The Catholic Calumet: Colonial Conversions in French and Indian North America (review)

There are dozens of books examining the activities and effects of Christian missionaries among North American Indians, from the earliest colonial times to the present. Many of these concern Catholic evangelization, and the Jesuit missions of New France have received especially extensive scholarly treatment. Religious histories of various Algonkian-speaking peoples – Abenakis, Ojibwas, Ottawas, Crees, and others – have already been written. So have book-length studies of American Indian Catholics.

Still, there is always room for fresh focus and insight. Historian Tracy Neal Leavelle of Creighton University has drawn upon the famous Jesuit Relations of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, published over a century ago in seventy-three volumes, to analyze the cross-cultural relations between the Jesuits and a relatively little known Algonkian group, the Illinois Indians of the American Midwest.

For about a century, beginning in 1673 with Jacques Marquette, Jesuits and the Illinois engaged in “cultural translation and mutual conversion” (6). Some of the Indians, like the Peoria band, resisted Catholic entreaties; others “adapted to the presence of Christianity, some enthusiastically” (13). Some, like the Kaskaskia band, seemed to undergo “conversion as a change of heart or a rebirth” (13). Illinois women, like the prominent Marie Rouensa, embraced Catholicism as a liberating “expression of social and spiritual power” (155). Illinois men seemed more intrigued by Catholicism as a tool of “French alliance, social order, and power of healing” (174). Over time Illinois interest in Catholic faith and allegiance “fluctuated” in “stops and starts” (197), and the mission efforts appeared to be “moribund” (189) by the mid-1700s. Still, when the United States entered treaty relations with the Illinois in 1803, diplomats recognized Catholicism as the Indians’ – at least the Kaskaskia band’s – living faith.

In his book Leavelle has successfully transcended Catholic hagiography and anti-mission diatribe, in order to appreciate the potential of Christianity as an authentically Indian tradition, through ambiguous processes of imitation, attraction, exploration, contestation, syncretism, creativity, and nativism. Thus, his is an analysis of inculturation in many symbolic forms, including the uses of crosses and calumets to express Native American Catholic spirituality. His two great archival finds are Illinois dictionaries produced by Jesuit linguists, and he does especially well in examining the semantic range of Algonkian terms for spiritually charged beings – the manitous, the Master of Life, the personage of Jesus Christ – sources of “power and grace” (138). One might wish to know what happened to the Illinois Indians and their newfound faith after 1800; however, the author has produced a worthy portrayal of nascent Illinois Catholicism.