Apostles of Empire by McShea Bronwen;

Author:McShea, Bronwen; [McShea, Bronwen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: HIS006010 History / Canada / Pre-confederation (to 1867), HIS028000 History / Native American, HIS013000 History / Europe / France
Publisher: UNP - Nebraska

To “Civilize” the Natives or “Play the Savage”?

In the Relation of 1661 Superior Jérôme Lalemant explained how his confreres sometimes chose to live like the Native Americans among whom they preached, rather than to impose French ways on them. The missionaries ate the same food as the Natives, slept on the ground like them, learned indigenous languages and cultural symbols, and communicated Catholicism in terms that were comprehensible to the locals. Especially in mobile missions among the Montagnais and other hunter-gatherers, the Jesuits continuously battled the elements, including subarctic snows and chills. Difficult as all this was, the strategy seemed best for easing populations into lasting, faithful membership in the Church. “One must play the savage with them,” Lalemant said, “and almost cease to live like a man, in order to make them live like Christians.”5

“Play the savage” was a droll characterization for the metropolitan audience of a culturally accommodating approach to Christianization that the Jesuits had been developing for decades in the Eastern Woodlands. In private communications, missionaries were frank about the “long and slow martyrdom” the approach often represented for them. In a message of 1697 to his successors at the Saint-Xavier mission among the Montagnais, François de Crepeuil warned of unsanitary conditions, such as eating from dishes that had been “washed . . . with a greasy piece of skin, or . . . licked by the dogs.” Children sometimes swarmed with “vermin” and were infected with scrofula, yet missionaries had little choice but to share common pots of food and drink with them. Crepeuil urged younger Jesuits to prepare themselves that life among the Montagnais would be “truly penitential and humiliating.”6

Such language demonstrates continuity with encounter-era descriptions by Paul Le Jeune, who saw mission work as coming to the rescue of “poor” and “miserable” Natives. However, later mission sources often struck different notes, demonstrating respect for various people in the Eastern Woodlands. Still observing indigenous societies from a Francocentric perspective, the missionaries would liken some Native Americans to a wider range of social groups in France than the peasants and urban poor who featured in subtexts of the early Relations. For example, in the early eighteenth century, Gabriel Marest compared some tribes to borderland peoples in Europe conquered by the French. The Assiniboine Sioux, for example, were “serious and . . . phlegmatic,” like peoples in the Low Countries dominated by the French since the 1660s. The Kriqs, differently, were “vivacious . . . always dancing or singing,” like the people of Gascogne, a province incorporated into France at the end of the Hundred Years’ War. The comparison held up, too, he noted, because “both tribes” were “brave” in wartime.7 Marest insisted the comparison was valid despite the fact that neither indigenous nation had “villages or fixed dwellings,” as the Flemish and Gascons had possessed for centuries. What mattered more to him were personal “dispositions,” not environmental factors.

Other Jesuits likened Native American leaders to European royalty and aristocrats. In 1672 mission superior Dablon devoted ample space

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