“Civil in any Country, if They Are So in the Fashion of France”

As the 1550 Royal Entry in Rouen described in the opening of this chapter reveals, Renaissance and Early Modern France was home to a deeply ceremonial culture in which political and social rituals held complex meanings. This chapter reviews significant historical and cultural developments that transformed Europeans’ predominantly oral cultures after 1500. At the time of their explorations in the Americas, the French were familiar with a variety of sign traditions that informed their perception of Indigenous gestures and prepared them well to communicate with signs in the New World. In France, gestural communication was deeply connected to the realms of religious and secular oratory, drama (theatre), and court protocols. The seventeenth century saw a renewal of scientific and philosophical interest for manual eloquence with new universal language schemes being developed, including some of the first manuals of sign language. Increased state control over definitions of civility and ongoing distrust of theatrical gestures as unauthentic resulted in diverging types of nonverbal expression among the elite and the rest of the population. The chapter ends with an overview of early Atlantic repertoires of signs that evolved from the traditions of mariners and soldiers who participated in early voyages.

“Acquainted by Some Signes”

Throughout the colonial period, the remarkable linguistic diversity of Indigenous America puzzled, amazed, and frustrated European colonists. But pre-Columbian Indigenous peoples across the continent were already experts at communicating with foreigners through alternate means, including whistle speech, smoke signals, and gestures. In this chapter, complex Indigenous nonverbal traditions of communication are situated within the rich linguistic landscape that existed in America prior to the colonial encounter. Native expressiveness, the author argues, must be understood through its multimedia combination of visual, verbal, material, and nonverbal dimensions. The chapter also offers an overview of the regions and cultures where early French colonists were most likely to encounter fully conventional forms of Indigenous sign language and other nonverbal practices, which profoundly shaped the form and outcome of early colonial interactions. The French often drew simplistic conclusions about the varying degrees of “civilization” or “barbarism” of the groups they met based on their communicational successes and failures with these groups. The chapter argues that their writings obscure (but can also reveal) the true diversity and richness of Indigenous communication in Northeastern North America, South America, and the Circum-Caribbean region.

“The Greatest Speech-Makers on Earth”

This chapter considers some of the ways in which nonverbal repertoires that had been painstakingly created over two centuries of interaction were creatively mobilized by Indigenous and French individuals in the long seventeenth century to produce culturally-hybrid performances. Opening with the Great Peace of Montreal (1701), the chapter describes the epistemological differences that caused misunderstandings even as Jesuit missionaries and Indian orators skilfully blended visual and verbal metaphors and registers to reach their audiences during religious and diplomatic exchanges. The highly adaptable and multimedia nature of Indigenous verbal art is compared with the efforts of the Jesuits to insert select Indigenous gestures within their orations. Ambivalent feelings towards the unauthentic nature of theatrical performances and competition with Indian jongleurs (shamans) limited the missionaries’ ability to harvest the power of Indian oratory. As the French expanded westward and down the Mississippi valley in the second half of the century, they were forced to confront the limits of some of their nonverbal strategies, as demonstrated through the case-study of the calumet. After two centuries of embodied communication, it had become harder to tell “French” apart from “Native” nonverbal devices.

Conclusion

The conclusion provides a synthetic summary of the book’s main arguments and extends its lessons into the eighteenth century. Long after the age of exploration, nonverbal communication continued to occupy a crucial place in French colonization schemes and strategies, in Indigenous resistance to colonial ambitions and the pursuit of Indian nations’ agendas, and in the joint creation of an evolving balance of power in the Atlantic world. The French claimed a special proficiency in nonverbal forms of expression that gave them an edge against their European competitors. Because Indigenous practices and oral traditions were in reality so influential in shaping colonies, the conclusion puts to the test the French’ claim of exceptionalism, and brings comparisons to the experiences of the Spanish and the English in select regions of the Americas. Drawing preliminary conclusions, the author invites further scholarship on nonverbal communication in these colonial contexts. In the end, the French mastery of nonverbal communication was not a mark of a more benign style of colonialism, but instead directly contributed to the violence, erasure, and subjection applied against Indigenous peoples in colonial America.

“Many Friendly Signs”

In early America, French and Indians communicated more by doing than saying. This chapter focuses on sixteenth-century encounters and the signs that mediated them, as foundational in shaping lasting mutual perceptions and expectations among the groups in colonial America. While acknowledging misunderstandings and language barriers, most early French visitors to the New World reported adequate successes in communicating and obtaining desired information through alternate media. This chapter compares Jacques Cartier’s encounters with the peoples of the Saint Lawrence Valley in Canada with the experience of French Huguenots who founded Charlesfort and Fort Caroline among the Timucua of Florida. Within each section, colonial narratives and visual sources are critically revisited to reconstruct Indigenous practices and meanings and understand the role of touch, place, and gestures in diplomacy and spiritual exchanges. A more complicated understanding of these early communications and Indian expressions of “joy” emerges. The chapter concludes with a look at how different Indigenous signs encountered across the Americas were selected and homogenized by Marc Lescarbot in his Histoire de la Nouvelle France (1609) to provide a conceptual and practical foundation for the budding French empire.

“The Most Thorough Traitors and Deceivers”

As permanent colonial settlements took roots and French-Indigenous relations solidified in the seventeenth century, intercultural relations were increasingly defined by a tension between trust and distrust. Dependence on Indigenous knowledge made it necessary for the French to credit their allies with some degree of truthfulness. At the same time, they always remained on their guard, and used observations of Native bodies and movements to ground their claims about the quintessential deceptiveness of Indians. The French also used nonverbal eloquence in return to deceive and enact violence against Indigenous peoples. This chapter explores the complex intermingling of sincere friendship and deep distrust in seventeenth-century French colonial contexts, with a particular focus on the Circum-Caribbean region. The first section of the chapter is dedicated to the ways Indigenous bodies and embodied expressions were targeted as inherently “treacherous” by French writers. Next, the Indigenous practice of fictive kinship known as compérage by the French in Brazil, Guiana, and the Antilles is illuminated to understand how personal and intimate bonds worked or failed to preserve peace between the groups.

“A Thousand Gesticulations and Affectations”

From the first encounter, gestures were used alongside speech to communicate across linguistic and cultural barriers. Gestures and sign language continued to occupy a crucial place in the language-learning process as colonial relations matured in the seventeenth century. In both Europe and Native America, bi- or multi-lingual individuals were rare and multilingualism mostly associated with trade, war, and diplomacy. Nonverbal and paralinguistic elements of speech played an important role in shaping each group’s perception of the qualities and weaknesses of another’s language and culture. This chapter explores what identity shifts were associated with learning, teaching, and speaking another language in Indigenous societies and for different groups of Frenchmen. Lay Frenchmen, traders, and interpreters were able to adopt more fluid and immersive strategies to acquire Indigenous languages than Catholic missionaries. Still, despite their reluctance to adopt Indigenous language-learning techniques, the Jesuits also came to depend on deeply embodied dialogues with Indian and French informers and teachers to acquire verbal and nonverbal fluency critical to the success of their missions. Examples of Indian converts who preached in their tongues are given.

Introduction

This introduction explains why it is crucial to pay attention to nonverbal means of communication when trying to understand colonial encounters and the culturally hybrid worlds they produced. Throughout the colonial period, people mobilized age-old communicative strategies using embodied means of telling and learning, both alongside and independently of spoken language. Some things could be well understood without language, and misunderstandings were not the primary cause for violence. Situating this book within the larger historiography, the author details her methodology, sources, and terminology. The book’s contributions to multiple fields, especially the history of the French Atlantic, colonial America, and Native American and Indigenous studies, are outlined. Nonverbal communication is described along a spectrum of kinetic signs, deeply connected to rich Indigenous alternate literacies and worldviews. Signs and sensory exchanges helped connect otherwise dissimilar cultures, making nonverbal communication fundamental to French colonies between 1500 and 1700. The French imagined an intercontinental empire through commercial connections and shared communicative practices. While the demands placed on intercultural communication changed over time, Indigenous traditions of nonverbal expression remained highly influential well into the eighteenth century and must be further acknowledged, with important consequences for descendant communities.