On one level, Peter Moogk's latest book, La Nouvelle France: The Making of French Canada—A Cultural History, is a candid exploration of the troubled historical relationship that exists between the inhabitants of French- and English- speaking Canada. At the same time, it is a long- overdue study of the colonial social institutions, values, and experiences that shaped modern French Canada. Moogk draws on a rich body of evidence—literature; statistical studies; government, legal, and private documents in France, Britain, and North America— and traces the roots of the Anglo-French cultural struggle to the seventeenth century. In so doing, he discovered a New France vastly different from the one portrayed in popular mythology. French relations with Native Peoples, for instance, were strained. The colony of New France was really no single entity, but rather a chain of loosely aligned outposts stretching from Newfoundland in the east to the Illinois Country in the west. 
     Moogk also found that many early immigrants to New France were reluctant exiles from their homeland and that a high percentage returned to Europe. Those who stayed, the Acadians and Canadians, were politically conservative and retained Old Régime values: feudal social hierarchies remained strong; one's individualism tended to be familial, not personal; Roman Catholicism molded attitudes and was as important as language in defining Acadian and Canadian identities. It was, Moogk concludes, the pre-French Revolution Bourbon monarchy and its institutions that shaped modern French Canada, in particular the Province of Quebec, and set its people apart from the rest of the nation.

"In olden days, in a village peopled by animal creatures, lived Wild Cat (another name for Lynx). He was old and mangy, and he was constantly scratching himself with his cane. From time to time, a young girl who lived in the same cabin would grab the cane, also to scratch herself. In vain Wild Cat kept trying to talk her out of it. One day the young lady found herself pregnant; she gave birth to a boy. Coyote, another inhabitant of the village, became indignant. He talked all of the population into going to live elsewhere and abandoning the old Wild Cat, his wife, and their child to their fate . . . "

So begins the Nez Percé myth that lies at the heart of The Story of Lynx, Claude Lévi-Strauss's most accessible examination of the rich mythology of American Indians. In this wide-ranging work, the master of structural anthropology considers the many variations in a story that occurs in both North and South America, but especially among the Salish-speaking peoples of the Northwest Coast. He also shows how centuries of contact with Europeans have altered the tales.

Lévi-Strauss focuses on the opposition between Wild Cat and Coyote to explore the meaning and uses of gemellarity, or twinness, in Native American culture. The concept of dual organization that these tales exemplify is one of non-equivalence: everything has an opposite or other, with which it coexists in unstable tension. In contrast, Lévi-Strauss argues, European notions of twinness—as in the myth of Castor and Pollux—stress the essential sameness of the twins. This fundamental cultural difference lay behind the fatal clash of European and Native American peoples.

The Story of Lynx addresses and clarifies all the major issues that have occupied Lévi-Strauss for decades, and is the only one of his books in which he explicitly connects history and structuralism. The result is a work that will appeal to those interested in American Indian mythology.