Harvest of Souls: The Jesuit Missions and Colonialism in North America, 1632-1650, and: The Chaco Mission Frontier: The Guaycuruan Experience (review)

Harvest of Souls: The Jesuit Missions and Colonialism in North America, 1632–1650. By Carole Blackburn. (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2000. xvi + 173 pp., illustrations, maps, notes, references, index. $60.00 cloth.)

The Chaco Mission Frontier: The Guaycuruan Experience. By James Schofield Saeger. (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2000. xviii + 266 pp., preface, illustrations, map, appendixes, notes, bibliography, index. $50.00 cloth.)

Carole Blackburn's book, the twenty-second edition of the McGill-Queen's Native and Northern series, somewhat belies its title, as it is not so much about the Jesuit missions per se but examines "the dialogue between Jesuit missionaries and the Native peoples of northeastern North America" (i). It is a textual analysis of the Jesuit Relations and an "ethnographic study of the Jesuits" who attempted to convert the "people they knew as the Huron and Montagnais" (19) from 1632 to 1650. By combining the methods of colonial discourse studies and historical anthropology, Blackburn aims "to uncover the logic that underlies the Jesuits' accounts of their activities and their perceptions of Aboriginal peoples" (11) approaching "the Relations as a valuable site for an exploration of the pursuit and effects of power, and its justification, as well as looking at the power of language to naturalize . . . the ‘structures of domination'" (8). She characterizes them as "colonial texts, even though this period in the history of New France was characterized by minimal settlement and the absence of either French rule or French dominance" (11).

After a useful introductory chapter, Blackburn offers a brief overview of the history and ideology of the Jesuits and the early history of New France until the second coming of the Jesuits in 1632. Emphasizing the ideas of "order and authority" among the French, Blackburn juxtaposes these with the highly mobile society of the Montagnais and the more sedentary, agricultural, and organized Huron, both of whom demonstrated too much individual autonomy and too little "power to command" among their leaders, according to the Jesuits.

Setting her historical stage, she nicely deconstructs the Relations in her next three chapters, "The Wilderness," "Law and Order," and "Conversion and Conquest." Blackburn explains how the Jesuits viewed New France and its inhabitants as both physically and spiritually barren, existing in a state of sin marked by the absence of shame and freedom run wild. Using "civilized" agricultural metaphors, the Jesuits depicted themselves as the active agents who would "cultivate" and redeem the passive aboriginals and save them from their unchanging cultural past without writing, history, or civilization. Always pointing out how the Huron and Montagnais contradicted or "decentered" the Jesuits' discourse, she shows how they countered the Jesuits' universalist message with their own relativist vision of time, space, and ideology.

Blackburn argues that the Jesuits, while eventually recognizing and accepting certain indigenous ways, such as reparation payments and native speech styles, never gave up their message of obedience and submission as the pathway to conversion. And despite "evidence" in the Relations of some indications of transformation within Huron society, she emphasizes the importance of distinguishing between the "rhetoric of the Relations" and the "negotiations over meaning which the Jesuits were required to enter into with Aboriginal peoples" (101). These negotiations led to "conceptual slippages," which undermined the respect and obedience the Jesuits were seeking. The Hurons "subverted" the cultural meanings of baptism, hosts, religious images, and most important, writing and the Jesuits' position in relation to the epidemics devastating indigenous society. At first seen as curers, the Black Robes were later condemned as sorcerers by many Hurons due to the recurrent diseases. While first viewed with awe, writing was later seen as just another form of witchcraft. Unequivocally accepting James Axtell's (1988) interpretation of the native view of writing as an empowering "technology" for the Jesuits, Blackburn overlooks Peter Wogan's [End Page 463...