One of the greatest issues historians face when recounting the story of Native Americans continues to be a lack of written primary sources from an unbiased perspective. To fully encapsulate the Native experience, writers must develop a keen understanding of prejudices that derive from primary sources written by colonial explorers and traders. By the mid-seventeenth century, France developed a trading empire in the Great Lakes region they called “New France”. Beaver pelts could be traded for advanced tools such as arms and ironworks which the French produced in excess back in Europe. Furthermore, the French saw a divine calling in spreading Catholicism throughout the New World. To aid the cultural annexation, the Church encouraged Jesuit missionaries …show more content…
The broad painting of indigenous peoples as cannibals wasn’t restricted to just the French in North America. The English conquerors of Ireland regularly referred to certain Gaelic leaders as “the canyball”. Furthermore, one English commander claimed that the Gaelic Irish were “little better than Cannibals who do hunt one another.” The comparison of indigenous peoples to heathens only increases as the story continued. In the next phase of torture, Le Jeune refused to even describe the action, simply writing, “It is said that they perpetrated another act of cruelty upon him which would make this paper blush.” In refusing to name the “act of cruelty” the priest indicated that his morals were so superior to those of the natives that he wouldn’t succumb to their level of barbarism, even in writing. According to Le Jeune, even the French colonial government responded to the act. When informed, the colonial Governor of New France, scolded the Natives and demanded, “they should go somewhere else, not to wound the eyes of our French people by these acts of barbarity, to our eyes …show more content…
In their campaign against the ethnic Irish Gaelic in the mid-sixteenth century, the English massacred and brutalized thousands. One grotesque recount of the crusade by the observer, Thomas Churchyard, described the decapitation of fallen enemies to dissuade others from attacking the British. Churchyard wrote that the heads of all those killed that day “should be cutte of from their bodies and brought to the place where he incamped at night, and should there bee laied on the ground by eche side of the waie,” In spite of the colonial governments feigned disgust at the Huron’s actions, they themselves committed many of the same atrocities. Just thirty years after Le Jeune’s entry, the King of France, Louis XIV, ordered the extermination of the entire Iroquois nation in the Great Lakes