Time and again, what the Jesuits hoped would be the foundation of a lasting settled Algonquian community at Trois Rivières revealed itself to merely be a variation on the traditional pattern of the seasonal encampment. Bands, having benefited from the immediate assistance they desired, showed little interest in radically altering their subsistence and residence patterns. The “sort of village” put up in May of 1634 turned out to be of the temporary kind, lasting only the season. In 1639, following a show of force undertaken by Governor Montmagny at the head of a well-armed flotilla in response to renewed Iroquois movements in the region, the bands that orbited around Trois Rivières held once again a series of councils during which many of them “decided to embrace the Christian faith and to dwell near the French.” Once again they erected “good and long cabins” close to the town, and allowed the missionaries to entertain the hope that they were settling down permanently. They did not.79 The following year, a woman who had arrived at Trois Rivières as part of a famished band seeking assistance gave the missionaries cause to hope that she would “stimulate her compatriots to clear the land” when, with five children that she had taken in, she began to prepare a “fine, large” field of corn. The fact that she had been captured as a child by the Iroquois, and that she had spent most of her life living an agricultural village life among them before being recaptured by Algonquins, explains her atypicality.80
In an effort to urge the coalescence of a sedentary community at Trois Rivières, the Jesuits formalized the status of their residence there, which they began calling La Conception in honour of the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary. But the peak of eighty neophytes encamped in the vicinity of the town and associated with the mission, attained during its first years, was never again reached.81 A half dozen years later, in 1647 and 1648, the Algonquins, who periodically returned to the area, held a council in response to renewed pressures from the Iroquois, at which they publicly professed their interest in the Christian faith and raised, once more, the possibility of establishing a more sedentary presence.82 But still, nothing would come of it. The French outpost at Trois Rivières itself remained unsubstantial in these years, and the area remained very much exposed to enemy harassment. To missionary minds, the “diversity of nations which assembled at Trois Rivières occasioned, all these years, an indescribable confusion.”83
The effect of the Iroquois menace was far from straightforward, for as much as it might represent for the Algonquians a powerful argument for settlement, it could represent an equally strong argument against it. In spite of the arrival of French newcomers, the Saint Lawrence valley was no safer now than it had been generations before, when ancestors had withdrawn from it under pressure from their enemies. A group of Attikameks, from up the Saint Maurice River, explained it well to the missionaries in later years. Having promised that they would draw closer to Trois Rivières, and settle about a day’s journey from there “as much in order to learn the way to heaven as to cultivate the land,” they had been dissuaded from it by the threat of Iroquois incursions. “We are not men of war,” their chief explained, “we handle the paddle better than the javelin. We love peace. That is why we keep as far as possible from occasions for fighting. If we could overcome these people who wish to massacre us, we would very soon be near you.”84 Other Algonquian bands and individuals were considerably more bellicose in their rhetoric and actions, but they too continued to prefer an approach to subsistence and defence which rested on mobility and flexibility rather than coalescence. Dividing into small bands and family groups had long been favoured as a means of evading detection by the enemy, and it would long continue to be so.
The intercultural dialogue and experimentation of these early years did nonetheless sow the seeds of a mission settlement community, this one closer to Quebec, at the site known as Kamiskouaouangachit to the Algonquians and Saint Joseph or Sillery to the French. Its emergence, a focus of the next chapter, was among the factors that discouraged the formation of a comparable community at Trois Rivières. Figuring that the mingling of neophytes with the droves of unconverted who passed through the one site and periodically assembled there would not be conducive to the development of a Christian community, the Jesuits concentrated their limited resources on the other. Thus it was at Kamiskouaouangachit that the most enthusiastic neophytes and allies of the French coalesced.85
2
Friends and Brothers
Leadership, Alliance, and Settlement at Kamiskouaouangachit and Beyond, 1637–1650
In the spring of 1638, a man named Negabamat approached the Jesuits at Quebec. Like Capitanal before him, he is one of those individuals whom the sources at times describe as a “Montagnais” and at times as an “Algonquin,” hinting at the fluid boundary between the two groups. A decade earlier, he and his late brother Chomina had been known to conduct their winter hunt in the vicinity of the French settlement. It may be that the pair had special rights over this area as a family hunting ground. Manifestly, they were also establishing special claims to the friendship of the French. Chomina had never accepted baptism, but he had adopted the Recollet Joseph Le Caron as a brother and a faithful ally, and it was said that he and Negabamat were the only two Algonquians who offered to take up arms with the French against the English before the surrender of 1629. “We had not known one who was a more faithful and serviceable friend,” French explorer Champlain said of Chomina, on finding him to have passed away in the interval before the French returned to Quebec.1 Since then, the surviving brother Negabamat had tended to orbit around Trois Rivières. Now he returned with Nenaskoumat – a man, alluded to in the previous chapter, who had been noticed by the missionaries for his unusual interest in engaging in agriculture – and their respective families, amounting to some twenty persons, to take up residence in the house that the Jesuits had prepared on a sandy cove, about a league and one half upriver from Quebec. This was a site long favoured by the Saint Lawrence Algonquians, who occupied it on a seasonal basis for its abundant fisheries, and who knew this stretch of shoreline as Kamiskouaouangachit – a name which has in recent times been mistakenly believed to mean “place where we come to fish,” “where we spear salmon,” or “eel point,” but which was in reality a reference to “red sand,” the dark reddish schist that characterized the area.2
On this site of Kamiskouaouangachit, which the French came to call Saint Joseph and Sillery, would coalesce the first mission settlement of the Saint Lawrence valley. This development was not merely or even principally the product of missionary initiative, as it has often been portrayed, but indeed was fully a joint creation, the intersection of Indigenous and French desires, needs, and priorities. It represented the continuation and materialization of the intercultural dialogue and experimentation that had occurred in previous decades around religion, sedentism, agriculture, and collective defence. This dialogue and experimentation, moreover, was very much shaped by the leadership of charismatic Algonquian figures – like Capitanal or Makheabichtichiou might have turned out in earlier years – who sought, in these difficult times, an innovative way to ensure the perennity of their family bands and wider networks.“We have some influence among those of our nation,” Negabamat declared to the Jesuit superior Father Le Jeune in 1638, suggesting that he and his friend Nenaskoumat would in time attract many more followers. Sure enough, the pair quickly emerged as the “two chief pillars” of the nascent mission community, drawing, during the summer, many other families to cluster around the Jesuit residence.3 By 1642, the presence of some 35 to 40 neophyte families established on a more or less year-round basis was observed there, “in addition to an unspecified number of unconverted ones.” The following year, the mission was said to be nearing 150 inhabitants; by 1645, they reportedly numbered 167. Hundreds more visited the mission on a less regular basis.4
Though missionary sources foster an impression of permanence, Kamiskouaouangachit was a sedentary community only in a relative sense. The outstanding majority of the people who came to or
bit around the mission continued to reproduce a traditional seasonal subsistence pattern, encamping in the vicinity of the mission during the warm months to fish and forage; even most of those who could be considered residents of the mission tended to spend the winters away, hunting.5 Still, the mission settlement of Kamiskouaouangachit was not merely a missionary delusion or a rhetorical construction. It was something new. A significant infrastructure distinguished this site from other seasonal gathering sites and from the intercultural experiments at sedentarization previously undertaken at Trois Rivières. It became a service centre, where both spiritual and material assistance could be obtained from the Jesuits and, for a time, the Augustinian sisters. It also boasted permanent constructions. Besides the bark cabins that were put up and dismantled on a yearly basis, the people of Kamiskouaouangachit acquired over a dozen houses built in the French style, a chapel, a hospital, a wooden palisade, and eventually a stone fort. In addition to their fishing weirs, they had gardens and fields – tended, albeit, more by the missionaries’ hired help than by the neophytes themselves.
Kamiskouaouangachit was a site of considerable investment for the French, but it was also a site in which Algonquian peoples invested themselves heavily. A new community emerged there – people came to share a sense of collective belonging, associated with a place and with a way of life that blended tradition and innovation. Public dedication to Christianity and to the French alliance marked the distinctive identity that emerged there. The people of Kamiskouaouangachit, also known as “Christians of Saint Joseph” or “Christians of Sillery,” adopted a rhetoric and a practice of inclusion and exclusion based around their interpretation of missionary teachings. As privileged interlocutors of the French, they acquired for a time ascendancy within the long-standing alliance that opposed the Saint Lawrence Algonquians and their Wendat allies against the Iroquois. A handful of especially assertive leaders articulated and promoted this collective orientation. The names that Negabamat, most notably, would go on to accrue in the few years following the mission’s foundation – Noel and Tekouerimat – are emblematic of his vision and influence. Noel, his baptismal name, was a reference to the mission’s chief financial backer across the Atlantic, Nöel Brûlart de Sillery. Tekouerimat, the chiefly title given to him by his own people, was for its part related to the root tak8erimau, which an early missionary dictionary glosses as “je le tiens, je le refrène, je l’arrête” (I hold, I restrain, I stop). As the French verb arrêter (stop) also carried the meaning of sedentarization, it is tempting to see in this name – plausibly connoting “He who settles him/her/them” – an expression of this man’s vocation as one of the chief proponents of a village community where nomads were called upon to change their way of life.6
***
Negabamat and Nenaskoumat’s expressions of interest in the settled life in 1637 and 1638 came at just the right time. The Jesuits’ calls for financial assistance from across the Atlantic were answered by Noël Brûlart de Sillery, a wealthy and influential shareholder of the Company of New France, and a pious former ambassador who was ordained as a priest in his later years. His family had a long-established interest in France’s colonial project. As foreign minister and long-serving lord chancellor of France, his older brother, Nicolas Brûlart de Sillery, had been among the more powerful supporters of Champlain. In 1618, colonial chronicler Marc Lescarbot had dedicated one of his publications to the chancellor, expressing his hopes that “vagabond peoples” of New France might by his “favour, assistance and support, […] be one day settled [arrêtés].”7 Though the family had lost some of its influence at court with the advent of Louis XIII, they retained their interest in the colonies. In 1634, as he prepared himself to join the priesthood and divested himself of much of his fortune, Noël first explored the possibility of funding the construction of a school at Quebec for the instruction of Indigenous and French girls. By 1637, however, he had been persuaded by Le Jeune to fund the Jesuits’ enterprise of conversion and sedentarization instead.8 Recognizing the Algonquian predilection for the site of Kamiskouaouangachit, Le Jeune orchestrated a series of land transactions. He made arrangements to secure rights to the site through another pious benefactor, François Déré de Gand, commissary of the Company of New France’s storehouse at Quebec. That June, de Gand obtained seigneurial title to the land from Governor Montmagny. Almost immediately he authorized the Jesuits to establish their mission there, for by July of 1637 they had begun the construction of a first small house, a new résidence. This missionary residence, the adjoining mission, and the nearby cove took the name of Saint Joseph, under whose patronage the enterprise was placed, as well as of Sillery, in honour of Noël Brûlart, the enterprise’s main earthly benefactor.9
Kamiskouaouangachit had not been the Jesuits’ first choice. The observation that the Algonquins, Innu, and Attikameks “like the Three Rivers better than Quebec, […] stop there more often, and in greater numbers,” had made Metaberoutin the most obvious choice of a site where a mission settlement might be further encouraged. Yet the Jesuits feared that the mingling of neophytes with the droves of unconverted who passed through the area and periodically assembled there would not prove conducive to the development of a Christian community. Moreover, as the westernmost colonial outpost, Trois Rivières was too exposed to Iroquois harassment.10 The Island of Montreal, although the subject of the earliest discussions of settlement a quarter century before, between Champlain and the Kichesipirini, remained even more vulnerable, and the French had not yet dared to establish a post there. Kamiskouaouangachit offered the relative advantage of distance from the war front and of proximity to the main colonial settlement.
More than anything, however, it was the fisheries that lent appeal to Kamiskouaouangachit. While the Jesuits would never acknowledge as much in their published Relations, they noted in private memoranda arising from subsequent disputes over the exploitation of these rich aquatic resources that “the design and expectation of this fishing has been the only, or at least the principal reason why these poor Sauvages have chosen the land at Sillery to establish a residence and accustom themselves to stay there.” They had “not been willing to accept any other place to cultivate, though more advantageous for grain, with the sole design that the Sillery cove was most advantageous for the eel fisheries, which forced [us] to make their church and houses on this site which are there to fix them even more.” In the context of intensifying warfare, eels, which when smoked and dried or rendered into grease could provide sustenance throughout the winter, had become an especially precious resource. These fisheries, it was explained, were “more necessary to them now than ever because of the great dangers involved in going far to seek their subsistence owing to the frequent hostilities of the Iroquois.”11
It was in this context that Le Jeune had been driven to make arrangements to secure title to the land. In July of 1637, he began directing the construction of a first small house, a new residence for the missionaries to be named after Saint Joseph. The cove in which this house was built was, as a matter of fact, but a subsection of Kamiskouaouangachit as it was originally understood by the Saint Lawrence Algonquians. This “place of the red sand” most certainly corresponded to a much lengthier stretch of shoreline, extending between the point of land the French themselves called Cap Rouge, in reference to the red hues of the exposed stone cape, and the narrows of Quebec a dozen kilometers further downstream.12 People gathered to form an outenau. The French translated this word as “village,” but it referred to a distinctly flexible arrangement. The cabins of family bands were not assembled tightly in a single spot, but strung along the shore in a way that was continuously adapted to the dynamics of water. Every year, they reassessed the landscape, the ways in which the ice floes had nudged the contours of the shore and kneaded tidal flats, to find the best place to install their weirs and most convenient locations for their dwellings. That said, the cove which came to be associated most specifically with the mission had distinct advantages. Besid
es the consistent abundance of the eel harvest, it was nestled below a wooded bluff and thus offered shelter from the winds that elsewhere raked the river’s shores. It also featured several freshwater sources. Archaeological research attests to an Indigenous presence there going back as far as six thousand years.13
Negabamat and Nenaskoumat, as with the site itself, had not been the missionaries’ first choice. In having a second small house in the French style built at Kamiskouaouangachit during the winter of 1637–38, the Jesuits instead intended to offer it to a man named Etinechkawat whom they destined “to be the foundation and base of the reduction of Saint Joseph.” An unimpressive orator according to his contemporaries, Etinechkawat was nevertheless held in high esteem and exerted considerable moral authority as “a Captain by descent” and as “a man of good sense, and courageous.” There was good reason to hope that his conversion and settlement would attract a much larger Innu and Algonquin population. However, even though Etinechkawat had shown a tentative interest in clearing a field at Trois Rivières in the spring of 1637, he persisted in disappointing the missionaries by resisting conversion and settlement. Thinking back on this time, he later explained to Le Jeune: “I was afraid my people would look upon me as a Frenchman, hence I did not wish to give up the customs of my nation to embrace those of yours.”14 Negabamat and Nenaskoumat were quicker to appreciate the opportunity presented by the missionaries. Thus it was that the two men, with their respective families, amounting to some twenty persons, arrived at Kamiskouaouangachit at the end of the winter hunt of 1638 to take up residence in the house that had been prepared with Etinechkawat in mind.15
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