Flesh Reborn Read online

  Towards the end of May 1633, a band of Algonquians travelling in eighteen canoes arrived at Quebec from upriver. Their leader was a man known to the French as Capitanal, a name or title that seems derived from a trading pidgin word for “captain” or chief, rather than rooted in his own people’s idiom. He was considered to be the “principal captain of the Three Rivers,” the place called Metaberoutin by Algonquian speakers and Trois Rivières by the French, where the waters of the Saint Maurice River flow by three channels into the Saint Lawrence. Capitanal is otherwise an elusive figure, seldom mentioned in the sources. A later allusion refers to his people as Montagnais, but indications that their country lay towards Trois Rivières, rather than downriver near Quebec or Tadoussac, has led some historians to describe them instead as Algonquins – they were no doubt among those peoples in-between.57 Though the French had reoccupied Quebec and begun to rebuild the previous year, Champlain had just now returned to take command. Fearing that Capitanal’s canoes would continue downstream to Tadoussac to offer their furs to several English vessels still anchored there, Champlain visited his encampment on 24 May. Both men shared a desire to reestablish the longstanding relationship between their peoples, and to expand on its foundations.58

  Addressing Capitanal through his interpreter, Champlain tried his utmost to dissuade him from travelling onwards to trade with his enemies. He invoked the old alliance, arguing forcefully “that the French had always loved and defended” Capitanal’s people and “that he had assisted them in person in their wars.”59 Aged about sixty, the Frenchman was the older of the two; his counterpart was, it is likely, just over half this age, about as old as the alliance itself. At a great tabagie or feast held at Tadoussac in 1603, five years before the establishment of the trading post at Quebec, Champlain and his commander at the time, François Gravé du Pont, had extended on behalf of their king, Henri IV, an offer of diplomatic and military assistance to the Innu-Algonquin-Maliseet coalition, to assist them in making peace with their enemy, the Iroquois, or otherwise in defeating them. From the perspective of the Algonquians of the Saint Lawrence valley, the incorporation of the French newcomers into their preexisting alliance network, which stretched into the interior to the Wendats and beyond, had represented an opportunity to secure a privileged access to trade goods and assistance against a long-standing enemy. French entry into this alliance had meanwhile served the purposes of merchants, for whom it was a means of expanding the fur trade and excluding rival traders. It had also advanced the Crown’s ambition of forming a permanent colony in the Americas.60

  In 1609, 1610, and again in 1615, Champlain demonstrated his commitment to the alliance by joining his new Innu, Algonquin, and Wendat allies in campaigns against the Mohawks and Onondagas. Glossing over the fact that these early experiences had disenchanted him of the military dimension of the intercultural alliance, and that he had not picked up his arquebus in eighteen years, Champlain reminisced how during his last campaign he had fought and bled alongside Capitanal’s own father, taking an arrow on the battlefield where the other man had died. He professed that if he now returned to the colony, it was to see his allies again and to fulfill the desire that they had expressed in years past that a French habitation or post should be made in their country to defend them “against the incursions of their enemies.” Champlain announced his readiness to comply with their wish, pledging that “he would not fail to satisfy them all as soon as he attended to the more urgent affairs.”61

  Capitanal listened attentively to the Frenchman, and responded with disarming eloquence and modesty. He and his people cherished dearly the old alliance with the French, and he protested that he did not intend to meet with the English downriver. He had sent some moose skins in that direction, it was true, but they were destined for other Algonquian nations, and meant to strengthen the alliance that united them against the Iroquois. As far as the claim that his people had asked for the establishment of a French post at Metaberoutin or Trois Rivières was concerned, he declared emphatically that he could not recall it. “I do not know that I have asked for it,” he said, adding that he could not remember his elders speaking of it either. He saw through Champlain’s benevolent rhetoric and understood that French inroads upriver were not purely altruistic. Still, Capitanal and his people welcomed the project, seeing that it could be mutually advantageous. “You will make, to begin with, a house like this to live in,” he responded, designating a small space with his hand, “that is to say, you will make a fortress” – an impressive word perhaps, but referring here merely to a fortified trading compound like those the French had already built at Tadoussac and Quebec. “Then you will make another house like that,” he went on, gesturing at a larger space, “and then we shall no longer be dogs who sleep outside, we shall go into that house.” The missionary chronicler who reported on this meeting observed that this second house was metaphorical, and that the speaker meant by it a “bourg fermé” (enclosed village). “You will sow wheat,” added Capitanal, having noted that the land was better upriver, in his country, than at Quebec. “We shall do as you do, and we shall no longer go to seek our living in the woods; we shall no longer be wanderers and vagabonds.” Responding to Champlain’s assertion that Jesuit missionaries would gladly live and minister among them, the Algonquin leader expressed the caveat that “this good fortune will be for our children; we, who are already old, shall die ignorant. This blessing will not come as soon as we should like to have it.” After Champlain’s concluding words, to the effect that “when that great house shall be built, then our young men will marry your daughters, and we shall be one people,” the Algonquians laughed heartily and went away.62

  Capitanal’s words thus pandered to his interlocutors and mirrored, with diplomatic dexterity, their aspirations and prejudices. He flattered them with hyperbolic self-abasement, disavowing his people’s “wandering, vagabond” way of life, declaring, for example, that he was “only a poor little animal, crawling about on the ground,” while the French were “the great of the earth, who make all tremble.” The Algonquian laughter which concluded the meeting was understood by the French as joyful agreement with all that had been said, but with hindsight we might also interpret it as a giddy response to the fanciful character of French ambitions.63 Surely, the two parties did not have quite the same thing in mind when they spoke of villages and fields. Yet though the French sense of permanence mapped imperfectly on the relative, flexible sort of arrangement that Capitanal and his people no doubt envisaged, the evolving context made the latter willing to experiment with the idea of settlement.

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  The Jesuit Relations of the 1630s and 1640s make a great deal of “the fear that the Algonquins [and Innu, for that matter] have of their enemies, the Iroquois.”64 The missionaries’ pastoral predisposition to view the Algonquians as lambs for the slaughter, in desperate need of salvation, both spiritual and temporal, goes a long way towards explaining why. The pervasiveness of terror, not unlike the perils of nomadism, became a recurrent trope: upon rumours that enemy warriors were prowling in the vicinity, the Innu all “trembled with fear”; the news of men killed or captured in war, even of a single loss, “frightened” them tremendously. Even victories, which might otherwise have been cause for rejoicing, brought panicked apprehension: the reprisal that was expected after the killing, on one occasion, of a prominent Iroquois man, made “these poor wretches live in fear.”65

  Missionary paternalism aside, such expressions of anxious vulnerability did rest on a basis of truth, for family bands who spent much of the year dispersed in search of game did present an attractive target for hostile war parties. Although ranging through great wooded expanses provided a band with a measure of security, its small size and prolonged isolation from related and allied groups meant that if caught up by determined enemy warriors it was in no state to defend itself. Encampments were not fortified. In this context, attentiveness to the slightest signs of a possible enemy presence in the area – suspiciou
s tracks, the circulation of vague reports, or dreams and shamanic visions – was a key to survival. Even as they delighted in dismissively pointing out that the Innu and Algonquins were inclined to exaggeration and quick to give “a thousand false alarms,” and that dreams and visions of lurking Iroquois war parties most often “passed away in smoke,” the Jesuits were glad for the fact that fear seemed to incline these vulnerable populations to value the newcomers as allies and spiritual guides. “Fear is the forerunner of faith in these barbarous minds,” and “calamities attract the Natives,” judged Paul Le Jeune.66

  The menace was no illusion. In this early contact period, wars were fought by Iroquoians and Algonquians in part to improve material circumstances with the manufactured goods introduced to the region by the Europeans. By securing access to hunting territories, trading routes, and posts, trade goods and tradable pelts became new forms of plunder, an additional material reward for war.67 But the impact of waves of disruptive and traumatic epidemics was arguably greater still. While it is not impossible that European diseases spread to the Saint Lawrence valley as early as the sixteenth century and contributed to the dispersion of the Iroquoians there, recent archaeological studies have cast doubts on this. Only in the first decades of the seventeenth century, after sustained colonization began, did various pathogens, including smallpox and measles, begin to shake Indigenous societies. Documentary evidence suggests that the first epidemic in the Northeast occurred in New England in 1616–18, but that it did not spread far. The first major epidemic to strike Iroquoian populations and their neighbours in the interior occurred in 1634–35. Other waves followed, including, in 1639, another smallpox epidemic which this time spread from Quebec to the Innu and Algonquins, and from there westward. The impact was decimating: among the Wendats and Mohawks, the mortality rate has been estimated at approximately 60 percent.68 Demographic decline led to societal destabilization. For Iroquoian peoples, pressures to incorporate outsiders in keeping with mourning war patterns, aimed at replenishing the human and moral strength of the community, acquired a new importance as a means of making up for these unprecedented population losses.69

  The Five Nations of the Iroquois League, in particular, became an increasingly menacing foe to their neighbours through the 1630s and 1640s. In this context of intensified warfare they had a marked advantage over the Algonquians of the Saint Lawrence and Ottawa valleys, due to their densely populated agricultural, palisaded village communities which facilitated both defence and offence. The abundance of men and food stores made it easier to mobilize large forces and undertake long-distance expeditions. The Iroquois had yet another notable advantage, this one over their Iroquoian neighbours too, in the form of firearms which they began to acquire from the Dutch in 1637; it would be some time before the French would agree to furnish their own trading partners and notional allies with the same. Though scholars have debated the effectiveness of muskets compared to bows in this context, the former provided two signal advantages: penetrating power and shock value.70 This initial edge was multiplied over time, as victories raised Iroquois confidence and demoralized their opponents, and as the taking of captives strengthened them while weakening others – a central theme of several subsequent chapters.

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  Although during these years Algonquian hunting bands occasionally sought refuge at Quebec, Trois Rivières – or Metaberoutin – remained the centre of their experimentation with sedentism. In 1634, within a year of Champlain’s meeting with Capitanal, the French constructed an outpost there. The juncture of the Saint Lawrence and Saint Maurice Rivers was a site which Algonquins and Innu, as well as Attikameks from the upper Saint Maurice drainage and others, seemed to “like […] better” than Quebec, stopping there more often, for longer periods, and in greater numbers. With the French post’s establishment, and the creation of a Jesuit residence within its walls, the missionaries hoped that an important seasonal gathering site might evolve into a permanent Indigenous settlement. But though the missionaries posted at La Conception, as the new residence was named, began to instruct and baptize more people than at Quebec, and though they announced their readiness to have a patch of land cleared, sowed with maize, and cultivated by hired hands for the first family which could be persuaded to give up its nomadic lifestyle, the offer elicited little immediate interest. That year the project lost its principal promoter when Capitanal was beset by illness and died unexpectedly. Significantly, he was buried near the settlement of Trois Rivières, according to his wishes, and Champlain “had a little enclosure placed around his grave, to distinguish it” – a metaphorical palisade that must have reminded onlookers of the one for which the late chief had asked.71 The elderly Champlain himself passed away a little over a year later.

  In the face of a new wave of violence and a decisive shift in the balance of power between the Iroquois and their neighbours, the appeal of the project – finding strength in numbers and in alliance by coalescing into an enclosed village in the shadow of a colonial settlement – did not die with the two men. A peace treaty between the Algonquins and their Mohawk adversaries in the fall of 1634 proved shortlasting, and bands of Weskarini and Kichesipirini Algonquins from the Ottawa River, and others from Trois Rivières, clashed sporadically with Iroquois warriors from the summer of 1635 onwards.72 Other leaders picked up where Capitanal and Champlain had left off. On 27 April 1637, an Innu named Makheabichtichiou, with another unnamed headman from Tadoussac, asked to speak with Champlain’s successor, Governor Charles Huault de Montmagny, at Quebec. Though not officially recognized as a principal chief of his nation, Makheabichtichiou “played the captain” to a band of Innu and Algonquins owing to his great skill as a warrior and an orator. He had spent the winter encamped with his followers near the Jesuit residence. His request for a meeting was very likely the outcome of councils held with other band leaders. People were coming in after the winter hunt, and just a few days earlier another Innu captain from Tadoussac had passed through on his way to meet up with Algonquins around Trois Rivières to mount a joint raid against Mohawk Country.73

  Makheabichtichiou opened his meeting with Governor Montmagny by declaring that they had learned from their deceased leader – Capitanal, perhaps – that some years ago Champlain “had promised to help them enclose a village at the Three Rivers, to clear the land, and to build some houses.” They “had often thought about it,” he explained, and now some of them had at last resolved “to locate there, and to live in peace with the French.” He went on to give some context: “We have two powerful enemies who are destroying us. One is ignorance of God, which is killing our souls. The other is the Iroquois, who are slaughtering our bodies. They force us to be wanderers. We are like seeds which are sown in diverse places, or rather like grains of dust scattered by the wind: some are buried in one place, some in another.” Pointing out that game had become scarce in the vicinity, he went on to plead that “unless we reap something from the earth, we are going to ruin.” He asked for assistance in this settlement, in keeping with the promise made by Champlain.74

  Father Le Jeune, who responded alongside Montmagny, reminded the two Innu that assistance was entirely dependent on their willingness to become sedentary and have their children instructed in the Christian faith. He announced that a school would be built for that purpose at Trois Rivières, but that in the meantime they should leave their children at Quebec, a proposal which elicited Makheabichtichiou’s resistance. We catch a glimpse here of some of the reluctance that had gone unstated or unrecorded during earlier discussions. While Makheabichtichiou took the opportunity to publicly declare his “wish to believe in God,” he indicated that his people were not all of the same mind. Indeed, many resented the Jesuits’ efforts to regulate their way of life; some, far from believing that the French were valuable allies, had come to believe that those who united with them only died. Makheabichtichiou countered to these naysayers that “we ourselves are being ruined, that no more harm could happen to us than is happening
every day, for we are dying every moment.” Though reluctance was again voiced when the two men returned to their people to report on their meeting with the governor, the “old men all decided that they ought to begin to clear the land and avail themselves of the help of the French,” with the stipulation that they should first await the arrival and approval of one of their chiefs who was absent and remains unnamed in the record.75

  The return in the following weeks of Innu and Algonquin warriors who had left for Mohawk country around the time of the meeting caused great alarm. They had been flatly defeated, and their respective captains had been killed. In contrast with the orderly return of warriors during the previous year’s expedition, survivors straggled back with reports that the enemy was fast approaching.76 Apprehension of the Iroquois caused a “panic” to spread among the Algonquins and others then assembled at Trois Rivières. On 14 May they “begged that their wives and children might be taken into the [French] fort, to be in a place of safety.” In an effort to further the settlement project, the French replied that if they returned on the following morning some stakes would be lent to them “with which to enclose a sort of village under the shelter of the fort.” At the crack of dawn the next day they all showed up to carry off the stakes, and within a matter of hours of hurried work they had prepared a site where they now “found themselves barricaded.”77

  In the apprehensive weeks that followed, the Algonquians at Trois Rivières strengthened their defences by erecting a second palisade, distant about a foot and one half from the first one, intending to fill in the space with branches and mud. “It seems that they wish to fortify themselves for good,” reported the enthusiastic Jesuit Father Jacques Buteux to his superior. Once the alarm had passed, however, it became apparent that only two families were taking steps to clear land for cultivation nearby: that of a man named Etinechkawat, described as a “Montagnais Captain” but who is elsewhere portrayed as being “from the country of the Atticamege,” that is, an Attikamek from north of Trois Rivières; and that of a man named Nenaskoumat, who had already sown more than half an arpent and now declared that next year he would “make a great field […] if he can get some help.” Buteux gladly gave the two men a present of some corn seed, which they promptly planted, and promised them “every assistance, in proportion to our limited means.”78