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

A three week visit by a diplomatic delegation of Illinois to French colonial New Orleans in 1730 provides the interpretive starting point (though chronological endpoint) for this study of Catholic missions and religious exchange in the Great Lakes region. During this visit, the Illinois presented French leaders with two ceremonial calumets, one to symbolize diplomatic and military alliance, and the other a common and shared attachment to Christianity. Leavelle’s purpose is to discover the processes and interactions that made this ritual encounter possible. He argues that this meeting marked the culmination of decades of effort by the French, Illinois, and Ottawa to ‘transform and humanize the other’ (p. 74) in a quest to establish order amidst often bewildering change that followed the fall of Huronia in 1649. In doing so, Leavelle rejects binary interpretations of conversion that see religious change as absolute, and instead focuses on movement and change (10), which he suggests is best observed in practices, rituals, actions, and speech. Under this lens, Jesuits who participated in Illinois and Ottawa ritual life and immersed themselves in local communities experienced conversions equally with Indigenous peoples who experimented with and negotiated the limits of Catholicism and alliance with the French. Without doing away with the term ‘conversion,’ therefore, Leavelle moves to complicate it while insisting on the authenticity and sincerity of missionaries and Native peoples alike who together struggled to make a new order that ‘gave birth to the “Catholic” Calumet’ (p. 8).

Leavelle relies on letters, journals, linguistic manuals, and official Jesuit correspondence, some of which appears as the ‘allied documents’ in the well-worn Thwaites edition of the Jesuit Relations, but much of which remains unpublished in archival collections. Chapters are thematic, focusing on foundations and elements of cross-cultural exchange, the respective origin stories of Jesuits, Illinois, and Ottawa, competing moral and spiritual geographies of the Great Lakes region, understandings of human and metaphysical realms, language and translation, and finally religious transformation itself and its effects on gender and community. Throughout, Leavelle offers textured descriptions of religious encounter and conversions that move back and forth between Jesuit and Indigenous perspectives, comparing them, seeking points of understanding, as well as all-too-common instances of confusion, misunderstanding, and conflict. He carefully maps how both sides in this encounter sought interaction as well as a degree of separation, and how the tolerance of often deep ambiguities was essential to the negotiations that characterized the search for spiritual power and order in the upper country.

Many of the themes, stories, and even conclusions Leavelle presents will be familiar to readers already versed in recent literature on encounter histories; the adaptation of Indigenous Christianities, the ambiguity of conversion, the complexities of translation, and roles played by ritual and gender in colonial encounters. What is compelling is Leavelle’s method and the detail of the stories he tells. His persistent juxtaposition of Jesuit with Illinois/Ottawa perspectives, his determination to give equal interpretive weight to the variety of European and Indigenous conversions, and his sensitivity to profound personal and group transformations make for a compelling read. His attempt to retain the notion of ‘conversion’ by redefining it according to process and practice rather than doctrine and result, provides a nuanced way of thinking about religious change without revisiting unhelpful dichotomies of assimilation and resistance. Here, the colonial encounter changes everyone who participated in it.

Occasionally, however, the structure threatens to break down. The ‘conversions’ experienced by French missionaries often seem to pale in comparison to those endured by Illinois and Ottawas. Undoubtedly, French missionaries in the pays d’en haut experienced profound personal change as a result of the colonial encounter and adapted their own practices and assumptions accordingly, but Leavelle’s determination to present these conversions as equal in weight to the fraught process Indigenous peoples underwent to create ‘a new Christian culture that contained at least the memory of certain Native spiritual traditions’ (p...