“Seeing These Good Souls Adore God in the Midst of the Woods”

Abstract

Up to 1647, Jesuit missionaries in New France attempting to evangelize nomadic Algonquians of North America’s subarctic region were unable to follow these peoples, as they wished, in their seasonal hunts. The mission sources, especially the early Jesuit Relations, indicate that it was Algonquian neophytes of the Jesuit mission villages of Sillery and La Conception who themselves attracted other natives to Christianity. A veritable Native American apostolate was thus in existence by the 1640s, based in part on the complex kinship networks of the nomads. Thus it appears that during that decade, the Jesuits of New France adopted a new strategy of evangelization, based partly on the kinship networks of the nomads, which allowed for the natives’ greater autonomy in communicating and embracing Catholicism. A difficulty faced by the Jesuit editors of the Relations was how to concede to the culture of the nomads without offending their devout, European readers of the era of the “great confinement,” upon whom the missionaries depended for financial support. One way the Jesuits favorably portrayed nomadic neophytes—who were often unaccompanied by a missionary in their travels—was by underscoring the importance during hunting season of memory-based and material aids for Catholic prayer (Christian calendars, icons, rosaries, crucifixes, oratories in the woods, etc.). Thus, in the Jesuit literature, the gradual harmonization between Native American mobility and the Catholic liturgy was the key feature of the missionaries’ adaptation to the aboriginal context of the 1640s—a defining period for the Jesuit apostolate in North America through the rest of the seventeenth century.

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