The Death and Afterlife of the North American Martyrs by Emma Anderson (review)

EMMA ANDERSON’S The Death and Afterlife of the North American Martyrs is an impressively researched and well-crafted intersectional analysis of the deaths and legacies of the eight colonial Jesuits collectively known as the “North America martyrs.” These eight Jesuits were killed in Huronia during the turbulent 1640s by factions of the Wendat and Iroquois of whom they were attempting to forcibly convert to Catholicism. Previous hagiographic literature has primarily traced the martyrs’ attempts to convert Native peoples of North America through descriptions of their suffering and deaths in what Anderson describes as “crescendos” to narratives of martyrdom. In contrast, her text shifts the focus by beginning with the martyrs’ deaths as the point of departure for understanding their “afterlives.” Rather than focus solely on Anglo-Christian perspectives that have framed Native North Americans as simply antagonists in narratives of Jesuit martyrdom, Anderson analyzes the narrative afterlives of the martyrs as “hybrid events” requiring recognition of the diversity of roles and perspectives of Native participants.

Anderson explores how multivalent meanings, historical memories, and affectual experiences of martyrdom have lived on in narratives of colonialism, nationalism, religion, spirituality, and resistance. This analysis illuminates the contrasting and often adaptive coming together of Native and Christian concepts such as the meaning of “good death,” sacrifice, suffering, victimhood, superiority, and survivance (among others) that converge in individual and collective understandings of the martyrs. Anderson’s analysis thus importantly highlights the circumstances of Native North Americans’ erasure from historical narratives of martyrdom and the way in which those erasures continue to perpetuate a legacy of colonization for contemporary Native peoples.

Anderson’s text is well worth reading for scholars in religious studies, Native Indigenous studies, American studies, transnational and border studies, and history. Her particular interest in conveying the visceral qualities of martyrdom art, literature, and artifacts and how “witnessing” these artifacts has led individuals to “imaginatively” engage the martyrs, importantly contributes to a deeper understanding of why the North American martyrs have left such lasting yet complex legacies.

For scholars in Native and Indigenous studies, I highlight just three of the many contributions that may be of particular interest. Chapter 1, “A Spectacle of Men and Angels,” narrates the deaths of the eight North American martyrs through an “aboriginal context.” This approach brings to light the ways in which Wendat and Iroquois, in the face of tremendous social upheavals, reasserted and often adapted traditional conceptions of soul return and sacrifice in postwar practices of ritual torture and adoption. Attention to the aboriginal context disrupts hagiographic narratives that frame the martyrs’ deaths as religious persecution, therein revealing the diversity and complexity of Native actions and responses to the Jesuits.

Chapter 4, “For Canada and God,” notably analyzes the ambivalent representations of Native peoples by Anglo-Canadians in two nationalistic cult commemorations of the martyrs’ deaths held in 1949 at the Midlands Martyrs’ Shrine. These commemorations recast Native actors as “descendants of the slayers” while narrating apparent conversions as the “triumph of Christianity.” Anderson compares these productions with the disinterment of Wendat remains originally buried at Ossossané in 1636 to demonstrate that these tropes rendered Native actors/peoples a “silent presence.” This erasure of Native histories has led to conflicting conceptions of the “sacred” at the sites and the unequal treatment of Native and non-Native remains in the pre-NAGPRA era.

Chapter 5, “Bones of Contention,” analyzes the NAGPRA-era repatriation and reburial of 681 Wendat skeletons at Ossossané in 1999. Anderson illuminates significant shifts in cultural and religious power that occurred through repatriation as Native peoples attempted to reconnect with ancestors through the context of the Feast of the Dead ritual of reburial. Repatriation reinscribed Ossossané as a site of Native survival and resistance to martyr histories that had previously led to the erasure of diverse Native responses to the martyrs. These responses ranged from Catholic conversion to returns to “traditional” Native concepts that rejected conversion. These erasures, in turn, led to the unequal treatment of Native...