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  • Between Heaven and Earth: Reconsidering Indian and Jesuit Interactions of Faith and Power
  • Christian Ayne Crouch (bio)
Tracy Neal Leavelle. The Catholic Calumet: Colonial Conversions in French and Indian North America. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012. 264 pp. Figures, maps, appendices, notes, bibliography, and index. $39.95.

Over the course of the seventeenth century, the members of the Society of Jesus (Jesuits) produced a remarkable assortment of writings describing the indigenous American nations on whom they focused their missionary efforts. These sources, collected into the multivolume Jesuit Relations at the turn of the twentieth century, have long been a valuable resource to ethnohistorians, colonial historians, anthropologists, and religious studies scholars alike. Tracy Neal Leavelle’s book provides compelling proof as to why Jesuit writings continue to be a critical lens into both the early modern American past and into Native cultures. Many works have used Catholic missionary efforts to uncover the relationships between Mohawk, Huron-Wendat, and Abenaki communities with the French. Focused on the pays d’en haut, or Great Lakes, and the Illinois country, Leavelle grounds his book on previously understudied Native communities to bring both individuals and region into the broader historiographic dialogue of Indian-French mission experiences.

At the core of The Catholic Calumet lies the complicated question of conversion. Here Leavelle grapples with some perennial questions: why did French Jesuit missionaries repeatedly insert themselves into the lives of Miamis, Kaskaskias, Peorias, Wendats, and Ottawas, among others; and for what reasons did Native peoples choose to reject or embrace these overtures? These are topics that have long interested scholars but are also issues that can yield overly simple conclusions. Rejecting the ideas that Jesuits were cynical, self-interested agents of empire; that Indians found nothing of utility in Roman Catholicism; or that neither side understood or respected the other’s beliefs, Leavelle instead explores the notion that “cultural encounters that involved any authentic exchange across lines of difference required a reorientation, a turn toward or away from the other” (p. 10). Put more simply, Leavelle is interested in tracing and illuminating the spaces of “cultural translation and [End Page 197] mutual conversion” (p. 6). The theme of conversion opens up a fluid zone in which Leavelle investigates expectations, realities, and accommodations for both Jesuits operating deep in the American continent and the indigenous nations who hosted the missionaries, interacted with them, became araminatchiki (those who pray), or rejected these “black robes.” Many works have discussed the revitalization offered to indigenous communities by their interactions with Christianity, but almost all of these studies have focused on the mid- to late eighteenth century. The Catholic Calumet, firmly grounded in the seventeenth century and in a space that remained overwhelmingly indigenous, adds a compelling antecedent to that literature as well as to works studying Native adaptation and resilience.

The book opens in 1730 with a meeting between Illinois Indians and French officials at New Orleans, but the bulk of Leavelle’s examples draw on the late seventeenth century and very early eighteenth century, the golden age of Jesuit mission efforts throughout the Great Lakes region. While other scholars have used Jesuit records to recover Indian daily life and practices or to interpret the experiences of the Jesuits themselves, Leavelle instead focuses consistently on Indian and French exchanges in the realm of the sacred. In order to frame the cosmological perspectives coming together in the seventeenth century, Leavelle traces the roots of the Society of Jesus, describing how the daily exercises designed by Ignatius of Loyola and the mission efforts of Francis Xavier remained the ideals that French Jesuits emulated throughout their time in the Americas. Turning next to Algonquian worldviews, Leavelle offers a reading of how Native nations saw their beliefs literally inscribed into the landscape of their home—a terrain portrayed by Jesuits as wild but imbued with deep meaning to Indians. Leavelle’s balanced readings of Algonkian creation narratives and tales of manitous—such as Nanabozho, the Great Hare, who generated and marked the landscape—demonstrate his deft ability in both religious studies and ethnohistory. The chapter on “Geographies” is, however, one of the rare moments in which readers may find Leavelle’s intentions working at...

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