In Search of the Savage Sauvage: An Exploration into North America's Political Cultures

Abstract

Introduction On his 1534 voyage to the St. Lawrence, Jacques Cartier first encountered the Sauvage when he saw Beothuk Indians, elusive in the distance, as his ship reached the barren coast of Labrador. He described these aboriginal inhabitants of North America as having well-formed bodies, but as gens effarables (frightening) et (the older French spelling of sauvages) with their hair tied up on the top of their heads like a handful of twisted hay with feathers in it, and clothed in skins of animals (Cart ier, 10 I). As his journey progressed Cartier made closer and closer contact, until the French were trading with and offering food to various sauvaiges. He wound up kidnapping two sons of Donnacona, an Indian chief, and taking them back to France. The appears in 1600, where the French sauvaiges become savages in Hakluyt's English translation. Subsequent translators have continued Hakluyt's practice. The Indian as appears throughout the Thwaites Jesuit Relations translations and in other nineteenth and twentieth century translations of the records of French missionaries and explorers, including those for the Champlain Society. But the French word has a quite different meaning from the English word savage. Sauvage as used by Cartier and the other early explorers and missionaries had few of the connotations of brutishness and ferocity now associated with the English savage. Translations that treat the two words as synonyms give a misleading impression to English-speaking readers of how the early French missionaries and explorers regarded Canada's aboriginal people, and masks important differences between the French and English colonists in North America in their dealings with aboriginal people. This paper explores th e differences between the Sauvage and the Savage. It identifies two basic constructs: one the bon sauvage, or good Indian found by the French missionaries and explorers; the second the savage discovered by the English colonists. The two constructs differ profoundly, as did the way the two colonial powers treated North America's aboriginal inhabitants. (1) I. Savage and Sauvage The differences between the present meaning of and do not lie in what the words denote, for both refer to the aboriginal inhabitants of North America. But words have much broader implications and resonances than the simple denotation of an object, event, or person. They relate to and imply a whole range of other things, and their broad connotations shade, in important but often hidden ways, the cultural associations and implications of the people or things denoted. The most recent Oxford English Dictionary definition of the English word savage, as a noun and adjective is: Savage...[adjective]: 1 fierce; cruel (savage persecution; a savage blow). 2 wild (a savage animal). 3 archaic offensive uncivilized; primitive. 4 informal angry; bad-tempered (in a savage mood). 5 archaic (of scenery etc.) uncultivated (a savage scene). 6 Heraldry (of the human figure) naked. [noun]: 1 archaic offensive a member of a primitive tribe. 2 a cruel or barbarous person. (2) According to the Dictionnaire Larousse the adjective also can be used with these sorts of connotations of action violente, impitoyable, bruwle, barbare, ftiroce as in competition pour le pouvoir, Se defendre avec une energie or capitalisme sauvage but Larousse offers this as the eighth of nine meanings, and the first seven contain no connotations of ferocity or brutality, but rather an absence of domesticity and cultivation. To illustrate the difference in usage: if canoeists go to a store to buy bug repellent they will find that the Deep Woods appropriate for the Canadian North becomes, on the French side of the canister Off Regions Sauvages. …