The Betrayal of Faith: The Tragic Journey of a Colonial Native Convert (review)

Emma Anderson’s book is a welcome addition to the literature on Catholic missions in seventeenth-century New France. It is clarifying as colonial history because it pushes the limits of historical narrative. Anderson enjoys an uncanny ability to convey interpretive complexity in reconstructing historical events. She also achieves a reflexive exploration of the intellectual, cultural, social, and religious character of missionization from a cross-cultural perspective.

Anderson reconstructs the biography of an Innu individual, Pierre Pastedechouan, from his childhood, through his education in France, and especially after his return to Canada as a dislocated (from his Innu family and from the French who shaped his adolescent years), disturbed, bi-lingual and bi-cultural individual. These chapters are no small feat given Anderson’s limited documentary resources. But, The Betrayal of Faith does far more than to push the limits of biographical archeology. Anderson builds from the psychological microcosm of colonial impacts upon actual individuals and their strategic responses. Upon this biographical foundation, the book contributes to understanding the intellectual, religious, and social macrocosm of religious colonialism, not only in New France, but also in the larger history of the American peoples.

The Betrayal of Fairth is exemplary in achieving a convincing narrative history in a situation where textual documentation is less than one would like. In this sense, the book makes a major contribution toward how to understand struggles for human meanings in situations of cultural encounter. Anderson necessarily (particularly in the early chapters) relies on hypothetical reconstructions of Pastedechouan’s experience with Recollet missionaries, English interlopers and traders, his five year sojourn in France, and his return to Canada now again under French control. Because it is so clear when and why Anderson speculates, the reader is intrigued with possibilities that may have informed Pastedechoan’s life. Anderson is extraordinarily skilled in contextualizing texts in geographical, architectural, subsistence, and interpersonal visualizations that make this book a lively read.

For example, though few texts document Pastedechouan’s psychologically and culturally shifting time in France, Anderson herself visited the site of his indoctrination. She brings literally to sight the situations in which his personal experience of colonialism took place: classrooms, stables, dining rooms, chapels. Anderson writes: “In answer to pealing bells, Pastedechouan would have quit his small cell or abandoned his work in study or stable, hurrying through the shadowed cloister to join the larger community for their traditional eight daily periods of communal worship in their intimate chapel (85).” These tableaus include the urban, academic, church, national, and institutional contexts of Pastedechouan's cognitive and behavioral situation. Anderson uses visual detail to suggest the theologically terrifying (be was threatened with eternal damnation), and authoritarian (he met physical discipline at the hands of the Jesuits) conditions within which and against which Pastedechoan learned to position himself. The study gains interpretive strength in revealing Pastedechouan’s life after his better documented return to Canada, and Anderson’s skill at creating a fascinating and persuasive argument derives in no little measure from her literary skill in bringing the visual contexts of biography into nuanced view. This is a cinematic achievement that presents the interpersonal engagements that made colonizer and colonized highly motivated actors in self-defining ways.

Anderson also explores interdisciplinary intersections between history, anthropology, and religious studies to explain her interpretive reasoning. Anderson uses these disciplinary lens to reveal the unique complexity of Innu reasoning as a crucial way of understanding their thoughtful and anguished response to vociferous Recollect and Jesuit missionaries. Anderson again brings to light motivational color. Hers’ is no black and white narrative of singularly polarized French and Indian cultures. She reveals, to the contrary, intellectual, psychological, and social complexities on both sides of the cultural boundary. Her story is balanced. Colonists are shown within the cultural (and conflicted) roles they assumed: English and French, governors and headstrong fur traders, and missionaries at once intellectually confident and religiously anguished. Anderson also shows (either using the direct historical approach to...