Today, we are happy to bring you our conversation with Sharon V. Salinger, author of Perceived in Print: Indigenous American and French Ideas of the Other

What inspired you to write this book? 

Inspiration for this project came from Karen Kupperman’s Indians and English, her descriptions of the earliest encounters between Indigenous hosts and English visitors in Early America. These were not meetings of Native Nations and The English, but of people who were motivated and guided by their cultural schemes. They approached each other with curiosity and then made sense of the encounter using their understandings of how societies operated. The travel literature from the period allowed Kupperman to hear both sides of the conversation, to appreciate these encounters as dialogues. I applied her template to Native/French interactions, to enable the Indigenous voices to be heard at an equal volume to the interlopers. Just as in the story of ‘Indians and English,’ a huge, published travel literature written by adventurers and men of the church permits us to eavesdrop on the conversations of Indigenous and French people. A secondary, more personal motivation came from my long-held desire to work on a project that required I spend long periods of time working in France. Voilà!!

What did you learn and what are you hoping readers will learn from your book? 

I learned so much from working on this book. For example, we have been aware for a long time that in the early meetings between Native Americans and Europeans, the local inhabitants had the upper hand. They were better equipped to negotiate geography and to survive on the lands even though Europeans claimed to have had more advanced technology. We have also known that the meetings were run by the rules of Native customs. What I learned though was that the gatherings of Native Americans and French took place between two autonomous groups, each thinking themselves superior to the other, and each working through these interactions from their own cultural points of view. And while historians have reported for a long time that the French were ineffective in their attempts to convert and assimilate Indigenous Americans, I learned from Native interlocutors why they had no desire to emulate the French and why becoming Catholic held little appeal. Also, European landings in the New World sent shock waves back to the Old. The ancient wisdom of Europeans and the Christian Bible had no clue that there was a landmass between them and Asia, that in fact there were four not three continents, and perhaps most baffling, these lands were inhabited by a people previously unknown. It took a lot of head scratching and philosophical contortions to try to come to terms with this new knowledge.

What surprised you the most in the process of writing your book? 

Just as I learned a lot, I was often surprised especially by how critical Native Americans were of the French and the apparent ease with which they conveyed these sentiments. The list goes on and on. Historians wrote long ago about how Amerindians thought that the priests’ robes were ridiculous and dangerous and how they could not wrap their heads around their celibacy. Natives were also often exasperated by the priests seemingly endless energy for preaching, wished out loud that they stop often reminding them about why they were uninterested in what the priests were offering.

What’s your favorite anecdote from your book?

In a book that is largely anecdotal I’m hard pressed to choose just one. Two of my favorites: At a Mi’kmaq village gathering, the group was questioning a man who had recently returned from France. He reported that he was quite impressed with the splendor of their buildings, which were sometimes as tall as trees. However, as he remarked, this style of housing would not serve Indigenous Americans’ needs. Natives’ houses have all the conveniences of French houses: places to rest, drink, eat, sleep, amuse themselves and friends. But to their great advantage, Natives could carry their houses and put them where they wanted. The man admitted that he was baffled by men of five or six feet in height having ceilings that were sixty to eighty. Why did the ceilings in French homes have to be so much higher than their heads?

Membertou, a legendary Mi’kmaq sagamore, was often evoked by the Jesuits as a shining example of a successful conversion, the transformation of an Indigenous American into a Christian. According to the priests, Membertou embraced their message after his son survived a near-fatal illness. But the conversion of Membertou revealed the great cultural divide that remained between subject and priest. When Father Biard tried to teach Membertou the Lord’s Prayer, Membertou remarked, “Give us this day our daily bread. . . . But if I did not ask him for anything but bread, I would be without moose-meat or fish.”