Outside of a short but pithy book on the subject by Marc Jetten, drawn from a masters’ thesis, attempts to approach the mission settlements of the Saint Lawrence valley as a whole have tended to miss their mark.20 In the 1990s a few researchers honed in on the idea that these communities had been united in a “Confederacy of the Seven Fires” or of “Seven Nations.” Initially they posited this entity’s emergence in the late seventeenth century, but soon they came to understand that it was a much later development: the direct consequence of the fall of New France in 1760, and of an effort by Great Britain to give preeminence to the people of Kahnawake, whose friendship the British had been cultivating since the turn of the century, by fostering the formalization of new political entity, with the familiar Six Nations Confederacy offering, if not a true model, at least a label. This rectification came a little late, however, for the notion of the “Seven Nations” has since entered academic and popular discourse as a persistent shorthand to designate the inhabitants of the mission settlements through the French Regime.21 The seventeenth-century history of the mission communities was certainly entangled, as this book demonstrates, but this entanglement was of an altogether different, less straightforward nature.
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In reconstructing the history of the mission settlements and their inhabitants from an ethnohistorical perspective, Flesh Reborn thus elaborates upon a scholarship that is rich but fragmented. It does its best to contend with the unevenness of the source material. The effort at reconstructing the encounter of the Wendat elder and Tracy with which this book opens gives an idea of the challenges at hand. Only in 1669 did Louis XIV establish the office of Secretary of State for the Navy, whose responsibility included the colonies, and which corresponded to an official government department with a permanent staff; and only in the decades that followed was the practice of maintaining and archiving a regular official correspondence instituted – and even then, allusions to the mission settlements within this correspondence were terse. The Recollet frères, the Jesuit révérends pères, and the Sulpician messieurs who ministered in the Saint Lawrence valley had different approaches not only to missionary work, but also to record keeping. The Jesuits are best known for their annual Relations, full of rich ethnographic and diplomatic detail, published for a metropolitan audience between 1632 and 1672. For this period, as well as for the years following, there exists in parallel a small hodgepodge of letters and reports. Neither the Recollets nor the Sulpicians produced a comparable body of writing – though in the case of the Sulpicians, the outgoing correspondence of their superior in Paris with missionaries in the colonies has survived. All of this is to say that not all mission settlements and not all periods were documented with the same care, and that it is therefore necessary to develop a high level of tolerance for archival silences and uncertainties.
Missionaries and colonial officials serve as valuable, and indeed unavoidable, relays of information, but it is important to not forget that they were biased observers and reporters. They often misunderstood the words and behaviours of the peoples with whom they engaged. Even a first-rate missionary such as the Jesuit Pierre Potier, who in the mid-eighteenth century spent some time among the Wendats of Lorette before pursuing his ministry among those of Detroit, might thus jot down in an enumeration of aphoristic thoughts that he picked up or came up with along the way that “the Native is a Paradox (he is impenetrable [and] incomprehensible, he does not act like he speaks, thinks, etc.).”22 It must be further stressed that the nineteenth-century published transcriptions and translations of sources, on which scholars have relied heavily, add another layer of misunderstanding. The Thwaites edition of the Jesuit Relations’ description, for example, of a tense council in 1684 has the League Iroquois jeering against those of the mission settlements and forcing them to “perdre leur place” (lose their place), which was imaginatively translated as “lose their places in the council” – while the original Relation merely indicates that this had forced them to “perdre leur chasse” (miss out on the hunt). Similarly, while the narrative of the Sulpician missionary François Vachon de Belmont published by the Quebec Literary and Historical Society indicates that the warriors of Kahnawake “firent échapper” (allowed to escape, or made them do so) a hundred of captive Mohawks in 1693, the original manuscript indicates that they simply “virent échapper” (saw escape).23 While such errors are by no means plentiful, they have left an impact on our understanding of the subject matter.
Although the colonial record must not be taken at face value, it also must not be too easily dismissed either. When read between the lines and against the grain, to use two expressions beloved of historians, these sources serve as necessary points of entry into seventeenth-century realities. Triangulating the source material put to paper by as broad a range of observers as possible – French, English, and Dutch – makes it possible to draw closer to historical realities. Appraising and comparing observations emanating from different individuals, interest groups, and colonies provides remarkable opportunities to arrive at a fuller understanding of murky events. Conference and council minutes, transcriptions of judicial and quasi-judicial examinations, and more rarely of informal conversations, allow Indigenous voices to shine through and grant us precious insights into individual and collective perspectives.24 In keeping with the principles of ethnohistory, I have also drawn from linguistic materials, including early Indigenous dictionaries, as well as archaeological research, and oral traditions – and gained a wealth of insights and inspiration from encounters with people descended from the inhabitants of these seventeenth-century mission settlements.
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One of the effects of considering the mission settlements as Indigenous communities, rather than merely as locations for missionary activities, is to grant visibility to people who have been hidden from history, and to make it possible for us to begin to appreciate the historical agency of finer units of analysis than those that have tended to feature in the literature. Paying close attention to the nuances of identity, solidarity, and enmity is key to understanding patterns of conflict and migration. The French described the inhabitants of the mission settlements as nos Sauvages (our Natives) and as Sauvages chrétiens (Christian Natives). In the final decades of the seventeenth century the multiplication of missions and converts in the continent’s interior gave rise to a more precise designation, that of Sauvages domiciliés. The adjective, translated most simply as “domicilied,” or otherwise “resident” or “settled,” had until then been occasionally used in reference to the Frenchmen who had established their residence in the colony, i.e. Français domiciliés. Afterwards it became a convenient way to distinguish the Indigenous populations which had established a fixed residence in the heartland of the colony from the more distant French-allied or nominally Christianized peoples. Anglo-American colonists meanwhile referred to the inhabitants of the mission settlements collectively and vaguely as “Canada Indians,” “Canadian Indians,” “Praying Indians,” “French Indians,” or “French Praying Indians,” and spoke of the “French and their Indians.” Terms such as this obscure the very real independence that the inhabitants of these communities enjoyed.25
Although one must rely on labels such as “Algonquin,” “Huron,” “Iroquois,” or “Abenaki” in some contexts, it is important to recognize their inadequacy in others. Terms of convenience, they conceal an array of collective and personal identities. While the insufficiencies of the documentary record make it impossible to produce biographical scholarship that comes anywhere close to what has been written about Catherine or Kateri Tekakwitha – to this day the most famous resident of Kahnawake, or of all the mission settlements for that matter – they make it possible to catch glimpses of other significant life trajectories. Attentiveness to the personal names that appear in scattered sources, and a willingness to reconcile their garbled orthographies, has several benefits. It allows a clearer sense of the contingencies of these communities’ history, and of the role of Indi
genous agency in their formation. The leadership and networks of individuals – complex individuals, not pasteboard saints – influenced the formation, development, and political orientation of the mission communities. Settlement or resettlement in the vicinity of the French was a venture promoted or opposed by specific, charismatic persons who mobilized their kinship and communal relations and were empowered by them. Among Algonquians and Iroquoians alike, influence was more widely spread than an overly cursory reading of the sources might suggest. While male chiefs, also referred to as captains or sachems, and warriors loom largest in the record, their influence rested not only on personal ability and personality but on networks of relatives and friends among whom women occupied a crucial position. The latter’s role is generally obscured in the seventeenth-century sources, both as a result of their authors’ Eurocentric prejudices, and as a result of the gendered nature of interactions which meant that these male colonial observers rarely had the opportunity to sit in on the political discussions of women. There is no doubt, however, that women played a fundamental role when it came to migration and community relocation – especially so among Iroquoians, where women were responsible for the household and fields, but also among Algonquians.
Individuals are also important because they can serve as tracers which make it possible to detect the activity and relations of wider groups and networks that are otherwise gestured to only vaguely in the sources. They emerge as a key to understanding broader population movements and geopolitical developments. It is by following individuals and personal names that we can thus make sense of patterns of migration and conflict, and that we can get a sense of continuities through mobility, intermarriage, or adoption. Following individuals similarly forces us to revise old monoliths and binaries – French-Iroquois, for example, Iroquois-Huron, or Algonquian-Iroquoian. As mentioned above, without exception, the mission settlements came into being as heterogeneous, multiethnic, and multinational communities. Although French missionaries and officials failed in their initial ambition to turn the Indigenous residents of the mission settlements into perfect Frenchmen and Frenchwomen, these communities became dynamic sites of ethnic and linguistic assimilation, developing internal cohesions of their own. Diverse Algonquian peoples fused at Kamiskouaouangachit, and so did Wendats near Quebec, and later Wabanakis at Msakkikkan, Néssawakamighé, and Arsikantegouk; similarly, assimilative processes initiated in Iroquoia reached fruition in the mission settlements of the Saint Lawrence valley, with the Mohawk language and ethnic identity coming to dominate at both Kahnawake and Kanehsatake.
Retrieving the names which the inhabitants of the missions used to describe and distinguish themselves is much more problematic. Period dictionaries and ethnohistorical upstreaming make it possible to translate many colonial ethnic labels in a way that brings us closer to the historical actors and to their sense of self. In some cases, I have chosen to privilege, with a measure of confidence, Indigenous labels over colonial ones, and to speak of Innu (rather than Montagnais), Wendats (rather than Huron), and Wabanakis (rather than Abenakis), in keeping with a practice that is increasingly common among scholars. In other cases, however, owing to the silences and ambiguities of the sources, I have found it preferable to retain old colonial labels in an effort to avoid referring to seventeenth-century peoples by the ethnic designations that, though used to refer to their descendants today, they are uncertain to have used themselves. I have thus accordingly avoided translating the term “Algonquin” as Anishnabeg, and in light of the fluid boundary that existed between the Innu and Algonquins during the early seventeenth century, I have found it useful to adopt the neologism “Saint Lawrence Algonquians” for occasional use (see chapter 1). More hesitatingly, I have also deemed it safest to retain the term “Iroquois”: while the notions of Haudenosaunee (or Rotinonhsionni in Mohawk, “People of the Longhouse,” i.e. members of the Five Nations Confederacy) and Onkwehón:we (“Real Men,” i.e. ethnic Iroquois) would become conflated in the nineteenth century and take on new meanings in more recent times (with the latter term now being used to refer to Indigenous peoples more broadly), the seventeenth-century sources suggest the distinction may have been a crucial one (see chapter 8).
I have been bolder when dealing with the names of mission communities, given their centrality in the book. Beyond familiar toponyms such as Kahnawake and Kanehsatake, readers will thus encounter less familiar ones such as Kamiskouaouangachit instead of Sillery, and Msakkikkan and Néssawakamighé to designate the Wabanaki missions on the Chaudière River. In my attempt to come as close as possible to these distant senses of self and place, I use Wendake to refer to the old Wendat homeland, otherwise known as Huronia, located between Georgian Bay and Lake Simcoe, but not to refer to the settlement established near Quebec. Indeed, the evidence indicates that the inhabitants of the latter knew it as Lorette or, reflecting their own pronunciation, Roreke; only in the twentieth century, in the context of the community’s self-affirmation, did it come to share the name of Wendake itself. In the same way, I use Arsikantegouk rather than the current name of Odanak to describe the Wabanaki community established on the Saint François River at the very end of the seventeenth century, as the current name, meaning “the village,” only came into use in the nineteenth century. In transcribing Indigenous place and personal names, I have attempted a measure of spelling-standardization that offers a compromise between the seventeenth-century sources and current conventions (replacing, for example, the omicron-upsilon ligature, which appears as an opentopped 8, with the letters “ou” or “w,” depending on the case). I hope that readers will forgive the apparent idiosyncrasy of this nomenclature, and appreciate that it reflects at once the unevenness of our historical knowledge and a purposeful effort to drive home the point that these mission settlements were, above all, Indigenous communities. In keeping with increasingly widespread usage in Canada, I have opted to use “Indigenous,” rather than “Aboriginal,” “Indian,” or “Native” – with the exception of quotations translated from the French, where I rely on the latter term as the most satisfactory equivalent to the French “Sauvages.”
My attempt at defining identities as precisely and faithfully as possible should not be taken to mean that all of these identities were rigidly defined, static, or exclusive. On the contrary, identities were often fluid, multiple, and nested.26 A single individual, for example, might depending on the given circumstances feel a greater and more meaningful attachment to her or his identity as a Haudenosaunee, or an Onkwehonwe, or a Garihwioston, or a Kahnawakeronon, or a member of the Turtle Clan at Kahnawake, or an Oneida of Kahnawake, or a former Wendat – or to any combination of these identities. Social identity and community membership were constantly renegotiated and redefined. In the Saint Lawrence valley of the seventeenth century, individuals and groups can be thought of as being in a continual process of “becoming,” as a result of migration, incorporation, amalgamation, coalescence, dissociation, dispersal, and resettlement.
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What follows, then, takes the form of a narrative history of the mission settlements of the Saint Lawrence valley through the seventeenth century. The timeline of their formation makes it possible to cleave to a rough chronological order. The first two chapters, entitled “Sowing Seeds” and “Friends and Brothers,” examine the Innu and Algonquin experimentation with settlement. While history books tend to begin the story of these unique social and political entities with Jesuit initiatives and the institutionalization of the mission community commonly known as Sillery in 1639, the seeds of these entities can be found deeper. And whereas scholars who have considered the formation of the earliest mission settlements during these years have tended to emphasize missionary action, here they are reimagined as a joint creation, the result of intersecting French and Indigenous desires, needs, and priorities. Old summer gathering places such as Kamiskouaouangachit (Sillery) and Metaberoutin (Trois Rivières) acquired a new importance. The trajectory of the missions established there corr
esponded closely with the intensification of the Iroquois offensive and the decline of the Algonquians of the Saint Lawrence as a military power.
Chapters 3 and 4 turn towards the Wendats. Rather than portraying the resettlement of Wendats near Quebec as the epilogue to the destruction of Huronia, or as a meagre prologue to the more recent history of the Wendats, these chapters seek to place their community’s early history at the center of the analysis. In trying to gain a clearer understanding of the subject, “The Enemy’s Arms” examines how over six hundred individuals sought safety in the Saint Lawrence valley. Exploring Wendat-Iroquois relations during this period reveals the extent to which force and persuasion were part and parcel of a broader socio-cultural pattern of incorporation. “Promised Lands” recounts how the refugee community was subjected to considerable pressures, as Iroquois warriors and ambassadors in turn negotiated with, cajoled, and threatened them in an effort to prompt their relocation. These chapters invite us to see that the tendency among colonial chroniclers and contemporary historians to generalize about “the Hurons” and “the Iroquois” (or “the Five Nations”) has obscured the extent to which patterns of war and peace were shaped by more localized solidarities. They also allow us to see that what historians and the popular historical imagination conceive of as the “Franco-Iroquois” wars more often than not had as their principal protagonists not the French, but rather their allies of the mission settlements.
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