Jacques Cartier Monument

The Jacques Cartier Monument is composed of six stelae presenting French and English texts about cultural diversity, early encounters, and judgments recorded in sources tied to Jacques Cartier. One text gives a 1966 UNESCO statement that all cultures, in their rich variety, diversity, and reciprocal influences, form part of the common heritage of all mankind. Other texts include passages from seventeenth-century and Cartier voyage accounts describing people seen as miserable yet considered by themselves happier than Europeans, the French kneeling before a cross and indicating heaven and redemption, the giving of knives, glass beads, combs, and other low-value goods received with joy, a chief indicating that the surrounding land belonged to him and objecting to the planting of a cross without permission, the forced boarding of Indigenous people onto a vessel and the taking of two of the chief's sons with a promise to return them, and an opinion that these people would be easy to convert to the Christian faith and were the poorest people in the world.

Quebec · Canada