Introduction

In settler colonial discourses, Indigenous peoples are most often cast in an essentialist manner, that is, they are portrayed as static, with fixed traits and a nature that define them as well such. In fact, as one might be familiar, casting the nature of the Other in an essentialist manner is a common feature of modern colonial discourses. As the feminist theorist Stacy Alaimo summarizes,

“the idea that there is such a thing as the ‘nature’ of something is a type of essentialism, a philosophical or commonsensical belief in some sort of essence, core identity, or characteristic that defines an individual or group as such. An essentialist notion of say, woman’s nature, would assert a quintessence of woman, that could presumably be delineated. Both sexism and racism have been fueled by essentialist beliefs that women, as well as other groups, such as people of African descent or indigenous peoples, are inferior due to their unchanging, core ‘natures,’ which exist in a realm apart from histories of colonialism, economic systems, ideologies, or other social and discursive formations.”^[1]

Unsurprisingly, critical theorists writing from different vantage points have argued—and have arrived at a consensus—that to speak of a “nature” is to advance a kind of essentialism, which serves to justify colonialism, racism, sexism, heteropatriarchy, ableism, etc.

Yet at the same time, settler colonialialism, as a system of domination and governance, rests—and has to rest—on a fundamental notion that Indigenous peoples’ nature malleable. This is the very basis of the various interventions that colonists and settler states deployed and are still deploying, which are aimed to fundamentally reshape the nature of Indigenous peoples. I explore these two competing notions of “nature” in this chapter by examining a specific site of settler colonial politics, namely seventeenth-century Nouvelle-France, focusing specifically on the various interventions the colonial agents deployed to educate and discipline the very “nature” of Indigenous peoples by cultivating their mind and reason, as well as reconditioning their bodies. I understand education broadly, as a subjectifying process that aimed to shape subjectivity. This process was at once about “Francisation,” “civilization,” and Christianization—processes intended to “civilize” to Indigenous peoples through Chrisanity so that they become French (subjects) in the early days of Nouvelle-France.^[2] Although all European powers in the early modern period believed that they were superior in terms of civilization to non-European peoples, the French Empire was marked by a distinct civilizational logic in which colonization was both conceived and justified as bringing civilization to ‘savage’ peoples. The misisonaries were the main colonial agents laboring on the ground.^[3] The actual measures the missionaries deployed varied both temporally and geographically, as the missionaries had to constantly improvise due to the empirical situation they ran into and adjust their plans as many of their strategies ran into dead-ends. In general, these measures were intended to remove Indigenous children from Indigenous spaces to settler spaces, and by doing so shifting Indigenous ways of inhabiting spaces  to ‘civilized’ ways of being-in-the-world. At the end, Indigenous bodies would be disposed toward settler spaces, colonial authorities, and the settler colonial project as a whole.  We see that settler colonial education, from its early days, rests on the premise that the very “nature” of Indigenous peoples can be radically reshaped so that they would come to desire different objects and form different attachments, and colonial agents aimed to bring this vision into reality through the various means they created and deployed. Eventually, they would consent to their own subjection. In other words, the key to the cultivation of desire, understood as affective and embodied attachment, is the molding of nature. Paradoxically, the missionaries’ investment in education showed that what was conceived as the “nature” of Indigenous peoples needed to be brought into being through stringent—in other words, unnatural—colonial intervention and repetitive disciplines.

I closely read the various missionary reports from this period, particularly the Jesuit Relations and Ursuline Marie Guyart’s letters, which amount to a coherent discourse on conversion and civilization. As the primary colonial agents, the Jesuits and Ursulines had the most extensive contact with Indigenous peoples and derived reflections from their colonial experiences. I approach this discourse as a site of colonial knowledge production and development of colonial power rather than evidence of historical facts and truths. I seek to make it clear that colonial education as envisioned, designed, and carried out by the missionaries, who were the primary colonial agents in this early period of settler-Indigenous interaction, reveals an understanding of Indigenous peoples’ nature as at once essentialized and malleable. Although the scale of early modern settler colonial education was much more limited comparing to subsequent state-led investments culminating in residential and boarding schools in various settler states, there have been considerable continuity as well as difference. I contend that closely examining settler-Indigenous interaction in this early period illuminates both continuity and potential rupture in the development of settler colonial power. It specifically reveals how settler colonial power attempts to shape subjectivity by regulating Indigenous peoples’ bodies and affect, and enables us to see why Indigenous—especially Indigenous children’s—bodies have been intense sites of settler colonial intervention.

The missionaries envisioned that, through settler colonial education, Indigenous peoples’ “nature” would be drastically reshaped so that they would not simply consent to colonial domination but also desire—be attached to—their own subjugation. I suggest that the missionaries’ vision rested on a recursive logic, that Indigenous peoples, having been ‘civilized,’ would have consented to the coercive and often violent ways in which they were educated that made them so. Within this discursive formation, it is not simply that Indigenous peoples were represented as being attached to their subjugation; more importantly, they have had already consented to such subjugation because, as already ‘civilized’ beings, they would have chosen and consented to civilization and refused ‘savagery.’ In other words, in this colonial ideology, the effect of colonization is posited as the cause so that civilization is something that cannot be refused and consent is already presumed: had they been colonized, they would have known that colonization was for their good, so that colonization would be something they had consented to. The subjectivity produced by colonization is used to justify the means and cause of colonization. The effect then further justifies the cause and the means, and conquest and coercion are thereby thoroughly erased. The double connotations of nature is what made settler colonial education—and settler colonialism as a whole—at once genocidal, dispossessive, and assimilatory. We should note that genocide and assimilation do not oppose but rather complement each other: settler colonialism aimed to eradicate Indigenous cultures and all traces of differences, while preserving bodies that have been thoroughly ‘civilized’ and conditioned. Lying at the center of settler colonial ideology is a fundamental contradiction to both eliminate and preserve Indigenous peoples. This historical analysis thus helps contextualize and enables us to better understand settler state-backed residential schools and boarding schools, the atorocities of which we are only starting to grapple with.

Reconditioning Nature

Many scholars have noted that education was an integral part of the colonial civilizing mission in many parts of the colonized world. In settler colonial settings, education had a rather distinct and more fundamental function: to produce civilized imperial subjects by reforming the minds and bodies of colonized peoples.^[4] Though Foucault pinpoints the emergence of school as a key disciplinary institution in the eighteenth century, and many post-colonial scholars characterize colonial education as a nineteenth-century product, Domna Stanton contends that “schools and their pedagogical ideology are crucial to the formation of the disciplined, docile subject in the post-modern era, as it was in the early modern French state.”^[5] Seventeenth-century French pedagogy, Stanton argues, was closely linked to Counter-Reformation confessional practices and thus had a religious dimension.^[6] Indeed, many early modern European religious orders, especially the Jesuits and the Ursulines, were known for their dedication to education. The subsequent development of European colonial education is deeply indebted to this earlier period. The Jesuit educational model is particularly influential even until this day, whereas the Ursuline model has had a profound impact on girls’ and women’s education.^[7]

The advent of religious education in the seventeenth century also brought to the fore debates regarding the education of girls. Seventeenth-century French intellectuals disagreed vehemently on what kind of education, if at all, girls can and should receive. Yet despite such disagreements, they all shared the same philosophical belief that education should comply with women’s nature that is opposite to that of men so that both sexes could fulfill their natural function within the family, and by extension society and the state. In contrast, settler colonial education, which was at once conversion and civilization, was guided by a completely different ethos with a different goal. Rather than complying with the ‘nature’ of Indigenous peoples, the avowed goal of the architects of colonial education was to drastically reshape Indigenous peoples’ ‘nature’ by redisposing their bodies and reconditioning their desire. This vision reveals unstable, if not contradictory, notions concerning the ‘nature’ of Indigenous peoples and Indigenous women and girls in particular.

While the Jesuits were especially adamant in upholding theological orthodoxy and perceived the colonial world and Indigenous peoples through it, they also accommodated—and simply had to accommodate—local conditions.^[8] Such was also the case in Nouvelle-France. The Jesuits reinterpreted religious and theoretical principles through their colonial experience, especially their intersubjective exchange with Indigenous peoples. This process of interchange and mutual adaptation between philosophical principles and empirical colonial reality gave rise to a distinct ideology, at the center of which is the conviction that Indigenous peoples could be remolded through education to the extent that they would stop being Indigenous altogether. For them, education, which was religious in nature, entailed above all moral conditioning and habit formation through the re-disposition of the body. In other words, in this colonial ideology that directly grew out of colonial experiences, settler colonial education was both conceived and enforced as an embodied process. Such education both rested on and gave rise to a multifold conception of nature as disposition, which was embodied and habitual. While the political taxonomy Aristotle develops in Politics, as Pagden has shown, enabled early modern theologians and philosophers to conceptualize Indigenous peoples as natural children,^[9] there was another important strand of Aristotelian thinking that influenced the concrete practices of missionaries, especially the Jesuits, significantly: namely, his moral philosophy concerning nature, disposition, and habit. Though the Jesuits did not directly quote Aristotle, the influence of Aristotelian moral philosophy was quite clear in their discussion of education. This is not surprising, since Aristotle, along with Aquinas, was an authorial figure codified in the standard Jesuit curriculum that all Jesuit students had to receive.^[10] This was the primary philosophical resource from which they drew and which they attempted to apply to the new peoples and landscapes they encountered.

Unlike the Jesuits, the Ursuline (and the Augustinian^[11]) Sisters received limited informal education that was practical in orientation. The Ursulines, of course, arrived in New France with a pronounced apostolic ambition of ‘civilizing’ and educating “les petites filles sauvages.” In their Constitution, ratified in Québec in 1647, it clearly states that: “The particular devotion of the Ursulines of this country, as long as they remain there, is that their fourth vow extends more to Indigenous girls (filles sauvages).”^[12] Educating Indigenous girls remained the central maxim of the Ursuline endeavour in Canada, and as Marcel Trudel and Thomas Carr note, only in the early 1720s was the clause “I dedicate education to Indigenous little girls”( Je voue instruction aux petites filles sauvages) deleted from their vow.^[13] Though the Ursulines were cloistered—they only left their convent during natural accidents, while the Jesuits, being mobile, followed Indigenous bands to their home country and many went on hunting trips with them, though they also attempted to establish a permanent seminary—the Jesuits and the Ursulines shared the same pedagogical ethos and fulfilled similar colonial functions. This is not surprising since the Ursulines only arrived in Canada following the Jesuits’ call, and the Jesuits acted as spiritual leaders for the Ursuline nuns.

The Jesuits claimed that Indigenous peoples “have a strong aversion to constraint,” and “The Savage nature (Le naturel Sauvage) demands freedom, and is marked by an imperious desire (vouloir) for what is pleasing, or an avoidance of what is displeasing.”^[14] The Mother Superior of the Hospital, an Augustinian nun, in recounting the death of a Wendat nun, compares Indigenous girls’ abhorrence of constraint to that of chickens’ fear of kites and lambs’ inclination to run from the wolf.^[15] According to her, “All this proceeds from one and the same cause, namely, nature.”^[16] In this characterization alluding to the ’noble savage’ (bon sauvage) trope that would haunt the European imaginary of the New World,^[17] the missionaries saw both the desire and bodies of Indigenous peoples as naturally disposed toward freedom, which had the negative connotation of unruliness, lack of regulation, and cruelty.^[18]

On the other hand, the missionaries also claimed that the intelligence and natural good dispositions of the natives could be brought to light by instruction.^[19] In fact, this is the underlying principle of their whole educational, and more generally civilizational, enterprise. The missionaries had to believe that Indigenous peoples’ nature and bodily habits could be radically reshaped to justify their missionary activities. Paul Le Jeune, observing the Innu and Algonquin students at the Jesuit seminary, wrote in the 1639 Relations that, “These young lads, most of them between twelve and fifteen years of age, have taught us two admirable truths,—one is, that if animals are capable of discipline, the young Savage children are much more so; the other, that education alone is wanting to these poor children, whose minds are so good as those of our Europeans.”^[20] They showed “as much grace and docility as any of the French” once placed and educated in the seminary space.^[21] What is implied is that the natives can indeed become French—to embody Frenchness.

We see from this discourse that nature is understood as fundamentally embodied. The colonial agents were acutely aware that the education of desire entailed shaping and disciplining the body. This term that is regularly used when describing the ‘nature’ of Indigenous peoples, and sometimes themselves, is ‘disposition,’ which at once points to a moral attitude and a form of bodily comportment. What appears as ‘moral ills’ that Indigenous peoples display is a form of bodily malalignment. Redisposing the body—ridding it of bodily disease—would also cure the moral ills, whereas reconditioning moral attitude would entail disciplining the body. In other words, the body became an intense object of biopolitical control. More precisely, it was constituted as an object in the first place—became legible as a modifiable object—through such discipline.

Many Jesuits pronounced that their goal was to change “this barbarous disposition (cette humeur barbare) by teaching them to live like men, and then to be Christians;”^[22] to “cultivate them (à les cultiver)…[t]ame those fierce natures (dom[p]ter ces naturels farouches).”^[23] The Jesuits, the Ursulines, and the Augustinian Sisters regularly evoked the language of ‘cultivation’ in describing their colonial vision and practices. They especially saw the Iroquois as ‘barbarous’ because of the ongoing war they waged against other Indigenous Nations and how they treated their captives.^[24] These social and political practices, which were contingent responses to an ongoing crisis—significant demographic loss and depopulation exacerbated by diseases brought by Europeans—were taken to represent the very nature of the Iroquois. The Ursulines and Jesuits saw the aversion to restraint and desire for freedom as the nature of the natives in general.

But nature can be reshaped, affirmed the Ursulines. Shortly after their arrival in Canada, one Ursuline wrote that “Those who cross over here from your France are almost all mistaken on one point—they have a very low opinion of our savages, thinking them dull and slow-witted; but, as soon as they have associated with them, they confess that only education, and not intelligence, is lacking in these peoples.”^[25] Observing the girls who were sent to the Seminary, the Ursuline contended that “There is nothing so docile as these children. One can bend (plier) them as he will; they have no reply to anything one may desire from them.”^[26] In a letter Marie Guyart sent to Le Jeune, which was included in the 1641 Relations, she reiterated that the girls at the Seminary “left their savage nature (humeur Sauvage) at the door, they have brought no part of it with them.”^[27] Conferring an earnest compliment to one of the Seminarists, Magdelaine, Guyart claimed that “one would not take little Magdelaine for a savage.”^[28] These remarks are particularly interesting because they suggest that the very nature used to characterize a people can also be disassociated from and disembodied by the people. In a letter to her son, Guyart similarly valorized the piety of the seminarists and remarked, “Is this not delightful in girls born in barbarity?”^[29] The emphasis on docility and obedience lends force to their belief in being able to “bend” the nature of these native girls, to “cultivate these young plants, to render them worthy of the garden of the church, that they may be some day transplanted into the holy gardens of paradise.”^[30] While they displayed a ‘natural’ aversion to restraint, suggesting the limit of the colonial educational effort, their ‘natural’ obedience could be exploited to make them attached to their own subjection. That these incompatible traits are both ascribed to nature indicates that nature is a fundamentally malleable concept. It is conceived in an essentialist manner, as the timeless source of all worldly actions, as what characterizes Indigenous peoples in general, but at the same time as changeable.

Through the cultivation of their desire and pacification of their bodies, their ‘natural’ disposition was envisioned to be replaced by cultivated piety and obedience. Being disposed towards something implies a bodily orientation, a way of moving towards certain things while refraining from others. The French word humeur also exclusively concerns the human body. Bodily disposition and moral nature are conceived as intertwined and mutually expressive of the other. In a letter Marie Guyart sent to Le Jeune, which was included in the 1641 Relations, she wrote about a native girl named Magdelaine Amiskonian, that she was, “in her manners (mœurs), like one who has been brought up among us; you could not find a disposition (humeur) sweeter or more pliable.”^[31]

The humour theory (théories des humeurs), which can be traced back to ancient Greek thinkers Hippocrates and Galen, was dominant in the early modern period in explaining differences in human behavior and personality, and in particular sexual difference.^[32] It was widely applied in medicine to diagnose bodily alignment in early modern Europe.^[33] The theory was also included in the first edition of the Dictionnaire de l’Académie française, published in 1694 in Paris.^[34] Under the entry “humeur,” the humour theory is introduced, and immediately afterward it also states: “Humour, is also said of a certain disposition of the mind, either natural or accidental.”^[35] Organic bodily illness and moral failures are mutually implicated: both required the re-making of the self through certain techniques (techne), and such techniques are at once organic and spiritual. The transformation of nature thus requires the re-conditioning of the body—literally ridding it of diseases; or rather, it is through the modification of bodily comportment and disposition that nature could be reshaped. This is especially evident in Marie’s descriptions of the girls at the Seminary. When she praised their piety and affirms their ability to be made “very good Christians (très bonnes chrétiennes),”^[36] she most often commented on their manners, bodily dispositions, and embodied practices. For her, obedience and piety foremost entailed a bodily disposition—to religious authorities, to cloistered life, and to God. Confinement within the seminary would pacify Indigenous girls who, as the nuns put it, had a “strong aversion for constraint.”^[37] By constraining bodies within the confine of the convent space, feminine virtues such as modesty, chastity, resignation, and religious piety were to be cultivated. Corporeal punishment such as whipping and deprivation of food was also routinely used in the convent when students make ‘mistakes’.

Yet confinement simply could not be enforced as thoroughly as the nuns would have liked in this context. In one of her letters she sent to her son in 1668, Marie Guyart mentioned that there were only three Indigenous full-time borders at the Seminary (in comparison to sixteen French girls), while most were attending on a temporary basis. She confirmed that the Ursulines did ‘successfully’ raise some Indigenous girls “in the French manner.”^[38] But Guyart also lamented that their natural attachment to their parents and freedom prevented them from being fully civilized, that is, satisfied with being confined. In her words, they

“are like birds on the wing (des oyseaux passagers), staying with us only until they become sad, a condition which the character of the savages cannot endure (ce que l’humeur sauvage ne peut souffrir). As soon as they grow sad their parents will take them away, fearful they will die. On this score we leave them free, for we win more this way than by constraint. There are others who take off by whim or caprice. Like squirrels, they climb up our palisade (which is as high as a wall) and go running in the woods.”^[39]

She also scorned Indigenous parents for loving their children too passionately (leur parans qui sont passionnez pour leurs enfans) and regarding giving their children to the Ursulines as a favor–^[40]–while Guyart, like many later actors who were directly involved in educating Indigenous children, thought of it as a favour they were conferring on Indigenous children and their families.

Guyart’s remarks, ironically, accentuates that in the settler colonial context, confinement also had another crucial function: separating Indigenous children from their families and communities. This was to shield them from the ‘polluting influence’ of ‘savage ways.’ This was precisely what evoked objection and resistance. In the 1668 Relations, Le Mercier reported, “I have been obliged to join with them [native children] some little French children, from whom, by living with them, the Savages will learn more easily the customs and the language.”^[41] It was believed that these isolated spaces would serve to civilize and assmilate Indigenous children while also cultivating religious piety and obedience to colonial agents. By imitating French children, they would learn to embody ‘civilized’—French—manners, and eventually cease to be Indigenous in nature. Though Le Jeune claimed that the natives were “more easily subdued by love, rather than fear,” the missionaries routinely deployed corporeal punishment in their pedagogical practices, both in the seminaries and beyond their walls. Both the seminary and mission settlement, we see, were intended to dispose Indigenous bodies away from the native ways, Indigenous communities, Nations, and land, and toward ‘civilization.’

Conclusion

The seemingly contradictory conceptualization of nature—as something that is both timeless and malleable—signals that in this early modern discourse, the “nature sauvage” is essentialized and denotes particular sets of ‘savage’ characteristics, whereas Indigenous peoples are believed to be able to be radically reshaped, that is, civilized. What civilization produces is not civilized Indigenous men and women—which is logically impossible—whose nature is radically re-formed and whose bodies are radically re-disposed; but rather, they will simply become civilized subjects of empire who are completely rid of such “naturel sauvage” altogether. In other words, they would stop being Indigenous in nature altogether. The belief that Indigenous peoples’ ‘nature’ could be radically reshaped made education the focal point of the civilizing mission. In turn, this belief is reflected in the colonists’ educational vision, designs, and practices.

Corporeal punishment, self-inflicted mortification, migration, and dislocation, were the primary means the missionaries deployed. In describing their educational practices and narrating the drastic changes they brought on to Indigenous peoples, they show that they were invested in shaping and transforming the very ways in which Indigenous peoples disposed themselves, specifically their bodies. At the same time, these descriptions and narratives also give rise to a discourse of conversion that hinged on the education of desire. This discourse was enabled by the coming together of particular forms of power and knowledge, which ultimately rested on competing, if not contradictory, understandings of Indigenous peoples’ ‘nature’ as at once given and static, and malleable. I would suggest that this conflict is at the core of settler colonial ideology, which is at once genocidal, dispossessive, and assimilatory. Many scholars have noted that in contrast to their British counterparts, the French settler colonial agents were more accommodationist to Indigenous cultural differences.^[42] While accommodation may appear as the opposite of assimilation, I contend that instead the former was a means to the latter. Missionaries attempted to master Indigenous languages and understand Indigenous cultural and social practices only to facilitate and accelerate their civilizing progress. Hence, these early pedagogical designs and practices, and the overall colonial ideology, reveal more continuity with than a contrast to later state-led assimilationist and genocidal efforts.

While differing vastly in scale and impact from later settler colonial educational measures, specifically boarding and residential schools,^[43] there has been considerable consistency in ideology driving settler colonial education towards Indigenous chidren spanning from the early period of settler colonization, once we take a longue durée perspective. My analysis thus complicates and enriches our understanding of early modern European conceptions of Indigenous peoples and settler colonial ideology, power, and means of regulating and disciplining Indigenous peoples’ bodies and desire. Many policies and actions that are thought of as rather recent, such as separating Indigenous children from their parents and kinship networks and communities, and confining them within enclosed settler spaces, were already deployed by missionaries in the early modern period, at the very genesis of settler colonialism.

The logical conclusion of this settler colonial vision is that Indigenous peoples would cease to be Indigenous altogether. In other words, it is a vision premised on assimilation and ultimately cultural genocide—radical eradication of difference. The focus of colonial education was to cultivate a particular form of embodied subjectivity so that the educated students would be attached to their own subjugation and be disposed towards obedience to colonial authorities and the settler colonial order as a whole. Empirically speaking, the missionaries’ educational efforts produced frustrating results, and many even failed—such as the Jesuit seminary.^[44] The missionaries had limited means and resources, and their efforts often met with frustrating results in this early period. Indigenous students often ran away or refused to be confined within seminary walls. Many remained imbued within Indigenous cultural and spiritual traditions and disposed and attached to their homeland, kin, and community. Yet the very logic I identify here would survive and continue to be reflected in the subsequent development of education concerning Indigenous children in settler states in the centuries to come. The importance settler states would accord to the education of Indigenous children, and the scale of investment in it, in fact testifies to the resilience of Indigenous cultures and peoples. As redressing the traumatic legacy of residential and boarding schools has been a priority in transitional justice in many settler states, including the US and Canada, looking at the roots and early form of settler colonial education can help us understand the profoundly violent logic underwritting it and urge us to come up with pedagogical designs that truly honour and respect Indigenous ways of being and ways of knowing.