I clowned a scratched lib recently for being french-canadian and proud of it, and that was pretty funny. But more recently someone else asked me about that incident a bit, and then she pretty much shilled for the French at me.

She said stuff like "well French canadians are a bit more complicated I guess... lots of them are metis or straight up native american" and "they had an alliance with them[indigenous peoples] and did marriages to strengthen it" ( ) and even "A lot of Acadians went to live with natives when colonies were disbanded by france". With a little bonus "Yes the French were really strong on defending Mi'kmaqs and saw them as the actual authority on the land" as a treat.

Now, I don't believe most of this nicey-nice pro-French shit for a second. But I sort of had to ask, how and why the hell were the French even there to start with? You rarely if ever hear about French colonists in North America; they still stole all the land like any settler-colonialists, right? Glancing at NATOpedia, I can see that Iroquois peoples were not overly happy at the french being there, which is about what I would expect. (although they did align with Dutch and English settlers themselves) The French government sent over "indentured servants" to their colony too, which, oof. Also

Enslaved men, women and children represented approximately 65 percent of the 6,000 non-indigenous population of Louisiana by the end of French rule.

Haiti pre-1791 moment. But funny enough, the NATOpedia article rarely makes mentions of any abuses of New France's indigenous populations, other than a bunch of wars with the Iroquois(started by Some Guy de Bastard murdering a few of their chiefs, it seems). That has to be a lie by ommission, right? Like

Modern historians have highlighted that despite largely functional relations with indigenous peoples, administrators in France viewed co-operation as a wholly irritating task. Geographically removed from the colonies, Parisian courtiers viewed indigenous peoples as 'sauvages', often criticising New French officials for even interacting with nations.

but mostly the NATOpedia article is about fucking fur traders, coureurs des bois, okay. Basically though the French populations of settlers shouldn't have any special consideration compared to Dutch or British settlers, right? Surely any european that shows up on north american shores, claims the land by alleged divine right and starts exploiting its resources is a bastard, yes?

E: sorry if I put my foot in my mouth anywhere