1
The First Pattern
The Response to Jesuit Missions
"It is you women," charged the men of a Montagnais band in New France in 1640, ". . . who are the cause of all our misfortunes, —it is you who keep the demons among us. You do not urge to be baptized; you must not be satisfied to ask this favor only once from the Fathers, you must importune them. You are lazy about going to prayers; when you pass before the cross, you never salute it; you wish to be independent. Now know that you will obey your husbands."[1] Frustrated and angry, the men blamed women's commitment to traditional beliefs as the stumbling block to the community's well-being. This banc of Cree-speaking people in the St. Lawrence region of Canada had been under French influence since a Jesuit missionary coaxed survivors of the 1639–40 smallpox epidemic to accompany him from their summer encampment at Trois Rivières to the St. Joseph mission at Sillery, established three years earlier. There the French had sheltered them, and resident Christian Indians soon demanded their conversion. The priest who recorded the above incident never mentioned if the women capitulated, but he did remark that at least one woman escaped into the forest rather than submit. The majority of men, apparently convinced that female independence and lack of interest in Christianity had divided the group, resolved that should she be captured, they would chain and starve her as punishment.[2]
There was more at stake in the conflict between the men and women at St. Joseph's, however, than the simple desire of male converts to find a scapegoat for their troubles. Indeed, the tensions in this community disclose the first pattern of response to colonization: gender-based perceptions of and reactions to Christianity and Western culture. Although this pattern may
Jesuit Missions and Tribal Areas
not have typified all native peoples of New France, it was evident among many of the "domiciled" groups who are the focus of the present study. In their communities, a good number of men decided to adopt Catholicism and a sedentary life-style—thus, perhaps, reflecting a reassessment of the viability of the traditional system. Some scholars have argued that male converts, along with priests, brooked no opposition from women at the missions and succeeded in undermining women's status by 1640.[3] While there is little doubt that this was, indeed, the Christian neophytes' intention, the men's accusations make it clear that some women stubbornly resisted the imposition of both Christian values and gender roles well into the mission era.
The Jesuit mission to New France began in 1611 when Pierre Biard and Ennemond Massé arrived to proselytize the Abnaki in the vicinity of Port Royal. The mission, short-lived and fraught with misadventure, ended with the priests' capture by a Virginian expedition in 1613. Only in 1625 did Jesuits return to the colony, joining a small contingent of Recollets who had labored in their stead during the intervening years. Even so, the Jesuits did not successfully install their mission until 1632, for in 1629 English raiders carried away Jesuit and Recollet alike in the process of commandeering French settlements. When France regained its possessions in 1632, the Jesuits' moment had arrived: the drive to evangelize the sauvages of eastern Canada now began in earnest. The missionaries commenced with the Montagnais in the environs of the reopened Quebec parish and within the year had ventured to the trading post upriver at Trois Rivières; St. Joseph's at Sillery opened its palisaded doors to interested Montagnais and Algonquins in 1637.[4]
Throughout the remainder of the seventeenth century, bands of Cree, Ojibwa, and Algonquins settled in villages adjoining missions across New France, usually to secure protection from predatory enemy bands or to recuperate from the devastating epidemics that swept the area with morbid regularity. And occasionally Jesuits settled with them, hoping to make the villages home bases for future mission sites.
These Algonquian-speaking peoples occupied the land from Labrador to Lake Winnipeg.[5] The Ojibwa, Cree, and Montagnais-Naskapi based their economies primarily on hunting, fishing,
and gathering, although some more southerly groups of Ojibwa practiced occasional horticulture. They also shared many elements of material culture, social organization, and ritual beliefs and practices. These similarities allow us to consider their interactions with Europeans as analogous without discounting the discreet worldviews and lifeways of each group. Such a regional approach makes it feasible to move beyond the sometimes contrived and limited political delineations of tribes and to look instead at the dynamics of colonization.[6] Because of the many affinities in material culture and ideology, I will include some information on Ottawa and on Micmac of the Gaspé Peninsula and Maritimes as well.
Reports, journals, and travel accounts from New France furnish us with a large, if biased, portrait of the social organizations and belief systems of native communities in the early contact period.[7] Prominent in this profile is the sexual division that permeated all aspects of the native peoples' world—in rituals, the exercise of authority, productive and reproductive activities, spatial arrangements, and food distribution—and profoundly influenced how women and men faced the vicissitudes of daily living. Each sex played an integral yet autonomous role in the social and productive unit. Males and females had complementary functions that seldom overlapped, though they might be overlooked temporarily when necessary, as during a spouse's illness. As Paul Le Jeune, superior of the reopened missions, noted of the Montagnais in 1632,
the women know what they are to do, and the men also; and one never meddles with the work of the other. The men make the frames of their canoes, and the women sew the bark with willow withes or similar wood. The men shape the wood of the raquettes [snowshoes], and the women do the sewing on them. Men go hunting, and kill the animals; and the women go after them, skin them, and clean the hides.[8]
"To live among us without a wife," one man later explained, "is to live without help, without home, and to be always wandering."[9]
Ritual practices and beliefs complemented the separation of responsibility and authority. Men and their rituals focused on
the bush. Although males actively participated in camp life, their primary productive role was hunting large game and furbearers such as moose, caribou, bear, beaver, and deer. A man's authority and value to his group arose from his contributions as a hunter, and the respect tendered him rested on his skills. Success in the chase depended on the cooperation of animal spirits and the guidance of supernatural "helpers" gained through vision quests, dreaming, or divination. Men moved between the bush and the camp yet governed neither, for animal spirits "owned" the bush, and women controlled the camp.[10] With the exception of warring and divination, males' activities as hunters required minimal cooperative effort; instead men generally worked alone or in very small groups, a degree of physical isolation from the group forced upon them by their responsibilities. For Cree men working in the deep, powdery snow of the northern forests and muskeg, as for Ojibwa and Algonquin men of the Great Lakes, hunting meant absence from the camp for days, perhaps weeks, as they tracked game or checked traps.[11] A hunter's relationship with the supernaturals vital to the chase, too, was a highly individual one, which he was compelled to maintain on his own, even though rituals designed to placate animal spirits, such as returning beaver bones to water, were observed by the whole community to ensure their continued well-being and full stomachs.[12]
Women usually worked apart from men, either within the commensal unit or in groups, and the communal nature of their work allowed them regular contact with one another. They fished and hunted small game, such as rabbit, marten, and birds, in the vicinity of the camp, providing a good portion of the daily diet. In the mixed conifer-deciduous forests of Wisconsin and Minnesota, dotted with numerous lakes and rivers, women of the small, autonomous bands of Southwestern Ojibwa gathered nuts, berries, and fruits and tapped sugar maples, and in the fall both sexes harvested wild rice. The women of all groups also controlled the distribution of meat; once the men reported the kill, it became the women's property to butcher and process as they saw fit.[13] After spending the winter of 1633–34 in the bush with a Montagnais band, Paul Le Jeune described this exchange with amazement: "Men leave the
arrangement of the household to the women, without interfering with them; they cut, and decide, and give away [meat] as they please, without making the husband angry."[14] A woman's distribution of meat to families within the group established her autonomy and her authority to control food while reinforcing a sense of community and interdependence among households.[15]
Women were responsible for processing hides—scraping, stretching, and rubbing them with brains or grease—to be used as furs or made into shirts, leggings, parkas, moccasins, and other items of clothing; and they fashioned animal bones into awls, needles, ladles, and other tools (with the exception of bear and beaver skulls and feet, which received special ritual treatment). Men then received these items in exchange for the meat they provided. Women also controlled the assignment of living space and the selection of campsites.
Raising and training children occupied an important place in women's activities; after weaning at the age of two or three a child's care became a communal effort in which all women participated. Children were cherished, and they also were needed for the parents' support in old age. Births apparently were carefully planned and spaced, through abstinence and possibly through the use of abortion. "The father and mother draw the morsel from the mouth if the child asks for it," commented Nicolas Denys. "They love their children greatly." A Jesuit observer similarly remarked, "The Savages love their children above all things. They are like the Monkeys—they choke them by embracing them too closely."[16]
Women kept most ritual activities, like their practical activities, separate from those of men. Shamanistic rituals, such as the shaking tent or divination, were performed by both sexes. For example, Le Jeune described a woman performing the shaking tent ritual: "At the three Rivers [Trois Rivières], a Juggler having called the Manitou, or some other Genius, and not having succeeded in making him come, a woman entered and began to shake the house and to sing and cry so loudly, that she caused the devil to come."[17] However, references to specific female beliefs and customs are obscure in the French records, since the practices the Jesuits recorded were usually the hunt-
ing rites of men. But Le Jeune and others did note that women had some special foods, such as the hearts of certain birds, held separate feasts, and performed dances quite different from those of men. In 1691, Le Clercq described a women's dance among the Micmac, an Algonquian-speaking people in the area of the Gulf of St. Lawrence, the Maritime Provinces, and the Gaspé Peninsula, whose belief systems and rituals had many similarities to those of the northern and western hunter-gatherers discussed here: "They draw back and push out the arms, the hands, and the whole body, in a manner altogether hideous, looking intently on the earth as if they would draw out something therefrom by the very strength and force of their contortions."[18] Although women, like men, had supernatural "helpers," Le Jeune also learned that women had a special, innate spiritual potency, strongest during menses and childbirth.[19]
The separate rituals and attributes of the sexes indicate that male and female had distinct gender identities in traditional ideology. This system recognized the autonomy of men and women by emphasizing their different needs and concerns. The division was not disruptive, however, countered as it was by the complementarity of social and productive activities. Instead, the different aspects of female and male combined in a vital symmetry upon which the community's survival depended.
Interaction with Europeans through missions and trade disrupted this balance, for colonization involved more than simply moving people, institutions, and laws to new terrain. While missions and trading posts were not merely transplanted French institutions (in the literal meaning of the term "colonization"), missionaries and traders did expect to change the lives of the natives; it was inherent in the very concept of a "New France" that Indians would eventually conform to the ideological and socioeconomic values of the newcomers. Although some scholars have suggested that the early missionaries presented no real threat to groups such as the Ojibwa, European concepts of social relations, combined with religious and economic programs to colonize New France, slowly undermined the equilibrium of many native communities.[20] The hierarchical social structure and religious values of the French clashed
with the balanced and more harmonious relations of Indian women and men, altering their productive and spiritual responsibilities.[21]
In evaluating gender-based responses to colonization it is essential that we consider the symbiotic association of religion and economics in New France. Missionaries did not face virgin country when they set out to evangelize the sauvages . A fundamental economic transformation already had begun as market-oriented trapping gradually replaced subsistence hunting-gathering. This shift preceded the mission effort, and paved the way for it.[22] The fur trade acted as a catalyst for modifications in social and economic structures throughout native bands, which the Jesuit program of Christianization complemented. During the seventeenth century, the proximity of domiciled Indians to merchants at missions such as Tadoussac, Trois Rivières, Quebec, and Montréal facilitated their accommodation to French economic practices. Settled Indians and those groups that kept close seasonal trading contact with the French experienced gradual changes in both the nature and significance of their productive activities as their interaction with European priests and traders became more complex.
Although trade for favored items existed prior to contact with the French, the concept of undertaking intensive production in order to accumulate and then exchange surplus goods appears to have been introduced with the fur trade in the sixteenth century. As Nicolas Denys explained:
The hunting by the Indians in old times was easy for them. They killed animals only in proportion as they had need of them. When they were tired of eating one sort, they killed some of another. If they did not wish longer to eat meat, they caught some fish. They never made an accumulation of skins of Moose, Beaver, Otter, or others, but only so far as they needed them for personal use.[23]
Early Europeans in New France were dismayed to find that native peoples placed little value on tangible wealth as a source of status. Their economic system was more communal than competitive; each person gained prestige through contributions to the group's welfare. Originally, Indians were hard put to understand the Europeans' desire for wealth. "You [the
French] are covetous," they reprimanded one missionary, "and are neither generous nor kind; as for us, if we have a morsel of bread we share it with our neighbor."[24] The Montagnais suspected that the French valued material possessions more than native goodwill. Le Jeune recounted with some frustration that "when you refuse anything to a Savage, he immediately says Khisakhitan , 'thou lovest that,' sakhita , sakhita , 'Love it, love it; 'as if they would say that we are attached to what we love, and that we prefer it to their friendship."[25]
This careless attitude toward property would change, the French hoped, once they had enticed the Indians to settle, "for anyone who has taken the trouble to cultivate a piece of land does not readily abandon it, but struggles valiantly to keep it."[26] The French saw a direct relationship between native economic concerns and their own missionary work. They were, in fact, much freer with material aid to those who expressed an interest in conversion. In 1639, the Company of New France, whose shareholders were motivated by religious and national concerns as well as profit, granted settled Christian Indians privileges in their store equal to those of the French. They also offered cleared plots of land as a special inducement to women to convert and marry.[27] Their success in influencing material values was at first limited, however, only to those who had chosen to become Christians and settle. In 1703, Baron Lahontan noted that among the Ojibwa, at least, "money is in use with none of them but those that are Christians, who live in the Suburbs of our Towns."[28]
The interdependent, complementary roles of male and female in sustaining the community began to alter with the introduction of the European-based system of trade.[29] French traders wanted the furs obtained by men rather than the small game, tools, utensils, or clothing procured or produced by women. "They deal principally in Beavers," the Jesuit Charles Lalemant observed in 1626, "in which they find their greatest profit."[30] For groups that participated directly in trade, fur hunting and trapping gradually became the major activity of most men. Because furs served as the medium of exchange for goods, daily and seasonal life for all came increasingly to revolve around the trade. Most of the items given in exchange by
the French were tools and weapons intended to facilitate trapping—which occurred at the expense of subsistence hunting. Discussing changes in Micmac hunting patterns, Denys explained that the cost of operating muskets made men reluctant to use ammunition on game not suitable for trade: "It is not that the choice of small game is not good and abundant there, but this does not suffice their support, besides which it costs them too much in powder and ball." To make the focus on furbearers feasible, traders deliberately included foodstuffs in trade exchanges.[31]
The introduction of and growing dependence on European goods obtainable primarily with furs not only reoriented male hunting patterns, but it altered or eliminated many female productive activities as well. Two lists of trade goods exemplify this change. In his Relation of 1616, Biard remarked on the nature of the trading that took place along the St. Lawrence during the summer. Indians, he wrote, exchanged skins for "bread, peas, beans, prunes, tobacco, etc.; kettles, hatchets, iron arrow-points, awls, puncheons, cloaks, blankets, and all other such commodities as the French bring them."[32] Ten Years later Lalemant carefully recorded "the merchandise which these Gentlemen use in trading with the Savages; that is to say the cloaks, blankets, nightcaps, hats, shirts, sheets, hatchets, iron arrowheads, bodkins, swords, picks to break the ice in Winter, knives, kettles, prunes, raisins, Indian corn, peas, crackers or sea biscuits, and tobacco."[33] These lists suggest that for domiciled Indians and those in the trade, subsistence patterns were beginning to change dramatically. European merchandise replaced items whose manufacture had previously constituted some of women's most important productive activities. Where women had been responsible for processing skins and transforming them into garments, hunters now obtained clothing with furs. "Now that they trade with the French for capes, blankets, cloths, and shirts," Le Jeune reported, "there are many who use them."[34] And Biard commented of the Micmac that "they are also quite willing to make use of our hats, shoes, caps, woolens and shirts and of our linen."[35]
Although native people did not, of course, immediately buy all of their clothing from the French, ready-made goods may
have seemed a convenient substitute for time-consuming manufacture of native dress. Acquiring such items from traders also allowed women to spend more time readying furs for market. Thus, as women's relationship to the disposal of hides and furs changed, the significance of their direct contribution to the community welfare diminished.[36] As for men, while they too experienced a degree of alienation from the fruit of their labor, their contribution now became the focal one within the economy.
The orientation of many female tasks began to shift from the creation of a useful end product, such as clothing or tools, to assistance in the preparation of furs. Awls and bodkins that otherwise might have been used for sewing coats or breechclouts instead enabled a woman to stretch more furs and stretch them faster. Women were undeniably vital to the production of the furs that Europeans sought so eagerly—their scraping, stretching, and tanning of skins was essential to the process. No longer, however, did they participate as producers in their own right; rather, they were becoming auxiliaries to the trapping process.[37]
In groups that had not become sedentary, other items introduced by the French fostered change by allowing greater mobility and flexibility in the search for furs. The copper kettle, for example, among Micmac at least and one suspects elsewhere, replaced the stationary wooden cooking troughs that had marked frequently used campsites. With the easily portable kettle, moves were soon regulated less by custom than by the desire to increase the fur take.[38] Although access to game had always been a priority of seasonal nomadism, the new focus on furs shifted responsibility for moves largely out of women's control. This was a significant departure from the system in which "the choice of plans, of undertakings, of journeys, of winterings, lies in nearly every instance in the hands of the housewife."[39] Generally, moreover, frequent moves to unfamiliar areas must have been disruptive for women, who were responsible for setting up and tearing down the camp and for gathering fuel at each new site.[40]
Increased dependence on European foodstuffs affected native women's activities as well. Their food procuring—fishing,
hunting small game, and gathering—was crucial to the aboriginal economy. After the introduction of European food items, however, although women continued to gather nuts and berries when available and to fish, the importance of these subsistence foods decreased as French foods became more accessible. When Le Jeune listed the foods that had been a routine part of the diet of the Montagnais band he wintered with in 1633–34, he included in his notes that "they get from our French People galette, or sea biscuit, bread, prunes, peas, roots, figs, and the like."[41] Women's direct contribution to communal and family well-being diminished as dried peas, bread, and biscuits became common fare acquired by the trapper in exchange for his furs. While certainly the use of European dry staples could provide a buffer between harsh winters and starvation, one suspects that it also eroded the authority that had accompanied women's role in allocating and preparing meat.[42]
This is not to say that women made a rapid shift from being producers to mere processors, or that Indian men ruthlessly exploited women for personal gain. Rather, the fur trade initiated changes in the subsistence activities of women and men, changes that imparted greater economic importance to male labor because European traders hungered for furs. The uneven transmission of European technology to men and women compounded this situation. Muskets and steel traps traded to men in exchange for furs increased their efficiency and potential yield. The items that women received, in contrast, tended to be trinkets or goods such as awls or copper pots, which, while making some tasks easier, were geared toward assisting them in their secondary position as fur processors.[43] In response to French demands, an inequality in the productive values of the sexes had developed that Indians were forced to accept, at least in part, if they were to participate in the fur trade.
The immediate benefits of tools and trade goods probably obscured the economic and technological developments that created this imbalance; moreover, the gradual nature of these changes made it improbable that Indians could respond directly to many of them. But one dimension of the transformations was clearly visible to Indians and could be reckoned with: namely, the clear intent of the missionaries to change rituals
and social organization. In particular, Jesuit attempts to form Christian communities provided an immediate focus for the reactions of native men and women to the changes affecting them.
The missionaries labored energetically to effect the spiritual colonization of New France; they were educated and earnest men who worked tirelessly to spread the gospel and promote European cultural values in native communities. The disparities between their worldview and that of their prospective converts, therefore, were an ongoing source of discomfort and irritation. Father Jean de Brebeuf, of the Huron mission of Ste. Marie, wrote to Le Jeune in 1637 with suggestions for instructing new missionaries and explained the problems of life in the field: "Leaving a highly civilized community, you fall into the hands of barbarous people who care but little for your Philosophy or your Theology. All the fine qualities which might make you loved and respected in France are like pearls trampled under the feet of swine, or rather of mules, which utterly despise you when they see that you are not as good pack animals as they are."[44] The Indians, in turn—male and female alike—were often puzzled by the urgency with which priests attempted to change native customs and beliefs. Pierre Biard, of the first Jesuit mission of 1611–16, found that when he argued with natives about some practice, they responded: "That is the Savage way of doing it. You can have your way and we will have ours; every one values his own wares."[45]
The key to inculcating French Christian values, the priests decided, was to encourage Indians to establish permanent settlements near missions and trading centers. "One of the most efficient means we can use to bring them to JESUS CHRIST," Le Jeune suggested in 1638, "is to organize them into a sort of Village."[46] But the seasonal nomadism of the Montagnais did not harmonize well with the collective rituals at the heart of seventeenth-century Catholicism. Nor did native social organization lend itself to the hierarchical system of male secular authority that characterized European society. The Jesuits hoped that offers of material goods might win souls, for "not one of them hopes to be lodged and assisted who does not resolve to be an honest man, and to become a Christian,—so much so
that it is the same thing in a Savage to wish to become sedentary, and to wish to believe in God."[47] Once the natives were settled, the priests assumed, it would be a simple thing to instruct them in religious devotion and the basics of the Christian marriage and family. The combined effects of epidemics and ongoing conflict with Iroquois, coincidentally, aided the Jesuits in their efforts to establish villages near the missions.
Conversion efforts in these model settlements, however, did not go as planned. The elderly of both sexes often rejected the missionaries' evangelizing—though the priests blamed this on the obstinacy of old age. It was all that could be expected of the old men, Le Jeune caustically remarked, "whose brains, dried up in their old maxims, had no longer any fluid in which to receive the impression of our doctrine."[48] Occasionally, whole bands resisted the Jesuits' advances; as one weary missionary related, "they even prevented us from entering their villages, threatening to kill and eat us."[49] But gender differences in responses disturbed the priests even more.
At first the Jesuits focused their proselytizing on men and boys, alternating attacks on male hunting and divination rituals with blandishments of the comforts and virtue of life as a Christian man. Modesty and convenience limited their contact with women. In keeping with Jesuit practice, Le Jeune decided that "in regard to the women, it is not becoming for us to receive them into our houses," and effectively barred them from participation in most religious instruction.[50] But then, the priests expected women to convert as a matter of course, if only because the "neophytes" needed Christian wives to minimize the temptation of backsliding. Christian men who married pagan girls, Le Jeune feared, would, "as their husbands, be compelled to follow them and thus fall back onto barbarism or to leave them, another evil full of danger."[51] So although the Jesuits needed female converts to meet the goal of establishing sedentary villages based on the unclear family structure, they initially planned to leave the instruction of women to chance or to male converts.[52]
Some women did accept the Jesuits' teachings. In fact, the speed with which several Attikamek women attained baptismal status confounded Jérôme Lalemant, who had assumed that
their emotional tendencies would preclude any interest in religion. "What seems quite astonishing is," he reported, "that the women are in no respect behind the men in the performance of that duty. As they are naturally affectionate and more pressing, they have less of worldly respect in connection with these strange things, which are so holy and so useful to these people, who have remained for so many centuries in the shadows of death."[53] Paul Rageuneau also found some female converts very concerned about how to structure their relationships with God, noting in particular one woman who staunchly maintained her Christian faith despite persecution from others in her small band. Even the gloomy Father André at Green Bay reported with surprise in 1674 that "several women were very assiduous in their attendance, a thing I had not yet observed."[54]
Others, such as the young woman whom Le Jeune had consigned to the dungeon, clearly opted for conversion over flogging or imprisonment—an understandable choice.[55] In certain instances, too, baptism may have decreased French pressures on a community and alleviated tensions that arose, for example in the village of St. Joseph, from conflict over religious allegiances. And at least superficial observance of Christian practices perhaps enabled women to divert the missionaries' attention from themselves.[56]
If they converted, women tended to interpret and manipulate Christianity to serve their own needs.[57] Indeed, Catholic mysticism proved a useful tool in their continued emphasis of the sexual distinctions and female autonomy that had distinguished precolonial society. In 1691, Le Clercq, describing the activities of certain Micmac converts who emulated the missionaries, was surprised by the number of women involved. Moreover, he worried about their increased authority in the community:
These, in usurping the quality and the name of religieuses , say certain prayers in their own fashion, and affect a manner of living more reserved than that of the commonalty of Indians, who allow themselves to be dazzled by the glamour of a false and ridiculous devotion. They look upon these women as extraordinary persons, whom they believe to hold converse, to speak familiarly, and to
hold communication with the sun, which they have all adored as their divinity.[58]
By the 1670s a virtual cult of the Virgin had developed in some mission communities as women converts focused their ritual attention on that consummate symbol of femaleness in Catholic ideology. Ursuline convents—the ultimate separate institution for females within the church—became gathering places for Christian women. There they continued to stress older values of female autonomy, but now in a format acceptable to the demands of the missionaries.[59]
More frequently, however, to the missionaries' dismay, women declined conversion and instead stressed the importance of older rituals and practices. Women scorned priests and converts alike for flouting tradition, and they had little patience for Christians who threatened eternal damnation to those who clung to heathen practices. The confrontation between the men and women of St. Joseph's at Sillery clearly was not an isolated incident. Indeed, the Jesuits recorded similar episodes throughout New France, for the missionary effort soon proved a divisive force in many native communities, with women and men reacting differently to Jesuit proselytizing. In villages with Jesuit missionaries, the opinions expressed by women differed sharply from those of men. The Jesuits, Lahontan reported, had insisted that "a Fire is Kindled in the other World to Torment 'em for ever, unless they take more care to correct Vice. To such Remonstrances the Men reply, 'That's Admirable;' and the Women usually tell the Good Fathers in a deriding way, 'That if their Threats be well grounded, the Mountains of the other World must consist of the Ashes of souls.'"[60]
Le Jeune recounted in 1640 that the wife of one convert from Sagné, "a rough and wild creature, who gives a great deal of trouble to the poor man," refused to consider conversion when "Charles" insisted that he must have a Christian wife. The priest described the man's anxiety over the situation: "'You have told me that those who do evil are very often incited to it by Demons; alas!' said he, 'then I am always with some Demon, for my wife is always angry; I fear that the De-
mons she keeps in my cabin are perverting the good that I received in holy Baptism.'" The fellow confided that she had hurled a knife at him during an argument over her refusal to convert. The woman spurned his efforts—he even had volunteered to do her chores if she converted—and mocked his faith. "'Dost thou not see that we are all dying since they told us to pray to God?'" she asked, as would many others throughout New France. "'Where are thy relatives? Where are mine? the most of them are dead; it is no longer a time to believe.'"[61]
Other male converts had equal difficulty convincing wives to become Christians and grew increasingly aggressive and punitive in their attempts to secure a conversion. Le Jeune found the male converts' zeal gratifying; he observed that "there was nothing that they would not do or endure in order to secure obedience to God."[62] Women's husbands and brothers beat them in punishment for defiance, sometimes with the full support of the missionaries, who believed that the Indians were finally learning the importance of exercising justice.[63] The zealous Christian relatives of one unconverted young woman flogged her publicly for not discouraging an unconverted suitor; they forced the other girls in the community to watch the display and warned them that similar punishment awaited further rebellion.[64]
While these incidents may not have been daily occurrences, the conflict between females who retained customary beliefs and male converts and priests was an ongoing one with little evident potential for resolution. No one was "more attached to these silly customs [here, vision quests], or more obstinate in clinging to this error, than the old women, who will not even lend an ear to our instructions." wrote Father Dablon from the Ottawa mission of Sault Ste. Marie in 1669. He cited as example an incident following the conversion of four young sisters, when "an old woman who was strongly attached to her superstitions, rudely scolded them,—telling them, among other things, that Baptism was invented only to cause death, and that they must fully expect to die soon."[65]
Father Louis André at Green Bay found the women there equally resistant. When his cabin mysteriously burned in 1672, André was certain they had put it to the torch, for "the old
women especially blamed me greatly because I said that The evil spirit should be neither obeyed nor feared."[66] Although he eventually convinced some women to convert, André never really trusted them. It seemed to him that women were too steeped in paganism from birth. Their real objection to Christianity. he decided, was that it involved more work than they were accustomed to. Describing the vision fast undergone by adolescents, he, like Dablon, insisted that "the women are the Cause of this evil practice, even more than The men; For—in order to save themselves The trouble of preparing Food, or to economize their provisions, or to accustom Their children to eat only at night—they make Them fast like Dogs."[67] André's caustic observations were not altogether wrong in positing a relationship between women's emphasis on tradition and the more prosaic aspects of daily life. The women's refusal to convert was certainly a protest, but not simply of an increased work load. They may well have been responding to the redefinition of female and male identities and status.
The Jesuits' efforts to instill Christianity came in the wake of the fur trade and capitalized on the vulnerability of Indian communities weakened by imported epidemic diseases and the extermination of peltry animals through overhunting.[68] By introducing alien cultural values into groups already exhausted by inexplicable changes and newly settled near missions or trading centers, the missionaries actively helped to alter traditional gender relationships.
The system of balanced yet autonomous male and female roles baffled, even horrified, the priests. To cope, they automatically assigned each sex a place within the Western scheme of gender relations. Therefore, in observing women's camp-oriented activities, they assumed that the sexual division of labor reflected status, as it did in Europe: women's food processing, tool making, and camp tasks were manual work and thus drudgery. Noting that men hunted large game—an activity reserved for the privileged in Europe—whereas women generally remained near the camp, one early missionary concluded in 1610 that Micmac women's "duties and positions are those of slaves, laborers and beasts of burden"—hardly the most tempting targets for a conversion effort.[69]
The priests' confrontation with native women as autonomous, sexually active females provided yet another opportunity for misunderstanding. Monogamous, permanent marriage based on masculine authority and the control of women's activities and sexuality characterized French social organization and was integral to the system that the Jesuits struggled to establish in New France.[70] They found, however, that prospective converts did not share their views on authority, marriage, or sex. Indian women's power in the family and community shocked them. As Le Clercq explained in 1691, "The men leave the arrangements of the housekeeping to the women, and do not interfere with them. . . . I can say that I have never seen the head of the wigwam where I was living ask of his wife what had become of the meat of moose and of beaver."[71]
Le Jeune described more exactly what disturbed him about native marriage when he related an incident in which he tried to persuade a headman to enroll his son in mission school. When the man deferred to his wife's wish that the child remain at home, the priest complained that "the women have great power here. A man may promise you something, and, if he does not keep his promise, he thinks he is sufficiently excused when he tells you that his wife did not wish to do it. I told him then that he was the master, and that in France women do not rule their husbands."[72] By the good father's standards, gender relations in New France were definitely askew. He and others therefore encouraged made converts to assert their wills and exact obedience from recalcitrant spouses.[73]
But the unsettling aspects of Indians' marital relations paled when viewed against their amorous affairs, for women and men controlled their own pre- and postmarital sexual activities. While most missionaries and travelers agreed that the Micmac generally were monogamous and favored premarital chastity, on the whole native sexual mores appalled them. A description sent by Father Allouez in 1667 from the Ottawa mission conveyed his horror:
The fountain-head of their Religion is libertinism; and all these various sacrifices end ordinarily in debauches, indecent dances, and shameful acts of concubinage. All the devotion of the men is
directed toward securing many wives, and changing them whenever they choose; that of the women, toward leaving their husbands; and that of the girls, toward a life of profligacy.[74]
The priests found the ease with which native couples divorced equally outrageous. "The stability of marriage is one of the most perplexing questions in the conversion and settlement of the Savages," wrote Le Jeune's successor, Vimont, in 1642; "we have much difficulty in obtaining and in maintaining it."[75] And Pierre Boucher, a governor of Trois Rivières and resident of New France from 1635 to 1717, observed that "divorce is not an odious thing among them Indians. . . . For when a woman wishes to put away her husband, she has only to tell him to leave the house, and he goes out of it without another word."[76] In fact, most native peoples found divorce quite acceptable if a couple had a hostile or unsatisfying relationship. Women felt free to leave spouses who were poor or lazy hunters or otherwise were inadequate as mates.[77]
The Jesuits found this situation untenable and realized that sexual freedom, divorce, and polygamy had to be eliminated if native Christian communities were to be established. By 1638, they had decided that dispensing land and money might be the most tempting inducement to marital fidelity, "for a husband will not so readily leave a wife who brings him a respectable dowry; and a woman, having her possessions near our French settlements, will not readily leave them, any more than her husband"—or so they hoped.[78] The missionaries, convinced that "it was not honorable for a woman to love anyone else except her husband," worked hard to get women to accept monogamy.[79] But they often had to rely on male converts to enforce observation of this alien practice. In one notable instance, zealous Christians at Sillery captured a woman who had left her husband and imprisoned her without food, fire, or cover in early January of 1642.[80]
Women, particularly non-Christians, resisted the change because it was not to their advantage. Although they undoubtedly wanted to retain control over their sexual activities, they also objected to monogamy for more practical reasons, such as its impact on the system of sororal polygyny, in which sisters could
be married to the same man. The practice was found in many groups. For example, Charles Albanel reported sororal polygyny among Mistassini Cree, usually following the death of a sister's spouse. A Montagnais convert told Le Jeune in 1637 that "since I have been preaching among them that a man should have only one wife I have not been well received by the women; for, since they are more numerous than the men, if a man can only marry one of them, the others will have to suffer. Therefore this doctrine is not according to their liking."[81] Disease and Iroquois attacks had decimated the population, taking the greatest toll among men; the result, reported Barthelemy Vimont in 1644, was that "these remnants of Nations consist almost entirely of women, widows or girls, who cannot all find lawful husbands."[82] But despite the uneven sex ratio, when men became Christians it was incumbent upon them to become monogamous as well. "Those who had left their first wives are taking them back," Druilletes observed from the Sault mission to the Ottawa in 1671, "while those who had several are keeping only the first and discarding the others."[83] Men's acceptance of Christianity, therefore, removed the possibility of marriage for many women, consigning them to a life of social and economic uncertainty.
Despite its negative impact on women, Christian European culture appears to have attracted men, especially those involved in the fur trade. The fact that priests and traders initially targeted men undoubtedly contributed to their greater receptivity. More significantly, conversion placed the individual in the good graces of the clergy and the French colonial government. Christians thus had a decided advantage in terms of access to French goods and protection.[84] When conversion accompanied settlement in a mission village, a neophyte found himself strategically located near the very source of the fur trade. Proximity to missionaries was a further asset in that it was they who legitimized men's newly elevated position within domiciled groups. The Montagnais and other eastern subarctic and Great Lakes groups traditionally had no institutionalized decision-making process, no distinction of "formal" and "informal" to separate the household from the group. Establishing a definite sociopolitical structure with a recognized "chief" was
therefore a major goal of the missionaries.[85] The priests expected men, as members of a European-patterned community, to exercise authority over women, the family, and political affairs. Sedentary life made this new pattern possible by creating nuclear families, which functioned independently of one another, out of groups that had been largely cooperative.[86]
The transition from subsistence hunter to fur trapper demanded another social accommodation by men, which the move to the reserve made easier. The communal relations vital to a group's survival in the bush were not really appropriate to a market-oriented economy centered on trapping, where individual accumulation of furs for trade, not the group's welfare, was the important goal. By 1642, Christian men from the settlements had begun to avoid hunting with the "pagans," preferring to go alone or with a few other Christians. Of course, sincere concern for their spiritual integrity may have motivated this change, but it also coincided rather well with the more competitive approach necessary for successful commercial trapping. The emphasis in the mission villages on the nuclear family appears to have decreased traditional pressures for cooperative hunting and food sharing and, in turn, encouraged a greater individualism among the hunters-turned-trappers.[87]
At initial contact, the hunt had been more than a routine productive activity: it was virtually a religious vocation and not easily abandoned, one would suspect, for the more prosaic labor of trapping. Hunting had provided the very foundation of a man's social and religious identity. Perhaps spiritual crisis was the culminating factor in a man's decision to convert; certainly economic and status motivation alone cannot account for the shift from traditional hunter to Christian trapper. It is provocative that Christianity apparently appealed most to men who no longer identified themselves primarily as hunters. Indeed, throughout the Relations the Jesuits observe that men accuse the old religion of not working for them; they had, they said, lost touch with the supernaturals and animal guardians on whom they depended.[88] Shamans, the intermediaries between the natural and supernatural realms, "now universally complain that their Devils have lost much of their power, if compared with what it is said to have been in the time of their
Ancestors," Biard recorded as early as 1614.[89] Ironically, the intensely personal nature of a hunter's or shaman's liaison with his "helpers" may have smoothed the way for conversion. The individualism of a Christian's relationship with his God must have seemed similar to the one-on-one association developed with supernaturals. Alienated from their traditional source of self-definition by forces they could no longer rationalize, men appear to have found in Christianity a reasonable substitute.[90]
Women, however, were generally more reluctant to accept either the new religion or its followers. They apparently perceived little advantage in Christianity, finding instead that it imposed unfamiliar and unwelcome limitations on them. The reciprocity and interdependence that had previously governed the relationships between men and women were missing from the reserves , where missionaries worked to establish a hierarchy of stratified gender roles and status—a reflection of their own class-bound understanding of French social order. Priests and colonial officials deliberately and persistently stressed the importance of male authority in the community and family and of women's obligation to obedience. The settled life and nuclear family pattern advocated by the Jesuits to civilize the Indians encouraged the breakdown of the flexible, multifamily units based, apparently, on matrilocal principles, thus further weakening women's position in the community.[91] When male converts accepted this system and acted accordingly, women stood to lose both status and self-determination.
Another factor in women's poor reception of Christianity may have been that their personal spiritual development did not depend solely on individual rapport with supernaturals. Although the failure of the shamans' power undoubtedly disturbed women, they were not as susceptible to the disruption of relationships with "helpers" as men were. Their primary source of spiritual strength was largely internal, and so less vulnerable; because they probably did not experience the erosion of belief to the degree that many hunters did, they had little need for the replacement offered by Christianity.
Moreover, while Christianity's emphasis on individualism attracted men, it may have alienated women. Their social orientation had been more communal than that of men: they
performed many of their activities in groups and collectively controlled the camp area. One can speculate that the Jesuits, in their efforts to establish Christian nuclear families, were well aware that by isolating women from one another and decreasing their cooperative and ritual activities they undermined the community of women who opposed them. While the groups considered in this chapter were unique because of their domiciled status, their situation nevertheless offers a portent of changes that gradually occurred among other Indians in New France. Their experiences were, in effect, a trial run in the colonizing ventures that soon engulfed native peoples throughout the interior of Canada and the Upper Great Lakes.