Though the Augustinian sisters never returned to Kamiskouaouangachit after 1644, the Algonquians resumed their orbit around the mission which continued to function as a hospital and hospice, and to serve their material, spiritual, residential, and defensive needs. That same year, the Jesuits had a more substantial chapel built of stone in their compound, which three years later was dedicated to Saint Michel, the archangel Michael. At least seven little houses in the French style were clustered around the Jesuit residence, and three around the former Augustinian residence which likely continued to be used by the neophytes until the end of the decade. As the war intensified, the missionaries would invest further in the site’s defensive structures, rebuilding a palisade around their compound, erecting a stone windmill overlooking it, and eventually a bastioned stone fort.47
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The link between leadership, kinship, political alliance, and conversion was a strong one. In their effort to communicate the meaning of their religion to their audience, missionaries employed indigenous terms for “leader” to designate the Christian God. In prayers composed by Le Jeune in the 1630s, he used the word “utkimau” (or utchimau, oukhiman, oukhimame), meaning “captain,” as the term of address for the divinity.48 The parallel conceptualization of God as a father, beyond expressing his divine primacy, pointed to the bonds of kinship which united all Christians. “Is it not true,” asked Le Jeune, rhetorically, to an Innu leader before the mission’s establishment, “that you cherish those of your own nation more than [you cherish] the Algonquins who are your allies? Monsieur the Governor does the same. All those who believe in God are of his nation; he holds and loves them as such.”49 Neophytes concurred. Their conception of the new religion built upon traditional senses of identity based on kinship. For individuals uprooted from different kin groups and nations as a result of the waves of epidemics and warfare of the late 1630s and 1640s, the new Christian beliefs and behaviours offered a basis for the preservation of old support networks and the construction of new ones, and furnished a vocabulary for the expression of feelings of unity, solidarity, and alliance.50
In their relations with their relatives, friends, and acquaintances in places such as Trois Rivières and Tadoussac, the people of Kamiskouaouangachit quickly took on the role of enthusiastic promoters of their new faith and of their new community. As soon as the mission’s residents had planted their fields in the spring of 1640, their leaders informed the missionaries that they were going to trade with the people of the Saguenay and to invite the “Captain of Tadoussac” and his people to embrace the faith and, they said, to resettle near them. The missionaries expressed astonishment at this, not having themselves suggested or heard any other colonists suggesting such proselytism.51 So as to make their invitation more persuasive, the neophytes amassed a large quantity of wampum – white and purple shell beads of great worth, either woven into symbolic belts or threaded on loose strings – to which the missionaries contributed a share. If the people of Tadoussac reacted positively to their invitation, they expected that they would go on to invite even more distant nations to do the same. “In order,” they declared, “that we may all have only one God, and one way of doing things.”52 Though the people of Kamiskouaouangachit may very well have hoped to convince others to reside among them, given the pressures that this would have placed on the local resources it seems more plausible that their intention was to further their community’s standing as a diplomatic and ritual center. The hereditary chief of the Innu of Tadoussac, Neapmat alias Etouet, responded by requesting that a priest be sent to them. Consequently, Le Jeune carried out the first baptisms there in 1641.53 In an effort to encourage resettlement, the Augustinians donated some buildings near theirs for the express purpose of housing the Innu of Tadoussac.54 While it is unclear whether or not this measure prompted the relocation of any of the latter, it is apparent that in the decade that followed the Innu came to recognize the mission’s residents’ privileged access to the French and to the Christian God. During the winter of 1647–48, in a move that illustrated the bonds between the two communities, it is said that Etouet “gave the district most abounding in game” in his parts to Tekouerimat.55
Figure 2.2 Kamiskouaouangachit (Sillery) as depicted by the engineer Robert de Villeneuve, ca. 1685–86. The fort and chapel (7, 8) are visible, as is the former Augustinian hospital (9), and the windmill. The structures persisted but the mission community itself was by this late date located on a site above the bluff (10). (BNF, Département des cartes et plans, GE SH 18 PF 127 DIV 7 P 4, “Carte des Environs de Québec,” 1685–1686)
While some neophytes from Kamiskouaouangachit travelled to Tadoussac that summer of 1640, others went to Trois Rivières. They included Etinechkawat, who preached along the same lines: “We shall be very soon relatives indeed,” he declared to the Attikameks at Trois Rivières, with whom he happened to be related, exhorting them to conversion. “My true relatives are those who believe in God, and who are baptized, for I shall be eternally with them. We have only one Father, who is God; since you desire to know him, you will very soon be among my relations. The kinship that we have according to the flesh, is a trifling matter: you must be baptized, to be my true relative.”56 Two years later Etinechkawat again preached to Attikameks at Trois Rivières, inviting their captain, with gifts, to come and see Kamiskouaouangachit and the clearings that had been prepared for them. At Etinechkawat’s urging, they spent the winter there, provisioned with maize and eels by the neophyte community, acquiring religious instruction from the missionaries.57
The Saint Lawrence valley Algonquians’ network of allies stretched even farther to the west and south. Arriving in the early years of the century, the French had witnessed first-hand the long-standing alignment of the Innu, Algonquins, and Wendats against their common foe, the Iroquois. The French settlement at Quebec furthered the bonds of friendship and alliance between these groups, as an increasing number of Wendats canoed down the Ottawa River and the Saint Lawrence to trade.58 For Wendats interested in strengthening their ties to the French and neophytes, Kamiskouaouangachit became, in the 1640s, an obvious site of instruction and fraternization. A Wendat presence can be observed in the mission’s registers as early as June 1641, when Jesuit Father Barthélemy Vimont baptized a man named Charles Tsondatsaa, with Governor Montmagny himself serving as godfather; two other Wendats who spent the following winter at the mission also were baptized there in the following spring. A handful of others were baptized that year and the next, including one identified as being from the Attignehongneac village of Taenhatentaron and another from the Attignawantan village of Arente. Though the Jesuits, for want of means to support them, were not as of yet inclined to encourage these visitors to remain at the mission for good, they hoped to form a cadre of young Wendat men who could assist their missionary endeavours in Huronia.59
This strengthening of ties had an undeniable strategic dimension. Charles Tsondatsaa became the first Wendat to receive a gun, presented to him by Governor Montmagny upon his baptism with the explicit advice that he should use it to protect himself against the Iroquois. On this occasion, the governor proclaimed his willingness to extend his protection to those Wendats who were willing to declare themselves Christians, implying thereby that he would not be extending it to non-Christians. The captain of the “Christians of Saint-Joseph,” most likely Jean-Baptiste Etinechkawat, or perhaps Tekouerimat, made a declaration of his own to the newly baptized Tsondatsa: “You cannot imagine the joy of our hearts in seeing that you have adopted our belief, and have chosen this little church in which to be made our brother. […] we have henceforth but one Father, who is God, and but one common Mother, which is the Church; […] your friends are their [our] friends, and […] your enemies are their [our] enemies.” As Montmagny had given the convert an arquebus, the people of Kamiskouaouangachit presented him with gunpowder to use with it.60
The Innu and Algonquins of the Saint Lawrence also cultivated a relationship with the Algonquians wh
o inhabited the lands to the south and east, most notably with the Wabanakis of the Kennebec and Penobscot Rivers, in what the French then called Acadia and what is today New England. Algonquians all, they shared a similar set of social structures, subsistence and residence patterns, beliefs and customs; they spoke languages that, though not mutually intelligible, were sufficiently related that individuals from one group could achieve with relative ease some degree of understanding of the other’s tongue. The range of their hunting grounds overlapped in the woodlands of the south shore of the Saint Lawrence, and it was not uncommon for bands from the two regions to hunt together and intermarry. It is likely that these interactions became more frequent as hunting patterns shifted to accommodate trade with the Europeans on the Atlantic coast, with Wabanakis ranging increasingly far to the north in search of coveted beaver pelts. The Saint Lawrence Algonquians were also united with the peoples of Acadia by a common enmity towards the Iroquois. Periodically, small groups of men from the Kennebec came down the Chaudière and Saint Lawrence Rivers towards the vicinity of Trois Rivières “to help their allies in their wars.”61
Interaction among the peoples who orbited around Kamiskouaouangachit, including occasional intermarriage, allowed the Jesuits to hope that the mission would in no time be “inhabited by Abnaquiois.”62 For the leading neophytes there, religion joined trade goods as part of a new symbolic vocabulary by which intertribal relations could be negotiated. The murder of Makheabichtichiou, that onetime promoter of settlement who had abandoned the mission community for Wabanaki country as a result of his opposition to the enforcement of Christian monogamy, paradoxically contributed to the consolidation of bonds between this distant population and the neophytes. When two Wabanaki ambassadors came to Kamiskouaouangachit to make amends for the murder committed by one of their inebriated countrymen, Etinechkawat and Tekouerimat intervened as mediators to mollify the angry relatives of the deceased who lived at Trois Rivières, taking the opportunity to renew the peace between their people and the visitors. One of the principal neophytes, plausibly Tekouerimat, stated the conditions under which this peace might be further strengthened: “If you wish to bind our two nations by a perfect friendship, it is necessary that we should all believe the same: have yourself baptized, and cause your people to do likewise; that bond will be stronger than any gifts. We pray to God, and know no other friends or brothers than those who pray like us.”63 Etinechkawat, pressed by a Wabanaki captain who wished to marry one of his young relatives, refused to allow the union until the man had received instruction and been baptized. On many occasions like this one, the prospect of matrimonial unions with outsiders provided leading neophytes with opportunities to extend their network and to police its boundaries.64
The complaints of the French Capuchin missionaries in Acadia, who worried about the effects that Jesuit competition might have on their own endeavors, coupled with the misgivings of Governor Montmagny, who saw Wabanaki visitors as commercial interlopers who would drain valuable furs away from the Saint Lawrence valley, proved to be major hindrances to the rapprochement. Still, a handful of Innu, Algonquin, and Wabanaki leaders, notably Tekouerimat, persisted in their efforts to cultivate an alliance between their peoples by visiting each other’s villages through the 1640s and early 1650s.65 Making friends and brothers had always been of importance, but in the context of the Iroquois’s intensifying offensive it took on an even more vital character.
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The fluidity of movement of Algonquian populations, and the significance of leadership and war among the contingencies of settlement, are well illustrated by the case of Tessouat and his people. Over the years, the French became acquainted with a succession of men who under that name succeeded each other as hereditary chiefs of the Kichesipirini or “Captain of the Island” (Allumette Island, on the Ottawa River). Champlain met the first Tessouat at the great tabagie, or feast, held at Tadoussac in 1603, and saw him again on several occasions over the next decade. As chief of the Kichesipirinis and main spokesman for them, he may very well have been the person who in 1613 explained to the French explorer that his people had been forced to withdraw up the Ottawa River because “the roughness of the region served as a bulwark against their enemies,” and who declared that they would gladly come live near the French if they followed through with their plan of building an outpost on the Island of Montreal, “feeling assured that their enemies would do them no harm.”66 The evidence makes it impossible to say whether the Tessouat who died within months of Champlain’s death in 1636 was this same man or a successor; by the early 1640s, another man had succeeded to the name and leadership of the Kichesipirini. The Tessouat dynasty was known to restrict passage up the Ottawa River, across their territory, and thereby access to Huronia. But while Champlain had nonetheless regarded the first bearer of the name as an unusually wise and kind man, subsequent individuals with this name acquired among the French and their allies a reputation as arrogant and mean-spirited troublemakers.67
At least two groups of Kichesipirini had been attracted to Kamiskouaouangachit after the foundation of a mission there: some thirty persons who arrived in the spring of 1640, and an unknown number who arrived in the fall of 1641. The first group confessed to the missionaries that while they were relatives of the latest Tessouat, they were not very fond of him. Yet this Tessouat was himself among the second group of Kichesipirini who travelled to Kamikouaouangachit. He and his followers had come to explore the possibility of wintering at the mission where some of their relatives had been spending time. They were well received by the neophytes, in keeping with Indigenous traditions of hospitality, but before long Tessouat began to pick at the emergent community’s foundations.68
Though he proclaimed that he and his people desired to “bring about a closer union” between themselves and the Christians of Kamiskouaouangachit, and agreed that it was fitting “that they should all live together,” Tessouat made a case for settling somewhere far from Quebec.69 This was a signal challenge to the leadership of Etinechkawat and Tekouerimat. Discovering that his idea failed to find much appeal among the followers of the two men, who were both invested in the embryonic mission settlement, Tessouat and his people fell back on Trois Rivières for the winter. When, in the spring of 1642, these Kichesipirini relayed a new invitation to the people of Kamiskouaouangachit, this time to accompany them on an expedition against the Iroquois, most of the neophyte warriors refused. Tessouat’s people were officially rebuffed by Etinechkawat who, responding on behalf of the community, declared that, “your argument is not properly stated; you have inverted your words. You say ‘Let us go to war, and then we will be baptized.’ Reverse your language, and say ‘Let us be baptized, and then let us all go together to war.’”70
Now orbiting around Trois Rivières and the Jesuit residence of La Conception, Tessouat and his nephew Oumastikouei (The Toad) confirmed their reputation as troublemakers, in constant conflict not only with the local missionaries but also with Pieskaret, another Kichesipirini who had by this time emerged as the leader of the local Christian community.71 The foundation of Ville Marie (later to be known as Montreal) that same year, in 1642, provided Tessouat with an opportunity to consolidate his dwindling sphere of influence. The Island of Montreal, which occupied a key position within the world of the Algonquins of the Ottawa River, was closer than Kamiskouaouangachit to what Tessouat and his followers had in mind as a proper village site. As indicated in the previous chapter, the Kichesipirini believed that they had “in earlier times cleared the land, and had a settlement near this mountain [Mont-Royal]” which they had been forced to abandon “as they were too often molested by their enemies.” The Onontchataronon’s ancestors were similarly said to have inhabited the island in former times. Algonquins still referred to the Island of Montreal as Minitik outen entagougiban, “the Island where there was a village.” Some of the elderly recalled that their grandparents’ generation had grown corn there and had passed down a knowledge of the spots on the isla
nd where the good exposure to sunlight and rich soil had made horticulture most viable.72
Discovering this interest, the Jesuit missionaries did not hesitate to urge them to “return to their country,” that is, the Island of Montreal, informing them of the plans of the French to send people to succor them and promising to give them assistance to build their houses and till the soil.73 The missionaries’ ambition was validated by Algonquins who passed through the region to exploit its abundant game or on their way to war, and who, in keeping with what Champlain’s Kichesipirini interlocutors had intimated several decades earlier, suggested that “they would have settled there, long ago and in great number, if they had had there, as at present, a place of refuge against the Iroquois.”74 There was no doubt in the minds of the Jesuits, nor of the devout secular administrators of Ville Marie, who hoped to recreate through evangelization the purity of the primitive church, that the island and its vicinity would in time be home to a diversity of “Algonquins, as much those of the Island as of the Petite Nation, the Onontchataronon, and many others who are in those quarters, some Hurons, and even also some Iroquois.”75 However, it seemed likely that there would never be a large number,“until either the Iroquois are subjugated, or we make peace with them,” as these foes had caused for the time being “too much terror” to the potential neophytes and villagers.76
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