In Flesh Reborn, historian Jean-François Lozier focuses his attention on the indigenous mission communities that formed and developed in the Saint Lawrence River valley. Engaging at once a number of lines of historiographical inquiry and debate, Lozier writes that in the Saint Lawrence, “Indigenous populations did not simply withdraw or disperse before an advancing colonial frontier.” Rather, these Native American settlers “drew closer to European settlement, carving out a place for themselves in its immediate vicinity.” They came together “to form new political and social entities, both on a localized scale and at the level of individual mission settlements, and on the regional scale at the level of what might be called, for lack of a better term, the Franco-Indigenous alliance” (6–7).
These communities, so central to the form and function of French empire in North America, have not received, in Lozier’s view, the scholarly attention they deserved. Too often...
