The arrival of Jesuit missionaries further exposed the cultural differences between Indians and Europeans in New France. In Document 2.1, an elder Huron woman advises her village to reject the Jesuits’ preaching and suggests that the Black Robes, as the missionaries were called, be put to death. Although her sentiments were relayed by a third party to a French nun, Marie de L’Incarnation, who then quoted them in a letter sent to France, they seem to accurately reflect the views of many Indians in New France. Document 2.2 indicates that, despite Indian resistance, French Jesuits continued to proselytize in New France. In 1656 Father Pierre Chaumont spoke to a group of Iroquois assembled on the shores of Lake Onondaga. Like many Jesuits, he had learned several Indian languages and spoke to the assembled Iroquois in their own language.
| 2.1 | Statement from a Huron Woman, 1640 |
It is the Black Robes that make us die by their spells. Harken to me. I am proving it by arguments you will know to be true. They lodged in a certain village where everyone was well. As soon as they were established there, everyone was dead except for three or four persons. They went elsewhere and the same thing happened. They visited the cabins in other villages and only those they did not enter were free of mortality and sickness. Do you not see that when they move their lips—what they call prayers—those are spells that come from their mouths? It is the same way when they read in their books. Besides, in their cabins they have big pieces of wood [those are guns] with which they make a great noise and spread their magic everywhere. If they are not promptly put to death, they will finally ruin the country so that neither small nor great will remain.
Source: Joyce Marshall, ed. and trans., Word from New France: The Selected Letters of Marie de L’Incarnation (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1967), 82.
| 2.2 | Father Pierre Chaumont | Speech to the Iroquois, 1656 |
For the Faith, we have departed from our country; for the Faith, we have abandoned our relatives and our friends; for the Faith, we have crossed the Ocean; for the Faith, we have left behind the great ships of the French to set off on your small canoes; for the Faith, we have relinquished our fine houses to live in your bark cabins; for the Faith, we have deprived ourselves of our natural nourishment and the delicious foods that we could have enjoyed in France to eat your boiled meal and your other victuals, which the animals of our country would hardly touch.
Source: Natalie Zemon Davis, Women on the Margins: Three Seventeenth Century Lives (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 94.
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