slavery

“A general view of Quebec, from Point Levy,” 1761. Courtesy Université Laval

Julia Cieri
Local Journalism Initiative

Saint-Paul Street is considered Montreal’s oldest road, first paved in 1672. Among the many French colonists who established their homes on the street, more than half of all households owned enslaved Indigenous people.

The class of slave-owning white colonists was comprised of merchants, farmers, the political elite, and members of the Church, immensely contributing to the economic prosperity of the colony. 

For more than 200 years, slavery was part of Canada and Quebec’s colonial nation-building. In New France alone, there were over 4,200 slaves from the 17th century until the official abolition of the institution within the British Empire in 1834. 

More than half of enslaved people were Indigenous, and one third were Black. Thousands of enslaved people were bought, sold, traded and inherited as private property throughout  Canada. Indigenous slaves in what is now Montreal were called ‘panis’ in French, which signified ‘Indigenous slave,’ as a large percentage of them came from the Pawnee Nation located in present-day Nebraska, Oklahoma and Kansas.

The Link sat down with Michael J. LaMonica, a PhD candidate at McGill University whose research focuses on the intersection of law, commerce, and empire in the eighteenth-century French Atlantic, to learn about the origins of slavery in New France.

Prior to colonization, the primary use of enslavement within some Indigenous nations was for prisoners of war, LaMonica explained. “Slavery that existed within Indigenous groups was different,” he said. “They would take people in wars and sometimes make them members of their own nation through this process of fictive kinship.”

McGill history professor Allan Greer, who specializes in colonial North America, early Canada, and the French Atlantic world, explained that when some Indigenous tribes took captives, most were women and children who were exchanged with other groups when forging alliances. “Each side would give the other human beings as tokens of connection,” he said.

By the 1670s, LaMonica explained, the French coureurs-de-bois began venturing into the Great Lakes regions for the fur trade, which they called the Pays d’en Haut. Trade relationships and military alliances between different nations and the French colonists were thus developed. “This is how the first Indigenous slaves made their way into Montreal, through these exchanges,” LaMonica said. 

However, the system of enslavement utilized by the French was more dehumanizing, LaMonica said. Many nations had a particular status for their prisoners captured in war, which differed from the way the colonists regarded captured people, he added. The primary difference was the concept of hereditary slavery present in the French system. He explained that the colonists viewed enslaved people more as property than prisoners of war.