The vast differences in the Native American cultures with which early Jesuit missionaries came into contact called for differing evangelizing methods. Indios Gentiles, by Miguel de Cabrera, courtesy of Museo de América, Madrid.
ACCORDING TO Historian Nicholas Cushner, the Jesuit missionaries who came to the Americas, to Peru and Canada and many places in between, were representatives of Western culture to the many indigenous peoples they met. The Jesuits came to evangelize Native Americans, but they also brought a curiosity about the flora and fauna as well as the people. Moreover, they introduced new agricultural techniques and livestock, and they charted their travels.
In Why Have You Come Here? The Jesuits and the First Evangelization of Native America, Cushner considers the experiences of Jesuit missionaries a second "novitiate," a time to learn new languages and cultures and to acclimatize to bitter cold and searing heat. In the following excerpt, the author discusses the adaptations the Jesuits made in the name of their work.
The vast differences in the Native American cultures with which early Jesuit missionaries came into contact called for differing evangelizing methods. Indios Gentiles, by Miguel de Cabrera, courtesy of Museo de América, Madrid. |
The Jesuit reports from New France are invaluable today in reconstructing the early history of the Europeans in the New World. The European missionaries were the first to spend the most time with the native population. Through this contact they became "privileged observers." Language was the key. With it, they were able to go beyond being mere describers of the material world of the Native American and plunge into the belief system and political life of the Indian. And they did not stop in New France.
Jesuit missionaries pushed west through the Great Lakes and down the Mississippi. In Mexico they came north into Arizona. What drove Jacques Marquette, Eusebio Kino, or Claude Allouez to explore unknown rivers and arid deserts? One of the obvious reasons was their interest in discovering new groups of North American Indians for evangelization. This was the motive that prompted Marquette's superior to assign him to accompany Louis Jolliet to find the Mississippi. During their journey both Marquette and Jolliet went out of their way, hiking six miles inland, to visit a Peoria Indian village. There Marquette announced to the Indians that God had sent him to help them acknowledge his existence. After his voyage of exploration, Marquette returned to the Illinois Indians whom he had described as gentle and peace-loving. The same motive is evident in the land and river explorations of other Jesuits in North America. Kino's explorations through the southwest and over the barren hills of Baja California were all undertaken with a fundamentally evangelical motive. Paul du Ru's diary of the exploration of the Mississippi from the mouth of the river north is likewise sprinkled with references to the Indian groups that he encountered as potential converts.
When the missionaries found a tribe, the day would begin with the Jesuit explorers saying mass, the essential Catholic ritual, to ensure God's blessing on their enterprise. In many cases, the explorer would not wait to return to begin evangelizing, but would briefly instruct and then leave with the Indians an upright cross, the visible symbol of Christianity. The missionary-explorer would give a condensed version of the catechism, touching on redemption, Christ's life and death, and the need for adherence to the missionary's instructions. On his return, the other tangible images of Christianity that were important in winning converts could be presented to the neophytes.
The Jesuit explorers also inquired wherever possible about other Indian nations and other appropriate sites for missions. When Allouez traveled more than five thousand miles in 1666 through the Great Lakes, he wrote in his journal that "this lake [Superior] is the resort of twelve or fifteen distinct Indian nations who come from the North, the South, and the West. They come to fish in the lake ... but God's purpose is to proclaim the Gospel to these wandering tribes."
The religious motive of Jesuit explorers was supported by the more practical political impulses of the colonial government, whether Spanish or French. The missionary explorers have always described themselves to the Indians as messengers of God and King, for very practical reasons. Powerful rulers, they claimed, protected them. Kino's forays into northern Mexico and the French Jesuits' voyages differed significantly in that Kino frequently had a troop of Spanish or Mexican soldiers with him. Marquette and Allouez were never accompanied by armed guards. The Jesuit frontier missionaries were never able to convince the Apaches to lay down their arms, so they remained a constant threat. The Apaches were in continual revolt against intrusions and occupation of their lands.
 |  |
|
Jesuit Eusebio Kino, an early missionary to the Southwest, built missions, introduced cattle raising, and charted his discoveries. COURTESY OF THE OLD PRINT SHOP, NEW YORK |
On the other hand, French fur traders and voyageurs never threatened the Indian with occupation of their lands, so the missionaries were never viewed as an advance column for white land-grabbers. It is impossible to imagine what the Indians assembled in Sault-Sainte-Marie in 1666 thought of Fr. Claude Dablon's panegyric of the King of France and the French proclamation of ownership of all the land that stretched "from Montreal as far as the South Sea." After hearing speeches by Dablon and the French ambassador, they returned to their homes and life did not change.
A similar proclamation in New Spain would have been followed by settlers, mission construction, land occupation, and possibly a garrison for soldiers.
The frontier in New France was never pushed back in the same sense that it was occupied and expanded in New Spain. The mission was not a frontier institution in the north the way it was on the Mexican frontier. The frontier of Northern Mexico was an organized Spanish, mestizo, and Indian society that had distinct social and economic traits. It was a developing region that was characterized by changing land ownership, and most important of all, Indian relocation from less-accessible areas to the organized structures of the mission village.
It was this transfer, so eagerly espoused by missionaries, that resulted in social upheavals for the Indians and frequently in armed rebellion. The Indians in New France did not consider the missions and the church as agents for white economic and political control. There was an attempt to relocate them into mission villages, but the French colonial government never forced them to remain relocated. Hence, the missionary was considered much less of a threat.
The economic objectives of the explorers differed from the economic objectives of the political patrons of the explorations. Mines of precious metals were of great interest to the French patrons of du Ru when he sailed up the Mississippi. He himself thought of other ways of channeling the work of the Indians. Kino wished to improve the lot of the Pima Indians and those in Baja California. He tried to do so by bringing in cattle, improving the methods of planting, growing, and using cottons and grains. His Spanish patrons encouraged him because a sedentary, Christian Indian was a less troublesome Indian. Whereas Kino encouraged the Indians he encountered to move their homes to more fertile land, Marquette, Allouez, and du Ru simply returned to the Indians they found and put their villages into their missionary itineraries.
The French Jesuits had obviously developed a different sense of what an ideal Indian society should be. For them, relocation into European-style cultural units was neither appropriate nor feasible. It would have been demographically more efficient for the Jesuits, but they realized that the Indian would never tolerate such confinement.
Of all the motives that moved the explorer-missionaries, the most elusive but clearly evident was a Renaissance-like curiosity, a disinterested curiosity focusing on non-mission-related objects. This was an attitude they inherited from the Renaissance, a period that raised the cult of the individual, extravagant daring, and indifference to pain and fatigue to a virtue. It was not a scientific gathering and organization of data that the missionaries and explorers were after but a spontaneous, undisciplined, unsystematic absorption of knowledge. The Renaissance encouraged a more observant attitude towards natural history, and Jesuit reports and diaries are filled with descriptions of lakes and rivers, animals and people, bugs and flowers. The information was amassed rather than selected, arranged, and edited. By the same token, it was spontaneous and omnivorous. Du Ru's journal of his voyage up the Mississippi River describes alligators and Indians, villages and trees, flora and fauna with equal zest. He also has the distinction of having written the only known ode to the Mississippi River. There was no purpose to his descriptions, no set audience that he was trying to impress. He wrote the journal for himself.
What is also evident in the explorers' reports is the consciousness of taking part in great deeds. They shared in the somewhat exaggerated statement of Fernandez de Oviedo that the discovery of America was the greatest event in mankind's history since the birth of Christ. Whether the bounds of Christendom were being expanded, new peoples discovered for baptism, or rivers and hills mapp
 Nicholas Cushner, retired professor of history at the State University of New York, wrote Why Have You Come Here? The Jesuits and the First Evangelization of Native America (Oxford University Press, 2006. Reprinted with permission). |
Nowhere is this more evident than in Marquette's reports of his voyage down the Mississippi or Kino's repeated announcements that California was not an island but a peninsula that could be reached overland by turning left at the Gila River. Marquette thought that the Pacific was just a stone's throw from the Mississippi, just across a plain that stood in his way. North was the water route to China and Japan, the long-sought and fabled Northwest Passage. Kino was convinced that the crowns of Spain and France would make contact through the Jesuit explorations down the Mississippi and north of Mexico. He had no conception of the vast spaces between the river and the northern Mexico frontier.
Neither Marquette nor Kino were honored in their lives for their accomplishments. In the eighteenth century, the Jesuit provincial in Mexico City was still under the impression that California was an island. Marquette's feat went virtually unnoticed for decades. But each knew what he had done and on some level was conscious of its importance.
The Jesuit explorers were propelled by a mix of motives. Decorum demanded that the religious motive take precedence. Politics required that due respect be shown the political and economic advantages accruing to the crown. But the mix included a large dose of Renaissance curiosity.