Who were the Jesuits of New France?

Ever since the first of the second born of this continent arrived here, religious transformation of the continent had been at the forefront of a new destiny for North America.  The Spanish and French would bring with them an exclusive Roman Catholicism.  The English, Dutch, Swedes, and Danes would bring with them a Protestantism that excluded this Catholicism in return.  The Russians would bring their Orthodox Christianity.  In any case, the soldiers and merchants came hand in hand with various missionaries.  Nearly all of them were as concerned with replacing as much of the culture as the religions of the peoples they encountered.  The loving message of Christian transformation for the world, sadly, often came hand in hand with a pointed gun.  The missionaries would cry out "shame, shame" or at least shake their heads in silent disapproval, but nothing really changed as a result of their weak disputes with colonial domination.

One group, however, was quite different.

Ever since their foundation in 1534, the Jesuits were drawing some of the keenest and brilliant minds in Europe into their world.  These men were scientists, philosophers, politicians, artists, even warriors, but they all shared an intense zeal for spreading their faith and love of Jesus Christ to others.  They were explorers as well, just as much concerned with evangelization as with roaming about the world and embracing its beauty and offerings.  Very often, this brought them into conflicts not only with non-Catholics Christians, but also with the other missionary orders within the Catholic Church.  By the early 1600's, such was the negative attention that they had received that other missionaries made active efforts to keep them out of new territories.  One notable exception was New France.

The Franciscans in Quebec were finding that the rough country and alien cultures of the Algonquins and Montagnais were a far cry from the so-called civilized frontiers of the Arab and Oriental worlds that they had thus far been called upon to engage in conversion efforts.  Though they had started to gain experience with the first born of North America in Mexico, such evangelization efforts in the Spanish New World were augmented with steel and gun-smoke.  French efforts to colonize and economize on the New World were an altogether different affair; the native peoples were trading partners rather than subjects, and the missionaries were warned not to get in the way of the bottom line.  As the Jesuits were certainly available, willing, and capable of engaging cultures on their own terms, the Franciscans called them in for assistance.  Pretty soon, they were running the missionary effort, as well as the exploratory and diplomatic efforts on behalf of the French expedition.  They were among the first Europeans to learn the languages of the first born, and among the only to report back to the mother countries about a richness to cultures otherwise considered savage and backward.  They did, however, heavily impact any people they came across.  New France, from Quebec to Louisiane, as well as the deserts of northern Mexico and the southwestern United States, and the upper Missouri river basin were all regions that bore the mark of passing Jesuits: native peoples who had a somewhat neutral meeting with Europeans.  Their churches still stand and are in use, monuments to healthy missionary efforts:

http://www.sanxaviermission.org/

Feast of the North American Martyrs

On this day in the Roman Catholic Church are commemorated the Jesuit martyrs of New France.  Each of them endured a pretty brutal death at the hands of the Haudenosaunee, who at the time were mortal enemies of the Wendat and French.

They are commemorated in two shrines, one in Auriesville, New York, and a grander one in Midland, Ontario, which rises over a reconstructed Wendat village.  Love them or hate them, these people had a significant role in the development of North America, particularly in the conversion to Christianity of the first born sons and daughters of this land.  Together with Matteo Ricci, who worked as a missionary in China, they are largely responsible for helping to form centuries of Jesuit missionaries.  The Society of Jesus, through the experiences and sacrifices of these missionaries, learned how to carefully introduce their religion to a culture that might otherwise be somewhat worlds away from it.

So how is this for a crazy idea?  Let's spend the next week looking at what they did.

In the meantime, enjoy this fictional, but somewhat accurate, clip of a movie that spoils the ending for you.  Hint: Mortally speaking, it was not the most pleasant of endings.

On This Day...

...in 1812, Canadian forces consisting of British regulars, Upper Canadian militia, and Mohawk warriors repelled an American invasion force more than twice their number at Queenston Heights atop the Niagara Escarpment on the Niagara River.  Among the causalities at the battle was Sir Isaac Brock:

"The Death of General Brock at the Battle of Queenston Heights" by John David Kelley, 1896.  Courtesy Library and Archives Canada, C-000273.  

Despite the victory, which ensured that American forces would never achieve the quick peace and take over of Canada that they had hoped for, Brock's death would prove to be rather devastating for any hopes of a dominant Canadian position through the rest of the war.  Canada would survive, at least, if kept north of the Great Lakes.  The battle, especially in Ontario, has remained one of the high holy points of English Canadian history, a moment of triumph over American domination.  Like much of the War of 1812, the battle has also been romanticized a bit too much by Canadians, and neglected for mention in American history texts, but then, none of us were there, and our nations certainly have interesting ways of dealing with the present and future by imagining the past to be what we wish it to be.  Was Queenston Heights important?  Absolutely.  Was it, and the dramatic death of Brock, a deciding factor in the drive to keep the war going for both sides? Not nearly as much as it was the hearts and causes for all the people involved.  Wars are not glorious so much as they are crucial for understanding our consciousness of self as societies; what do we really fight for?

Rest in peace, Sir Isaac.  Your monument, the monument of all those on both sides who fell with you, stands in testament to your contribution to the history of two young and growing nations.

Opinion: Columbus Day?

Today the banks are closed, the mail is not being delivered, and some people will watch a news story about a statue of some Genoan who sailed for Spain looking for China a long time ago.  Some other people, generally more uppity about these sorts of things, will cite that today we celebrate half a millennium of genocide, cultural and physical enslavement, and all the other bad things that have happened since 1492.  These people regret that Europeans ever made contact with the West Indies that year.

I am not one of them.

What happened in 1492 did not destroy the New World.  The will and actions of individuals did that.  Did the discovery of a pair of continents with exploitable resources and peoples open up the gateways to domination by these people?  Yes, absolutely.  All the same though, Europeans, as with ALL humans, were pretty good at these things even before they made contact with the New World.  Let's be honest here, on that note: Native Americans are hardly innocent noble savages, no matter how much we would want them to be as a part of our common imagination.  Aztecs, Mayans, Incas, Haudenausonee, Crow, Commanches, etc... they were pretty rough cultures to be a part of, or worse, to be a neighbour to.  No one is entirely innocent.

Did some truly terrible things happen?  Yes, they certainly did.  I dare anyone to visit Washita in Oklahoma and not feel some sort of compassion, dread, or sorrow.  While away from the battlefield and in the comforts of one's armchair, Washita and other such slaughters of North America's first born can be rationalized away in the greater context of history and circumstance, witnessing the places where elders and children were mercilessly killed and horses shot simply for being beloved animals of the Cheyenne... I have problems even just typing this... well let's just say that the heart is moved.

All the same, I noted that such people were the first born of this continent.  Regardless of the actions of others, we must not fall into logical fallacy and blame entire peoples for atrocities.  The fact of the matter is that North America is now home to so many peoples.  This continent is a very diverse place; it was even before European contact.  There is no such thing as an "Indian", namely because there are so many different cultures and language groups present among the first born here.  Now that new generations have come, should we ask them all to go back to the rest of the world simply because they wanted to live in harmony and peace in a land where origins contribute to destiny, rather than dominate it?

I am a North American, even if my roots are European.  I think I first really came to know this when I returned home from living in London back in 2003 and looked down onto the shores of Labrador from my plane.  I saw the waves of the cold northwestern Atlantic beating down on the ancient granite of the Canadian Shield, and I knew then that I was home.  When I spent six weeks in Mexico refreshing my Spanish language skills back in 2008, I still felt at home among the pine-covered mountains of Morelos.  When I have traveled out into the truly divine wonders of the West, I have still felt at home.  Should we condemn the second child for the sake of the first?  I am sorry that the first born was screwed out of an inheritance.  That was wrong.  But I am just as much in love with my homeland, from the jungles to the tundra, as my brothers and sisters of a different mother are.

Today is a day for reflection, for all the good and ill that has come of life here in this New World since that year (even if Basques, Celts, Norse, and East Asians probably had been here before then).  Think about discovery, think about atrocity, think about a new chapter in the history of humanity.  Think about so many of the peoples of the earth making a destiny for themselves set apart from their accident of birth and instead built around what they can make of themselves.  Such are the hopes and dreams of Canadians, Americans, and Mexicans, no matter what their last name might be.  Columbus Day is a good thing.  

Oh, and by the way, today is also Canadian Thanksgiving.  Yes, we have one too, and yes, it is largely about the same reason: thankfulness for the bounty of the land.  While we don't have an iconography dominated by puritans and scantily clad native stereotypes, we do have turkey and stuffing.  If this blog makes it to next year, count on an extended history of it then.

Parks in the News: A Memorial for Margaret

On the first day of this year, Margaret Anderson, a ranger at Mount Rainier National Park was gunned down by a shooting suspect fleeing the Seattle metropolitan area.  In memory of her passing and service, a grove of Pacific Silver Fir (Abies Amabilis) have been planted near where she was killed.  The full story can be found here:

http://www.thenewstribune.com/2012/10/04/2320937/fitting-memorial-honors-mount.html

While monuments and memorials are often man made, something just seems really right for the more lasting beauty of nature to stand in memory of one who spent a life in service to her cause.  Even after the trees have fallen, their seedlings and those beyond them will live on even as the memory of Margaret fades.  May your trees grow tall, Margaret!

The last ranger to fall in the line of duty before Margaret was Kris Eggle, also gunned down, on August 9, 2002 in Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument on the Mexican border in Arizona.

A First Look: Ecology of a Cracker Childhood

I have recently been starting to read Ecology of a Cracker Childhood by Janisse Ray.

It is essentially a part-auto-biographical, part-heartfelt tale of love and longing for the writer's native people and landscape.  I mention the work because it has already been one of the most gripping works I have ever read from a contemporary writer.  The title is amusing or perhaps not to be taken seriously, the subject matter is hardly the most powerful choice of topic for amazing literature, and the work is probably not well known outside of a readership that is interested in books on nature, and yet for the life of me I can't put the thing down.

Perhaps this is emblematic of the way many of us in North America treat the region that Janisse speaks about.  The coastal plain or "Deep South" is often derided as a backwater culturally and economically.  In terms of the landscape, it is often seen as a fly-over area that people speed through in order to get to the beauty of the Gulf beaches or tourist Florida.  I myself am somewhat turned off by the heat and humidity that the author herself makes note to remind her readers of very early on in the introduction to her world.  Our misconceptions and biases, of course, blind us to the beauty of what our own desires have largely helped to destroy.

Picture a world of towering pines, an understory of lovely wildflowers, palms, magnolias, and evergreen oaks draped in Spanish Moss.  

This is a world that Janisse Ray has seen disappear in the face of economic pressures on the South to conform to the patterns and development paths of the rest of the continent.  While she is not specifically claiming that her childhood spent in a scrap yard surrounded by Longleaf Pine forests is something that she wishes to preserve and spread around as the ideal of Georgian life, she does lament the fact that the forests have been mowed over and that she, her family, and her ancestors have been mocked and shunned as backward rednecks who don't understand proper living.  Indeed, she thinks that the farther the rest of us get from a life shared with the land, the more we don't really understand what proper living ought to be.  As we grow more accustomed to forgetting our relationship with the land, we North Americans are going to keep getting greedier and less concerned about what makes our nations, no matter where we were once from, into what they have become and might yet be.

Most of us were first seen by our parents in a hospital.  Janisse was found among the leaves of a palmetto in the middle of a scrap yard.  The first page alone is enough to break your heart.  I will post a big review once I can make it through the rest of her book.