In 1730, a delegation of Illinois Indians arrived in New Orleans on a diplomatic mission. Two leaders, Chicagou and Mamantouensa, presented the French governor with two calumets: one representing the historic alliance between the French and the Illinois, and the other symbolizing the importance of Catholicism in Illinois culture. While in town, the Illinois demonstrated the depth of their Christianization through attendance at masses and a call-and-response Gregorian chant with the Ursuline nuns in Latin and the Illinois language. It is this Catholic calumet and Illinois-language liturgy that are of particular interest to Tracy Neal Leavelle, for they symbolize they way in which “indigenous cultural vessels” like the calumet and Illinois language had been adapted to carry new, Christian meanings (2).

The Catholic Calumet is an extended and elegant essay on the meanings and nuances of religious conversions in the pays d'en haut, or Great Lakes region, of the French colonial empire. Organized more by theme than chronology, the book opens with a framework for understanding these religious encounters that leaves room for “the adoption of a plural, dynamic, and flexible concept of conversion that accounts for the changes in all participants” (8). Intertwined throughout successive chapters are themes and ideas informed by Thomas Tweed's spatial and aquatic metaphors of dwelling and crossing, confluences and flows. Leavelle pays close attention to moral and physical geographies, the flow and exchange of people and ideas, and the kinds of cultural crossings that took place in the vast spaces of the pays d'en haut. Leavelle immerses the reader in the world of Native villages and French merchants and missionaries, describing the origins of the French Jesuit missions to the region in the 1660s and the various responses of Native groups to Jesuit religious overtures up through the eighteenth century, by which time Christianity had “become a potent cultural force in the region” (197).

In addition to its sophisticated and nuanced analysis of these religious and cultural exchanges, this book contains moments of exceptional insight. The chapter on “Translations” illustrates the difficulty the Jesuits had in adequately translating core Christian concepts, creeds, and catechisms into the Illinois language. The helpful line-by-line comparisons of the literal translations in Illinois, the glossed translation, and the English versions shed light on the impossibility of “maintaining the purity of Christian concepts” (109). In the Credo, for example, Jesus has two fathers and a mother, and the Apostle's Creed is rendered in the present tense. Other chapters on the Jesuits' own interior life and the gendered dimensions of Native religious engagement (in which the life of Marie Rouensa looms large) demonstrate Leavelle's close reading of texts and an eye for detail.

One of the most important overall arguments in the book is that conversion and religious change were not one-way processes (similar to yet different from Richard Pointer's Encounters of the Spirit [Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2007]). The subtitle gives a strong hint: Leavelle is interested in the ways in which both Natives and Jesuits were changed by these encounters. Tracing the duality of colonial conversions is difficult, however, and although the reader walks away with a firm sense of how precisely the Illinois (and especially the Kaskaskias) adopted Christianity as an important community marker over time, it is less evident how changes Jesuit missionaries underwent could be similarly compared to Native religious adaptation. Leavelle does take us into the interior worlds of the Jesuits to show that they—whether individual or collectively—went through soul-searching and shifts in their ideas about their mission and purpose, to be sure, but Leavelle is hard-pressed to show any Jesuit “conversions” that mirror the scope and intensity of those exhibited by the Natives populations. The idea is intriguing, however, and resonates with some of the more recent work on Indian-Euroamerican encounters and perhaps points a way forward in terms of future framings of such encounters. One might also wish for a clearer narrative at times, since the thematic organization is sure to leave readers unfamiliar with the region's history a bit confused as to chronological development. There is also no formal introduction or conclusion to the text, although the opening section of chapter one and the closing section of chapter eight essentially serve as such.

Overall, however, The Catholic Calumet significantly adds to a growing chorus of scholarship on Native religious encounters that emphasizes the ambiguity of religious change; the full spectrum of responses by Native communities (including experimentation, rejection, and embrace); the fluctuation of religious engagement over time; and, above all, the inadequacy of static views of conversion. It is also a rare and welcome installment on religion in the Great Lakes region in the colonial period. Scholars and students alike of Native American, French colonial, and American religious history will surely find this volume to be an important and informative read.