Flesh Reborn: The Saint Lawrence Valley Mission Settlements through the Seventeenth Century by Jean-François Lozier (review)

Jean-François Lozier's Flesh Reborn is a detailed, nuanced examination of the formation of the multi-ethnic Indigenous settlements of the seventeenth century Saint Lawrence Valley. Lozier offers a fine-grained account of the formation, tribulations, and settlement of several mission communities, as well as their importance to the history of both New France and the wider Northeast. Intra-Indigenous politics take centre stage in Lozier's account as the primary driver of Indigenous migration, alliances, and interaction with New France throughout the seventeenth century. Lozier himself notes that a full account of these communities and their significance would require an examination of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as well, but Lozier's analysis of the importance of the Laurentian communities in the 1701 Grand Settlement offers an insightful path forward to understanding the place of these communities in the centuries following his account.

Flesh Reborn offers a complex and non-linear account of what Lozier calls "the processes of settlement" (6) in which Indigenous communities formed, reformed, migrated, and merged to form new communities that retained multiple, overlapping Indigenous identities. Attention to the many layered identities of Indigenous actors as well as specific reference to individual nations, clans, and individuals is a particular strength of Lozier's narrative. The first two chapters examine Innu and Algonquian experimentation with sedentarization in the first part of the seventeenth century, while chapters three and four offer a fresh analysis of Wendat migration. In the next pair of chapters, Lozier breaks with recent Iroquoianist scholarship by emphasizing the "falling-out of the mission and League Iroquois" (21). In the final pair of chapters, Flesh Reborn examines how the upheavals of late seventeenth century New England and intra-Iroquois conflict, including what Lozier calls New Iroquois (adopted members) and Old Iroquois, drove new waves of refugees to Laurentian settlements and culminated in the Grand Settlement of 1701.

The many definitions of settlement frame the central questions of the book, and Lozier integrates oral history, linguistic evidence, archaeological evidence, and careful archival work to plumb these questions. French and Indigenous ambitions for sedentarization, the re-establishment of communities in ancestral territories, the relocation of populations, and the resolution of conflict present interesting paths for understanding the formation of Laurentian mission settlements. This framework invites a productive reconsideration of the creation of mission settlements, which Lozier argues were a "joint creation" (20) of French missionaries and Indigenous converts. Europeans were not the only settlers in the early Saint Lawrence Valley; by examining how Indigenous groups formed settlements as well, Lozier demonstrates that diverse ethnic groups were settling in this area. This helps underline important continuities in Indigenous communities by surfacing the many influences that shaped interaction with French allies.

One of Flesh Reborn's great strengths is its deep archival work. Lozier offers a fresh reading of well-known French sources such as the Jesuit Relations and other French archival material that the Anglophone literature of New France and the Indigenous Northeast has long failed to grapple with. This is a primary strength of the book and makes it essential reading for scholars of early North America. Use of the Jesuit Relations is coupled with a careful reading of both the original texts and translator Reuben Thwaites's occasional mis-translations, offering an important corrective to Anglophone narratives based on the widely used English translation. However, the significant reliance on French government and ecclesiastical records at times reproduces French views of Indigenous actors that may have been productively disentangled.

Indigenous and settler women are likewise often characterized through a French lens. Lozier rightly notes both that Iroquoian and Algonquian women played important governance roles in their communities, and that these women are often difficult to discern in the historical record because of European recording practices and gendered diplomatic norms. Both...