Lesson 101: How to Slap Paint Over Samuel De Champlain & Canada's Failures
Generally, Samuel de Champlain is portrayed as a Sauve, compassionate, frontier explorer with regards to Indigenous people in Canada. But if you take a good look at the underlying foundation of history, you'll see there's many cracks in that narrative.
Most Eropean history celebrates Champlain as a peaceful, visionary diplomat who built Canada through hard work & fair partnerships, pointing to the 1603 Tadoussac alliance. Which treats the land as terra nullius (nobody's land). To compareiewing Turtle Island (Earth) as raw resources waiting to be mapped, proccessed, and hooked up to the European economy.
Indigenous oral history look past what the so called "authors" or "victor's" of 2 faced diplomacy to the structural damage done to many existing, highly complex social systems.
Champlain didn't build a new foundation; he tapped into a living ecosystem without understanding the load limits. His 1609 military intervention against the Haudenosaunee was devastating. Triggering proxy wars (Beaver Wars) that destabilized centuries of Indigenous diplomacy.
Champlain was also a key architect in introducing European disease (small pox blankets), which acted like a brutal network virus, wiping out 50% to 60% of some nations. Notably, because Indigenous legal frameworks are held by Elders via oral tradition, losing half a population instantly fractured the sharing of social, political & traditional knowledge.
De Champlains' famous 1612 maps weren't neutral science. They were blueprints drawn to claim centuries old land traditionally inhabited by Indigenous people. This allowed the French Crown to lay the structural framework to deny inherent Treaty rights.
The bottom line is that Colonization isn't a historical event that finished centuries ago; it's an active, ongoing structural frame work. Modern economic and social inequality aren't accidents, they're symptoms of a compromised foundation. Heck the last residential school closed in 1996, and how many children died, or were abused (physically, sexually or emotionally) in those places.
If we want to fix systems, social norms and relationships with Indigenous people we have to stop putting lipstick on a pig, use some make-up remover, and address the accurate history.