Flesh Reborn Read online

  You see at your feet the wreck of a great country, and the pitiful remnant of a whole world, that was formerly peopled by countless inhabitants. But now you are addressed by mere carcasses, only the bones of which have been left by the Iroquois, who have devoured the flesh after broiling it on their scaffolds. There was left in us nothing but the merest thread of life; and our limbs, most of which have passed through the boiling cauldrons of our foes, had no more strength – when, raising our eyes with extreme difficulty, we saw on the river the ships that were bringing you, and, with you, so many soldiers sent us by your Great Onnontio [sic] and ours.

  Thereupon the Sun seemed to shine upon us with brighter beams, and to illuminate our fatherland of old, which had been so many years overcast with clouds and darkness. Then our lakes and rivers appeared calm, and without storms or breakers; and, to tell you the truth, I seemed to hear a voice issuing from your vessel, and saying to us, from as far as we could discern you: ‘Courage, O desolate people! Your bones are about to be knit together with muscles and tendons, your flesh is to be born again, your strength will be restored to you, and you shall live as you did live of old.’4

  The imagery in this speech remains as powerful today as it was then. These words speak to the interplay of change and continuity that is at the heart of every historian’s endeavour, including this book. They invite us to explore the ways in which the Saint Lawrence valley, even as it became the center of French colonial settlement, became a space of renewal and regeneration for a range of Indigenous peoples who were experiencing great upheavals. The Wendats who were living within the town of Quebec at the time of Tracy’s arrival had previously spent half a decade settled on the Island of Orleans, and within a few years they would move not far from Notre Dame de Foy, before occupying a succession of two sites known as Lorette. Their experience was unique, but the evocations of social collapse, resiliency, and renewal, are emblematic of the collective experience of Indigenous peoples who, beginning in the late 1630s, established, under the auspices of Jesuit and later Sulpician missionaries, a string of settlements along the Saint Lawrence River – more accurately, the river that the French called Saint-Laurent, and that these peoples tended to conceptualize, in each of their languages, as the Great River or Big Waterway: Ladawanna in Wendat, Wepistukujaw Sipo in Innu, Kitcikanii sipi in Algonquin, Ktsitekw in Wabanaki, or Kaniatarowanenneh in Mohawk.5

  By the end of the seventeenth century, there existed four or five mission communities in the Saint Lawrence valley, depending on how a community is defined: Lorette (today Wendake), Arsikantegouk (Saint François, today Odanak), Kahnawake (Sault Saint Louis), and the twinned sites of Kanehsatake (La Montagne) and Skawenati (Sault au Récollet), all of which persist to this day, albeit not in precisely the same locations and forms. They were inhabited on a more or less sedentary basis by a total of some two thousand persons. They were not merely French missions, but indeed Indigenous communities formed as a result of intersecting desires, needs, and priorities. Following an initial period of official and ecclesiastical optimism with regards to the assimilation of these communities’ residents, clear boundaries took shape between the two groups. This population engaged with its French neighbours, but though by the final third of the century the latter came to represent a large demographic majority in the area, the former were never absorbed by them. In fact, during the seventeenth century rather few of either group ever learned to speak the language of the other, and cross-cultural marital unions were relatively rare. Through to the end of the French Regime and well beyond it, the inhabitants of the mission settlements maintained traditional kinship structures, languages, and subsistence patterns.

  The story of the formation and development of the mission communities of the Saint Lawrence valley jars with the expected narrative of contact in early America: here, Indigenous populations did not simply withdraw or disperse before an advancing colonial frontier; rather, they drew closer to European settlement, carving out a place for themselves in its immediate vicinity. The questions at the heart of this book, then, center on why and how peoples were brought together to form new political and social entities, both on a localized scale at the level of individual mission settlements, and on the regional scale at the level of what might be called, for lack of a better term, the Franco-Indigenous alliance.

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  This book is thus preoccupied by the spaces and processes of settlement. At first glance, there is something disturbing in this perspective, considering the ways in which “Indigenous peoples” and “Settlers” tend to be understood as two distinct and conflicting groups. Yet thinking in terms of “settlement,” which can both refer to places and processes, turns out to be a productive way of considering the subject matter. First, the process of sedentarization – of settling down – was a central feature of the encounter of Innu and Algonquin peoples with French missionaries and officials, to which the first portion of this book is devoted. These nomadic huntergatherers belonging to the great Algonquian linguistic and cultural family experimented with the establishment of a more permanent presence at specific points on the land. Secondly, while there is no question that the Innu and Algonquins occupied the Saint Lawrence valley when French settlers established themselves there in the first decade of the seventeenth century, the notion of settlement aptly describes the way in which other groups who came to reside in the missions later in the century came from afar. To be sure, the Wendats, Iroquois, and Wabanakis had deep ties to the Saint Lawrence: some of their ancestors had lived alongside it in the sixteenth century, and they continued to visit it periodically to hunt, fight, and trade. But the establishment of lasting communities there involved major population displacements away from more recent home territories. In the case of the Wendats, it was a migration of nearly a thousand kilometers by canoe and across portages, from the shores of Georgian Bay and Lake Simcoe in present-day Ontario. For the Iroquois of what is today upstate New York and the Wabanakis of Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont, it was a journey that reached as much as half that distance. Seventeenth-century French observers on occasion spoke of Huron and Iroquois “colonies,” in a way that jars with our modern-day conceptualizations but gives us an important historical insight.6

  Thirdly, the notion of settlement is also useful to describe, beyond the processes involved, the diverse spaces of community under investigation – archaeologists, more so than historians, are used to this way of designating sites of habitation in all their dynamism and ambiguities. All mission communities underwent periodic relocations within the Saint Lawrence valley, in keeping with the pressures of the environment and tensions arising from the proximity of colonists, and their social composition fluctuated with the seasons and rhythms of war and peace. Their residents maintained longstanding seasonal subsistence patterns that hinged on the combination of agricultural activity with hunting and fishing expeditions which kept most away from their villages for the greater part of the fall and winter. They also shuttled to traditional homelands to visit family and friends, to find partners, to trade, and to take part in diplomatic and military activities, and as a result, residential groups were often reconfigured. Mission communities also exhibited a range of spatial arrangements. Some, namely those of the Wendats and the Iroquois, corresponded to houses clustered together within a palisade that clearly defined spaces which the French called tended to call bourgs (towns) or villages. But others, while having at their core a “fort” which corresponded to a missionary compound containing a chapel and residence, and perhaps a few dwellings for the leading Indigenous neophytes, tended to consist of houses spread beyond along the water and near fields; they functioned more as sites of summertime gathering and ritual, and as service centres rather than year-round population centers.

  A fourth and final meaning of settlement also emerges as central to this story, namely the resolution of a dispute or conflict between parties. Indeed, the formation and development of the mission communities of the Saint Lawrence valley is intimat
ely linked with armed conflict and its outcomes. The expressions of despair and hope voiced by the Wendat elder points to the ways in which the diverse peoples who came to form these communities were harrowed by disease, famine, and war – with the Iroquois representing the principal military threat through the century. No imagery could more strikingly communicate what had happened to them than that of the tortured, cannibalized, and decomposing victim of the Iroquois, the human body being here equated with the political and social body. Other Wendat speakers, besides the one alluded to above, similarly described their nation during these years as “devoured and gnawed to the very bones, by war and famine,” and their people as “carcasses […] able to stand only because you support them”; or as “fragments of a once flourishing nation,” a “remnant of living carrion,” “the skeleton of a great people, from which the Iroquois has gnawed off all the flesh, and which he is striving to suck out to the very marrow”; “the wreck of a great country, and the pitiful remnant of a whole world,” now “mere carcasses, only the bones of which have been left by the Iroquois, who have devoured the flesh after broiling it on their scaffolds” and after passing it “through the boiling cauldrons.” The Wendats were not alone in using this imagery. Some Loups, or Mahicans, are similarly recorded as having explained to French interlocutors that they had “become a small nation, the flesh taken from our bodies.”7

  War, long recognized as a fundamental process of historical change, played a critical role in shaping these communities. But we must not be deceived by the rhetoric and reality of violence into crafting narratives of victimhood, weakness, and passivity.8 Indeed, these communities shaped their own circumstances, as well as the course of war and peace in the region. Conflict was at once a destructive process, and an integrative, incorporative, and creative one. Even as it tore populations apart and from their lands, it brought people together spatially, politically, and culturally. It challenged, reconfigured, and created personal and collective identities and solidarities, in ways often unexpected. Flesh Reborn accordingly explores the entanglement of community-building, identity formation, armed conflict, diplomacy, kinship, leadership, and migration. It is about how blood was at times spilled and at times mingled, and how bodies, individual and political, were destroyed and remade.

  The power of the Wendat address to Tracy lies not only in its vivid evocation of violence and trauma, but also in its expression of renewal. Before being displaced from their homeland on the shores of Georgian Bay, the Wendats’ mortuary customs had involved something known as the Feast of the Dead, a ritual by which the dead were periodically disinterred and reburied in communal ossuaries. These mass reburials were often triggered by settlement relocation, reflecting the desire to keep the dead in the neighbourhood of the living. The people would pull the remains of their relatives from the individual graves in which they had initially been interred, cleaning the remains of flesh and sinew as necessary. They then wrapped the dry bones in beaver robes and brought them into their homes for a feast, before transporting them to a new burial site and lowering them in a common pit. The Feast of the Dead was a time for public mourning, celebration, and the reaffirmation of ties. “By means of these ceremonies and gatherings,” explained the French Recollet missionary Gabriel Sagard who witnessed such an event, “they contract new unions and friendships amongst themselves, saying that, just as the bones of their deceased relatives and friends are gathered together and united in one place, so also they themselves ought during their lives to live all together in the same unity and harmony, like good kinsmen and friends.”9

  Figure 1.1 The Saint Lawrence valley, showing the location of mission communities by 1701. (Map by Andrée Héroux)

  The arrival of the French and the adoption of new beliefs and practices changed this. Not radically, at first: in 1636, another missionary, the Jesuit Jean de Brébeuf, noted the presence of fifteen to twenty baptized Wendats among the bodies reinterred during a Feast of the Dead ceremony.10 But the Christianized Wendats, who when pushed out of their homeland by an Iroquois offensive sought refuge in the Saint Lawrence valley, chose to leave the bones of their ancestors behind and to align their mortuary practices with those of their French allies and neighbours. They developed a new vocabulary of alliance, new ways of affirming and reaffirming their ties, of creating relationships. It is, therefore, not surprising to find that the Wendat elder’s address to Tracy echoes not only the rituals of Indigenous warfare and burial, but also the teachings of the missionaries that his people had been making their own. Indeed, the elder’s words track unmistakably onto those of the Old Testament prophet Ezekiel, who describes a dreamlike vision in which he is transported to a valley of death littered with dry bones. Commanded by God to prophesy, Ezekiel sees before him the bones reconnected with tendons, covered with flesh and skin, and resurrected. The remains are revealed to be those of the people of Israel in exile, to whom God asks Ezekiel to speak on his behalf: “My people, I am going to open your graves and bring you up from them; […] I will put my Spirit in you and you will live, and I will settle you in your own land.”11

  To be clear, each of the diverse peoples who established themselves in the mission settlements of the Saint Lawrence valley in the seventeenth century had their own social and cultural baggage, and neither the Algonquins, Innu, Iroquois, or Wabanakis shared the custom of mass reburial with the Wendats. Yet, as with the violence of war, the rhetorical motifs and imagery evoked by their elder speak to their collective experience.

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  It follows from their centrality to the French colonial project, both as sites of religious indoctrination and of strategic importance, that the mission settlements came to occupy a choice position in the writings of the period and of modern historians. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, a few of the Roman Catholic missionaries assigned to the communities descended from seventeenth-century foundations developed a keen interest in local history which led them to compile notes on the subject and to publish a handful of brief articles and longer monographs. The preoccupations of these early ecclesiasticalavocational scholars were conspicuously rooted in their faith: they were above all captivated by their own predecessors, the Jesuit and Sulpician missionaries of the French Regime, heroic figures in their eyes, devout, dedicated, and tireless; the Indigenous populations to whom they had ministered were sketched out as the recipients of their teachings, faithful new Christians on the whole, though often fickle and occasionally seditious.12

  With the exception of an isolated foray into the subject by the historian G.F.G. Stanley, who in a 1950 article, “The First Indian ‘Reserves’ in Canada,” outlined the mission settlements of the Saint Lawrence valley under the French Regime as benevolent precursors of modern-day reserves, it was not until the late 1970s that academic scholars began to pay attention to the subject. Working in the new perspective of ethnohistory, blending the sources, methods, and insights of both history and anthropology, pioneering studies by Gordon Day of the “complex peopling” of Odanak or by James Ronda of the Jesuit “experiment” at Sillery, among others, emphasized the diversity and complexity of motivations for relocation, pointing to the way in which economic and political motives, beyond religion, were central to the formation of these communities.13 The mission settlements and their inhabitants also began to be featured in studies centered on the peoples from which they had detached themselves and with whom they retained intimate links, with, for example, scholars providing brief overviews of the Wendat settlement near Quebec as an epilogue to the story of the Wendats writ large, or of the formation and development of Kentake, Kahnawake, and Kanehsatake in the context of broader studies of the Iroquois Confederacy.14

  This first wave of academic histories, pushing back against their ecclesiastical-avocational precursors, tended to argue that the inhabitants of the mission settlements engaged with Christian teachings only to the extent necessary to achieve peaceful coexistence with their missionaries and neighbours. James Ronda saw the “Sillery
experiment” as a missionary failure, owing to its inhabitants’ refusal of the cultural suicide that it represented. David Blanchard, working on Kentake and Kahnawake, concluded that Catholic practice was merely a “thin veneer calculated to enable traditional belief and practice and the pursuit of more secular interests.”15 More recent scholarship, however, drawing from a rich literature on religious encounters throughout the early modern world, has instead emphasized the way in which these communities constituted sites of vibrant religious negotiation and hybridization. Conversions were widespread, and though they were sometimes superficial, very often they were manifestly deep and sincere. Rather than a wholesale acceptance of Catholicism or rejection of Indigenous customs, a synthesis, by means of selective appropriations and adaptations, produced unique forms of syncretic Indigenous Catholicism. Missionaries exercised a form of leadership, but they were often themselves followers.16 Thus, though it may be tempting, in light of its echo of Ezekiel’s prophecy, to dismiss the Wendat elder’s words as mere parroting of missionary speech or pandering to missionary sensitivities, the broader context instead invites us to see in it a genuine fusion of Iroquoian and Christian motifs, spiritualties, and aspirations, of a sort that was typical of the experience of the mission settlements’ inhabitants.

  Through the 1990s, the context of the Oka Crisis and of increased litigation, negotiation, and advocacy surrounding the rights of First Nations bands descended from the seventeenth-century’s mission settlements, spurred further research and publication by Québécois and Canadian academic and public historians, most notably relating to Kahnawake, Kanehsatake, and Wendake/Lorette. The emerging consensus has been that while the members of these communities were subject to pressures from colonial officials, they received privileges and exemptions, notably in matters of criminal law, on account of their considerable economic and military significance.17 Scholars working on the history of war have similarly demonstrated these communities’ independence from the French and their ability to pursue their own political and military objectives – “parallel warfare,” to use the expression of the historian Peter MacLeod. The French depended on the assistance of their Indigenous allies, but they could not dictate the terms of their participation in intercolonial conflicts.18 Finally, scholars have recently begun pushing back against the persistent stereotype of French colonialism as gentle, a view famously encapsulated in Francis Parkman’s old adage that “Spanish civilization crushed the Indian; English civilization scorned and neglected him; French civilization embraced and cherished him.” Notwithstanding the realities of Indigenous autonomy and accommodation on the ground, as far as the mission settlements or any other contact zones are concerned, there should be no doubt that the French colonial project was one aimed at political domination. That the French generally lacked the means to impose themselves must not make us lose sight of this fact.19