This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Samuel de Champlain founded Quebec in 1608 as the anchor settlement of France's new colony in North America, and Catholic missionary work followed close behind it. Recollet friars, the first religious order on the ground, arrived to evangelise the Algonquin and other Indigenous nations from 1615, and Jesuit missionaries, including Jean de Brebeuf, settled from 1625 onward, gradually taking over as the mission field's more prominent and enduring presence and building the church that became New France's established religious institution.
The missions kept detailed annual reports, sent back to superiors and published in France as the Jesuit Relations, meant both to sustain financial support for the mission and to recruit new missionaries for it. Those reports recorded both genuine efforts at cross-cultural relationship between missionaries and Indigenous communities and, as across the Americas more broadly, missionary pressure exerted against existing Indigenous spiritual practice, a history this atlas names rather than passes over.
What this changed for Christianity's spread was the establishment of Catholicism as New France's official religious institution within a generation of the colony's own founding, carried by two successive religious orders working the same mission field. The Jesuit Relations that recorded that work survive today as one of the richest documentary windows historians have onto early contact between European missionaries and North America's Indigenous nations.