Parkman, Francis
1997 The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century. Lincoln : University of Nebraska Press.
Notes: New introduction by Conrad E Heidenreich and Josė Brandāo. Originally published in 1867 by Little and Brown , Boston. Paperback, $25.00. xxx, 586 p. : ill., map ; 21 cm. Includes bibliographical references and index.Reviewed 14 May 1998 by:
Raymond A. Bucko <bucko@maple.lemoyne.edu>
Le Moyne College, Syracuse, New YorkMedium: Written Literature Subject
Keywords:Jesuits -- Missions -- New France -- History -- 17th century
Canada -- History -- To 1763 (New France)
Wyandot Indians -- Missions -- New France -- History -- 17th century
ABSTRACT: This second volume of Parkman's monumental France and England in North America specifically focuses on the Jesuit Mission to the Hurons as well as the founding of various French colonies, foreign policy and a summary of Parkman's understanding of Native and French Catholic cultures of the time.
This work, by noted historian Francis Parkman, permits the reader a vicarious entrance into two worlds. Parkman escorts us through the seventeenth century encounters by European immigrants from France, England, Holland and Sweden among the Native inhabitants of Northeastern North American, such as the Erie, Neutral, Huron, Micmac, and Iroquois. But ironically, and more importantly, he also takes us into the world of a nineteenth century scholar, exemplified by Parkman himself, revealing then current conceptions of history, race and culture.While the title of the work covers an entire century, its actual focus is onthe Jesuit mission to the Hurons. Beginning with an explication of bothIndian and Jesuit cultures, Parkman chronicles the Jesuit missionary efforts begun in 1632 and ending ingloriously with the destruction of the Huron mission in 1649. Included in this is the founding and development of various French settlements, international diplomacy, politics and policies, as well as warfare and torture. Parkman focuses primarily on Iroquois and Huron brutality, saying little in this work of their European counterparts.
Brilliantly written and thoroughly engaging, this is a work of high drama and deep allegory, depicting the workings of destiny and fate as enlightened reason eventually triumphs over savagery, tyranny and despotism. The footsteps of progress are audible to Parkman at every turn and he writes with the serene expectation that his readers will hear them as well. For example, summing up the struggle between the Huron and Iroquois, Parkman states:
"It was a strange and miserable spectacle to behold the savages of this continent at the time when the knell of their common ruin had already sounded. Civilization had gained a foothold on their borders. The long and gloomy reign of barbarism was drawing near its close, and their united efforts could scarcely have availed to sustain it. Yet, in this crisis of their destiny, these doomed tribes were tearing each other's throats in a wolfish fury, joined to an intelligence that served little purpose but mutual destruction" (435).
For students of Indian history and culture, Parkman seemingly offers fewinsights into the intellectual and cultural life of Iroquois, Huron, Algonkians and other Indian peoples covered in the book. In fact, beyond observations of material culture, most of what Parkman says about Indian people would hardly be judged anthropological let alone civil by today's standards. Yet ironically he does begin his work with an attempt at a cultural assessment of the Native Peoples of the Northeast, devoting considerable amount of his work to a portrait essential for understanding the history of Native interaction with the Europeans.
He also devotes a shorter chapter to the spiritual and historical context ofthe Jesuits, again lacking much insight beyond historical sequence. While Parkman admires the intellect and nobility of the Jesuit actors in hisaccount, he cannot fathom their religious motivations. He recognizes that they are indeed moved by faith, but a faith which Parkman sees as corrupt and superstitions, little more dignified, in his view, than that of thesurrounding Indians. He does manage to portray the Jesuits with some sympathy for their efforts and courage, but ultimately cannot understand the world from which they come, both because of his own prejudices towards a charicature of Catholicism he constructs as well as the Jesuits' remoteness in time and culture from the ethos of his own era.
Having introduced the major actors in this drama, he sets the stage withbrilliant description and enlivens his actors with eloquent speech and manner, moving among historiography, poetry, drama and lucid prose to restage a drama of epic proportion. Parkman is a wonderful writer, but one who is tightly enmeshed in his own culture and times, and unable to enter emotionally or intellectually into either Native American or Jesuit worldviews. Nevertheless, the history Parkman produces is methodologically important for his time and our own. He utilizes a wide variety of carefully documented and translated primary sources, relying most heavily on the original French versions of The Jesuit Relations, published by that Order in France to chronicle and seek support fortheir activities in the "New World." He also employs what enthologicalmaterial was available at the time, as well has his own direct observations of Indian peoples. Though he, like his contemporaries, believed that Indian people would disappear, he does acknowledge their cultural and political persistence in his own day. So too, he foreshadows the quest in the twentieth century for native perspective in allowing Indian voices, at least as documented in the Relations, to protest the incursion of the Jesuits and their religion into their world.
This is the second volume of his monumental France and England in North America, a task that absorbed over 30 years of Parkman's life. This series begins with The Pioneers of France in the New World (1865), the present work (1867), and is followed by La Salle and the Discovery of the Great West (1869), The Old Rėgime in Canada (1874), Count Frontenac and New France under Louis XIV (1877), the two volume work Montcalm and Wolfe (1884) and, finally, A Half Century of Conflict (1892). His first work on France in the New World is considered a sequel to this series: The Conspiracy of Pontiac and the Indian War after the Conquest of Canada (1851).
One must be careful not to review a book in the spirit of presentism. True,much of what Parkman writes will cause thoughtful readers to recoil. Just as Parkman occasionally states in the work that he will spare the reader the details of various tortures carried out by the Indians, this reviewer willspare you the tortures of a litany of Parkman's ethnocentrisms and biases. While few today would agree with so allegorical and triumphalistic an analysis of history, it is essential that we understand that this was how America viewed its role in the theater of the world; this self-understanding often resulting in policies and actions which devastated other peoples. Conrad Heidenreich, geographer and scholar of Huron culture, and Josė Brandāo, historian of Iroquois French relations, provide a superlative introduction to this new edition of Parkman's book which contextualizes the author as well as the work,applauding its strengths and offering alternative views for its biases.
Today students of the history of this era have a wealth of information inprimary sources. The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents (1896 to 1901, reissued 1959 and again on the internet though not yet complete(http://vc.lemoyne.edu/relations/index.html), contains, in French and English translation, the original Jesuit publications know as The Jesuit Relations upon which Parkman relied for this work. Lucien Campeau, S.J., has published an even richer compilation of primary sources in his eight volume Monumenta Novae Franciae (1976-1994) in the original languages of the Jesuits as well as ecclesiastical Latin. On the enthnological front, the Smithsonian completed Volume 15 of the Handbook of North American Indians, The Northeast in 1978. Edited by Bruce G. Trigger, this work, though a bit dated, provides a vast array of information and resources. This is supplemented by a wide variety of more recent ethnohistorical scholarship. As in the nineteenth century, there remains a strong Native voice in Iroquois studies.
Parkman remains an important exemplar both for research and writing, but also for the attitudes and actions of an era whose sometimes tragic consequences we have inherited today. By rejecting an interpretation of moral action based on religious experience and motivation, both on the part of the Jesuits and the Indians among whom they labored, Parkman begs a series of question which continue to grow in urgency. Questions of the rightness of colonialism, as well as the consequences of hegemony and cultural genocide beg to be addressed by today's readers.
The story of the Jesuits in New France has become a new metaphor, not one devoted to imperial conquest or enlightened progress, but the struggle for faith and moral action. This has found expression in such places as Brian Moore's novel Black Robe as well as the movie by the same name. Recast in the context of science fiction, it is the theme of Mary Russell's The Sparrow and The Children of God.
Despite Parkman's evolutionist predictions of demise and "progress", the Iroquois continue to maintain their identities and distinctiveness, Jesuits still lay down their lives for what they believe, the French Canadians remain a cultural and political force, and most importantly, the moral and religious questions engendered by our common past continue to call out for examination and resolution. Rather than burying these questions, reading Parkman today can effectively bring them to the fore.
To cite this review, the American Anthropological Association recommends the following style:
Bucko, Raymond A.
1998 Review of The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century. Anthropology Review Database. May 14. Electronic document, http://wings.buffalo.edu/ARD/cgi/showme.cgi?keycode=187, accessed February 9, 2010.© Anthropology Review Database
(available online: http://wings.buffalo.edu/ARD/)