During the seventeenth century, the three major European colonizing powers—France, England, and Spain—viewed the Indians differently: the French saw Indians as trading partners, the English viewed them as vermin to be exterminated, and the Spanish saw them as a labor force. Despite these differences, all three of the European powers dedicated some effort into converting the Indians into Christians and eradicating the traditional Indian religions. While the French officially proclaimed the conversion of Indians to Christianity-- particularly the Catholic faith--as one of the reasons for establishing colonies in the Americas, trade was really of greater concern.
Christian Viewpoints
Christian theologians and missionaries generally held one of two primary viewpoints regarding the religions of Native Americans: (1) that Native Americans did not have any religion, or (2) that they worshiped Satan. During the seventeenth century the Jesuits, a Roman Catholic order, carried out missionary work in New France. Regarding the Jesuit missionaries, James Moore, in his book Indian and Jesuit: A Seventeenth-Century Encounter, writes:
“The native religions were demonic in the missionaries’ view, and they came to believe that Satan communicated directly with at least some of the tribal shamans.”
Thus, the shamans—often called medicine people and spiritual leaders—were viewed as the evil adversaries of the missionaries. The Jesuits felt that some Native spiritual leaders were in direct contact with Satan while others were simply imposters—often designated by the Jesuits as “jugglers.” They viewed the “jugglers” as resorting to fraud and trickery to extort a good living from other tribal members. With regard to other Native shamans, James Moore writes:
“The Jesuits came to accept some of the phenomena surrounding native shamanistic rites as evidence of the direct intervention of Satanic forces in the native cultus.”
In her book Chain Her by One Foot: The Subjugation of Native Women in Seventeenth-Century New France, Karen Anderson writes:
“In the Jesuits’ view, because Satan was particularly powerful in the New World, it was their task to struggle on behalf of God and Jesus against him and his legions.”
Missionary Activities
One of the earliest French explorers was Samuel de Champlain (1567-1635) who led an expedition into what is now Canada in 1603. Regarding Champlain’s missionary plans, Gordon Steward, in his book History of Canada Before 1867, writes:
“He hoped to find a shorter route to China, he sought precious metals, and he expected to make a profit in the fur trade. But he also had a spiritual motive and was dedicated to a full-scale, church and government-supported missionary effort among the Canadian Indians. This missionary effort, as was the case in later episodes of European expansion in Africa, was inextricably linked to the material goals of the French colonizers, but the missionary endeavor in Canada was a much more complex phenomenon than a mere ‘cover’ for the fur trade.”
Gordon Steward also reports:
“[Champlain’s] missionary plans were part of a vigorous attempt by the Roman Catholic church and the Catholic powers of Europe like France and Spain to stop the spread of Protestantism and to revitalize Catholicism.”
With regard to the French support for missionary activities, Mason Wade, in his chapter in Attitudes of Colonial Powers Toward the American Indian, writes:
“This missionary motive, so often assigned to the early French discoverers by French Canadian clerical writers, was probably mere pious lip service, a convention of a highly religious period, making a very modern interest in acquiring wealth.”
Initially, the task of Christianizing the Native Americans of New France was given to the Recollets, a branch of the Franciscans. This order was active in establishing missions in Spanish America and was also active throughout France. The missionary work of the Recollets, however, lasted for less than a decade and obtained few conversions. With regard to their impact on the Indians, historian Matthew Dennis, in his book Cultivating a Landscape of Peace: Iroquois-European Encounters in Seventeenth-Century America, writes:
“But the mendicant Recollets lacked the necessary resources, seemed ill-suited to this missionary work, and were too few to make a large impact.”
Much of the Christian missionary work in New France was carried out by the Jesuits, called Blackrobes by the Indians because of the robes that they wore. Historian Matthew Dennis writes:
“The determined, disciplined, highly trained, and militant members of the Society of Jesus were the shock troops of the Counter Reformation.”
Unlike the Recollects, the Jesuits saw no advantage in assimilating the Indians into French culture. They did not wish to alter Indian culture any more than was necessary for them to convert to Christianity.
The most powerful Indian nation in seventeenth century New France was the Iroquois Confederacy made up of five nations. Historian Matthew Dennis, in his book Cultivating a Landscape of Peace: Iroquois-European Encounters in Seventeenth-Century America, reports:
“Iroquois hostility and their reputation as fierce cannibals only seemed to inspire the missionaries of New France to further efforts. The difficulty of Iroquois conversion represented a challenge the Jesuit pride could not resist.”
Working among fierce and hostile tribes gave the Jesuit priests an opportunity to become martyrs, an opportunity which many of them eagerly sought. Working among the Algonquin and Montagnais in 1652, Father Jacques Buteux wrote:
“I should think myself fortunate to be reserved for the fire; their cruelty is great and to be burned by slow fire is indeed horrible torture, but there is nothing that the grace of God cannot overcome.”
Father Buteau was later killed while working among the Iroquois.
Gordon Steward writes:
“The Jesuits not only acted as interpreters but also traveled and mapped the Great Lakes area and played a vital role in creating and preserving a French influence with Amerindians from Montreal to Green Bay and beyond.”
About the Jesuits, James Moore writes:
“For the wandering tribes they sought not change in native life-style except what affected Christian moral stands and general church discipline, and with the sedentary tribes they sought to form villages apart from the French where Christianity and the native life-style could blend.”
In summarizing the Jesuit approach to missionary work among the Indians, James Moore writes:
“They concluded that Christianity ought to be planted in native soil, be fed and watered with what was indigenous to the native culture, and be presented to the Indians in a manner that was not foreign or artificial to them. The amenities of European civilization were irrelevant to the missionaries’ purpose.”
From their viewpoint, the missionary was to live and work among the people; they must become “barbarians” with the “barbarians’ in order to lead them to Jesus Christ. This meant learning their language and eating their food. When traveling with the Indians, this meant paddling a canoe for many hours and carrying baggage on the portages. According to James Moore:
“They sought to build on the good that they found in Indian society, not supplant it with something else, for European civilization in their view was no more endemic to Christianity than was the Judeo-Roman civilization in which it was born.”
Communication
One of the concerns of the Jesuits was how to communicate with the Indians, particularly regarding religious matters. One way, obviously, was for the missionaries to learn the native languages. In general, the French, both missionaries and traders, learned Indian languages. When the Jesuits arrived in New France in 1611, they began learning Indian languages.
Another way to communicate involved the use of pictographs to illustrate some Christian concepts. James Moore writes:
“The pictographs also indirectly helped the missionaries to learn the native languages, since these pictographs often engendered spirited discussion to which the missionaries intently listened.”
Proto-Christianity
Many of the Jesuit missionaries maintained that the traditional religion of the Indians contained a clouded notion of the existence of the “true” Christian God. James Moore writes:
“The fathers believed they detected this ‘secret idea’ of God in certain individual Indians, not only among the sedentary Hurons but also among the Algonquins, the Montagnais, and the other nomadic tribes beyond them to the west.”
Many of the Jesuit missionaries felt that some of their converts had encountered the idea of the Christian God before coming in contact with the missionaries themselves. The idea that the traditional American Indian religious were a kind of proto-Christian religion is still common among many Christians today. James Moore writes:
“While the Indians in their natural state, untouched by Christianity, were deemed to be savages without the hope of heaven, they were not, in the Jesuits’ view, devoid of intelligence and reason. The ‘image of God’ in which man had been created, though blurred by the ‘fall’, was still to be found in the Indian.”
According to Jesuit perceptions of Indian cultures, the Indians had vestigial theism and corrupted ideas of the immortality of the soul. Moore writes:
“In the reasoning of the missionaries, if natural revelation and natural law could be perceived through man’s innate reason regardless of any attributes of civilization, then Christianity, which is the highest fulfillment of natural revelation and natural law, obviously could also exist in conditions considered by standards of European civilization to be primitive or savage.”
Visions
Visions were an important part of traditional Native American religions, and the Jesuits allowed visions to be incorporated into Native Christianity. James Moore writes:
“Since the missionaries themselves believed it was possible to see visions and hear voices from the spiritual realm, the Indians, who had fully acknowledged such phenomena all their lives, likewise continued after their conversion to consider such phenomena as a possible experience.”
James Moore also reports:
“Gradually, the fathers came to believe that a Christian Indian might very well experience a dream resulting from divine inspiration; and they even came to wonder if an unbaptized person might not also receive such a dream in order to bring about his or her salvation.”
Names
Europeans used a two-part naming system consisting of a surname which was inherited from the father and a Christian first name. This naming system reinforced the European patriarchal viewpoint of social relations and inheritance. American Indians, on the other hand, did not have this viewpoint or this naming system. In many Indian cultures, such as that of the Iroquois, a person was born into the mother’s family (clan) and this clan designation was important to the social order. For the European missionary, the idea of stressing the mother’s family rather than the father’s seemed unnatural. Regarding names among the Christian Indian converts, James Moore writes:
“While the name of a saint was always adopted at baptism, the convert still retained his Indian name and sometimes took on another Indian name, as was native custom, if some later event or circumstance required it. They did so with no disapproval from the missionaries.”
Marriage
Marriage presented the missionaries, both Jesuit and Protestant, with some major obstacles. Native American concepts of marriage were vastly different from those of the Europeans, and, in addition, marriage was seen as a civil and economic matter, not a religious matter. Yet, marriage was a matter which the missionaries strongly felt must be done in accordance with European custom, not Native custom. One of the issues was polygyny (the marriage of one man to more than one woman). Polyandry (the marriage of one woman to more than one man) was so unthinkable to the missionaries that they failed to see it even when it was commonly around them.
In the seventeenth-century concept of Christian marriage, the woman was to submit herself to her husband, to become his property and to take his surname. Indian women, on the other hand, were from an egalitarian culture in which women did not submit to men. Indian women did not see themselves as being inferior to men. Karen Anderson writes:
“The Jesuits found many aspects of the relationship between native women and men intolerable, contrary to God’s laws and to the laws of human nature.”
In addition, the missionaries had a great deal of difficulty with the practice of premarital sexual intercourse and with the idea that women were not only sexual beings but had control over their own sexuality. Karen Anderson writes:
“The Jesuits found the ‘sexual license’ of young girls and women particularly disturbing.”
Closely associated with this was the lack of a European-style nudity taboo among Indians. The missionaries were often shocked at seeing Indian woman with their breasts exposed and Indian men being unconcerned about being totally nude in mixed company.
Since marriage had been ordained by the god, the missionaries felt that divorce should not be permitted. Karen Anderson writes:
“The native practice of leaving an unsuitable spouse ran contrary to Christian teachings of the inviolability of marriage, and, in the Jesuit view, provided a constant opportunity for sin, and thus for the Devil to be served.”
It is understandable that the Jesuits and other missionaries found it more difficult to convert women. Karen Anderson writes:
“As women, they refused to conform to the behavior that the Jesuits knew God had ordained for their sex. They would not submit themselves to the authority of their husbands and fathers. They would not behave in a modest and gentle fashion. They made no attempt to hide their sexuality, did not value virginity, chastity, or sexual continence and refused to remain married to an unsuitable spouse.”
Indians 101
Twice each week—on Tuesdays and Thursdays—this series presents American Indian stories. More seventeenth-century histories from this series:
Indians 101: English religion and American Indians in the 17th century
Indians 101: The English and Indian land in the 17th century
Indians 101: The Spanish and the Indians in the Seventeenth century
Indians 101: The Dutch and American Indians in the 17th century
Indians 101: The French and American Indians in the 17th century
Indians 101: New Sweden and the Indians
Indians 101: The 17th Century Wampanoag
Indians 101: Jamestown and the Indians, the First Decade