A French Nun Reports a Huron Woman’s Views of the Jesuits, 1640
Jesuit missionaries and Ursuline nuns brought the Catholic faith to Indians in New France along with germs and guns. In this letter, the nun Marie de L’Incarnation writes to her superiors about the views expressed by an elderly and respected Huron woman. She conveys a report she heard about this woman, who told her village that the Jesuits, known as Black Robes, were destroying their communities. L’Incarnation summarizes and then analyzes the Huron woman’s speech.
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What is the Huron woman’s evidence of the Jesuits’ danger to her people? What are the sources, in her experience, of the Jesuits’ power to do harm? How does Marie de L’Incarnation interpret the message of this Huron woman? |
It’s the Black Robes who are making us die by their spells. Listen to me, I will prove it by reasons that you will recognize as true. They set themselves up in a village where everyone is feeling fine; no sooner are they there, but everyone dies except for three or four people. They move to another place, and the same thing happens. They visit cabins in other villages, and only those where they have not entered are exempt from death and illness. Don’t you see that when they move their lips in what they call prayer, spells are coming out of their mouths? It’s the same when they read their books. They have big pieces of wood [guns] in their cabins by which they make noise and send their magic everywhere. If they are not promptly put to death, they will end up ruining the country, and no one will be left, young or old. . . . When she stopped speaking, everyone agreed that this was true, . . . [and] it seemed true . . . , for wherever the [Jesuit] Fathers went, God permitted death to accompany them so as to render more pure the faith of those who converted. Source: Marie de L’Incarnation, Correspondance, ed. Dom Guy Oury (Abbaye de Saint-Pierre, 1971), trans. Natalie Zemon Davis, Women on the Margins: Three Seventeenth-Century Lives (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 111–12. |
Put It in Context
How might this account of a Huron woman’s perspective have been transformed in its retelling and translation? Despite these changes, what can it tell us about Huron interactions with Catholic priests and nuns in the early 1600s?
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