Extraordinary recent documents relating to Jeanne Mance (1606-1673), which shed light on the founding of Montreal, confirm that the Iroquois were on the verge of destroying the French colony through their warlike tactics.
The situation in New France is serious. The year is 1665 and the repeated raids of the Iroquois force Jeanne Mance to call on the metropolis for help. In a letter written by hand and now certified as authentic, Montreal co-founder Paul de Chomedey called on de Maisonneuve to send a hundred colonist soldiers to prevent the indigenous population from winning the war.
This letter is a great discovery, says Paul Labonne, general director of the Musée des Hospitalières de l'Hôtel-Dieu de Montréal, in a telephone interview. It was he who, after a careful examination of the Séminaire de Québec's funds, was able to identify Jeanne Mance in the documents in question.
The director states that Jeanne Mance's letter was part of a corpus that was believed to have disappeared forever since the fire at the Hôtel-Dieu in 1695. We discover, in the Montreal co-founder's own words, the reasons that led her to ask France for armed support.
After the Iroquois had defeated the Hurons, they had become much prouder and more insolent than before, and began again to harass us and attack us so often and frequently that they did not relent.
The colony is indeed going through very precarious days. The Iroquois, then allies of the English, had just won the tough battle they were waging against the Hurons. They now have their eyes on Montreal, which they are on the verge of falling.
By 1665, the barricaded colony was truly in crisis. Aboriginal attacks continued relentlessly and without the Crown's help, Montreal would simply have disappeared from the map, says Mr. Labonne.
In order to save the colony from the barbarians and impudent Furies, as she describes in her letter, Jeanne Mance is also willing to pay the travel expenses from an amount granted by the patron Angélique Faure Bouillon. The amount of 22,000 pounds is staggering for the 17th century: it is equivalent to a million dollars today.
Jeanne Mance faces the Iroquois attack force. The latter will concentrate their war effort on Montreal, primarily for commercial reasons, which will lead to numerous conflicts with the French, adds Paul Labonne.
According to Taiaiake Alfred, researcher and senior advisor in Indigenous governance at McGill University, the letter is of great historical significance because it confirms what the Mohawks already knew about their Iroquois ancestors, the Haudenosaunee, and the conflicting relationships they had with the first French settlers.
“Reading the letter, we see that the French feel completely abandoned and that most of them are even ready to return home, to the other side of the Atlantic,” explains Taiaiake Alfred, author, on the sidelines of several works on indigenous people Identity and History, particularly the acclaimed It's All about the Land.
About to win the battle
The Mohawk, a member of the Kahnawake community, emphasizes that the course of history would have been complete without the arrival of regiments like that of Carignan-Salières, which were immediately dispatched to New France in 1665 to respond to the Iroquois raids in the St. Lawrence Valley Putting an end to it would have been quite different.
It was not will that allowed the French to stay in the territory and build their colony, but luck, money and military support, the researcher emphasizes. On the other hand, we see that, thanks to a complex war strategy, the Iroquois had a genuine desire to expel the colonists at the risk of their lives.
The Haudenosaunee's main goal was to expel French settlers from the region. We understand that they were close to achieving this, which would likely have jeopardized the existence of a French presence in North America.
The era was crucial to Canadian history, he recalls. The French and English colonies multiplied, the alliances between the whites and the natives took place in parallel with the conquest of territories. Everything is decided here and the European empires understood that they would never succeed without violence and weapons.
Despite the outcome of the conflict – the Iroquois Wars ended with the Great Peace of Montreal in 1701 – the Mohawk says he is proud of his ancestors' fight and the commitment they had to defending their land.
From an indigenous perspective, the First Nations experienced the arrival of Europeans as an invasion. The national narrative teaches that it was inevitable and that the Europeans were there to win. The fierce battles of the Haudenosaunee prove the opposite, namely that nothing is written in advance.
However, the researcher regrets that his community was not consulted during the research to identify the archival documents, including Jeanne Mance's will. This story is not only about the founding of Montreal, but also about the past of our people and the military policies of the colonial power that tried to exterminate us.