All recent immigrants to New France came from the colony’s mother country, France. As such, they spoke French, were Catholic and applied the laws of the French institutions.
Seeing as New France was over 5000 kilometres from the mother country, orders took several months to be communicated across the ocean. This enormous distance between mother country and colony, made communication difficult and forced the society of New France to develop independently.
The new habitants of the colony struggled in the first few years because their European way of life was ill-suited to their new environment. The colonists needed to adapt to survive. Gradually, they incorporated the customs of Indigenous peoples into their traditional French way of life. This mix of the two cultures gave rise to a typically Canadian way of life that adopted elements of the culture of the Indigenous people.
To improve their quality of life, the colonists had to change the way they built their houses. Canadian houses had no windows on the north side, to avoid winds chilling the inside, and had steep-sloped roofs so that snow would slide off.
Seeing as First Nations peoples had lived on the land for thousands of years, they had developed techniques and objects that made everyday life easier. The French colonists had no choice but to copy their expertise to adapt and settle in the territory.
From the early years, the colonists had to adopt aspects of Indigenous peoples’ way of life to survive. Scurvy, a serious illness, devastated the French colony’s new habitants. Settlers needed experienced help—the Indigenous peoples taught them a very effective remedy using a drink made from a local tree. With this know-how, many of the French settlers who came later were spared.
Over the years, the colonists adopted several elements from the Indigenous people’s way of life which, in turn, became a central part of Canadian culture. Snowshoes, moccasins and dogsleds are all examples of technology borrowed from Indigenous peoples.
The settlers developed an independent spirit as a result of living so far from their mother country. Since everything needed to be built in this new world, the Canadiens could not wait for orders from France.They regularly took liberties and resisted the authority of the clergy and the military. These traits as well as the financial appeal drove some colonists to become coureurs des bois. A coureur des bois was an inhabitant of New France who took inspiration from the Indigenous people’s way of life, trapping animals themselves and acquiring furs from the land.