Flesh Reborn Read online

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  Historians have often repeated that the mission at Sillery or Kamiskouaouangachit, and the other mission settlements that would later appear in the Saint Lawrence valley, were modeled on reducciones de Indios established by Jesuits among the the Guaraní of Paraguay.16 Indeed, the annual reports produced by the South American missionaries circulated widely, and fed the imagination of those who came to the Saint Lawrence valley. In the Relation of 1632, Paul Le Jeune compared the Wendats to the Guaraní; in 1637, he wrote to a fellow missionary that to read the reports of what was occurring in Paraguay was to catch a glimpse of what would someday be accomplished in New France. In 1638, in a letter to his superior general in Rome, Le Jeune used reduximus, the Latin equivalent of the Spanish reducción to refer to the settlement of Kamiskouaouangachit; in the Relation of 1639, he referred to “Sillery, where the Réduction of Sauvages was made.”17 In the sacramental register of the mission, the term “reduction” was also used: regularly from Le Jeune’s first act in April 1638 to June 1640; twice in January and October 1641; and sixteen times in 1649–50. Otherwise the terms “residentia” (residence), “sacello” (chapel), “ecclesia” (church), or “oppidum” (fort) were preferred.18 This unsystematic use of the term reduction and its disappearance from the Relations as early as 1639 and from the registers after 1650, indicate the limits of the concept. If Jesuit efforts in South America offered a model, it was only in the loosest sense. A superficial understanding of what was happening in the missions of Paraguay, and a quick realization that the human realities of the Saint Lawrence valley were of a different sort altogether, made a close emulation impossible. Abandoning the expectation that Indigenous peoples could be assimilated to colonial society in the short term, from the 1630s onwards the Jesuits of New France adopted an approach that privileged Christianization above francization.19

  Arguably, it was Indigenous leadership, much more so than missionary vision, that made Kamiskouaouangachit. The emergence of leaders in this location was in keeping with Algonquian traditions surrounding chiefs or “captains,” as the French translated the word Ukimau (in Innu) or Okima (in Anishnabemowin).20 Among the Innu and Algonquins, leadership of regional bands derived from a combination of achievement, heredity, and election. There existed “two kinds of captains,” as one Jesuit explained: “those by right of birth,” prominent chiefs whose nomination rested on genealogical considerations and who were ritually installed for life, and “those by election,” task-oriented leaders who emerged for more limited diplomatic, commercial, or military purposes.21 Etinechkawat was clearly of the former type; Negabamat may very well have begun as one of the latter, though his adoption of the name Tekouerimat, noted for the first time in 1639 and passed on to aseries of male relatives after his death, suggests that he transitioned from one category to the other.22

  Figure 2.1 Saint Lawrence Algonquian settlements, 1639–50. (Map by Andrée Héroux)

  The authority of both type of leaders did not rest on an institutional or coercive power, but rather on the ongoing approval of the group. It flowed from personal character, skill as hunter and shaman, and wisdom. By experience and instinct such men understood the territory well, knew the places where, for example, eels abounded, where beavers dwelled, where moose travelled. Hence each year they were able to guide people to areas where they could conveniently meet their needs. There are indications that leaders of groups were considered to have special rights over hunting territories and could redistribute them. It was by ensuring at the same time the management of resources and the satisfaction of the needs of all families that such men were able to assert themselves and maintain their influence. Leaders were expected to give generously, to motivate others to reach consensus and follow a given course of action through example and persuasive oratory, to display proficiency in hunting and in warfare, as well as a capacity to ensure the well-being of their followers through their knowledge of the land and their relationships with its human and nonhuman occupants.23 By tapping into Christian beliefs and rituals as new sources of spiritual power, and by cultivating an alliance with the French, neophyte leaders were innovating within well-established structures. Accepting baptism, Negabamat alias Tekouerimat took on the Christian name of Noël in honour of his community’s material benefactor and in an apparent confirmation of his personal standing. Nenaskoumat for his part assumed the name François-Xavier, in honour of the great Jesuit missionary Saint Francis Xavier as well as of the other benefactor of the mission, François Derré de Gand, who was present at the ceremony.24

  Disease posed challenges to the community and its leadership, but it also offered opportunities. Within a year of its founding, the “bourgade encommencée” or “incipient village” of Kamiskouaouangachit was temporarily evacuated at the missionaries’ own insistence to prevent its ruin by a smallpox epidemic.25 One of the missions’ first two “pillars,” Nenaskoumat, did not survive long after his baptism in December of 1638. Its other pillar, Negabamat alias Tekouerimat, was himself brought to the brink of death. At this juncture he demonstrated his investment in the community by selecting his eventual successors, declaring to the missionaries that “when I am dead,” a given family, regrettably unidentified in the record, “will take my place.”26 But Tekouerimat would not die just yet. The epidemic scare had the effect – paradoxically in light of the ways in which such scares could also push people away from the missions – of increasing the appeal of missionary teachings and strengthening neophyte leadership. As survivors, Tekouerimat and others achieved a degree of acquired immunity which afforded them a greater resistance and more solid health in the face of subsequent epidemic waves. This invariably reinforced their aura of spiritual power and moral authority within their own bands and in their relations with others. The establishment of a cemetery near the mission, where the less fortunate might be buried, also contributed to the coalescence of a community, insofar as Kamiskouaouangachit emerged as a funerary site, where genealogical memory and relationships with the world beyond could be perpetuated.27

  The spread of the sickness throughout the Saint Lawrence valley in 1638 and within Etinechkawat’s own family appears to have played a key role in convincing the reluctant “captain by descent” to at last convert and relocate with his own followers at Kamiskouaouangachit.28 As noted earlier, most newcomers to the missions were reproducing a traditional seasonal subsistence pattern, encamping on the site and its vicinity during the warm months to fish and forage, with few if any intending to remain year-round. But missionary liberality did have an impact on the traditional movements of the Saint Lawrence Algonquians, and did make a contribution to the emergence and consolidation of population. It also encouraged the reinforcement of links that had until then been more distended. The arrival of visitors from afar who were tempted to settle there on a somewhat more permanent basis, notably some Kichesipirini Algonquins from the Ottawa valley, prompted the leaders, during the summer of 1641, to formalize the bases of the community and to reinforce their claims to authority.29

  Without consulting the missionaries, Etinechkawat, Tekouerimat, and another leading neophyte, the Algonquin Étienne Pigarouich, convened other bands in the region to “offer them strong inducements to believe. If anyone showed himself an open enemy to the faith, they resolved to drive him away from the village that they are beginning.” During the council, the three men spoke in turn, with Etinechkawat speaking last. “I believe that the only means of restoring your nation,” he urged the visitors, “which is going to destruction, is for you all to assemble and to believe in God.” The handful of men who voiced their objections to these pressures included Makheabichtichiou, the renowned warrior and orator who just three years earlier had himself expressed the desire to embrace Christianity and settle down near Quebec. However, on account of his determined polygamous ways, he was now marginalized. Having failed to produce a consensus during the meeting, Etinechkawat, Tekouerimat, and Pigarouich asked the missionaries to act in secret with the governor
so that he might “prompt them to appoint some captains to lead them in their small affairs.” Accordingly, the governor convened the principal men of the mission and advised them that they should elect chiefs.30

  Etinechkawat’s own name was not put forward for election, for “being a Captain by descent, everyone gave him the first rank” by default. The Christian men whose names had been elicited, certainly including Tekouerimat and plausibly Pigarouich, won a sweeping victory which was ratified by the community in the missionaries’ absence. Besides the three captains elected to lead in collaboration with Etinechkawat, the assembly selected three other persons unnamed in the record: a “Captain of prayers” who would be responsible for communicating the missionary teachings to the rest of the community, and two others who would “keep the young men to their duty.” During the council, those assembled “confirmed the resolution they had made to cultivate the land” with the governor’s assistance.31

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  Kamiskouaouangachit did promise a “means of restoring [the] nation,” to borrow Etinechkawat’s phrase. Beyond the natural bounty of the eel fishery, it became a privileged service centre where French assistance both material and spiritual was apportioned. Importantly, though the Jesuits gave themselves the starring role in the Relations, they were not alone in providing for the neophytes. Several servants assisted them with physical labour, and nuns brought their own considerable resources and zeal to the mission in its early years.

  In August of 1639 a ship brought to Quebec six young women from two religious orders: three Augustines de la Miséricorde de Jésus from Dieppe and three Ursulines from Tours. The latter were teachers, and they intended to build a school in the colony; the former were nursing sisters, intent on founding a hôtel-Dieu, as hospitals were called. Upon their arrival, the three Augustinian sisters rushed to Kamiskouaouangachit where the locals were astonished to learn that these whitegowned women were virgins. The sisters had expected to serve the Indigenous people from their residence in the town, as had the Ursulines, but mortality there was so high during their first winter that their would-be patients dubbed it “the House of Death” and stayed away. Seeing that illness and death followed them and touched other nations, the Algonquians changed their mind and began sending their sick from Kamiskouaouangachit to the nuns’ hospital in town, which also began to feed the healthy with provisions given or lent from its stores. The inconvenience was such that they asked the nuns to come to Sillery, “because they did not like it at Quebec.”32

  While the Ursulines chose to remain at Quebec, the marked Algonquian preference for Kamiskouaouangachit determined the Augustinians to relocate their operation there. The small cove of Saint Joseph being occupied, they selected as a site in the next cove upriver, separated from the Jesuits’ mission by a small hill that jutted from the bluff out to the water; this second cove became known as “Anse du Couvent” or Convent Cove. About 150 meters separated the Jesuits’ residence from the site where, with great ceremony, they laid the first stone for their own dwelling, on 9 July 1640. At first, the nuns lodged with the Jesuits and then in the nearby house of the colonist Pierre de Puiseaux, before occupying their half-built house in December. Completed the following year, this large stone house featured a north-facing gable and two chimneys, windows, wood floors, interior partitions, and a space that served as chapel. A fence surrounded the compound, which variously was called the convent or the hospital.33

  While the Jesuits sought to inspire confidence with their Relations, the Augustinians’ own annals reveal that the first winter spent at the convent-hospital was a harrowing one. “Cold and misery” reigned. The three sisters fell gravely ill: Marie Guenet, Mère de Saint Ignace, the superior, “spit up blood,” and one of her sisters died early in the year.34 Still, they could count on some eight or ten servants who assisted them and their clientele, and their presence confirmed the mission’s function as a site where the most vulnerable could receive special attention. With the arrival of moose-hunting season, Innu and Algonquin bands departed, leaving the children, elderly, and infirm in the care of the nuns and missionaries, being “very happy to be unburdened from them and to not be forced to kill those who could not follow them in their travels, as they formerly did.”35 Once it became clear that the scattering of small bands offered little protection from the ravages of epidemic disease, it also became a place where the sick sought out medical attention and the sustenance that they were too weakened to find on their own – food in the form of flour and biscuit, but also kettles, blankets, and firewood, the cutting of which kept the missions’ servants busy. In illness and death, the spiritual expertise and the teachings of the missionaries and nuns offered a measure of comfort. Due to one such epidemic wave in 1642, the Augustinians witnessed a great augmentation of the number of people to whom they provided attention at Kamiskouaouangachit, some three hundred in all. On account of the dirt, grease, and smoke, the nuns reluctantly decided that year to dye their white garments brown with walnut bark and logwood extract from their dispensary.36

  To the people of Kamiskouaouangachit, the French acted the part of providers. In the first years, it was not only the missionaries and nuns who distributed foodstuffs and supplies, but also Governor de Montmagny and the Company of New France’s storekeepers.37 As one neophyte put it, in a letter dictated for a benefactor of the mission back in France, and published in the Relation of 1642–43, “ouwatch endrakiwatch. Nisasikis ka mininita arokesi kat peiik wemichtigouch witchihitch itchi Kitikeian,” meaning, “I am old. I can no more work; would to God that a Frenchman would aid me to cultivate the land.”38 As another stated a few years later to the Augustinians, “take courage, my Mothers, God will give you what is necessary to help us. He who has made everything has made us very happy by bringing you here. You will save our lives by lodging and feeding us; we will pray God that he will give you always the means of assisting us.”39 But the arrangement was reciprocal, and the neophytes were quick to offer gifts of eels and game, furs and skins. Some of these gifts elicited squeamishness: the Augustinian sisters’ annalist confided that the nuns gratefully accepted the abundance of smoked meat that the Algonquians brought them after one winter hunt but could not come around to eating it themselves, and, out of disgust, instead passed it along to their workmen whom they plied with wine for the occasion. Gifts of eel were more welcome, as were beaver pelts and moose skins. Given the reluctance to sully the purity of the missionary project by associating it with commerce, the sources make it possible to only catch but the faintest glimpses of this economic activity. However, they do hint at its scale: the Jesuits’ unpublished journal for 1646 notes that the neophytes harvested some forty thousand eels that year, “most of which were sold” to colonists at a rate of a hundred for a halfécu, for a total of two hundred écus or over six hundred livres.40

  Besides solace in times of disease and penury, Kamiskouaouangachit promised a measure of protection in times of war. Yet the site, low-lying and nestled below a wooded bluff, was not a well protected one. One of the nuns complained that the plot on which their house had been built “was configured in a way that made it possible for two hundred men to easily hide very near us without being spotted,” a situation that was equally true of the Jesuits’ residence.41 In the spring of 1641, fear spread that the Iroquois would attack. Having discussed peace with Governor Montmagny but failed to reach an agreement, “they withdrew and threatened to come to Sillery.” The missions’ residents relocated their cabins close to the nuns’ house, which as it was larger and entirely built of stone,“seemed stronger to them than that of the Jesuit Fathers.” For additional protection, a “large enclosure of stakes” was built just beyond the nuns’ gardens.42 The Jesuits’ compound appears to have been similarly enclosed by a palisade sometime before December 1642, as suggested by the Latin reference to the “oppidum Sancti Josephi vulgo Silleri” (“Fort of Saint Joseph, commonly called Sillery”) in the sacramental registers.43

  In 1643, the “fear of th
e Iroquois” drew many natives to Kamiskouaouangachit, asking to have some “houses in the French style” built near the Augustinians’ dwelling so that they might find safety there. The Jesuits had had a series of such houses built near their own residence, a few with stone walls, but most of them likely timber-framed or half-timbered, and topped with gabled roofs: the one first intended for Etinechkawat but taken up by Negabamat and Nenaskoumat (1637–38), followed by four others (1640), and then two more (1643). In response to the demands of the neophytes, the nuns had three more houses built at great expense near their own and distributed blankets and kettles to the families who came to occupy them. They balanced their expenses by retaining only four of their ten servants. Governor Montmagny sent soldiers to guard the hospital compound, six at a time. Still, the mission’s staff could not go about its business except at great risk.44

  Quebec offered a fallback position. Already in 1642, the Augustinian nuns, amidst renewed alarms of war, were considering returning to the town. On that occasion, the neophytes asked the sisters to ensure a retreat for them where they might at least place their most vulnerable relatives out of harm’s way if the war did intensify.45 In the spring of 1644, the Iroquois captured some Algonquins, Wendats, and Frenchmen on the Saint Lawrence. Montmagny explained that he had no soldiers to spare, and asked the Augustinian sisters to withdraw to the safety of Quebec. The people of Kamiskouaouangachit expressed their desire to do the same, as “they did not wish to remain in this mission anymore.” Indeed, the neophytes did not wait for the nuns’ departure, “and were the first to leave the village.” Having made a polite show of reluctance, the Augustinians left the mission on 29 May 1644 with a few remaining families. At Quebec, the Algonquians built their cabins in the courtyard of the Augustinians’ new hospital, which was completed that summer in the Upper Town, but “not feeling themselves in safety in their bark cabins, […] because the enemy could easily set them on fire,” they asked for French-style houses similar to those that had been built for them at the mission. The nuns agreed to have a small house constructed, and it was presented to them in December. On that occasion, one of the neophytes expressed his people’s gratitude: “This is very well, the Iroquois will never think that we are here; here we are safe.” Most of the Algonquians who might otherwise have orbited around Kamiskouaouangachit spent the winter with the Augustinians, except those who resolved to go hunting when it was learnt that the Iroquois had withdrawn a little.46