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Canada’s diplomatic relations with India are at their nadir now. But the importance of the world’s second-largest country by area cannot be underestimated. It is part of the G7, the seven most developed countries globally. Even more importantly, it is on the frontline of climate change.
Canada, with its huge Arctic coastline, second only to Russia’s, its boreal forests and temperate climate has been slowly changing of late. Heat waves, wildfires and rising temperatures having been increasing in number in the country.
Canada is also home to a large indigenous population, who constitute five per cent of its people. Canada, like its big southern neighbour, the United States, Australia and New Zealand, is a ‘settler-colonial society’. Indeed, the very story of Canada begins with a kidnapping.
The ‘discovery’ of Canada is attributed to Jacques Cartier, a French explorer. Born in 1491, Cartier was a resident of Brittany, in the remote northwest corner of France. Brittany has always been distinct among the regions of France due to its Celtic culture, in comparison to the Gallo-Roman and Germanic culture of the rest of the country.
Cartier was born in St Malo, a port on the English Channel (Manche in French) coast of France. In 1534, Philippe Chabot, Sieur de Brion and High Admiral of France, introduced him to Francis I, the French king. Praised as a competent mariner by the high admiral, Cartier was commissioned by Francis to explore the eastern coast of North America.
He set out on the first of three voyages, on April 20, 1534, from St Malo with two ships weighing 60 tons each, the US historian James Phinney Baxter notes in his 1906 work, A memoir of Jacques Cartier.
On the morning of July 24, the ships reached Gaspe, which is today on the coast of Quebec in Canada. Here, as Cartier and the other Frenchmen were erecting a 30-feet-long cross to claim possession of the land, the local inhabitants led by a chief had an uncanny feeling of what they were doing as they watched them.
Baxter describes what happened: “Around the cross with joined hands knelt the adventurers, regarded with astonished wonder by the natives. Returning to the ships, they were followed by the old chief with his three sons and brother, who made Cartier understand by signs that the country belonged to them. Luring them on board his ship, Cartier seized two of the chief’s sons, giving him to understand that he wished to take them with him.”
Cartier pacified the ‘Indians’ with presents and promised the chief that he would return with his sons and that the cross was only a marker.
“The old chief and his brother having returned to land and informed the people of the matter, with touching eagerness they paddled to the ship to bid their departing friends good-by.”
The two captives, named Domagaya and Taignoagny, were the first indigenous Canadians to visit France, with Cartier sailing back and reaching St Malo on September 5.
His description of the areas he visited during the first voyage meant that Cartier was commissioned again for a second one. This time, he took three ships and returned to the area in 1535.
As the ships entered St Peter’s Strait, writes Baxter, “…familiar objects began to meet the eyes of the captive Indians who accompanied him, and they eagerly pointed out the way into Canada. They told him of the Saguenay, from which came the precious red copper; of the great river and the populous town upon its banks, of which, perhaps, he heard for the first time. They were again in their own country and nearing their kindred, whom they were anxious to greet and regale with the wonders which they had beheld in France”.
And it was then that Cartier first heard the word ‘Canada’, as per Naming Canada: Stories about Canadian Place Names by Alan Rayburn.
“ ‘That is the way to Canada,’ Jacques Cartier’s young Aboriginal companions Taignoagny and Domagaya shouted as the explorer neared Ile d’Anticosti on the St Lawrence River on 17 August, 1535,” writes Rayburn.
The word they used, ‘Kanata’, was actually Huron, which belongs to the Iroquoian family of languages. Cartier recorded in his account of the voyage that the word meant ‘town’ or ‘cluster of dwellings’.
And so, Cartier returned to the chief whose sons he had taken captive the year before. The chief’s name was Donnacona and his village (‘Kanata’) was actually known as ‘Stadacona’. Cartier also came to know that further southwest along the St Lawrence river, on which Donnacona’s town stood, was another settlement, Hochelaga.
Cartier visited Hochelaga too in the following days. He first sighted the village at the foot of a hill, which he later climbed.
“As he took leave of these simple folk, the women brought fish, vegetables, and other food, which they pressed the strangers to accept. These were declined, but an invitation to ascend the mountain overlooking the village was accepted. From this mountain Cartier and his companions looked out over a wide prospect glowing with autumnal splendors, so grand that it inspired him to call the mountain from which he beheld it Mont Royal,” writes Baxter.
After spending time in both settlements, Cartier decided it was time to go. But then, he repeated his action of abducting the locals again. This time, he took 10 people captive with him as he returned to France.
“Before sailing, Cartier managed to secure the king, Donnacona, as well as his former captives, Dom Agaya and Taignoagny, with several others, and to imprison them on board his ship, to the great consternation of the people, who came about the ships and exhibited their grief by loud cries. In vain they offered presents to Cartier, hoping for the release of their king. All they could obtain was a promise, that after visiting the King of France he should return to them,” notes Baxter. On July 6, 1536, Cartier was back in St Malo.
Tragically, the 10 people who included Donnacona, Taignoagny and Domagaya had to suffer terrible consequences this time. Not adapted to the European climate, nine of them died in France, with the exception of the tenth, a little girl.
“Unfortunately, when the prospect was opening for them to return to their home and friends, they all died but one girl about ten years old. What caused their death is not stated, out probably consumption, a disease to which natives of high latitudes are particularly predisposed when introduced to the enervating luxuries of civilization,” describes Baxter.
Cartier would return to the St Lawrence for a third voyage. But the nine indigenous Canadians would never see their homes again.
As for Cartier, intellectual, cultural, and gender historian Jeffrey Vacante has noted, “Because he had neither established a permanent settlement nor led an explicitly Catholic mission to proselytize the Native peoples, Cartier’s explorations did not fit easily into the existing narratives of the period. Not until the middle decades of the nineteenth century would conservative nationalist writers begin to take another look at Cartier.”
The story of Canada, especially French Canada, and two of its biggest cities (Quebec City built on the site of Stadacona and Montreal on the site of Hochelaga) thus starts with abductions and betrayal of indigenous people. A dark way to start a nation.
