Kenan Cheung
Marco Jaimes
History 100
April 20, 2025
Devotion or Domination? "The First Year"
Written in 1640 by an Ursuline nun in Quebec to a lady of rank, "The First Year"
constitutes a striking piece of primary source material on the French colonial mission in New
France. As a letter, it reveals the everyday running of the seminary and the religious coloration of
colonial actions. The author praises the mission's forward movement in converting Indigenous
girls and interprets their actions within a frame of Christian devotion. Underneath the gratitudes
and pious expressions lies the colonial agenda that links salvation with cultural transformation.
This essay contends that the letter justifies Indigenous people's cultural assimilation by invoking
religious language and gendered narratives, thus making it an instance in point concerning the
general intersection between faith and imperialism in seventeenth-century New France. An
examination of the letter about its contents, historical context, and significance shows that
missionary work was just as much about domination as it was about devotion.
Its contents express the progress of the conversion of Indigenous girls into Christian
virtue, contrasting obedience, innocence, and willing adherence to French customs. One girl "is
so ardent in praying to God that it is never necessary to advise her to do so; she even leads the
others."1 This kind of praise presents Christian piety as the highest virtue, while also implying
1
Ursuline Nun, "The First Year," in Letters from New France (Quebec, 1640), 71.
that Indigenous children are praiseworthy only if they conform to the French religious
framework. The letter often describes the girls in infantilizing and idealized terms, assuming
their very spiritual purity makes them eligible for conversion. Another girl “had no sooner seen
him than she threw her hatchet aside and said, 'Teach me.' She did this with such good grace that
he was sensibly touched by it.”2 She wanted to learn of catechism from him. These portrayals
obscure the underlying power dynamics and refuse to account for any power the girls may have
possessed in such situations.
The letter is firmly situated by history in an era when Catholic missionary activities were
at their peak in New France, with Jesuit and Ursuline orders taking center stage in France's
colonial expansion. The letter in question touches briefly upon the set-up of a seminary at
Sillery, meant to Christianize and "settle" Indigenous populations. To the author's way of
thinking, a girl "was only five months in the seminary and was able to recount the principal
points of our Faith and knew the catechism and Christian practices perfectly."3 This shows how
it converts Indigenous girls by a kind of spiritual cleansing. Yet this religious narration occurs in
a field deeply entangled with social and political agendas. The goal of the missionaries was, by
teaching the girls how to read, pray, and observe Christian morals, to destroy the Indian cultural
systems and replace them with their French ones. The process that was described in the teaching
was a part of France's much grander aim to establish a "civilized" New World colony, in which
cultural alteration was mistaken for spiritual enlightenment.
The document’s significant historical consequence revealing the (colonial ideologies)
veiled in the garb of religious salvation was this letter. This letter proves how Christianity was
2
3
Ibid., 73.
Ibid., 73.
made a civilizing force by specifically targeting the young Indigenous women as vials of cultural
transformations: "They model themselves upon us as much as their age and their condition can
permit."4 This statement lays open the belief that Indigenous children are not to be embraced in
any way except French ways as measures of success, throwing their original identities and
traditions in the dustbin. More so, through the text, gendered assumptions are perpetuated in
presenting girls as more malleable and having a better propensity for embracing faith within a
patriarchal structure of the mission hierarchy. Lectures as well as texts speak about these
missions as cultural erasure tools while couched in the language of salvation.
In conclusion, therefore, "The First Year" presents an excellent case of how religious
rhetoric was directed to push the French colonial agenda in New France. The focus of the letter is
on obedience and phrases that refer to conversion or moral purity, reflecting how such terms
would develop the use of Christianity as an assimilation tool. This is an example of the
emotional, often selective presentation of Indigenous girls by the resulting document, pertaining
more to its author's values than the lived experiences of those she describes. As a historical
source, it offers insights into the intersection of gender, religion, and imperialism in the Atlantic
world of the 17th century.
4
Ibid., 74.