Premières Nations: Collections Royales de France
by Sam Solomon
Quebec Heritage News, Fall 2007
Brush aside those pesky postcolonial anxieties. The small but surprising exhibition Premières Nations: Collections Royales de France features an exceptional collection of native North American artefacts on loan from the Musée du quai Branly in Paris. It is now on at Pointe-à-Callière Museum in Montreal until October 14, 2007 and is so successful that it makes wading through the hordes of camera-toting tourists and ice cream vendors in the Old Port worthwhile.
The collection itself is stunning. Alongside French maps sit superbly maintained First Nations hides, clothing and tools; moccasins looking as though they are new, with ornate decorative flourishes; Labradorian coats, leggings and snowshoes; Mi’kmaq baskets and pottery. Also on display are ceremonial feathered peace pipes, headdresses, weapons and several impressive full wampum belts, including the one thought to have been given to Samuel de Champlain by the Ottawa during negotiations in 1611. In the centre of the room, a wonderful, giant, brightly painted robe from the mid-18th century depicts the Arkansas tribe’s proximity to a French outpost on the Mississippi River.
Conspicuous among the artefacts is a rather delightfully unexpected trope: the phenomenon of cultural crossover. A number of items are the result of the European-American interface, and demonstrate effectively the speed with which such distinctions became blurred. Iroquois leggings feature Scottish-style flaming-heart images; a painted hide of unknown provenance is covered in images of birds and flowers that look distinctly European; and, most curiously, a Huron-Wendat wampum belt made on Île d’Orléans praises the Virgin Mary in Latin. But, unlike the flow of power and money, such cultural exchange moved in both directions. A French-made tomahawk-pipe, from 1762, is adorned with fleurs-de-lis, and a note explains that the British became as adept as First Nations tribes at making wampum belts by 1725 or so.
Women’s lives are not omitted, as is so often the case in accounts that measure history by wars, technology and men signing treaties in the halls of empire. Considerable effort has obviously been spent providing explanations of the role of women in First Nations life, both in terms of domestic behaviour and the production of textiles (an industry destroyed by the influx of European-produced goods by 1800).
Among the problems with many such shows is the question to which the majority of a generation of Western critical theorists devoted their lives: what remains of these artefacts sitting motionless under glass, illuminated by artificial lights, separated entirely from function, reduced to mere form – mere medium, in McLuhan’s rendering? This decontextualization serves a purpose, subtly and perhaps unintentionally: the obscuring of the brutality of military rule in New France. The stories of how these various pieces were acquired, and at what cost to the original owners, are left out, dependant upon the informed or imaginative visitor to conjure. For instance, 18th-century naval commander and Quebec governor Roland-Michel Barrin de la Galissonière’s ‘Canadian savage’ mannequin, a gift to the King’s children, is left essentially without examination of the meaning of such an appropriation. In addition, the majority of references to political dealings between colonizer and colonized emphasize amicable trade and peace treaties arrived at through negotiation. In contrast, the reality is that French soldiers and settlers forced their religion on Native peoples, subjugated them by force or the threat of force, and used them as pawns in skirmishes with British troops in the disputed territories between French and British settlements in what are now Ohio, Michigan and elsewhere.
Pointe-à-Callière itself is worth at least as much time exploring as the exhibition. Spread across two buildings, the museum’s most striking feature is the jarringly modernist tower that stands beside the St. Lawrence River. But the tower’s design belies what sits below the two edifices: a sprawling and exhaustive set of colonial-era Montreal artefacts, dug up in the very spot where they sit today. In 1989 it was discovered that Pointe-à-Callière is on top of the city’s first Catholic cemetery, a fact which helped lead to the fort’s location. The smaller of Pointe-à-Callière’s two buildings, Place Royale, was the city’s first public square and customs house. In fact, a museum archaeologist and researchers from the Université de Montreal revealed in mid-August that Fort Ville-Marie, the original French settlement on the island, sat in a warehouse not far from where the museum is. It’s refreshing somehow to see the confluence of the tower’s 20th-century design and the underbelly of a 17th-century outpost – a juxtaposition that fits neatly alongside the current exhibition’s exegesis of the beginnings of European-American cultural exchange.
Sam Solomon is a Montreal journalist. Premières Nations: Collections Royales de France is at Pointe-à-Callière Museum in Montreal until October 14, 2007.
