Category Archives: History

As most know the story line I will paraphrase Proff. Eccles conclusion and also from Angus J. Macdougall, SJ’s excellent booklet on Brébeuf below.

Just as the fruits of the Jesuit mission to Huronia were bearing fruit, the menace of the Iroquois loomed larger again.  Recall that the Iroquois Confederacy, located in western NY and allied with the English colonists in Albany, sought to take over the Huron role of middlemen in the lucrative fur trade between western tribes and the colonial powers.

In 1648 a 250 strong party of Huron paddled to Trois Rivieres and enroute, routed an attacking  Iroquois war party.  However while they were gone, an even stronger Iroquois war party attacked St Joseph mission and a neighbouring village in Huronia.  Of a total population of 3000, about 700 Huron were killed or captured, mostly women and children.  Fr. Antoine Daniel, SJ was killed too.

That winter was a cruel one.  Over 6000 persons took refuge in St. Marie as starvation stared them all in the face.  On March 15, 1649, a war party of some 1200 Iroquois attacked St-Ignace in complete surprise, breaching the palisade and over running the village.  After two unsuccessful attacks on nearby St-Louis, the same result occurred the next day.  Frs. Jean Brébeuf, SJ and Gabriel Lalemant, SJ who were visiting St. Louis at the time, baptised catachumens at the breach, urging the Huron to die bravely.  They themselves refusing to flee, were captured.  Both villages were burnt to the ground.

Not far away at the fortified St.-Marie mission, the French and Huron prepared for a last stand.  300 brave Huron from La Conception sortied out and inflicted severe losses on the Iroquois before being overwhelmed by much superior numbers.  Fearing the arrival of other large Huron relief forces, the Iroquois then withdrew.  This was on March 19 which was the Feast of St. Joseph.  The French attributed their deliverance to his special protection.  St Joseph is the patron saint of Canada

Frs. Brébeuf and Lalement were martyred after being gruesomely tortured.  (In 1930, they along with six of their fellow Jesuit missionaries were canonized by Pope Pius XI.)  In the weeks that followed, 15 additional Huron villages were abandoned out of fear of further Iroquois attacks.  Two months later the missionaries would burn and abandon St.-Marie, their pride and joy.  The final withdrawl of the Jesuits occurred in 1650 as the Huron nation had been destroyed.  This they sadly believed was clearly part of God’s grand design.  The Jesuits then moved further west and established a new mission on the southern shore of Lake Superior.

The Iroquois themselves having suffered severe losses, negotiated a peace treaty with the French in 1653.  The Jesuits were then allowed to establish themselves in the villages of the Five Nations.  While free to trade in both Montreal and Albany, the role of middleman eluded them, as the Ottawa Nation centered around Michilimackinac took over this role from the Huron.  Remnants of the Huron survived, dispersing to the west and south

And so ends the story of the Jesuit and Huron Nation.  You can see all this amazing history by visiting the Canadian Martyrs Shrine and the neighbouring St.-Marie Among the Huron restored village in Midland, Ontario.  Here are a few pics from our visit there a few years back.  Thank you Proff. Eccles and Fr. Macdougall, SJ for your painstaking research and analysis.

 

 

We learned last time from W. J. Eccles in the The Canadian Frontier 1534-1760, that the Jesuits established themselves in missions in Huronia during the period 1632-39.  Their goal was to convert the Huron Nation, some 30,000 strong, to Christianity.

Prof Eccles continues: “The Indians found little that appealed to them in the Christian way of life.  Moreover, the attempts by the Jesuits to make them change many of their established customs did not sit well.  The Indians lived without laws and with very few restraints; each man or woman was free to live as he/she thought best, and crimes were punished by the victim or his kin, not by the collectivity.  The only restraint on action was the normal desire to be held in esteem by his/her community.

Women were the masters of their own bodies and from puberty until pregnancy they gave themselves to any male that pleased them.  To the Jesuits this was a carnal sin.  Some others of the French, the men sent by the fur trade companies to establish good trade relations, found the Indian moral standards very acceptable and took full advantage of the Indian girls lack of sexual inhibitions.  Thus when the Jesuits tried to persuade the Huron to lead chaste lives, they met a cool reception.  If chastity was such a good thing, why did all the French Christians not practice it, they asked.  To this the missionaries were hard pressed to find an answer.

 

The Jesuits found that before they could hope to enjoy and real success, they had to undermine the old beliefs of the Huron, and in so doing, they helped to destroy their culture.  One approach was to demonstrate that the Indians reliance on dreams to govern their future actions was inefficacious.  Once a few Huron had been converted and openly rejected the belief in dreams, and if they had as much luck in the hunt as the pagans, the latter began to doubt their old beliefs.

If the Huron were occasionally impressed by the efficacy of the Jesuit prayers, they were quick to blame them when something went amiss.  And amiss it did.  It appears about 15,000 Huron, many of them children, died in the 1630s when a European disease for which they had no resistance, attacked their villages.  The missionaries saw this as the work of Satan but were quick to take advantage.  Previously, they feared baptizing an Indian unless they were reasonably certain that henceforth, she/he would lead a Christian life.   The missionaries were now able to baptize the dying by the hundreds.  Because the Jesuits were blamed for the disease, they encountered more resistance than ever but took satisfaction that thousands had gone to heaven that otherwise would have been barred to them.

No sooner had the plague run its course and began to abate, than another, and even worse disaster stuck the Huron.  The Iroquois anxious to gain more control of the fur trade, negotiated a commercial alliance and peace treaty with the Huron and French in 1645.  However they gained nothing by this accord and soon embarked on a war of extermination against the Huron.

In 1647 their sudden assaults forced the Huron to abandon some of their outlying villages and withdraw to the more populous villages near St. Marie for protection.  At or near St. Marie Mission were some 13 Huron villages.  During that year, 3,000 persons had been given shelter and food.  Converts numbered in the thousands and over 2,000 in all had been baptized; however a large number of the last had been moribund.  Attempts were made to renew the peace treaty and to arrange a military alliance with the Andastes, a fierce Iroquois Nation in the Susquehanna Valley (in NY and PA) hostile to the Five Nations Confederacy.  The Jesuits remained confident that the Iroquois assaults could be curbed and they started to see some success to their missionary efforts at last.”

 

 

 

(To be concluded next time…)

 

We celebrate National Indigenous History Month in Canada during June: https://www.rcaanc-cirnac.gc.ca/eng/1466616436543/1534874922512

I thought I would share a few excerpts from a history book I am reading.  It concerns the first interactions of the Jesuits with the Huron Nation in New France during the first half of the 17th century.

Prof. Eccles writes:

“It was in the west in Huronia, a vast area bounded by Georgian Bay, Lakes Huron, Erie, Ontario, and Simcoe that the Jesuits concentrated their major effort to convert the natives to Christianity. The Huron, estimated to number some 30 to 35 thousand, had obtained a more advanced culture than the Algonkin nations.  Living in semi-permanent villages, they depended on agriculture for their main food supplies and traded their surplus of corn with the northern and western tribes for furs.  Between 1634 and 1639, the Jesuits established 3 missions here, the largest of which was called Ste. Marie… As many as 65 French resided there at one time, priests, lay brothers, servants, a surgeon, an apothecary, and a number of artisans…These tiny outposts separated from the settlements on the St. Lawrence by hundreds of miles of wilderness, formed a unique frontier, a frontier of the intellect.  There the products of the highly sophisticated Baroque civilization confronted the Stone Age.

 

 

…The Huron had a religion of their own which sufficed for their needs, and which they showed a great reluctance to abandon.  Theirs was a cruel world in which sudden death could come at any time.  In seeking to explain chance events and the phenomena of nature that affected their lives at every turn, they had developed a deep-rooted set of mystic beliefs.  For them, the natural world, inanimate objects as well as animals, were inhabited by spirits; some were benevolent, some malevolent, all had to be placated, appeased or at least acknowledged.  They believed that in their dreams they were in communication with the spirit world; thus, to dream of success in the hunt ensured it; to dream of disaster caused plans to be abandoned.  Some among them were able to induce conditions of hysteria in themselves, and in this way communicate with spirits.  These were the shamans, the wisemen, who healed the sick with simple remedies of magic, and gave advice on what action to take to cope with major problems.  They were the priests of the Huron culture. Others possessed supernatural powers but used them malevolently; these were the sorcerers, and they had to be appeased.

…One great difficulty in any attempt to understand the Huron religious beliefs was that their beliefs were passed from one generation to the next orally.  The Indians had developed a large body of myths and legends to account for the inexplicable in nature, and although some Jesuits sought to understand these beliefs, the language barrier and the desire to impose their own alien beliefs made real understanding virtually impossible.  Yet this primitive religion was intricately interwoven into the whole of Indian life and society.  The early Recollets and then the Jesuits discovered that the Indians appeared to believe in a supreme being and in an after life, hence in the immortality of the soul.  The problem than became whether these beliefs could be accepted in essence and amended in accord with Christian beliefs, or whether they had to be destroyed, eradicated, then replaced by a pure Christian creed.  Initially the Jesuits, appalled at the strange mores and practices of the Huron, sought to eradicate and impose.  As they came to understand these Indians better, they discovered how impossible such a task is so they came to accept much and seek to build on it.

…Fr. Paul Le Jeune writes in Vol. IV of the Jesuit Relations : Our lives depend upon a single thread; and if, wherever we are in the world, we are to expect death every hour and to be prepared for it.  Your cabin is only chaff that might be burned down at any moment, despite all your care to prevent accidents, the malice of the Savages gives special cause for almost perpetual fear; a malcontent may burn you down, or cleave your head open in some lonely spot.  And then you are responsible for the sterility or fecundity of the earth, under penalty of your life; you are the cause of droughts; if you cannot make rain, they speak of nothing less than making away with you.”

Such was the nature of the first interactions between the Jesuit missionaries and the Huron in New France.  Proff. William J. Eccles has done a superb job in capturing this encounter.  William (1917-98) was a professor of history at the University of Toronto who wrote extensively on the French era in Canada.

To be continued.