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Reviews of Books
The Great Peace of Montreal of 1701: French-Native Diplomacy in the
Seventeenth Century. By
GILLES HAVARD
. Translated by
PHYLLIS ARONOFF
and
HOWARD SCOTT.
(Montreal, Que., and Kingston, Ont.: McGill-Queen's University Press,
2001. Pp. xvi, 308. $75.00 cloth, $24.95 paper.)
Reviewed by José António Brandão, Western Michigan
University
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In the summer of 1701, the Iroquois who inhabited the area south of Lake Ontario undertook negotiations with the English in New York and with the French and their native allies in Canada. In each place, representatives of the Iroquois Confederacy sought to secure peace and land rights and to retain a significant measure of political and economic autonomy in their relations with their European and native neighbors. The two European powers sought to secure the allegiances of their various native allies and economic and military advantages over their European imperial rivals. The treaty negotiation in Montreal, with well over 1,000 Indian participants and scores of French officials, dignitaries, and citizen onlookers, was by far the more substantial event in terms of pageantry, if not in outcomes. Three hundred years later, "the Great Peace of Montreal," as it has come to be called, continues to draw both popular and scholarly attention, and the summer of 2001 in the province of Quebec was marked by a flurry of activity to commemorate the three-hundredth anniversary of the peace talks. Gilles Havard's The Great Peace of Montreal of 1701 is one of the more significant offshoots of that celebration. |
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Two museum exhibits wonderfully conveyed the pageantry, material culture, and color of the 1701 Montreal peace talks. "Living Words: Aboriginal Diplomats of the 18th Century," at the McCord Museum, introduced visitors to the process of native and French diplomacy and diplomats. Highlighting the exhibit were the restored rare portraits of the "Four Indian kings," ironically, given the French focus of events, made famous by a diplomatic visit to England about a decade after the Montreal treaty. The Pointe-à-Callière Museum, located at the site of the original meeting in 1701, hosted "1701: The Great Peace of Montreal." The centerpiece of the show, despite many rare artifacts from museums around the world, had to have been the original 1701 document that recorded the final speeches of that August day three centuries earlier. In both exhibits, native diplomatic process was carefully explained, native aims clearly articulated, and, especially at Pointe-à-Callière, the peaceful and cooperative nature of French-native relations was stressed. |
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Those unable to attend the exhibits need not feel neglected. Each museum published illustrated histories of the events, and the special commission created to organize celebrations of the Peace of 1701 produced The Great Peace: Chronicle of a Diplomatic Saga, a lavishly illustrated work written by Alain Beaulieu and Roland Viau in the form of letters as if by an eyewitness to the events. More scholarly treatment of all facets of the 1701 negotiations (from an analysis of the "totems" the Indians used to "sign" the treaty to the layout of the site of the signing ceremony) can be found in a special edition of the journal Recherches amérindiennes au Québec, 31:2 (2001), and in the book under review. The latter work is a translated and revised version of Havard's earlier publication, La Grande Paix de Montréal de 1701: Les voies de la diplomatie franco-amérindienne. (Montréal, 1992), that was released to coincide with the tercentenary. |
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