The Jesuit Relations: Natives and Missionaries in Seventeenth-Century North America

239 Pages·2000·4.059 MB·English

by  Allan Greer, Allan Greer

UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH LIBRARIES
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THE BEDFORD SERIES IN HISTORY AND CULTURE
The Jesuit Relations
Natives and Missionaries
in Seventeenth-Century North America
Edited with an Introduction by
Allan Greer
University of Toronto
BEDFORD/ST. MARTIN'S Boston • New York
To Eleanor
For Bedford/St. Martin's
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Developmental Editor: Molly E. Kalkstein
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Cover Design: Richard Emery Design, Inc.
Cover Art: Inset from a 1657 illustrated map of New France, Novae Franciae Accurata
Delineatio, attributed to Francesco-Giuseppe Bressani. Courtesy of the University
of Western Ontario.
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Copyright © 2000 by Bedford/St. Martin's
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Foreword
The Bedford Series in History and Culture is designed so that readers
can study the past as historians do.
The historian's first task is finding the evidence. Documents, letters,
memoirs, interviews, pictures, movies, novels, or poems can provide
facts and clues. Then the historian questions and compares the sources.
There is more to do than in a courtroom, for hearsay evidence is wel-
come, and the historian is usually looking for answers beyond act and
motive. Different views of an event may be as important as a single ver-
dict. How a story is told may yield as much information as what it says.
Along the way the historian seeks help from other historians and per-
haps from specialists in other disciplines. Finally, it is time to write, to
decide on an interpretation and how to arrange the evidence for readers.
Each book in this series contains an important historical document or
group of documents, each document a witness from the past and open to
interpretation in different ways. The documents are combined with
some element of historical narrative — an introduction or a biographical
essay, for example — that provides students with an analysis of the pri-
mary source material and important background information about the
world in which it was produced.
Each book in the series focuses on a specific topic within a specific
historical period. Each provides a basis for lively thought and discus-
sion about several aspects of the topic and the historian's role. Each is
short enough (and inexpensive enough) to be a reasonable one-week
assignment in a college course. Whether as classroom or personal read-
ing, each book in the series provides firsthand experience of the chal-
lenge — and fun — of discovering, recreating, and interpreting the past.
Natalie Zemon Davis
Ernest R. May
iii
Preface
Over the last hundred years, the Jesuit Relations have provided source
material for countless studies in history, anthropology, religious studies,
geography, and other fields. These missionary reports, first published in
French in the seventeenth century, became more widely available to re-
searchers in the 1890s thanks to the monumental seventy-three-volume
compilation, The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents, published under
the editorship of Reuben Gold Thwaites. Thwaites and his team of edi-
tors and translators assembled all the Relations, together with other Je-
suit materials from the period, and presented them in bilingual format,
with original French and English translation facing each other on alter-
nating pages. The impact of this editorial project on the world of schol-
arship was immense, and its influence in stimulating historical studies
of Europeans and North American Indians has by no means been ex-
hausted. And yet the Relations themselves, highly readable and intrinsi-
cally interesting though they may be, are available only in major re-
search libraries, and even there they are too bulky to be of much use to
students and nonspecialist readers. This book of selections from the Je-
suit Relations is meant to open up that textual treasure chest to a wider
audience.
It was not easy to make a choice from among the more than twenty-
one thousand pages of material that the Thwaites collection comprises.
I ended up focusing on the native nations that the Jesuits knew best: the
Montagnais, the Hurons, and the Mohawks. I also assembled writings
on certain themes—war, medicine, and nature — that preoccupied
those missionaries. To give readers a real feel for the Relations, I favored
comparatively long texts and tried to avoid the pastiche approach.
The Thwaites edition is not the only modern edition of the Jesuit Re-
lations. Since 1967 the Jesuit historian Lucien Campeau has produced
eight volumes of Jesuit documents, including the Relations and much
more. This collection sets a new standard for completeness and rigorous
editing. It reproduces texts only in their original language (mostly
vi PREFACE
French, though there are some Latin and Italian documents), however,
and so far it covers only the early decades of the Jesuit missions. I con-
sulted Campeau's edition extensively, both to verify the accuracy of the
Thwaites texts and to benefit from the editor's learned annotations.
Though basically sound, Thwaites's hundred-year-old translation is
frequently awkward and occasionally incomprehensible. In revising the
English text, I did my best to untangle convoluted sentences, update ar-
chaic vocabulary (for example, translating the French tu as "you" rather
than "thou"), and correct the occasional error. The most problematic
term proved to be sauvage, which the Thwaites team rendered as "sav-
age." I decided that the English term Indian gives a better sense of the
connotations of sauvage, except in a few cases where the Jesuits wanted
to emphasize savagery.
Readers should be aware of thorny issues connected to another term,
demon. Quoting or paraphrasing Indians, the Jesuits often referred to a
person, object, or unseen force as a demon. This was their way of con-
veying what the Hurons would have called oki and the Algonquins man-
itou, by which they meant the soul or spirit that gave a thing or a feature
of the landscape, such as a rock or a waterfall, the power to influence hu-
man affairs. Some exceptional people also possessed such supernatural
abilities. The Jesuits took such claims to supernatural power seriously,
but since they knew that this power had nothing to do with Christianity,
they assumed that these were diabolical forces, thus the use of the word
demon. Rather than translate this word as "spirit," which might give a
better sense of what the natives were talking about, I opted to leave it as
demon to remain true to the historical text, with its characteristic blend
of ethnographic reporting and religious judgment.
Finally, there is the vexed problem of what to call the original inhabi-
tants of North America. The terms Indians and Native Americans, com-
monly used in the United States, sometimes raise objections in Canada,
whereas the favored Canadian terms, natives, aboriginal people, and
First Nations Peoples, seem awkward and unfamiliar to most Americans.
In my introductory sections, I decided to compromise (by definition, a
compromise is less than a perfect solution) by alternating between na-
tives and Indians.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
In addition to acknowledging the work of Thwaites and Campeau, I
would like to take this opportunity to thank some people who made more
immediate contributions to this book. Over the years, my students at the
PREFACE Vil
University of Toronto have read and discussed selections from the Jesuit
Relations with passion and insight, and their reactions have done much
to shape this collection. One student, Jeff d'Hondt, acted as an able and
resourceful research assistant on this project. Jeff's forbearance was put
to the test by the tone of some of the missionaries' comments about
his native ancestors, but his good humor and dedication to history al-
ways carried the day. Recognition also is due to Naida Harris-Morgan
for her anthropologically informed word processing services. And to
Gary W. Kronk, my thanks for helping me understand Jesuit astronomi-
cal observations.
The Newberry Library, Chicago, provided the ideal setting in which
to annotate the chapter on Father Marquette's explorations. I am grate-
ful to the Newberry staff and to library fellow Helen Tanner.
It has been a great pleasure working with the staff at Bedford/St.
Martin's. I particularly appreciated development editor Molly Kalkstein's
ability to combine editorial rigor with warm enthusiasm. I also want to
thank Katherine Kurzman for getting the project off on the right foot and
Melissa Lotfy and Emily Berleth for guiding it to completion. I am in-
debted to the following readers for their thoughtful criticism of the draft
manuscript: Colin G. Calloway, Catherine Desbarats, James D. Rice,
Gordon Sayre, Timothy J. Shannon, and Laurier Turgeon. Finally, my
thanks go to series editor Natalie Zemon Davis for her encouragement
and her helpful editorial suggestions.
Allan Greer
University of Toronto
Contents
Foreword iii
Preface v
LIST OF MAPS AND ILLUSTRATIONS xiii
Introduction: Native North America and the
French Jesuits 1
The Society of Jesus in Europe and Abroad 3
Iroquoians and Algonquians 6
The Colonization of New France 9
The Canadian Missions 11
The Jesuit Relations and Their Readers 14
Confronting the Other: The Problem of Cultural
and Historical Difference 16
1. Montagnais Hunters of the Northern Woodlands 20
Paul Le Jeune Winters with Mestigoifs Band,
1633-1634 21
Paul Le Jeune, Journal [of a Winter Hunt], 1634 23
Paul Le Jeune, On Their Hunting and Fishing, 1634 26
The Montagnais Described 28
Paul Le Jeune, On the Beliefs, Superstitions, and Errors
of the Montagnais Indians, 1634 28
Paul Le Jeune, On the Good Things Which Are Found
among the Indians, 1634 32
ix
X CONTENTS
How to Settle Disputes and Discipline Children 35
Paul Le Jeune, What Occurred in New France in the
Year 1633,1633 36
2. Jean de Brébeuf on the Hurons 37
Language 38
Jean de Brébeuf, Of the Language of the Hurons, 1636 38
Religion, Myth, and Ritual 41
Jean de Brébeuf, What the Hurons Think about Their
Origin, 1636 41
Jean de Brébeuf, That the Hurons Recognize Some Divinity;
Of Their Superstitions and of Their Faith in Dreams, 1636 46
Jean de Brébeuf, Concerning Feasts, Dances... and What
They Call Ononharoia, 1636 48
Law and Government 50
Jean de Brébeuf, Of the Polity of the Hurons and of Their
Government, 1636 51
Jean de Brébeuf, Of the Order the Hurons Observe in Their
Councils, 1636 59
The Huron Feast of the Dead 61
Jean de Brébeuf, Of the Solemn Feast of the Dead, 1636 61
3. Disease and Medicine 70
Huron Medical Practices 72
Jean de Brébeuf, [Cure by Lacrosse], 1636 72
Jérôme Lalemant, [Cure by Gambling], 1639 73
Jérôme Lalemant, [Satisfying the Soul's Desires], 1639 75
The Influenza Epidemic of 1637 78
François Le Mercier, The Malady with Which Our Little
Household Has Been Afflicted, 1637 79
François Le Mercier, The Help We Have Given to the Sick
of Our Village, 1637 81
François Le Mercier, Ossossané Afflicted with the
Contagion, 1637 82