Minnesota Claimed as New France

This caricature depicts French explorer Monsieur de Saint Lusson claiming territories of the Western Great Lakes, including Minnesota, for the King of France and Christianity.

The North West Company Depot at what is now the Grand Portage National Monument. 

It would be some time before Dakota and Ojibwe people felt the full force of European presence, but colonization of Minnesota began with a religious ritual. On June 4, 1671, on an overlook above Sault Ste. Marie, where Lake Superior flows into Lake Huron in the heart of Ojibwe territory, Monsieur de Saint Lusson and the Jesuit priest Claude Allouez erected a cross in the presence of Native onlookers, declaring the territories of the Western Great Lakes for the King of France and for Christianity.¹

But a sea change was looming on the horizon. This is a pivotal part of Minnesota’s religious history, for it ritualized the Doctrine of Christian Discovery – an emerging principle of the “law of nations” that European monarchs could legally claim discovered territory in the name of their Christianity and the lack thereof among Indigenous peoples. This theological assertion would later become a legal doctrine, incorporated into U.S. law in 1823 when the Supreme Court ruled that European sovereigns (and their U.S. heirs) enjoyed absolute title to lands they claimed in the name of Christianity and assigned to Native peoples the rights of occupancy only. 

Although Allouez and his fellow Jesuits Louis Hennepin, Jacques Marquette, and others first extended Christianity to the Ojibwe in Minnesota, French colonization took a more commercial interest in the fur trade, which required Indigenous lifeways on the land largely to continue apace Gichi Onigaming, known to the French as Grand Portage, became a bustling multilingual and multicultural center in the 1700s, as furs brought down the portage from the vast network of interior waterways were exchanged with traders who navigated the Great Lakes in their large canoes to markets in Montreal. French Catholic missionaries were always part of the presence, but conversions at the time were few, eclipsed by the French focus on trade. The majority of Native Catholics were the children of French fur traders and Ojibwe women.