Jesuit missionary Jean de Lamberville stated in 1673 that the “Gospel” was “too weak” to convert Native Americans. While working consistently with Mohawks and Onondagas near the St. Lawrence Valley, Lamberville observed Native Americans who appreciated gods who instructed and provided through the entirety of the senses. Lamberville noted, “these tribes, who are chiefly guided by the senses, needed that God should instruct them in a sensible manner.”Footnote 1 This celebrated Father, who was believed to have converted the later Roman Catholic Saint Kateri Tekakwitha, realized at this juncture what many Jesuits discovered throughout the early decades of the French colonial experiment in North America: the desire of Native Americans to have a broad assortment of sensation bound within spiritual rituals.
Knowing that Native Americans valued the sensate, Jesuits turned to their noses when trying to convert them. As historian James Axtell noted, “the mysterious fragrance of incense, which resembled [Native Americans] own tobacco offering to the Great Spirit,” proved important to many Jesuit conversion efforts.Footnote 2 Most indigenous Americans resisted these Catholic attempts at conversion, and many Jesuits died tortuous deaths due to Iroquois advances during the 1640s and Native American retributive acts throughout the later colonial era. However, for brief periods of possible coexistence in New France, the St. Lawrence Valley, and later the Pays d'en Haut, Natives and Jesuits attempted to find commonalities towards coexistence. These goals of cohabitation included highlighting the spiritual reverence of the lower senses, which increased the importance of smelling within cross-cultural exchanges.
European state formation, which involved the introduction of sewage projects and subconsciously induced social controls associated with the civilizing process, gradually limited the olfactory in daily life within Europe after the sixteenth century.Footnote 3 Jesuits resisted many of these deodorizing tendencies within early modern Europe by confronting Reformation dogma which aimed to control the lower senses of tasting and smelling. These Reformation goals were meant to rid Catholic sensuality from Christianity through the heightened use of vision for scriptural reasoning.Footnote 4 Jesuits crossing the Atlantic to North America in the 1600s, applying respect for the senses as spiritual guides, entered France's American experiment with open noses uncontrolled by these desensitizing aspects of the Reformation. Natives within the American interior appreciated odor in their lives, especially within spiritual practices tied to medicine and subsistence hunting. Jesuits learning of this common sensory ground applied, and increased, their own respect for odor to convert different tribes to the Catholic faith. Fittingly, this emphasis on the olfactory suited the sensate desires of Native Americans of the American interior.Footnote 5
These olfactory cross-cultural achievements of economic and cultural harmony were produced through “creative misunderstandings” between Europeans and indigenous North Americans. As Richard White stated, colonists “had the ability to establish avenues of communication and creativity through the unlikely path of misunderstanding,” creating “with Indian peoples mutually comprehensible worlds.”Footnote 6 In a similar vein, Linford Fisher's The Indian Great Awakening: Religion and the Shaping of Native Cultures in Early America summarized how Native Americans coopted fragments of Christianity rather than convert dogmatically. Within the historiographical tradition of New Indian History, Fisher argued that conversion was ambiguous, modified, and fractured, existing as an ever-changing idea that had multifarious cultural, spiritual, and religious meanings. Many of these conversions involved Native American social sampling, whereby specific tribes would test traits of European culture, and then modify those ideals to their own means, or refuse the trait as other.Footnote 7 In the late seventeenth century, Jesuit and Native American appreciation for odor persisted within these improvised and fragmentary cross-cultural middle grounds partially created through mutual appreciation of the knowledge which could be cultivated through scenting.
Recent historical analysis has focussed on the importance of nonverbal communication in colonial America. Matt Cohen's The Networked Wilderness: Communicating in Early New England highlighted a historiographical ignorance which has placed Native Americans as people apart from the book, whereas colonists were tied integrally to the written word. Rather, colonials applied a vast array of nonvisual and nonliterary communication techniques in early New England, and Native Americans participated in the history of the book through publication procedures altered by their multisensory bases of identity.Footnote 8 Native Americans and European colonials communicated through nonliterary means more so than through the written words passed down to the paper archive. Therefore media should not define a boundary between logocentric Europeans and sensual Natives as both colonials and Native Americans informed the semiotic content of all media – written, spoken, or smelled – across cross-cultural boundaries. In this liminal discursive space, media was reconciled by different cultures to create a syncretic sensory experience that both Jesuit priests and Native Americans could access on aromatic middle grounds.Footnote 9
As Robert Morrissey summarized, Jesuits desired conversion of Native Americans “on the Indians' own terms,” opposing French imperial endeavors that hoped to unify indigenous languages for ease of communication with goals of political domination.Footnote 10 The cultural expressions desired by Native Americans were not merely those terms visually presented as the written word or audibly preached. For most Native Americans of the colonial era, literateness implied more than Western ideals of reading and writing. One such literate sensory skill applied among North American tribes was an increased olfactory awareness that read the smells of shifting American environments and incoming European occupiers.Footnote 11 The Jesuit appreciation of odor was exacerbated by this powerful Native American desire for olfactory religiosity, symbolism, and knowledge acquisition.Footnote 12 In the later seventeenth century, these Native American desires for multisensory, and especially olfactory, knowledge passed into French national goals driven by the fur trade. Later British imitators attempted to politicize through a similar olfactory sensory rhetoric desired by Native Americans.Footnote 13
From a distanciated, structural, and presentist perspective Jesuit religious aromas were instruments of legitimization whereby Jesuit Fathers subverted Native American sensibilities to submit Native religiosity to Catholic practice. After such subversion, the Jesuit Fathers contained the ideal of odorous Catholic exercises by retaining the singular ability to define who possessed aromatic piety. The Jesuits, from this viewpoint informed by the historiographical ideal of “subversion and containment,” created an aesthetic device to which they alone controlled access.Footnote 14 However, to argue from such a distanciated place removes the phenomenological experience of the Jesuit nose as it performed on American landscapes. Jesuits could rarely assert aesthetic sacred ideals for means of control because they believed in those sacrosanct principles. As Peter Moogk summarized, the citizens of “New France and its colonies lived in a world ruled by supernatural forces” they understood as mutable.Footnote 15 Thus this article focusses not on mechanisms of control, but on the phenomenological sensory experience of Jesuits in North America. Hagiographies, scented relics, aromatic tropes of devotion, and controlling access to those community ideals were legitimizing activities.Footnote 16 Nonetheless, the Jesuits of New France, indulging in their fragrant proselytizing devotion influenced by Native American sensory requests, rarely understood them as such.
SCENTING GOD: REFORMATION AND COUNTER-REFORMATION
Scent was vital to religious practice in both the ancient and medieval eras. Monotheist traditions applied principally dichotomous religious olfactory patterns. The food of heaven in the Torah, manna, had a scent that the pious on earth acquired for their ascents into the afterlife. Healthful aromas similarly informed Abrahamic religious doctrines through narratives of scentful martyrs. The scent of sulfur, in opposition, followed the Devil's wake, represented paganism, and sprang from deep within the bowels of the earth.Footnote 17 During the medieval era, the European public applied scenting through religion to appraise either the sulfuric and wild stench or the aromatic piety of those living within Christian societies. Persons who aimed to dissimulate these signifying odors with perfume were often indicted for moral negligence. In the anti-Semitic rhetoric of the era, Jews were many times considered malodorous, while the religiously venerated radiated an olfactory identity of blessedness – in most cases a requirement for Catholic sainthood. These odors of the medieval Church offered perceptions of health, sanctity, and admonitions against encountering those on earth tainted with the Devil's perniciousness.Footnote 18
Two devout European women, Lydwine of Schiedam and Teresa of Avila, exemplify the numerous saints who died emanating odors affiliated with holiness, the odor of sanctity, a “trope of devotion” of the pious dating to as early as the second century.Footnote 19 Lydwine, a Dutch nurse who lived during the early fifteenth century, vomited parts of her internal organs when ill. Once out of her body, these pieces smelled of sanctity. Her tears, red with blood, left those who encountered their odors scenting flowers. Teresa of Avila, in sixteenth-century Spain, was thought to have changed the pungent odors of medicine used upon her skin to aromas of perfume. Scents such as these, which most Catholics considered virtuous while applying them to religiously determined social hierarchies, had their roots in the ancient world.Footnote 20
Later imitative Catholic olfactory traditions, exemplified in the aforementioned saints, created a dually split perceptual paradigm composed of a continuum bookended by scents protruding from either malevolent noisome hell or Edenic aromatic heaven. St. John of the Cross's Spiritual Canticle (1578) summarized the odor of sanctity implicit in the positive side of this scale. He summarized,
profuse are these odors at times that the soul seems to be enveloped in delight and bathed in inestimable glory. Not only is it conscious itself of them, but they even overflow it, so that those who know how to discern these things can perceive them. The soul in this state seems to them as a delectable garden.Footnote 21
Symbolized in such a tradition of classifying sweet-smelling odors as holy were Christians who believed themselves capable of utilizing their olfactory sense to discern the scentful putridity of the Devil in the evil peoples amongst them.
However, with the destruction of miraculous proofs of God's existence fomented by the Reformation, many Christians became disconnected from their previous olfactory religious confirmations.Footnote 22 Englishman Richard Allestree's Ladies Calling (1673) summarized, “since God professes … that that very incense which was design'd as a part of his worship, was an abomination to him, because not accompanied with the acts of mercy, we cannot think he will better like of those, which have no higher aim then delicacy and sensuality.”Footnote 23 Much of the Protestant world, and the Christian world in general, moved away from odorphilic sensibilities through a process which began as early as the sixteenth century. Though many aromatic tenets remained in Christian practice later, especially within Catholic exercises, the metahistorical trend suggests that the Reformation helped to propel the “discrediting of miraculous proofs of holiness such as the odor of sanctity, the prohibition of incense in Protestant churches,” and the expurgation of the olfactory in general throughout early modern Europe.Footnote 24
Despite these changes within much of Europe, factional Jesuits believed in annihilating the self through sensory purification involving an appreciation of the worldly capability of recognizing the scents of damnation or paradise on earth. In Ignatius's foundational meditation on hell in Spiritual Exercises (1548) he discussed the discovery of evil on earth through “the smoke, the sulphur, the filth, and the rotting things.” These odors were perceived on peoples existing in the liminal state between earth and their final destination. The profusion of scentful roses, perfumed tears, and aromatically altered medicine placed their initiator between earth and heaven; sulfur, false perfumes, and decaying odors between the world and pungent damnation.
The Exercises were practiced in seclusion divided into week-long stages. The sulfuric scentful “meditation on hell” occurred during the “purgative” stage which started within the first week. During this stage, Jesuits were to follow Ignatius's proposals for the use of the senses alongside vision to create multisensory mental images for remembrance of Christ's sufferings.Footnote 25 Juan Alfonso de Polanco, Ignatius's secretary, noted through the soul's “longing for Christ, whom it desires to breathe in as the Word inviting us to the enjoyment of full union, it receives a spiritual sense of smell, so that it may walk in the fragrance of Christ's ointments: and thus Christ is its life.” To Jesuits these spiritual senses, internally sensed perceptions of the soul, were triggered by God within the lived world as physical sensations. Because God was perceived in all things, his presence was deemed manifest through the physical world to Jesuits regardless of the sinful associations of disproportionate worldliness found within doctrinaire Protestantism.Footnote 26
In North America, Jesuit priests continued to apply these olfactory worldly proofs of God's eminence and the presence of hell after the turn of the eighteenth century due to the Catholic resistance to the Reformation's attempts at the removal of sensory proofs within Europe and Jesuit proximity to Native American tribes who valued the lower senses. The Exercises of Ignatius applied the olfactory as critical in perceiving spiritual and earthly worlds. The smell of sulfur as hellish and the odor of sanctity as heavenly were thus, as Mark Smith has stated, “not abstractions” to Jesuits, as sensory proofs had become for many Protestants of the era, “but rather clues to finding God's presence in daily life.” Thus the Jesuits, who claimed Loyola as their ideological forefather, fell into a larger cohort of the Catholic Counter-Reformation where the space between the spiritually sensed and the physically sensed closed to near-equivalence.Footnote 27
To Aristotelian-trained Jesuits of this era, reasoning set man apart from animals, but reasoning to God and for conversion could only come through the sensory perception of God's majesty on earth. The Exercises were thus aimed at overcoming worldly experiences through “self-narration” whereby one articulated their phenomenological past upon a spiritual pathway by applying sensory experiences towards otherworldly cleansing. Jesuit education applying these sensory paradigms was propagated in both the New World and Old by numerous textbooks placing Aristotelian philosophy within Christian doctrine.Footnote 28 Such Arcadian sensory empiricism, through which the Jesuits based many of their scientific, artistic, and theological beliefs, argued that “intellect is initially a tabula rasa with no innate species of its own by which to understand the world; intellectual cognition must come by way of the senses.”Footnote 29 Therefore Jesuits, unlike Calvinists and other early Protestants, had no “inherently serious conflict between the truths of faith and the evidence of the earthbound senses.”Footnote 30
During the seventeenth century, Jesuit priests in North America following the ideals of their progenitor Loyola and textbooks based on these sensory teachings of Aristotle applied their sense of smell diametrically in their early contact with Native tribes. They defined a stenchful sewer of paganism or the fragrance of Eden as sweet flowers in opposition, not wholly as metaphors for the internal scents of souls, but as perception of spiritual flaws uncovered through smelling the physical world. Throughout their time among the indigenous communities of North America, Jesuits noticed the smell of Natives who converted to Catholicism transitioning from an odor of impurity to cleanly aromas or the absence of odors, sometimes represented through floral purity. These perceptions and applications of odor became especially prominent after Jesuit priests noticed a similar appreciation of olfactory proofs applied by Native communities; a sensory resemblance in spiritual practice existing across the Atlantic prior to European contact with the Americas.
NATIVE AMERICAN REVERENCE FOR SCENTING WITHIN SPIRITUAL PRACTICES
The Jesuits arrived in New France in 1625 to reinforce failing Recollect factions who handled the Canadian climate poorly and did not convert enough of the indigenous population to appease the European Catholic leadership. Jesuits, or “black robes” as Native Americans took to calling them, used French advances in the pelt trade to follow economic networks into indigenous areas for attempts at religious conversion. In Huron country rested the central Jesuit mission, Saint-Marie. Missions pushed deep into the American interior – around the St. Lawrence Valley by the 1640s, and into the Pays d'en Haut tapped by fur traders as early as the 1670s. Following more “patient” measures for conversion than their forebears within New France, these Jesuits aimed to rearticulate the failed conversion message of the Recollects with an altered focus upon respecting customs within indigenous villages. Within these communities, Jesuit fathers “exploited the ceremonial complexity” of Church rituals through the senses in hopes of placing Native Americans into states of amazement on pathways towards what they perceived as honest conversions.Footnote 31
Many Jesuits lauded Native American sensory capabilities upon first contact. Italian Jesuit missionary Francesco Giuseppe Bressani wrote during his travels in New France during the early 1650s that Natives were “certainly worthy of particular admiration … their senses, which are most perfect” included what Bressani described as “a rare sense of smell,” with which “they frequently discover fire long before seeing it, especially at night.”Footnote 32 Regarding Native American communities of French Louisiana, the later traveler, historian, and Jesuit priest Pierre Charlevoix similarly wrote, “it is besides certain that they have great advantages over us, and I hold for the first of all the extreme perfection of their senses over us both internal and external … their smelling is so exquisite, that they smell fire at a great distance.”Footnote 33 Describing the tribes of the Mississippi, the Franciscan Louis Hennepin correspondingly summarized this odorphilic Native American use of smell as a safeguarding agent on the vast American landscape: “for in these countries they smell fire at two or three leagues distance, according to the wind … savages take a particular notice of it, to discover where their enemies are.”Footnote 34
The Jesuit Relations, a collection of texts sent to European readers as religious guides for future conversion strategies and as travel propaganda, portrayed Native American cultures as incompatible with European ideals attempting to limit the olfactory.Footnote 35 Throughout the era of contact, Native Americans valued smelling for their spiritual health. Jesuit writers in the New World were impelled by this sensuous element of sacred life to often discuss their Native American neighbor's sensory biases. The French Father Pierre Biard, as early as the 1616 relation, questioned why Natives seemed so happy with little control upon the sensory pleasures of their religious lives, stating, “if we come to sum up the whole and compare their good and ill with ours, I do not know but that they, in truth, have some reason to prefer (as they do) their own kind of happiness to ours.” To Native Americans, the sensuous living Biard implied was what their spirits asked of them. Living through the senses and providing the felicity of the senses to the divine was motivation towards rather than away from that which the spirits wished.Footnote 36
Specifically, the aroma of tobacco smoke was of metaphysical value to Iroquois in the St. Lawrence Valley. Tobacco fumes, odors, and tastes pleased the spirits and put blessings upon those dispensing such spiritual amusements. The conviction that scents of tobacco were inherently gratifying and valued as pleasant enough to deliver to the spirits continued throughout the colonial era.Footnote 37 Mary Jemison, an Englishwoman who was taken captive by the Shawnee during the French and Indian War, summarized a Shawnee and Seneca religious ceremony that included olfactory aspects of tobacco for the ritual slaughter of dogs. She summarized her 1755 observations in the Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Mary Jemison (1824), noting, “they are burnt” with the “incense of tobacco or the like into the fire, the scent of which they say, goes up to Nauwaneu, to whom it is pleasant and acceptable.”Footnote 38
Like Jesuits who purged their worldly sins through meditative sensory experiences the better to contact their Catholic God, many Native Americans in North America practiced patterns of stench preparation before visiting with myriad spirits. The eighteenth-century Irish historian and ethnographer James Adair summarized Chickasaw practices that included personal scents controlled by dietary limitations. These devout celebrants “were allowed to eat nothing but green tobacco, nor to drink anything except warm water, highly embittered with the button-snake-root, to cleanse their bodies and prepare them to serve in their hold of beloved office before the divine essence.” These dietary limitations and purging dovetailed with the process of perfuming “priestly garments and ornaments” with “bear's oil” to prepare the Chickasaw for spiritual encounters.Footnote 39 Correspondingly, like the odorphilic tribes Adair wrote of, earlier Native Americans near Sault St. Marie burned tobacco as a dispensation to their spirits. Father Jerome Lalemant's relation of 1642 discussed the use of the plant in religious ceremonies, writing,
the most famous magician in the country was consulted to learn what success might be expected from the corn that had been planted. He gave two answers, – in the first place, that it was necessary that each one should go every day to his field, throw some tobacco on the fire, and burn it in honor of the demon whom he worshipped, calling aloud this form of prayer: “Listen, O Sky! Taste my tobacco; have pity on us.”Footnote 40
Praiseworthy odors such as these kept the spirits genial. In Paul Le Jeune and Jerome Lalemant's relation of 1640–41, a tale was presented of one Jesuit Father who recorded such odors of aromatic positivity among Natives who “made a feast over the graves of their dead … at which they served eight moose and ten beavers; the captain, haranguing, said ‘that the souls of the deceased took great pleasure in the odor of these good viands'.”Footnote 41
However, the odors of these spiritually integrated sensory practices were not always a bouquet of promised prayers. Tribes in the area of New France used mephitic scents to disgust spirits causing deleterious tempers in their lives. Reading between the uninformed lines of Le Jeune and Lalemant's naive representation of “manitou” in their 1640 relation provides another example of Native American olfactory admiration. They summarized the tale of “a savage” who was
very sick … his wife waited upon him with great kindness; when she saw that he was struggling and becoming frantic, she took a piece of skin and set fire to it, then rubbed it upon his head, that she might by this foul odor disgust the manitou, – that is to say, the Devil, – so that he should not approach her husband.Footnote 42
In the relation of 1639, Le Jeune similarly discussed a Father who observed Natives who “burn some ill-smelling thing to turn away the souls by … odor … they even put something with a bad odor upon their heads, so that the souls may not come near them.”Footnote 43 The French traveler Nicolas Perrot found comparable olfactory sensibilities regarding a specific tribe's understanding of the hereafter, noting a belief that when “souls have escaped from this peril they enter a delightful country … with all kinds of flowers, the odor of which is so admirable that it delights their hearts and charms their imaginations.”Footnote 44
Early European writers noticed such an indigenous propensity towards the sinuses and later oral histories included numerous references to the scentful ambrosia of the metaphysical. However, scenting spirituality was not solely concerned with the divine in Native American societies. It was an integrated system entwining everyday life with the environment as tied to medicine and subsistence. In Biard's 1616 relation such an olfactive pharmacology was exemplified by the Native American use of oils for massage which kept them “well … by the use of hot rooms and sweat boxes, and by the bath. They … massage, afterwards rubbing the whole body with seal oil, causing them to emit an odor which is very disagreeable.” Some Jesuits found this sweathouse briefly described by Biard to be abhorrent. Le Jeune nearly vomited from the stench emanating from the vapors within. Unlike the Natives, who handled the odiousness well, Le Jeune could not but scream out at the sharpness invading his nostrils, “bitter is this drink! How strong its odor!”Footnote 45 Charlevoix discussed southeastern Native Americans valuing the scent and heat of products that helped to induce sweating as a sign of medicinal and spiritual eminence. He regarded
another very singular method of provoking sweat, which is made use of in certain diseases: this consists in extending the patient on a couch raised a little above the ground, under which are boiled in a kettle, the wood of the hiccery tree and the branches of pine. The vapour which proceeds from it produces a most profuse sweat … the smell of it,
to these indigenous communities, was “extremely wholesome.”Footnote 46
The olfactory played a substantial anesthetizing role in later Native American herbal rituals. A 1730 letter from Father Le Petit, a missionary at New Orleans, summarized a confidence game involving an olfactive pharmaceutical practice of the Natchez whereby a medicine man would take “a certain root, which by its smell can put serpents to sleep and render them senseless. After having rubbed their hands and body with this root, they take hold of … reptiles without fearing their bite, which is mortal.” Indicating to his patient's retinue the use of the anesthetized rattlesnake's teeth, the tribesman would then “cut, with a flint, the part” of the ill person's body
affected with … malady, and then suck out all the blood they can draw from it, and in returning it immediately into a dish, they at the same time spit out a little piece of wood, or straw, or leather, which they have concealed under the tongue. Drawing to it the attention of the relatives of the sick man, “There,” they say, “is the cause of the sickness.”Footnote 47
When describing a similarly scentful practice, the Anglo-American explorer of Carolina territory John Lawson wrote of an earlier tribal tradition of the nose in diagnosis. He recited that the Native “doctor … smells of the patient's navel and belly, and sometimes scarifies him a little with a flint, or an instrument made of rattle snake's teeth for that purpose; then he sucks the patient and gets out a mouthful of blood and serum.”Footnote 48 The spirituality of Native life, and the olfactive component therein, did not flow only into these medical treatments or religious performances. To survive and control their environment in the manner they saw fit, Native Americans shielded themselves with an authority given to the nose increasingly lacking in much of Europe during the same era.
Deep into patterns of subsistence, the nose was tied to Native American odorphilic sensibilities and spiritual reverence for the bereavement of animals.Footnote 49 Odorphilia in northeastern Native American hunting practices was evident in William Wood's New England's Prospect (1639), wherein he fashioned a prejudicial metaphor between Native Americans and the dogs of early modern Europe: “their hunting it is to be noted that they have no swift-foot greyhounds to let slip at the sight of the deer, no deep-mouthed hounds or scenting beagles to find out their desired prey; themselves are all this.”Footnote 50 As Thomas Morton similarly discussed in New English Canaan, hunting deer applied scentful tracking skills alongside the visual. Morton having
seen a dear pass by me upon a neck of land, and a salvage that has pursued him by the view … the salvage, pricking the dear, comes where he finds the view of two dears together, leading several ways. One he was sure, was fresh, but which (by the sense of seeing) he could not judge, therefore, with his knife, he digs up the earth of one; and by smelling, says, that was not of the fresh dear: then digs he up the other; and viewing and smelling to that, concludes it to be the view of the fresh dear, which he had pursued, and thereby follows the chase and kills that dear, and I did eat part of it with him: such is their perfection in these two senses.Footnote 51
According to Rhode Island founder Roger Williams, Native American subsistence tactics involved such knowledge of odor that indigenous hunters could limit the keen sense of smell of deer by using ensconced traps. As with the venison described by Williams and Morton, Wood explained the English admiration for Native American habits of hunting beavers, “too cunning for the English who never catch them.”Footnote 52 Colonel James Smith, a captive among the Mohawks in 1755, was astonished by how his abductors used the aromatic environment to their advantage in hunting the beaver deemed so elusive to earlier generations of Europeans in New England. Smith asked of his captor,
“what was the use of the beaver's stones, or glands” … He said that as the beavers are the dumbest of all animals, and scarcely ever make noise, and as they were working creatures they made use of this smell in order to work in concert. If an old beaver was to come on the bank and rub his breech upon the ground, and raise a perfume the others will collect from different places and go to work: this is also of use to them in travelling, that they may thereby search out and find their company. Cunning hunters, finding this out, have made use of it against the beavers, in order to catch them … by this perfume … they decoy them to the trap.Footnote 53
Lawson, while in the Carolina backcountry during the early eighteenth century, saw Natives burning the bones of such hunted animals in a ritual manner. These men believed that “if they omitted that custom, the game would leave their country, and they should not be able to maintain themselves by their hunting.”Footnote 54 Adair similarly concluded, when falsely correlating Native American ceremonies to Jewish tribal habits of ritualistic sacrifice, that “Indians have among them the resemblance of the Jewish … for they commonly pull their new-killed venison before they dress it several times through the smoke … of the fire, both by the way of a sacrifice, and to consume the blood, life, or animal spirits of the beast.”Footnote 55 Numerous Native American oral histories enliven the point that hunting in colonial-era indigenous communities involved consistently aromatized components.Footnote 56 However, it was not simply in spirituality, nor medicine, nor merely hunting where the olfactory found its place. The sensorium evident in tales of Native American lives does not always implicate European writers with the false trope of the noble savage because many tribes amplified their use of odors as a sociocultural and environmental necessity.Footnote 57
JESUIT USES OF ODOR FOR CONVERSIONS AND CROSS-CULTURAL INTERACTIONS
During the seventeenth century, Jesuits in the North American interior were materially dependent on the Native American tribes they attempted to convert. Within this melee for souls, the Jesuits perceived the odor of their Native neighbors in various ways during their American endeavors. Prior to the process of spiritual cleansing involved in Catholic baptism and conversion, Natives had to be defined as ill-smelling as a physical signifier of the foul practicing of false religion. Le Jeune initially summarized that Natives “are dirty in their habits, in their postures, in their homes, and in their eating; yet there is no lack of propriety among them, for everything that gives satisfaction to the senses, passes as propriety … the entrance to their Cabins is like a pig-pen.”Footnote 58 Even after time spent with Natives, some Jesuits found Native practices foul-smelling. These smells represented to Jesuits that these Natives were anti-Christian and continued to exist in a liminal earthly state nearer to hell than to heaven. As Tracy Leavelle described, much of the perception of Native American habits relied upon the relative docility or adaptability of Native tribes, depending on whether those tribes were easily converted or resistant. The Illinois were thus described in the Jesuits' “applied anthropology” as men rather than animals, as experiences tied Jesuits to the Illinois, and their possible conversion to Catholicism.Footnote 59 Other tribes received negative sensory categorizations through Jesuit noses. As Jerome Lalemant compared in his 1639 relation concerning the Huron,
Casting our eyes over the customs and practices of these peoples, they had always appeared to us like stagnant, ill-smelling pools; yet we had hardly seen, in the past, more than the surface. But since we have been obliged … to search within, and remove this sewer, it cannot be believed what a stench and what wretchedness we have found there.
His smelling was tied directly to the sense's ability to define levels of piety, or the perception of the lack thereof.Footnote 60
In New France sensory onslaught came in myriad forms to the Jesuits. The New World acted upon Jesuit noses with the stench of the dead which pervaded the literature of many relations sent back to France. In 1640, Lalemant and Le Jeune described such a mephitic bombardment concerning the corporeal consequences of virgin soil epidemics upon ruined tribes near the Ursuline nunneries that the French established near Quebec. They noted, the “sick came from all directions in such numbers, their stench was so insupportable … that I do not know how these good sisters … endured … these hardships.”Footnote 61 As Alan Greer has similarly noted regarding sensory bombardment, the smell of human waste permeated the environment of New France as “outhouses were by no means universal, and so the streets of Montreal and Quebec, like those of Stockholm, Helsinki, and Paris, functioned as open sewers, particularly disgusting when spring thaw flushed out a whole winter's accretion.”Footnote 62
Jesuits were propelled by much of this pungent plight to increasingly value odor for numerous environmental and subsistence motives. As a sign of hope in the unrelenting siege of the Canadian climate, the Jesuits found positive the perfume of roses which promised new spring. As the Frenchman Paul Denis summarized in the relation of 1671–72, “they are in error who have held that this region, whether by reason of the intense cold, the ice and snow, or the lack of wood suitable for building and heating, is uninhabitable … I can assert … there were wild roses here … beautiful and fragrant.”Footnote 63 Across the continent, French categorization of the New World's wilds considered similar novel aromatic elements through diametrically opposed odors of heavenly incense, used to honor the altar within Catholic Mass within Europe and for purification of the faithful, and sulfuric hell tied many times to the poor odor of the visually beautiful in reference to the fall in the Garden of Eden. As Father Gabriel Marest communicated from his post in Kaskaskia near the Mississippi River in 1712, “the copal … issues a gum that diffuses an odor as agreeable as that of incense.”Footnote 64 What must have been seismic shifting was designated by Father Charles Simon in his Relatio Terraemotus in Nova Francia, in which he described preternaturally sulfuric “wide and deep gaps in the earth and frequent fissures … chasms of wonderful depth, exhaling a foul stench.”Footnote 65 Likewise, Charles Dablon, in his 1680 annual report as the superior of the Canadian diocese in Quebec, discussed a metaphorically spiritual aroma inherent in New France. At his station, “the most common and most wonderful plant … is that which we call the universal plant, because its leaves, when powdered, heal in a short time wounds of all kinds … and its roots have the smell of the laurel.”Footnote 66 The fragrant and implicitly Edenic laurel Dablon classified was later borrowed by Jesuits near New England in 1722 to mix with tallow candles which had offered a sometimes terrible pungency to dimly lit late-night sessions of biblical exegesis.Footnote 67
Like their changing perceptions of the American environment, Jesuit disgust for Natives through olfactory observations faded into cultural relativity the more time they spent within Native American villages. During the 1630s and 1640s Native Americans were usually articulated as ill-smelling. By the 1670s, relations reflected the transition of Native American smells within Jesuit perceptions. The changing olfactory language in the relations described Native Americans shifting from reeking undesirably to smelling positively based upon their religious conversions throughout the seventeenth century. This was reflective of the education of the Jesuit sensorium, rather than of any significant changes in Native Americans' biological smells, as physical cleanliness within the colonial era was of more concern to indigenous peoples than to early modern Europeans who usually believed water to be corruptive of health. Specifically, Jesuit religious reverence in North America began to apply smelling to perceive the odor of sanctity within converted Native Americans and extraordinary Jesuits. Lalemant's relation of 1647 recorded the early voyages of Father Isaac Jogues in Montreal. Beatifically, Lalemant described Jogues's redolent effect on the region; “his memory is still living there; the odor of his virtues still refreshes and comforts all those who have had the happiness to know him and converse with him.”Footnote 68 For many Natives, according to the Jesuits, conversion came because of this odor of piety associated with venerable priests and their works. The relation of 1679 of Dablon and Vincent Bigot regarded such olfactive redolence of a Native converted to be a Catholic Father whose “cabin, during the winter hunting,” diffused “so sweet an odor of piety that he made even the infidels who hunted near him live as Christians.”Footnote 69 His scent therefore acted as the conversion cause not simply as metaphor for purity but as a biologically sensed odor which the Jesuits perceived their Native American converts could detect through their noses as well.
As the relation of 1667–68 recorded, the concept of a similar aroma of sanctity was perceived within an ill fourteen-year-old Native American girl who noticed an ambrosial paradise on her deathbed; “in the night she was made to smell such ravishing odors of paradise, and her mouth was filled with some unknown substance, so delicious, that she would experience that sweetness and pleasure during all the following day.”Footnote 70 In North America, the combination of Native traditions valuing odor and previous sensual Catholic theology prolonged Jesuit odorphilia. The redolent tales of Jogues, the anonymous Native American Father, the teenager summarized above, and especially the life of Tekakwitha, the Mohawk Saint, exemplify the continued appreciation of Counter-Reformation sensuality for Jesuits confronting the Canadian expanse. Kateri Tekakwitha was born in 1656 in Mohawk country. In 1680 she died after years spent in a Catholic village, but the perceived miraculous nature of her deathbed scene, where God removed her scars and her perceived exquisiteness returned, supported her sainthood within Catholic tradition. Her later grave acted as a perceived healing point and a spiritual center for many, Natives and Europeans, who needed the hope of extraordinary therapy. Her eventual consideration for sainthood was earned, in part, because of the godly perfume emanating during her bereavement.Footnote 71 Within Europe the odor of sanctity grew into the desensitized literary metaphor it exists as in the modern West through a process of sensory secularization. In the Americas the odor of sanctity became increasingly real to Jesuits suffering through novel New World encounters, and in turn became an easily perceivable scent which the Jesuits believed their Native American neighbors could sense as well. In America the distance, within discourse, between the metaphorical odor of sanctity and the spiritually and physically sensed odor of sanctity diminished, at the moment when a process within Europe was separating the metaphor from physical reality.
Making alliances in North America involved the importance of gift giving tied to Native traditions, frontier subsistence, and religious practices. Jesuits learned to elevate the lower senses within Native communities the better to communicate with specific Native American tribes. Specifically regarding alliances, Europeans had to alter explicitly visual treaties towards correspondence involving more than simply the ocular black and white of a written accord. French documents offer the best examples of sensory language used in agreements between Europeans and their Native American neighbors due to the comparatively tolerant policies of attempted coexistence with many tribes. Claude Charles Le Roy Bacqueville de la Potherie, an early historian of the French colonies in the Americas, described a meeting between Frenchmen and the recently belligerent Miami tribe which relayed instances of sensory respect where the aromatic played an important role in negotiation. Perot, the Frenchman leading peace talks during a 1667 delegation near Sault St. Marie, offered the chief and a few sick tribesmen a dose of theriac, a medieval remedy for many diseases that contained opium and was flavored with many aromatic spices such as cinnamon and mace. He noted,
the great chief and two of the most prominent men among them came to awaken the Frenchmen during the night, and made him a present of ten beaver robes, in order to induce him to give them some of this remedy. He … refused the robes. Moreover, he told them that he could not do without the remedy in a voyage wherein he might encounter so many dangers, but they begged it from him even more urgently; and they asked him to permit them at least to smell it. This odor seemed to them so delightful that they believed that they would almost become immortal by rubbing the chest with this remedy.
The French ended up giving up half their theriac to the Miami so as not to insult the more respected tribal members while continuing to pursue negotiations.Footnote 72
Numerous well-told tales of calumet smoking involved a distinctive sensory component similarly requested by Native Americans and used by Jesuits. Later French political negotiators, using calumets and primed by knowledge of Jesuit sensory-laced conversions, came to appreciate the importance of the senses in politicizing Natives. In creating alliances, many French officials learned that one must acquiesce to all of the sensorium, not solely a paper treaty. As such, the relation of 1671–72 recited the treaty talks at the Mission of Saint François Xavier with sentient raptness. A Father involved in the mission orated that Onontio, the metaphorical French uncle who retained considerable symbolic political power over Natives in the area,
has wrested the war-hatchet from their hands. Your country was dead; he has restored it to life. He has cleared away the trees and rocks that blocked your rivers and checked the course of their waters. Fish, hunt, and trade in all directions, without fear of being discovered by your enemies, either from the noise of your arms, the odor of your tobacco, or the smoke of your fires.Footnote 73
The tobacco calumet, originally an indigenous ceremonial pipe, became both Catholic and political to the French after it developed important ties to interethnic and trans-religious practices during the seventeenth century. When a Mesquakie man met with Father Claude-Jean Allouez in 1671 he impressed the priest by taking “handfuls of powdered tobacco, one by one … scattered it over the crucifix and over me.” An action of the highest honor, for both the Jesuit and the Native American, provided through the pungent leaves usually set aside for the ritualized act of smoking.Footnote 74 The pipe, with all its sensory implications, was valued for numerous later acts of political negotiation. In a letter to the Marquis de Beauharnois from 21 May 1733 the French soldier Pierre Verendrye summarized a peaceful offer the French made using the known Native American desire for tobacco. He wrote, “I sent to the Sioux a collar and a pipe of peace on behalf of our savages with some black tobacco to get them to smoke, asking at the same time to make peace.”Footnote 75 French Jesuits attempted to create sensory linkages to their Native neighbors through the integration of the tobacco-scented calumet into Catholic practice. Native peoples offered numerous Jesuits tobacco as a gift to a perceived spiritual power, the French government in turn responded with the value-laden crop within political negotiations.Footnote 76
For many Native Americans near both English and French borders it was, in part, the smell of tobacco smoke that cemented a treaty. As the ethnographer Francis Densmore described in 1922, “a gift of tobacco accompanied a request and its acceptance signified a promise to grant the request. The smoking of tobacco by both parties was an essential part of the making of a treaty.” The smoking of the calumet in Illinois and Sioux country described above mirrored much of the smoking traditions across the Native American continent and among the Eastern Woodland tribes wherefrom the scattered descendants to the Pays d'en Haut and Western environs would find many of their ancestors. Extraordinary similarity persisted in these smoking rituals amongst indigenous tribes, and the sensory experiences associated with them.Footnote 77
However, not simply tobacco permeated agreements between Natives and their European counterparts. The union itself could create redolent exquisiteness. Later European nations within Native America applied their knowledge of indigenous sensory appreciation to treaty negotiations as well. George Croghan, an Irish-born English official well informed in Native American sensory customs, quoted a European negotiator's opinion of a successful agreement settled in 1765: “I gather up all the bones of your deceased friends, and bury them deep in the ground, that the herbs and sweet flowers of the earth may grow over them, that we may not see them anymore.”Footnote 78 The use of scentful language represents a learned skill among European negotiators to express themselves in sensuous terms. During an unrelated negotiation, Croghan, in the Ohio Valley during the French and Indian War, wrote of the Natives' scentful blessings upon their newly allied British neighbors. The Brethren Chiefs and Warriors involved in the meeting stated, “the ancient friendship that long subsisted between our ancestors is now renewed I wash the blood off the earth, that has been shed since the present war, that you may smell the sweet scent of the springing herbs and bury the war hatchet in the bottomless pit.”Footnote 79 In Native American communities many Europeans followed treaty customs of aroma respect to achieve goals with their Native neighbors, a process learned from Jesuits who discovered the Native American desire to understand sensory commonalities through their own spiritual perceptions.
JESUITS AND THE LITERACY OF SCENTING
Loyola primed his followers to use hell, with all its possible sensory manifestations, as the premier theme in conversion discourses with unconverted indigenous populations. Many Native Americans would not believe hell could burn continuously as no amount of wood could exist to keep the vast fires blazing incessantly. Hearing of these concerns a Jesuit priest gathered the leaders of the Native American community in question to prove that “the earth itself could burn.” At the meeting the priest passed around a lump of sulfur. After inspection the priest threw numerous pieces of the stenchful rock into the fire, “each time, the sulphur burst into flames and ‘filled the curious noses with a stifling odor,’ at which the Indians placed their hands over their mouths to register their astonishment.” Elaborating on these scentful torments of the damned allowed Jesuit priests to frighten Native peoples into conversions and create what they perceived as honest, and sensory-induced, dread of the Catholic God.Footnote 80
To correct the perceived moral failings of Native Americans, Jesuits applied their own beliefs in sensory-based religious proofs for educating Natives away from the perceived demons controlling them. Axtell argued that more than ten thousand Natives converted to Catholicism in early North America, most because Catholic “optimism, liturgy, art, music, and incense, appealed to the senses.” Liturgical modifications towards increased sensuality were amplified by Jesuits due to a powerful request from Native Americans that Jesuits learned to apply when attempting to convert their perceived Native flocks with incense, sulfur, or the doctrine of the odor of sanctity. Such incense was originally created from Arabian trees and oils, but later included many types of American pine sap or ground cedar bark, similar to the locally influenced allocation of the laurel for previously pungent tallow candles.Footnote 81 The American environment was altering Jesuit material goods to include more pleasant odors as the Jesuits themselves altered through conversion the perceived smell of the Native peoples who lived upon that very environment.
Hidden beneath promotional literature which discussed encounters with Native America are subtextual references to sensory influences, an augmented literacy of the olfactory, which Native Americans transmitted to their Jesuit boarders.Footnote 82 As Jesuits tried to make Native Americans believe in the Catholic God, increasingly peculiar alterations were occurring within the Jesuit sensorium that could not be fully articulated through the written word. As sensory scholar Michael Taussig summarized, the border between Natives and Europeans was the consistent and instantaneous creator of new identities through the cyclical mechanism of mimesis and othering:
Rather than thinking of the border as the farthermost extension of an essential identity spreading out from a core … think instead of the border itself as that core … identity acquires its satisfying solidity because of the effervescence of the … border, because of the turbulent forces, sexual and spiritual, that the border not so much contains as emits.Footnote 83
Efforts at cultural accommodation through similarities in the spiritual sensorium helped to create some cross-cultural concordance between Jesuit Fathers and Native Americans. This respect for the olfactory existed within a Jesuit siege mentality, born of the Counter-Reformation, which exacerbated sensory proofs while applying odor for the attempted conversion of Natives, combining the sensory seal of tobacco, the odor of piety, and the understanding of a forcefully influential Native respect for odor to Catholic conversion tactics and European alliance formation. Le Jeune once noted that “faith enters by the ear,” paying homage to the oral preaching of Saint Paul.Footnote 84 Upon the Pays d'en Haut and within the St. Lawrence Valley of the seventeenth century, faith entered not only through the Catholic word of God as written in Scripture, as spoken in Mass or on the missionary circuit, or as tasted through the bread and wine, but through the common experience of the olfactory which many Jesuits and Native Americans shared while open-nosed upon the American frontier.
