L'Amérindien dans la littérature descriptive canadienne-française, 1850-1900

Car, comme la culture et la religion, le territoire national se trouvait au coeur du projet de société piloté par l'élite intellectuelle canadienne-française, et si la vallée laurentienne, avec son flot d'immigrants anglophones, rendait désormais utopique l'établissement d'une nation francophone dans cette région, les territoires de l'intérieur, quant à eux, s'offraient comme solution de rechange où créer le nouvel espace national (Morissonneau 1978 ; Bouchard 1989). While the treatment of Native reality by the French Canadian historians of the 19th century is well known today, such is not the case for the image of Native people that is to be found in the much wider literature produced by the entire class of French Canadian intellectuals of the time. Based on the analysis of a representative literary corpus, this paper shows that just like the historians, but sometimes by following different paths, the French Canadian intellectuals of the second half of the 19th century proposed a specific image of the Native population, an image that had less to do with reality than with a preoccupation regarding the identity and survival of French Canadian society and culture. WASHBURN, Wilcomb E., et Bruce G. TRIGGER, 1996 : « Native Peoples in Euro-American Historiography », in B. G. Trigger et W. E. Washburn (dir.), The Cambridge History of the Native Peoples of the Americas, vol. 1, North America, partie 1: 61-124.