers were particularly attracted to land that had, in the preceding century, been home to indigenous communities.150 One of the first farms established as the settlement at Québec grew, for example, has a documented history of aboriginal occupation that stretched back millennia and that had only declined with the broader disappearance of Iroquoian agriculture in the area during the sixteenth century.151 Perhaps not surprisingly, in an era that regularly saw starvation threaten colonial settlements throughout the Americas, early explorers also focused a great deal of attention on the native foods of the region when they investigated Native cultures.152 Observation of edible plants was intimately associated with French experience of indigenous peoples and their cultures. In the fields of the Iroquoian Wendat in what is now Ontario, for example, French efforts to ascertain the civility of the people meant studying the botanical company that they kept and carefully cataloguing the cultivation, preservation, and consumption of food
