Travel Writing, Ethnography, and the Colony-Centric Voyage of the Jesuit Relations from New France

Abstract

This article argues that the Jesuit Relations, commonly read as the accounts of daring French travelers to the New World in the seventeenth century, must also be understood in light of the colony-centric circulation of the texts. In a step that has never before been considered part of the process through which the Relations collected and circulated information, some—and perhaps all—of the texts were sent back to Canada after being edited and published in Paris, giving Jesuits in the colony an opportunity to consult the published texts to see how they had been changed in France. This article focuses on two related areas of scholarship on the Relations that need re-evaluation in light of the colony-centric circulation of the texts: the status of the texts as travel writing, and as the premiere source of ethnographic data on the Amerindian groups that the missionaries encountered in Eastern Canada.