Presented at the Annual Meeting of the Canadian Historical Association, 2009
Abstract: The end of the eighteenth-century and first-quarter of the nineteenth century was an important period in the history of the Wendat village of Jeune-Lorette. During the 1790s, the French habitants who lived around the village petitioned and were successful in creating a parish of their own – desired because of parochial tensions with the Catholic Wendat in Jeune-Lorette. In the 1820s, village leaders spoke to the Assembly of Lower Canada on a number of occasions about their land rights – seeking to reclaim both seigniorial rights given to them in the seventeenth century and their hunting grounds north of Quebec City. This culminated in 1824/1825 when four Wendat leaders travelled to England to bring these concerns before the King. This paper examines these events by looking at the role of education in facilitating aboriginal activism. Its focus is on four Wendat graduates of Dartmouth College and Quebec’s Petit Seminaire, and how they used their education as a tool to increase the autonomy of their community.
Thomas Peace 