This particular identity came to matter because of the way in which war came to divide the allies of the French and the Five Nations. At the same time that the peace settlement of 1667 initiated an important population movement from Iroquoia to the mission settlements of the Saint Lawrence River, it also ushered in a wave of French expansion to the pays d’en haut (upcountry, literally) of the Great Lakes and beyond. Colonial outposts multiplied in the interior under the governorship of Frontenac, as traders, officers, and missionaries strengthened old commercial partnerships and political alliances with the Tionnontaté Wendats, Odawas, and Ojibwas, and extended new ones to the Potawatomies, Menominies, Miamis, Mascoutens, Kickapoos, Illinois, and others. In the spring, Odawa canoes laden with furs sometimes stopped at Kahnawake before pursuing on to Montreal.8 The Odawa’s neighbours, the Tionnontaté Wendats who had remained in the Great Lakes through the years of dispersal, and now settled at Michilimackinac and accepted among them a Jesuit missionary, also created opportunities for diplomacy and trade for the inhabitants of the missions of the Saint Lawrence valley. As mentioned in the previous chapter, some of these Tionnontaté Wendats visited Quebec (and presumably Notre Dame de Foy) in 1670 or 1671, and some Wendats from Notre Dame de Foy visited Michilimackinac in 1672. Reference to Louis Thaondechoren’s journey from Lorette to the Island of Montreal in 1676 to meet with “his countrymen, who had come to Montreal to trade,” also seems to imply such intercourse.9 The colony’s judicial archives further document the case of three Wendats from Kanehsatake, Louis Ouacouts alias Le Boiteux (the Lame One), Jean Gatessa, and Denis Oukwouté, who in 1682 accepted goods and cash worth 3304 livres from a Montreal merchant to buy beaver pelts at Michilimackinac, partnering for the occasion with Marie-Félix Arontio, one of the few Wendats of Lorette to marry a Frenchman, whom the Jesuits asked to serve as a courier for them.10 The relative rarity of such references to residents of the missions in the abundant records of French expansion across the pays d’en haut, however, demonstrates that on the whole they played only a minor part in this westward thrust. Yet they could not help but being embroiled in the conflict that this push westward brought about as, through the late 1670s and early 1680s, the willingness of French traders to supply the nations of the interior with firearms and promote their coalition became cause for alarm among their traditional western Iroquois enemies – the Senecas, in particular, who began to threaten and strike, prompting French campaigns of retaliation.11
The people of Kahnawake and Kanehsatake would confront the Iroquois of the League, both as diplomats and as warriors. In 1684 and 1687, they set out against the Senecas; in 1693, they struck in Mohawk country, and in 1696 against the villages of the Onondagas and Oneidas. “Who would have ever believed,” marvelled the Jesuit Claude Chauchetière, “that faith and religion would have united them so thoroughly with the French as to make them take up arms against the Iroquois […,] their own nation”?12 Turning the question on its head, modern scholars have tended to minimize the involvement of the mission villagers in this conflict, arguing that they resisted French calls to arms, taking part only reluctantly in joint military efforts and going out of their way to avoid actual combat.13 The evidence does not comfortably support this interpretation: during the final two decades of the seventeenth century, Iroquois did fight, kill, and capture other Iroquois. To be sure, some of mission villagers did resist – a number of warriors chose to sit out campaigns, and some families returned to Iroquoia – and in matters of strategy and tactics their war chiefs often deviated from the governor’s will. However, collectively they stood out as staunch allies of the French. The why lies not merely in the strength of their religious commitment, as Chauchetière and other missionary chroniclers may have liked to think, but in the specificity of their identities and relationships. The first phase of the war did pit Iroquois against Iroquois on some level, but not on the level that mattered most. As with the Wendat-Iroquois conflict described in previous chapters, patterns of migration and kinship played a fundamental role in shaping patterns of war and peace making: the fact that Kahnawake and Kanehsatake were populated mainly by migrants from Mohawk, Oneida, and Onondaga villages made war against the Senecas possible during the 1680s; only at the turn of the 1690s, as the war evolved into an altogether new phase, would they feel compelled to take up arms against people whom they deemed to be friends and relatives.
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The fact that the inhabitants of Kahnawake and Kanehsatake retained strong cultural ties and kinship bonds with the “Infidel Iroquois” of the Five Nations, even as they cultivated a distinct religious and political identity which drew them closer to the French, made them a target of suspicion in this increasingly tense period. Governor Frontenac and his clique, whose dislike of the Jesuits extended to their missions and residents, were characteristically captious. The Kahnawakes were alarmed, circa 1679, by rumours that officials wished to hold their captain – Togouirout, it is most likely, or perhaps Tonsahoten – accountable for the insolence of the League Iroquois and to imprison him for his role in “complicating affairs.”14 Although the Jesuits shared many of the governor’s reservations about the Iroquois of the League, they could not disagree more when it came to their wards in the mission settlements. In these increasingly troubled times they grew convinced that their missions played a crucial strategic role. “Those barbarians,” Father Thierry Beschefer, superior of the Jesuit mission at Quebec, wrote of the Five Nations, “have often resolved to wage war against the French, but they have always been checked by those whose kindred were at the Sault.” The Mohawks, in particular, had continually refused to give their consent to such a war because their “nephews and children” lived among the French.15 The view appears to have been shared by the principal officers and merchants of the colony, and Governor Joseph-Antoine Le Febvre de La Barre, who succeeded Frontenac in the fall of 1682, was quick to espouse it. Writing to the Secretary of State for the Navy within a little over a month after his arrival, he explained that Kahnawake in particular was “one of the things that will most engage the Iroquois to make peace with us.” He knew rather little about this mission as of yet – as betrayed by the fact that he mistakenly referred to it as the “mission iroquoise du saut de Sainte Marie” – but he had absorbed the belief that its development had all but depopulated Mohawk country and that, because all four eastern nations of the League had relatives there, they could be easily “adjusted” and isolated from the westernmost Senecas.16
In response to the disappointments of francization and to the arguments that the Jesuits and their supporter Intendant Duchesneau had been mustering in their effort to obtain a royal confirmation of the allotment of land for the mission at the rapids, the court’s optics on the mission settlements had been shifting. The wording of Louis XIV’s grant for the land of Sault Saint Louis, when it was at last issued in 1680, indeed echoed the belief that it was necessary “to retain the Iroquois, even to increase their number and extend by this means the lights of faith and the gospel.”17 In 1681, Duchesneau asked the king’s minister Colbert that funds be allocated to provide presents to the inhabitants of the mission settlements to attract an even greater number of people there. He made a strong case for the economic importance of the missions, beyond whatever merits they might have in terms of religion. The Iroquois needed to be maintained in the colony’s orbit because they served as crucial suppliers of furs. They also needed to be allowed to retain their traditional clothes and diet, he went as far as to argue, “so that they would not become effeminate and they would be fitter and less constrained for the hunt, which makes their wealth and ours.”18
To be sure, officials did not completely disavow the ideal of francization. Although Duchesneau and others were willing to give Indigenous men some leeway as hunters and warriors, they continued to believe that women could and should be integrated into colonial society, at least on a small scale – overlooking the way in which it was female work that transformed dead animals into commodified pelts
. In that same letter to Colbert, the intendant asked for funds for the girls who left the care of the Ursulines upon reaching adulthood, a suggestion which led Louis XIV to establish the following year the “king’s gift,” an endowment with which to furnish a dowry of fifty livres to every Indigenous girl who married a Frenchman. This measure failed to make any impact. Pointing out that “there is hardly one or two who marry each year,” Duchesneau’s successor, Jacques De Meulles, proposed that it might be more appropriate to give these girls a pig, some wheat, and hemp seeds as dowry instead of money; La Barre, for his part, advised that the funds should simply be repurposed to provide dowries to French girls. De Meulles, visibly unimpressed by the fact that those few girls taken in by the Ursulines over the years learnt only to pray and speak French, also proposed the creation of a “manufacture for Native girls” where they might instead acquire skills like spinning, sewing and knitting, caring for cattle, and milking cows. Such practical skills, he reasoned, would make a greater contribution to the colonial economy and eventually rub off on the girls’ Indigenous husbands. But the idea was fleeting, and nothing came of it.19
Among those who held on the longest to the ideal of francization were the Sulpicians, and particularly François de Vachon de Belmont, who succeeded Guillaume Bailly as director of the missions at Kanehsatake (La Montagne) in 1680. He believed that the Jesuits were far too indulgent in their approach to the missions – that they sought to maintain the neophytes “in Native coarseness” (“grossièreté sauvage”) – and they conversely thought of him as a bothersome dilettante. His administration of the mission on the mountain slope was idiosyncratic, in keeping with the relative independence which governed the relationship of Sulpician priests to the seminaries of Montreal and of Paris, and he drew on his considerable family fortune in an effort to carry out his vision there. Forming its children into two classes, Belmont endeavoured to teach them not only the fundamentals of religion, but to sing mass in Latin, and to speak, read, and write in French; while the boys received additional training in the rudiments of drawing, woodturning, tailoring, and shoemaking, the girls, under the care of two sisters of the Congrégation de Notre Dame (a religious community of French women based in Montreal, not to be confused with the lay confraternity of the same name that had been established among the Wendats), were taught sewing and other skills deemed proper for their sex. Exceptionally, two young women joined the Congrégation de Notre Dame, Marie-Barbe Atontinon in 1679 and Marie-Thérèse Gannensagouas shortly thereafter. Although they served as teachers at the mission, Belmont’s ambitious educational program appears to have held little appeal for Kanehsatake’s residents or, indeed, made little lasting impact on them.20
Exasperated by the disruptions that liquor was causing at Kanehsatake in spite of his best efforts, even Vachon de Belmont ultimately grew adamant and began advocating that, while the people of his mission might yet be civilized in time through the schooling of their youth, a safe segregation should be maintained between neophytes and settlers.21 “For a long time, it was believed that settling the Natives near our dwellings was a good means of accustoming them to living like us and learning our religion,” wrote Governor Jacques-René de Brisay de Denonville to Colbert de Seignelay in 1685, upon arriving in the colony to replace La Barre. “I realize, Monseigneur, that the very opposite has happened for, instead of growing accustomed to our laws, […] they have communicated to us everything that is wicked about them, and […] they have likewise taken on only what is most wicked and vicious in us.” In light of the Saint Lawrence valley’s mission settlements’ political and military value in a context of renewed war, he nonetheless announced himself eager to support them and to further the eventual formation of new ones.22
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Colonial officials’ beliefs were not unwarranted for, as “Iroquois” aligned with the French, the people of Kahnawake and Kanehsatake were indeed perfectly placed to mediate relations. When an expected Seneca embassy failed to show up at Montreal in December of 1682, four of Kahnawake’s principal chiefs and Kanehsatake’s head chief journeyed with the fur trader and interpreter Charles Le Moyne (known among the Iroquois as Akouessan, the Partridge) to insist that they send a delegation so that the newly arrived La Barre might resume the discussions initiated by his predecessor. Threatened upon their arrival in Seneca country, these emissaries nevertheless proved persuasive, for a Seneca embassy reached Montreal in July, followed by delegates from the other four nations that August. During the Franco-Iroquois councils that ensued, the deputies from Kahnawake and Kanehsatake continued to lend their support to the French position. From the governor’s perspective, they had “done their duty very well.”23 Visiting Kahnawake for the first time in the summer of 1683, he found “much goodwill” among its inhabitants. The chiefs enthusiastically pledged that their village would supply 150 warriors in case of war, even against the Iroquois of the League if the latter were so bold as to break their peace with the French.24
Reports that the Senecas had resumed their raids against the Illinois and Miamis, and, in early 1684, the news that they had dared to attack the French outpost of Fort Saint Louis in the Illinois country, determined the governor to go to war against the offending nation.25 Sometime in late spring or early summer of 1684, La Barre’s decision was announced at Kahnawake. Three courses of action, presented by the missionaries and digested by the community’s leaders, were discussed in council: the villagers could return to Iroquoia from whence they had come; they could remain in the mission settlement without taking any action; or they could accompany the French to war. The Kahnawakes are reported to have found the first two alternatives unsatisfactory: to leave their village would mean abandoning the Christian faith (and, if we push beyond the missionary’s reporting biases, abandoning expanded hunting grounds and networks of trade and alliance); and to remain there without taking part in operations would, by provoking French mistrust, similarly undermine the community’s relations with its colonial neighbours. The people of Kahnawake instead concluded that “having but one and the same faith with the French, they should also to run the same risks together.”26
For Chauchetière, there was no doubt that it was “Faith and religion” that “had so thoroughly united them with the French as to cause them to take arms against the Iroquois and their own nation.”27 Indeed, the inhabitants of the two mission settlements had developed over the previous decade and a half a vibrant religious and political identity distinct from that of the Five Nations – they viewed themselves as Christians and allies of the French. To be sure, the boundary between traditional and missionary teachings was fluid; notwithstanding the tendency of Jesuit and Sulpician chroniclers to portray the Christian Iroquois as having thoroughly rejected ancient practices to embrace the new religion, a great religious eclecticism characterized life in the mission. Though baptism served as a crucial initiation ceremony, an apparent requirement for full membership in the community, not everyone living in the villages was baptized. And even among the baptized, some of whom were long-term inhabitants of the villages, a number of traditional shamanic practices persisted – offerings to the sun and dream divination, for example – and were adapted to the new context. Christianity had nevertheless emerged as a fundamental constituent of individual and collective identity for the people of the two mission settlements, a crucial means of understanding and negotiating internal and external relationships.28
The Garihwioston of Kahnawake and Kanehsatake, like the inhabitants of other mission settlements, valued the rituals and symbols of the new religion for their sacred qualities, as ways of accessing the divine, as a means of sharing in the source of French power, and of counteracting some of the divisive trends that now seemed to characterize society in Iroquoia. Crucially, the vocabulary of the new religion provided the social and cultural cement which generated a sense of shared belonging within the mission settlements and allowed the formation of cohesive communities out of culturally heterogeneous fragments. Through sali
ent gestures and symbols, the Kahnawakes and Kanehsatakes set themselves apart from – and above, some of them believed – the people of Iroquoia. Common observances gave rhythm to the day and to the year, as men and women came together for the recitation of prayers, for mass – attended by almost all on Sunday and feast days, and by a substantial number on other days of the week – and for the celebration of baptisms, weddings, and funerals. Rituals of collective and individual penance, both public and private, were observed. Crucifixes and rosaries were worn as a means of accessing the sacred and as markers of affiliation. Even though the absolute temperance that had characterized Kentake’s first decade was breaking down by the early 1680s as a result of colonists dabbling in the brandy trade, a formal prohibition persisted and its ideal remained very much alive. Traditional religious customs and liberal sexual practices, categorized as sinful by French missionaries and Indigenous proselytes, were similarly rejected.29
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