The problem

The early globalization of New France, its evangelization and exploration, after a few years in Acadia, began in earnest in the 1630s, the same decade in which the Jesuit-trained René Descartes’s Discours de la méthode appeared, a text that formed the foundation of modern, rationalist philosophy. Just as our world is post-Cartesian, the formation of Canada was earnestly its opposite, and their ideological differences form the basis of a debate begun in Quebec in the nineteenth century between the liberal, secular historian Franois-Xavier Garneau and the more conservative, ecclesiastical historian Jean-Baptiste-Antoine Ferland. Inasmuch as the liberal side has prevailed, the missionary work of the Jesuits and its written legacy, not to speak of their influence on Marie de l’Incarnation, tends to be put aside, as, for example, a recent history in English has done. To neglect these texts, especially the Jesuit Relations, simply because they inscribe an ideology that does not it the contemporary doxa would be to distort the sense of Canada’s arrival into history. It is to forget that, before the “empire writes back,” it writes; and by merely writing, it claims an ideological and discursive territory that extends well beyond its initial frontiers. That they have not been entirely neglected is apparent from novels, poems and plays such as Leonard Cohen’s Beautiful Losers, Laure Conan’s À l’œuvre et à l’épreuve, Brian Moore’s Black Robe, Archibald Lampman’s “At the Long Sault,” Delaware playwright Daniel David Moses’s Brébeuf’s Ghost, and E. J. Pratt’s Brébeuf and his Brethren.