Swim Home by Kathleen McDonnell

Author:Kathleen McDonnell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Modern, 18Th Century, Biography & Autobiography, Native Americans, Personal Memoirs
ISBN: 9781525568497
Publisher: Friesen Press via Indie Author Project
Published: 2020-05-29T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 9

Women Between Worlds

“She was dressed as an Indian, she lived as one, and at length she had well-nigh forgotten how to speak English. Three years passed and it was reported that she herself was unwilling to leave the life she had adopted.”

-from An Unredeemed Captive: Being the Story of Eunice Williams, who at the Age of Seven Years, was Carried Away from Deerfield by the Indians in the Year 1704, and who Lived Among the Indians in Canada as One of Them the Rest of Her Life by Clifton Johnson, 1897

Ever since that September day in 1731, when the sight of her sent terrified villagers screaming, “The devil has come to Songy!”, the Wild Girl has stirred up extreme reactions. The villagers’ fear was quite understandable – this was a sight like nothing they had ever seen before; a creature entirely unknown in their previous experience. Though they soon discovered that “it” was human and female, they knew for certain that she was an Other, a Not-Us, and this profound sense of “otherness” marked her to the end of her days. It was through the process of becoming “civilized” that Marie-Angelique acquired the peculiarly Christian sentiments of shame and self-loathing. She could never escape who she was, how she was seen, and what people knew about her – that she had stripped naked and jumped into the moat, that she ate raw flesh, that she had killed a dog with a club. As Serge Aroles says, Marie-Angelique’s was a life like no other, unparalleled and unique in human history. Her predicament aroused a range of responses – disgust, fascination, and even sympathy – in the people who encountered her, either first-hand or through the sensational accounts of eighteenth-century print media.

Those accounts should be viewed through the lens of what we know about eighteenth-century notions of “the Savage.” There is a distinction to be made between the English word “savage” – variously defined as “fierce, violent, primitive, uncivilized” – and the French “sauvage,” which has the more neutral primary meaning of “wild,” or “in an untamed state of nature.” (literally “of the forest,” from the Latin sylvaticus). But it’s really more a question of semantics rather than a substantive distinction, because the perceptions of a savage person were common to all European cultures. From their earliest contact with Indigenous people, Europeans didn’t even consider them human, until a Papal Bull in 1537 decreed that they were human enough to try converting them to Christianity. In her groundbreaking book The Myth of the Savage and the Beginnings of French Colonialism in the Americas, Indigenous historian Olive Dickason traces the development of the concept from earliest contact through the rise and fall of New France. Europeans encountering Amerindians saw them as unreasoning beasts in a state of nature, coarse and indifferent to suffering. The Amerindians were mystified by the notion of land ownership and private property, and foolishly – in the eyes of Europeans – didn’t try to acquire more than they needed.

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