"They honor our Lord among themselves in their own way": Colonial Christianity and the Illinois Indians

In 1666 when the Jesuit missionary Claude Allouez first met Illinois Indians at his mission of Saint Esprit on Chequamegon Bay, he could scarcely believe their enthusiasm for Christianity. They were, he wrote, "the fairest field for the Gospel" in New France. Though he barely understood their Algonquian dialect, Allouez discovered that they lived "sixty leagues hence toward the South," and that "[t]hey used to be a populous nation, divided into ten large Villages; but now they are reduced to two, continual wars with the Nadouessi [Sioux] on one side and the Iroquois on the other having well-nigh exterminated them." But most important, Allouez wrote, they "worship one who is preëminent above the others . . . because he is the maker of all things," and they all longed to "see" this powerful manitou, or spirit, which "greatly facilitates their conversion" to Christianity. He thought that he only needed to replace this single manitou with the Christian God, tell the Illinois how to worship him, and they would convert. Allouez wrote that he preached about Jesus Christ to eighty Illinois traders and helped them worship their new God. "They honor our Lord among themselves in their own way," he wrote, "putting his Image, which I have given them, in the most honored place on the occasion of any important feast, while the Master of the banquet addresses it as follows: 'In thy honor, O Man-God, do we hold this feast; to thee do we offer these viands.'" The Illinois then traveled home from Saint Esprit and told their people of the Christian God. "[C]onsequently," Allouez wrote, "I can say that this Mission is the one where I have labored the least and accomplished the most." ¹

Scholars of religious contact between Europeans and American Indians during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries have used stories like Allouez's to argue vastly different points. Some argue that religious conversion was a relatively simple act, as Indians, convinced by the rhetoric of missionaries, understood Christian concepts as the missionaries themselves did. ² Others argue that missionaries failed in any way to convert Indians to Christianity. They claim that Indians either understood that conversion would bring cultural destruction and instead used the missionaries to get access to material benefits, or that Europeans understood their world so differently than the Indians that the missionaries could not adequately translate Christianity to them. ³ All of these scholars in turn have been critiqued by those who contend that conversion is much more complicated. They attempt instead to highlight and describe how each group approached and understood religious contact and used that cultural interaction to create new lives. ⁴

Scholars have yet to explore closely this complexity in the case of Indian people who made up the Illinois Confederation, however. Most historians and anthropologists examining the Illinois country of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries have focused on the French. ⁵ The few that examine the Illinois Indians fail for the most part to engage the religious and missionary history of the Illinois, opting instead for population studies or narratives of diplomacy and war. ⁶ This essay attempts to fill this gap with an analysis of Illinois Indian religious culture and Illinois-French missionary contact. Missionaries and other European observers during the colonial period wrote much about their contact with American Indians, and their writings give historians a perspective on how Indians viewed and understood their world, the events of their time, the contact with Europeans, and Christianity.

Various factors played into Illinois motives to embrace Christianity in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Wars with the Iroquois, Sioux, and other tribes had devastated the Illinois, forcing them to look for advantages over their enemies. The Illinois believed that French trade and knowledge could bring them protection and power. They believed that this power came in part from a Christian God...