Geographies of Encounter: Religion and Contested Spaces in Colonial North America

On June 14, 1671, Claude Allouez of the Society of Jesus and Simon François Daumont, Sieur de St. Lusson, directed an elaborate ceremony before an audience of Indians, missionaries, and Canadian traders at the Jesuit mission at Sault Sainte Marie. Commissioned by Jean Talon, the intendant of New France, St. Lusson carried a message from Louis XIV to the Indians of the upper Great Lakes. Interpreter Nicolas Perrot translated the message into a Native tongue for the representatives of fourteen Indian nations. He explained that St. Lusson had been ordered to their country "to take possession, in the King's name, of all the country inhabited and uninhabited . . . to produce there the fruits of Christianity, and . . . to confirm his Majesty's authority and the French dominion over it." This message was, furthermore, to be shared with the Illinois, the nations of the north, and still other peoples beyond the basin of the Great Lakes.¹

Allouez and St. Lusson then conducted a carefully orchestrated pageant to seal the words through action. On a height overlooking the village, they planted a cross in the earth and, near it, a cedar pole on which they affixed the royal arms of France. Three times, voices raised, they claimed all the land between the Northern, Western, and Southern seas as part of the dominion of Louis XIV, His Most Christian Majesty, "raising at each of the said three times a sod of earth whilst crying Vive le Roy, and making the whole of the assembly as well French as Indians repeat the same." The discharge of musketry punctuated the declarations. Père Allouez explained the great powers, spiritual and temporal, that the cross and the cedar post represented. "The whole ceremony was closed with a fine bonfire, which was lighted toward evening, and around which the Te Deum was sung to thank God, on behalf of those poor peoples, that they were now the subjects of so great and powerful a Monarch."²

The commission given to St. Lusson and the process by which he took possession of the country for the French king brought together the concerns of mercantilist development, religious imperialism, and continental empires. A royal official, translated by a French coureur de bois and assisted by a Jesuit priest, gathered in symbolic fashion a vast region and its many peoples into the French colonial system. With their pageant, the French ritually altered the existing landscape to reflect this new colonial vision, planting a cross for the Lord and a post for the French king and raising the earth itself in celebration. They began to reshape lands and reorganize peoples to fulfill their dreams of wealth, religious conversion, prestige, and power.

The dramatic ceremony at Sault Sainte Marie initiated a new contest over the interpretation and manipulation of space, a contest that would transform the cultural and human geography of the Great Lakes region and Illinois country in the century to follow. The process of mutual adaptation between Indians and French was, in part, an attempt to conceptualize, draw, and maintain boundaries and to establish a stable social and moral order in a diverse and swiftly changing social environment. Interaction brought competing geographies—divergent French and Indian visions of geographic order and disorder—into encounter, and the prolonged efforts of many parties to enact these visions in space actually altered the region's landscape, producing complex geographies of encounter. French attempts to complete the labor of possession and economic and religious transformation, expressed ceremonially at Sault Sainte Marie, tested the power and ability of Native peoples to counter, control, or channel geographic change, to influence the thickness, permeability, and placement of boundaries.

This analytical device, "geographies of encounter," relies on the notion of multiple, diverse, often shifting layers of geographical interpretation. Native peoples viewed and interacted with the world around them, discovering layer after layer of meaning. They mapped the locations of spiritually powerful places...