This fine first book brings a history of religions perspective to analyzing the cultural encounters and exchanges between colonial New France and Wendat (Huron) country in the first half of the seventeenth century. The author examines the lives of four individuals—a Frenchman, a Wendat man, a Wendat woman, and a Frenchwoman—who crossed cultural borders to create new religious identities, “new orientations to self, to others, and to the sacred” (5). Although these individuals are known to us through French sources only, the author reads French texts against the grain to seek evidence of counter-narratives, revealing “the complexities and opacities” (7) of the New World that emerged from intercultural contact.
Her first case study is that of Frenchman Étienne Brûlé (c. 1592–1633), who became a translator or go-between (truchement) when exchanged as an adolescent for the brother of a Wendat chief. The chief's brother returned to Wendat country after a year, but Brûlé remained there, living among the Bear People, the most powerful within the Four Nations Confederacy, until his death at Wendat hands. The author shows how Brûlé’s “life in between” (19) rendered him suspect to both the French and the Wendat. The French “desacralized, even demonized” (57) him for actively choosing a Native identity over a European one. He refused to share his knowledge of the Wendat language with French missionaries, and he remained with his Wendat kin rather than return to Europe when the colony fell to the English (1629–1632). Nonetheless, he “did not orient himself sufficiently to Wendat understandings of kinship” (71). By exploring trade relations with the Iroquois enemy, he “betrayed the sacrality of his relationship with his Wendat kin” (68), leading to his killing. The author concludes that Brûlé, as “a person expressing and enacting an orientation different from those around him,” would be resurrected in the North American archetype of the coureur de bois, a man “who traversed the landscape, creating new kinds of relationships based on new understandings of materiality and of value” (72).
Like Brûlé, the Wendat convert Joseph Chihoatenhwa (d. 1640) “constructed his own intercultural and interreligious space,” as “an innovator in religio-cultural hybridity” (121). A member of the Bear Nation, he solicited baptism when stricken in an epidemic, thereby establishing a significant new relationship with sacred power. He proceeded to collaborate with Jesuits to translate Christian theological concepts into a Wendat framework, and he brought members of his family, including his wife, Marie Aonetta, into his new way of being. In his redefinition of kinship, the male head of household replaced the clan matron, and baptized Christians took the place of unconverted blood relations. What remained consistent was the central value of protecting his family and community during a time of unprecedented disease and death. Like Brûlé, Chihoatenhwa was murdered, and although the Wendat blamed his killing on the Iroquois, he was probably killed by his own people, as a witch. In Iroquoian culture, witchcraft involved using one's relationship to sacred power to harm rather than help; Chihoatenhwa's murder took place during yet another epidemic.
The last two cases allow the author to address in detail the gendered dimension of the contact experience. She notes the Jesuits’ reluctance to focus directly on Native women as potential converts as well as their attempts to impose patriarchy on the traditionally matrilineal and matrilocal Wendat. Yet even though “the recurring phenomenon of women's resistance to conversion can be found throughout the texts of the Jesuits” (163), some Wendat women did convert. Thérèse Oionhaton (b. c. 1629) was none other than the daughter of Marie Aonetta and Joseph Chihoatenhwa, and like her parents, she became an exemplary Christian. In 1642, after two years in the Ursuline convent in Quebec, she was taken captive and adopted by Mohawks hostile to the French and Christianity. Nonetheless, she remained steadfast in her faith, and even left as her legacy “a line of female Catholic converts, godmothers and goddaughters” (127). Christian women like Oionhaton, mourning their kinspeople and bereft of the communities of women to which they had belonged, sought out and integrated themselves into alternative female networks modeled upon kinship structures. Like Chihoatenhwa, they were agents in maintaining their central value of kinship.
For French as well as Native women, the religious practice of godmothering helped reconstitute community in a new and often hostile environment. Marie Rollet (d. 1649) was the wife of Quebec's first agricultural settler, Louis Hébert. She and her daughter, Guillemette, served as godmothers to dozens of people, including “many of the Native young women who resided in their household while studying” in Quebec (182). These sacralized relationships created “a new and expansive cross-cultural familial structure” (200), but they were not egalitarian. Guillemette Hébert's godchildren included her household member Olivier, an African whose status was somewhere between a servant and a slave.
The author concludes that the new religious orientations created by intercultural contact are “instantiations of modern subjectivities” (10), while distinguishing between European and Wendat modes. If the European legacy is one of inegalitarianism, Native modernity resides in emergent senses of collective, as opposed to individual, identity. Perhaps these distinctions are too sharply drawn. The author underestimates the Native value of individual autonomy when she attributes Wendat failure to follow Champlain's orders in battle to their traditional manner of fighting “as a coordinated group, linked by their shared goals” (41–42). In fact, individual warriors were always free to go their own way; leadership was charismatic, but never coercive. Likewise, by emphasizing hierarchy, she downplays the ability of Europeans to open themselves to the other under certain circumstances. At Kanawake in the 1670s and in the Illinois country in the 1690s, communities of Native women would be at the heart of the Jesuit enterprise, and in Catherine Tekakwitha, French Christians would recognize the first Native saint. The author's analysis might have been further enriched by fuller engagement with historical scholarship, including the work of Karen Anderson, Dominique Delandres, Caroline Galland, Gilles Havard, Robert Morrissey, and Jan Noel. Nevertheless, she provides a sensitive and thought-provoking account of four lives in between, and in doing so contributes to our understanding of the religious dimension of contact between Wendake and New France.
