Chief Martin Dufour of the Innu Essipit First Nation visits Pointe-aux-Alouettes in Baie-Sainte-Catherine, Que., the site where Innu chief Anadabijou and Samuel de Champlain met in 1603 to set terms for the French presence in the land Champlain would later claim as New France.Mathieu Belanger/The Globe and Mail
Down a dirt track in an old Quebec whale-fishing village, there is a cluster of red granite blocks in the middle of a clearing, inscribed with only two words, in French and the Indigenous language Innu: kuei and ami. Hello friend.
The sculptures look like they might have been forgotten, when in fact they’re part of a process of remembering. Along with a series of plaques nearby, they form part of an unfinished historical site that is approximately 400 years overdue.
It will commemorate the Great Alliance of 1603, the first pact between French and Indigenous leaders in North America, and a moment that a growing number of scholars argue was the true beginning of Quebec and even Canada.
The site, a collaboration between local and national governments, including nearby Indigenous communities, is a tidy metaphor for the continuing renovation of Quebec’s collective memory that has recently dredged up this crucial point in history.
The alliance itself was sealed on a point of land where the Saguenay River meets the St. Lawrence, and saw the Innu chief Anadabijou welcome Samuel de Champlain at a celebratory feast to set out the terms of the French presence in this country.
Without the agreement they are believed to have forged there – military aid against the Haudenosaunee in exchange for permission to settle in the area – it is unlikely Champlain would have been able to establish his colony five years later.
A granite block bears the Innu and French words for 'friend' at Pointe-aux-Alouettes, which lies on the other side of the Saguenay river from the modern-day village of Tadoussac.Mathieu Belanger/The Globe and Mail
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The importance of the “grande tabagie de Tadoussac,” so called because of the importance of tobacco in the ceremony, was obscured for centuries by nationalist myth-makers who preferred to emphasize the founding of Quebec City in 1608, when the flag was firmly planted in the soil of “la Nouvelle-France.”
During an era of reconciliation with Canada’s First Nations, however, historians, anthropologists and even politicians have taken a renewed interest in what can be seen as a seminal pact between founding peoples.
In recent years, a series of academic articles, popular histories and even ribbon-cutting speeches have paid homage to the alliance. While some scholars criticize the idea that a friendly agreement can truly represent the colonial project that Quebec soon became, Indigenous leaders have pointed to the tabagie as a model for the nation-to-nation treaties they believe should govern their relations with Canada in the present.
Whatever way you look at it, says the historian and sociologist Denys Delâge, emeritus professor at Laval University, “it’s the founding date of contemporary Canada.”
From the historical site, you can see the St. Lawrence River and Saguenay fjord, top. Champlain mapped this area, such as in this excerpt from the 1613 book Les Voyages Dv Sievr De Champlain Xaintongeois. Tadoussac is marked with an 'A' near the centre of the map; next to it, a notation refers to the 'montagnet,' or 'mountain people,' an early French name for the Innu.Mathieu Belanger/The Globe and Mail, U.S. Library of Congress
On May 26, 1603, a small expedition of French sailors, merchants and explorers had finally descended the St. Lawrence as far as the fur-trading post of Tadoussac. The captain, François Gravé du Pont, was under instructions from King Henri IV to forge closer ties with local Indigenous nations for the purpose of advancing the country’s lucrative trade in beaver pelts. Champlain was the party’s cartographer and in-house author.
The group was dwarfed by the gathering of Indigenous people they encountered that day. About 1,000 men, women and children representing several different nations, including the Anicinabek and the Maliseet, were gathered at Pointe-aux-Alouettes to celebrate a military victory against the Haudenosaunee. Some 200 large canoes bobbed in the water. When Champlain went ashore, he found a festive atmosphere, with pots of meat boiling over fires in a large cabin with a bark roof.
The two sides were hardly strangers; in fact, business had connected them for decades. The Innu of the North Shore were sufficiently experienced in trading with European fishermen and whalers that they had composed a pidgin of Basque, Mi’kmaq and their own mother tongue to use as a language of commerce, as the ethnologist Florence Parcoret points out in the book Le Pitchitaouichetz ou La porte du pays innu. (The Innu mainly reside in eastern Quebec and Labrador, and are distinct from the Inuit.)
The meeting was also made smoother by the fact that Champlain and du Pont were emissaries of a relatively peace-loving king. Henri IV had recently ended France’s wars of religion by extending religious liberties to the kingdom’s Protestants. Perhaps in this spirit of reconciliation, he had also issued instructions for representatives of the Crown in Canada to establish friendships with its people and carefully maintain the treaties they signed. As the researcher Camil Girard points out, this was a dramatic departure in colonial policy from the days of Jacques Cartier, who came to Quebec in the 1530s and planted his cross like a conquistador.
If the French entered the tabagie as negotiators, not conquistadors, it was finally in no small part because they depended on the Indigenous for survival. A few years earlier, the fur-trade post at Tadoussac had been decimated by cold weather and disease; only a few of the men who wintered there survived, and then only because of help from the Innu.
The pact between the First Nations and the French was sealed by festivities spread over the course of two weeks. Champlain honoured the accord at first, joining his new allies on a series of war parties, as promised. The Innu allowed the construction of what is now Quebec City, but tightly controlled the extent of French settlement, preventing them from travelling inland to the fur-rich Saguenay. For a time, it may have almost seemed like a partnership between equals.
Quebec City flags surround the statue of Samuel de Champlain near the Chateau Frontenac in 2001.Jacques Boissinot/The Canadian Press
It didn’t take long, though, for the power imbalance between colonizer and colonized to emerge. The Innu came to resent the French claim of a monopoly on the fur trade and their pretensions to sovereignty, Ms. Parcoret writes; Champlain, for his part, came to see the Innu as his worst enemies among the Indigenous nations, after they murdered a number of settlers.
If the dislike was mutual, the fate of the two peoples was sharply asymmetrical. Despite worsening relations, the French presence gradually grew into a bustling colony of some 60,000 souls before the British conquest, while the Innu population dwindled thanks to imported diseases and a shrunken economic role. The Great Alliance had a winner and a loser, says Marie-Eve Théberge, negotiations co-ordinator for the Innu First Nation of Essipit, who is not herself Indigenous.
“The Indigenous people were had,” she said. “The French quietly imposed themselves here … In the end they dominated them much more than collaborating with them.”
Despite coming out on top, the leaders of New France had their own reasons for trying to forget the treaty. Champlain in particular set about minimizing the importance of the tabagie almost as soon as he described it in Des Sauvages, his account of that voyage (and our only written source for what happened). Once he had established Quebec City, in 1608, he had an interest in building up that single, dramatic gesture as the real founding of the new colony. “He rewrote himself as a hero,” Prof. Girard said. “He wrote his own founders’ story.”
With every revised edition of the book, Champlain diminished the role of other contributors to the birth of Quebec until, in 1632, he cut out the alliance entirely. Since this was the final version of the text – he died in 1635 – historians would rely on it for centuries, deepening their blind spot for an event they were already inclined to dismiss.
“Until the 1960s, historians did the story of the colonizers, the conquerors,” said Éric Bédard, a historian and professor at Université TÉLUQ in Quebec. “You had a lot of historians who were part of the clergy, who wanted to show that this was a colony founded by mystics, it was a work of Providence, we had to civilize this continent of barbarians.”
Illustrations of 'Montaignais' (Innu) people from one of Champlain's maps of New France.U.S. Library of Congress
Some scholars gradually began tunnelling under the foundations of this monolothic approach. In the 1980s and 90s, Quebec anthropologists such as Bruce Trigger and Serge Bouchard helped sensitize the wider public to the role of Indigenous nations in Quebec’s past by closely studying their cultures, Prof. Bédard said. Historians such as Prof. Delâge, Mathieu d’Avignon, and Prof. Girard – and a more recent moment of reckoning with Canada’s colonial past – also helped revive interest in the Alliance among scholars and governments.
“It’s because we want to integrate as much as possible the role of Indigenous people in our history,” said Prof. Bédard, who recently published a book about the history of Quebec that prominently features the tabagie and he has been spreading the word about 1603 whenever he can. Just over two years ago, he helped convince his friend, François-Philippe Champagne, then federal minister of infrastructure, to mention the pact in his speech inaugurating the new Champlain Bridge in Montreal. “Without this great alliance,” the minister said, channelling the new scholarly consensus, “many historians believe that Quebec itself could not have been founded in 1608.”
The same year as the bridge speech, work began on the historical site in Baie-Sainte-Catherine. Construction was paused because of the pandemic, but the public is technically welcome, said Stéphane Charest, head of works for the regional government of Charlevoix-Est, which is managing the project.
Amid the disordered pieces of the memorial, the plaque at Pointe-aux-Alouettes commemorates the 1603 meeting between the Innu and Champlain.Mathieu Belanger/The Globe and Mail
Today, a Government of Canada plaque tells the story of the Alliance in brief, with some notable understatement: how it sealed a partnership that “enabled the French to settle in the Québec region”; that it “fostered the development of the fur trade and the establishment of a permanent colony in Canada”; how, for the Indigenous communities, “it marked the beginning of vast changes to their cultures and territories.”
As mainstream Quebec society has slowly rediscovered this foundational moment, Indigenous communities have taken to citing it in discussions with Canadian governments of the present. Today, the Innu of Quebec are still seeking a treaty that would give them more autonomy within their territory and more access to resource development, and still invoking the Alliance as a touchstone. Chief Martin Dufour of the Innu First Nation of Essipit said he likes to repeat the story of the tabagie at the negotiating table, to remind his federal and provincial counterparts that such agreements are possible. “That’s why we’ve been negotiating for the last forty years,” he said. “To do what our ancestors did in the Great Alliance.”
Some academics take issue with the glorification of 1603, even as they recognize it as a more plausible founding date for Quebec. The University of Montreal historian Thomas Wien calls the idea of Henri IV as a New World peacemaker “one-sided,” noting that his expressions of goodwill toward Indigenous nations were always conditional, a “velvet glove” over an “iron fist.”
While something clearly began at the meeting on Pointe-aux-Alouettes, Prof. Delâge observed, it was not the history of Quebec per se. “We’re starting to recognize that the treaty of Tadoussac represents the arrival of the French, not in a virgin territory, but in a place where Indigenous peoples already were,” he said. “Our history doesn’t start in 1608 or 1603, but thousands of years earlier.”
While Innu leaders agree with many of these arguments, they remain defiantly proud of their ancestors’ role in shaping the early history of colonial Quebec. For the descendants of Anadabijou, remembering what happened at Tadoussac is also about acknowledging the power they once had, when they held the fate of an empire in their hands.
Mr. Dufour, the chief of Essipit, wants Canadians and Quebeckers to recognize that, whatever came after, their peoples once met on the shore of the Saguenay River as equals.
“It’s clear that it could be seen as the beginning of a relationship – an important relationship,” he said. “One that degraded over the course of time, because we were closed in on reserves and residential schools … But I still think we have to underline the fact that something important happened there.”
The meeting at 'could be seen as the beginning of a relationship – an important relationship,' Chief Dufour says.Mathieu Belanger/The Globe and Mail
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