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Sam W. McKegney
Second-hand Shaman: Imag(in)ing Indigeneity
from Le Jeune to Pratt, Moore and Beresford
ABSTRACT
This paper argues that Le Jeune strategically employs images of Natives within his Jesuit
Relations to navigate conditions of extremity in 1630s Quebec, and that the appropriation
of these images by later artists, intent on historical “accuracy” yet blind to the politics of Le
Jeune’s discourse, ultimately contributes to the semiotic misunderstanding of Native peoples
in this country.
Cet article montre Le Jeune utilise des images d’autochtones de façon
stratégique dans Les relations jésuites afin de présenter des conditions extrêmes
dans le Québec des années 1630, et que l’appropriation ultérieure de ces images
par des artiistes voulant développer une “exactitude” historique ne prend pas en
compte la politique du discours de Le Jeune et contribue, en dernière instance, à
renforcer l’incompréhension sémiotique des autochtones dans ce pays.
“Seeing that [the Sorcerer] acted the Prophet, amusing these people by a
thousand absurdities, which he invented, in my opinion, every day, I did not
lose any opportunity of convincing him of their nonsense and childishness,
exposing the senselessness of his superstitions.”
Father Paul Le Jeune 1634
“A small figure which, at first, [Father] Laforgue took to be a child ... walked
around the clearing, peering at the faces of the women and children like an actor
taking his bow, but stopped abruptly when he reached Laforgue. His glittering
black eyes narrowed and blinked as though he faced a blinding light.”
Brian Moore 1985
In her study of Native womanhood entitled I am Woman, Lee Maracle fictionally
re-envisions an historical confrontation between a Jesuit missionary and a Native
Chief in which the Black Robe endeavours to obtain custody over the Chief ’s
daughter for the purposes of education and proselytization. In representing this
verbal exchange, Maracle emphasizes the importance of reverent listening to the
establishment of proper understanding in cross-cultural dialogue. She writes:
Black Robe seemed agitated. He spoke fast, and later the girl learned from her
father’s account to her mother that he never repeated his listeners’ words as we do
(very rude). She heard everything Black Robe said because her father spoke in the
old way. He was careful to repeat Black Robe’s words verbatim, to show respect
for the speaker’s vision of truth and to ensure that no misunderstanding or
distortion of his words occurred. (1996: 62)
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The scene creates an explicit contrast between the dialogic discursive strategies
employed by the indigenous speaker and the monologic strategies of his European
counterpart. While the indigenous speaker’s careful repetition of his adversary’s
words shows an effort to acknowledge both individuals’ status as active and equal
agents in the resulting verbal artefact of conversation, Black Robe’s failure to follow this Native custom betrays a lack of respect for the Chief ’s “vision of truth”
and reveals an unwillingness to recognize the Native Other as a speaking subject.
By refusing to allow the Chief ’s words to pass “verbatim” from his own lips, Black
Robe denigrates their importance and implies the ascendancy of his own discourse over that of the indigene.
Terry Goldie argues that with literature, media, television and film in Canada controlled predominantly by non-indigenous entities—a phenomenon even more acute
at the time his study Fear and Temptation was first published—the representations of
indigenous peoples most often encountered by Canadians are by necessity mediated by “white signmakers” (1989: 10). In effect they replace the Black Robe from
Maracle’s formulation, creating a “semiotic field” (9) whose “uniformity of...control”
and “power” are “ongoing” (6). Building on the foundation forged in Leslie
Monkman’s A Native Heritage (1981), Goldie catalogues the appearances of indigenous characters in Canadian writing to reveal the rigidity of the prescribed categories into which they are slotted by white writers.1 He argues that in white Canadian
literature indigenous characters are forced into a finite number of roles, which
tend to reinforce pervasive stereotypes—positive or negative—thereby augmenting white Canada’s profoundly oversimplified understanding of Native peoples
and their cultures. Due in part to the relative minority of Native peoples in Canada
and the presence of the reservation system, which conspire to limit non-indigenous Canadians’ personal interactions with Native peoples, the idea of the indigene fostered within white-mediated forums such as literature frequently precedes
actual encounter. Wih the extensiveness of white semiotic control, such divestiture
of autonomy within the image ultimately infects both the culture by which it is
created and that which it depicts. Denied the opportunity to participate in his or her
own discursive re-creation, the Native individual becomes victim of a crisis of
perception in which the idea of the indigene comes to mediate his or her social interactions; he or she comes to be measured in relation to a set of images that because
they are created externally from indigenous culture are inevitably reductive. Oppressed by the tyranny of the image, the indigene is forced to struggle for some
sense of authentic identity within a suffocating discursive arena constructed by a
culture and a power structure not his or her own. I wish to focus my attention on
the process by which such identity has been problematized by tracing one image
from one of the birth places of that discourse, The Jesuit Relations, through its
reiterations in the work of E. J. Pratt (1985), Brian Moore (1985), and Bruce
Beresford (1991).
Because The Relations in English have so pervasively influenced subsequent historical, literary and filmic accounts of early Native-White relations, they remain significant to an examination of the indigene’s place in the semiotic field of contemporary Canadian culture. Historians such as J. R. Miller (1996) and Bruce Trigger
(1991) have mined their pages for authoritative access to the past; filmmakers
such as Beresford have sought their insights to lend historical credibility to artistic
creations; and authors such as Pratt and Moore have gained from their vivid
accounts inspiration for literary masterpieces.2 Their lasting legacy in the work of
artists and critics has rendered The Relations enormously influential on the semiotic field in which the image of the indigene currently functions and has been
made to function over the past three and a half centuries. Because this semiotic
field and the conceptions it fosters ultimately influence how people interact with
their social world, The Relations continue to bear a vicarious effect on how Native
people are perceived by many in English Canada. By examining the letters of
Father Paul Le Jeune, Jesuit Superior in Quebec from 1632 to 1639, I intend to
expose his employment of certain strategies outlined by Goldie for containing the
indigene in the realm of the image. By analyzing the letters not simply as historical
artefacts, but as literary creations structured to elicit desired responses from an
identified target audience, I will attempt to articulate their historical specificity,
suggesting that while they form part of an historical continuum of white representations of Native peoples, they also represent a unique historical moment whose
complex circumstances must be interrogated to yield a viable understanding of
their importance. The purposes of this paper are thus twofold: first, to show Le
Jeune’s strategies for figuring the indigene in his correspondence, and second, to
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Composed by Jesuit missionaries in New France between 1611 and 1791, The
Relations constitute an immense corpus of correspondence detailing the state of
the mission and documenting Native cultural practices for clerical superiors back
in France. Serving both narrative and didactic functions, these letters not only
report events occurring in New France, but also engage in doctrinal debate in
attempts to “gain points against [the Jesuits’] critics” (Blackburn 2000: 7). John
Webster Grant further indicates that among The Relations’ primary functions was
“to stimulate interest in the missions, above all among potential donors” (1989: 31)
and for this reason they were published in France until 1673. The Relations provide
one of the first sustained semi-ethnographic accounts of Native customs in what
would become the provinces of Quebec and Ontario, and in the Maritimes and as
such, provide a valuable—albeit one-sided—resource for researchers of Canada’s
First Peoples. In the 1890s this resource became more widely accessible due to the
publication of The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents under the editorship of Reuben
Gold Thwaites. Although over a century old, Thwaites’s seventy-three volume compilation remains the primary means by which English readers gain access to The
Relations and it is this translation upon which I will base my discussion of The
Relations’ legacy.
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show how these strategies have persisted illegitimately within the semiotic field in
which the indigene functions.
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In his examination of the paradoxically simultaneous attraction and revulsion toward the Other that dominates twentieth-century Canadian writing on Natives,3
Goldie identifies certain strategies for what he calls “indigenization” (1989: 13).
He defines this as the process of manufacturing one’s claim to indigenousness
through the invitation of the indigenous Other into the colonial self while maintaining the ineffable cultural superiority of that colonial self. Although theorized in
relation to a different epoch, these strategies provide an intriguing critical lens
through which to explore Le Jeune’s Jesuit correspondence. Le Jeune’s letters exhibit a similar desire to view Native peoples as at once self and Other, but one
which is predicated on the acquisition of indigenous souls, rather than the authentic ownership of land. Because the Jesuits’ proselytizing endeavour in New France
depended on the belief that Native peoples had souls that could be won over to the
Catholic faith, Le Jeune and his brethren had to conceive of a fundamental affinity
between themselves and the indigenous population they sought to convert, an
affinity endorsed—at least in theory—by the theological body of which they formed
an active limb. In a Pastorale Officium dated May 29, 1537, Pope Paul III declared
it “‘heresy to say that [the Natives] were irrational and incapable of conversion’”
(qtd. in Petrone 1990: 1). Le Jeune repeatedly reinforces this sentiment in his
letters, arguing “the mind of the Indian, it is of good quality,... Education and
instruction alone are lacking” (qtd. in Greer 2000: 33); and that the Natives “are
not so barbarous that they cannot be made children of God” (qtd. in Miller 1996:
40). At the same time, however, in his efforts to promote ideals of European
civility among the “savages,” Le Jeune betrays covert assumptions about Native
inferiority and Otherness.
Father Laforgue (Lothaire Bluteau) instructs Montagnais Chief Chomina (August Schellenberg)
regarding the magic of the written word.
Le Jeune’s relationship with his superiors in France is one of complex co-dependence fostered by two factors: the obligatory subservience of Jesuits, the most rigidly hierarchical sect of an already hierarchical religious body, and the extremity
of New France’s social environment. In accordance with the papal bull that confirmed the institution of the Jesuit order in 1540, Le Jeune and his brethren were
required to vow absolute obedience to the Pope, which in turn required the obedience of each Jesuit to his immediate superior who served as a conduit to His
Holiness (Mealing 1963: vii). As Jesuit Superior in New France, Le Jeune bore—
at least in theory—absolute authority over the Fathers in his charge and yet remained completely subordinate to his own Father Provincial Barthelamy Jacquinot
back in France, to whom his relations are addressed and to whom he looked for
the adjudication of Jesuit policy. Le Jeune remained absolutely dependent on
Jacquinot and other Church authorities for all official decisions concerning the
mission, a dependency exacerbated by the mission’s material and environmental
vulnerability. The Jesuits in New France relied on Old World authorities for the
farming implements, tools, trading goods, writing materials, and men who would
not only aid in their conversion of the Natives, but would also ensure their own
survival. In fact, the material concerns of the mission were deemed so crucial to
its success that they came to overshadow questions of theology in Le Jeune’s letters. In the epistolary account of his initial voyage to the New World, Le Jeune
gestures toward the subordination of religious concerns to material ones by detailing the interruption of his Pentecost day sermon by a cry of “Codfish! codfish!”
(Le Jeune 1963: 17). Without betraying a hint of resentment, Le Jeune recounts
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Le Jeune recognizes as a primary duty of his office the denigration of Native
culture, admitting that he “did not lose any opportunity of convincing [the ‘magician’] of the ... nonsense and childishness [of his beliefs], [and] exposing the senselessness of his superstitions” (Le Jeune 1963: 34), nor of “representing to [the
non-sedentary tribes] the wretchedness of their present way of life” (30). He refuses
to recognize the sophistication—or even the relevance—of pre-contact modes of
existence or theological systems, thereby betraying a hidden belief in the indigene’s
inherent cultural inferiority. The proselytizing mission undertaken by the Jesuits
thus requires a duplicity in its stance toward Native peoples who remain close
enough to the Jesuit self to be considered capable of redemption and yet fundamentally inferior due to the “wretchedness” of their culture. In attempting to negotiate this doubleness in his epistolary writing, Le Jeune employs certain rhetorical
strategies identified by Goldie for depicting the indigene as simultaneously self and
Other. However, I do not intend simply to slot Le Jeune’s correspondence into the
categories of white writing Goldie theorizes in order to reveal an unbroken historical continuum. By considering the power relations obtaining between Le Jeune and
his superiors in France, I suggest that Le Jeune’s representations of Native people
are the product of a precise historical instant during which the image of the indigene became a persuasive tool, wielded to convince those dictating policy in France
to follow courses of action deemed desirable by Le Jeune and his brethren within
the severe climate of New France. Le Jeune’s image of the indigene is peculiar to
his situation, and it will be seen that subsequent historical, literary and filmic applications of his work transplant methods of representing the indigene which become
historically inappropriate and contribute to the problematic nature of Native identity in contemporary society.
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the sailors’ abandonment of his preaching to the lure of fish lying vulnerable to
French poles and hooks; rather than chastising the fishermen for their neglect of
his divine tutelage, he merely comments that “[t]hese fresh supplies were very
welcome to us after such continuous storms” (17). Faced with the material deprivation of the journey, both sailors and Jesuits recognize the acquisition of fresh
food as a more urgent necessity than the preaching of the “Word of God.” In a
similar fashion, during a relation from 1634, only two years after his arrival in
New France, Le Jeune details for six pages the implements and personnel required
to make the mission self-sufficient before touching on the topic of conversion,
presumably the mission’s primary purpose. He speaks of “pork, butter, drinks and
flour,” of “cows” and “fruit trees,” “indian corn” and “peas,” of “barley” and of
“rye” before finally stating, “Let us come to the spiritual” (27). Le Jeune is acutely
aware that the needs of sustenance must be met before the project of proselytizing
the Natives can be successfully undertaken,4 and remains in constant contact with
his superiors in France, anxiously requesting supplies for the mission and awaiting
instruction on how to organize the proselytizing venture.
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Le Jeune’s subordination to Church authorities, however, was not so complete as
might be doctrinally implied. Unlike most of his superiors, Le Jeune had first hand
knowledge of the social and environmental climates of New France, the languages
and customs of the indigenous populations, and the primary needs of the mission,
rendering him clearly the best suited to dictate Jesuit policy. Le Jeune’s superiors in
France only gained access to this information—the information that would assist
in their administration of official decisions for the mission—through the representations offered in Le Jeune’s relations, causing an unavoidable tremor in the balance of power between Old and New World religious authorities. Because his
letters could re-create the circumstances in New France in a manner conducive to
the adoption of desired courses of action, Le Jeune was capable of influencing the
decision-making process and thereby gaining for himself remarkable discursive
power. Due to his obligation of deference, however, this power needed always to
be hidden within his letters. Hence, while Le Jeune argues forcefully for certain
policies he deems beneficial to the mission, he never fails to recuperate his impertinence into a discourse of subservience which explicitly acknowledges the power
of decision-making to lie beyond his grasp, such as in the persuasively stated: “Your
Reverence will weigh all these reasons, if you please.... I deem it best to do what I
am about to say” (24).
As Le Jeune recognized the need for his letters to be carefully conceived and
executed, his representations of the indigene became a covertly political bartering
tool within his persuasive rhetorical arsenal. In order to aid the success of the
mission, Le Jeune strategically depicted the indigene, whose soul remained the
mission’s professed object, as at once “Savage” and capable of redemption. If he
over-emphasized Native barbarity to a point where conversion seemed implausible, he risked having the mission recalled like that of the failed Récollets in 1629;
however, if he neglected to mention the Jesuits’ difficulties in achieving conversions by depicting the Natives as remarkably attracted to the authoritarian precepts of seventeenth-century Catholicism, he risked being disallowed the increments so desperately required for the mission’s survival. Le Jeune’s depictions of
Natives are thus strategically structured with the anticipated reactions of his intended audience in mind.
In his earliest account of the Natives, Le Jeune writes:
When I saw them enter our Captain’s room, where I happened to be, it seemed to
me that I was looking at those maskers who run about in France in Carnival time.
There were some whose noses were painted blue, the eyes, eyebrows, and cheeks
painted black, and the rest of the face red; and these colors are bright and shining
like those of our masks; others had black, red and blue stripes drawn from the ears
to the mouth. Still others were entirely black; except the upper part of the brow
and around the ears, and the end of the chin; so that it might have been truly
said of them that they were masquerading. There were some who had only one
black stripe, like a wide ribbon, drawn from one ear to the other, across the eyes,
and three little stripes on the cheeks. Their natural color is like that of those
French beggars who are half-roasted in the Sun, and I have no doubt that the
Savages would be very white if they were well covered. (17-18)
This identification does not seem entirely pervasive, however, and the exact analogies that Le Jeune uses are quite telling. He compares the indigene to a “French
beggar” and a masquerading carnival goer, thereby instituting distinctions that
seek to resurrect, to a certain degree, “the separation of belonging” between Jesuit
and indigene. Particularly given Le Jeune’s later identification of many of those
living in “wretched want” as “ruined people ... of evil lives” (Le Jeune 1963: 121),
it is clear that he sees a fundamental disparity between the “French beggar” and
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This introduction performs a variety of tasks for its author. It serves the strictly
narrative function of depicting for his addressee in France—whose only access to
indigenous peoples has presumably been through travel narratives and perhaps a
personal encounter with one of the handful of Native orphans sent by the Récollets
to be educated in France—the spectacle of the Native Other. Emphasizing their
novelty, Le Jeune vividly recounts the colours and shapes that adorn the Natives’
skin in an effort to whet his readers’ appetites for the exotic, thereby arousing their
curiosity and hopefully stimulating interest in the mission’s target population. Focusing his authorial energy on the external spectacle of the Natives, Le Jeune is
able to exploit the magnetism of extreme difference while subtly maintaining the
capacity for identification between his audience and his narrative subject. By situating exotic difference in the pigments applied to the Natives’ skin, Le Jeune implies
the possibility for such difference to be cleansed or removed; in fact, he claims that
if the Natives’ skin were not ornamented in paint nor continually exposed to the
sun it would be “very white” like that of the Frenchman. In order not only to
render the indigene comprehensible to an uninitiated audience, but also to suggest
a fundamental cross-cultural contiguity, Le Jeune employs a series of analogies to
French cultural commodities which serve to “erase th[e] separation of belonging”
(Goldie 1989: 12) between colonial subject and indigenous Other. Le Jeune’s depiction of the Natives as “masquerading” not only aligns them with French citizens
during “Carnival time,” but also configures their “[s]avage” difference as a façade;
they are playing the part of barbarians, adorning themselves in carnivalesque costumes which can ultimately be discarded to reveal a human soul akin to that of the
Frenchman underneath.
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his audience of clerical superiors, and of course the masquerading carnival goer
represents, at least in a Bakhtinian sense, an affront to the church order for which
that audience stands. Thus in the same moment that the indigene is explicitly
linked to the French subject, he or she is denied actual identification through the
precise choice of rhetorical representation employed by the author. In this way, Le
Jeune’s use of carnival makes a double move which ties it to Terry Eagleton’s
critique of Bakhtin. Eagleton argues that carnival cannot be truly revolutionary
because it recuperates transgressive activity into a policy endorsed by authority. It
is, after all, “a licensed affair in every sense, a permissible rupture of hegemony, a
contained popular blow-off as disturbing and relatively ineffectual as a revolutionary work of art” (1981: 148). Le Jeune’s depiction of carnivalesque Natives enacts
a similar move toward conciliation; it provocatively asserts that indigenous people
are like the French, but couches such commentary in images that can still be segregated as Not-self if necessary by both author and reader. Although the ominous
transgressive potential of the Native as carnivalesque Other is recuperated into a
dialogue on the uniformity of French and Native souls which seeks to exalt the
mission’s potential for success, Le Jeune never permits the depicted indigene to
attain absolute identification with the Jesuit self. Le Jeune thus skilfully represents
the Native as simultaneously self and Other, similar but not same, equivalent but
not identical; he creates an image of the indigene that makes the idea of conversion seem plausible but not easy and seeks to reassert the viability of the proselytizing endeavour.
In his relation of 1634 subtitled “On the Means of Converting the Savages” (1963:
29), Le Jeune demonstrates a quite different strategy for depicting the indigene as
both self and Other which he immediately subsumes into a dialogue designed to
provoke specific actions from his audience. Greatly concerned over the future of
the mission because of its failure at this point to win a significant number of souls,
Le Jeune structures his epistle to illustrate the mission’s proselytizing potential and
thereby to convince his superiors as well as potential financiers in France of the
efficacy of adopting somewhat expensive measures to ensure that potential is met.
Le Jeune intricately entwines a graphic and engaging narrative account of his
winter among the Montagnais in 1633-34 with well-argued recommendations for
future Jesuit policy in the New World. Unlike the sedentary Huron at whom the
main thrust of the mission had been directed, the Montagnais remained migratory
hunters which rendered them less accessible to Jesuit preaching, less given to the
rigid self-denial required of Catholic converts, and overall less easily converted. In
his relation of 1634 Le Jeune utilizes his experiences among the Montagnais to
call for a more elaborate and aggressive—not to mention expensive—Jesuit policy
that would target even nomadic tribes, stating “if I can draw any conclusion from
the things I see, it seems to me that not much ought to be hoped for from the
Savages as long as they are wanderers” (30). Not only does he call for two seminary
schools, one for boys to be constructed immediately and one for girls to be constructed at such a time as female teachers can be imported from France, but he
also recommends the supplying of all migratory Native Nations with the implements of farming as well as instruction in order to aid their transition to sedentary
existence and render them more accessible to religious instruction. These proposed endeavours would require the importation of huge numbers of workers and
supplies, which clearly makes Le Jeune anxious. In 1634 Le Jeune finds himself in
an extremely tenuous argumentative position: he needs to produce results that will
convince his superiors of the mission’s viability in order to make them willing to
risk investing more resources in the endeavour, but he needs more resources in
order to produce such results; he needs converts in order to attain the mechanisms of conversion.
Seemingly appropriate to the exploits of a religious sect calling themselves soldiers
of Christ, such militaristic metaphors polarize the opposition between Shaman
and Jesuit and between the religious systems for which they stand. Le Jeune’s
lengthy account of why he and the sorcerer “have always been on very bad footing”
(34) makes it clear that he perceives certain fundamental disparities between Native mythology and Catholic theology which ultimately confirm the ascendancy of
the latter over the former. While portraying his own preaching as genuine acquiescence to the will of God, Le Jeune depicts his adversary’s “act[ing] the Prophet” as
entirely feigned “in order to preserve his credit, and to get the dainty pieces” (34),
thereby establishing a binarism between the Jesuits’ evangelizing based on spiritual
impulse and the sorcerer’s posturing based on the “gratif[ication] of his covetousness” (34). Le Jeune then crystallizes this hierarchy between flesh and spirit by
depicting his opposition to the sorcerer’s authority as “touching the apple of his
eye and wresting from him the delight of his Paradise, which are the pleasures of
his jaws” (34). Juxtaposing the infinite bliss of Heaven, as conceived in the Catholic faith, with the simple pleasure of a “choice morsel” (35), Le Jeune denigrates
the sorcerer and his faith to the point of perversity, while subtly implying his
adversary’s allegiance with the Devil through an allusion to the apple from the
Garden of Eden. The opposition between religious authorities is then rendered
almost absurd in its extremity; Le Jeune recounts Carigonan’s attempt to trick the
priest into uttering profane words in the Montagnais tongue, to which Le Jeune
replies: “Thou hast me in thy power, thou canst murder me, but thou canst not
force me to repeat indecent words” (35). Piously embracing the prospect of his
own martyrdom, Le Jeune claims for himself and the faith for which he stands an
incontaminable grace against the treachery of the bawdy Sorcerer. He zealously
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In a strategic move calculated to free himself from the circularity of this conundrum, Le Jeune invokes an image of the indigene designed to substitute for the
conspicuously lacking evidence of converted souls required to prove the mission’s
worth. By creating for himself a nemesis in Carigonan, a Montagnais Shaman
most often identified as “the sorcerer,” Le Jeune simultaneously presents a possible cause for the mission’s lack of conversions and a theological scapegoat toward
whom he can purge his latent prejudices about the cultural inferiority of Native
people. The sorcerer functions as an excuse for the mission’s poor salvation record
because, as a representative of Native religion, he has done “all he [can] to destroy
[Le Jeune] and make him appear ridiculous in the eyes of his people” (35); he has
striven against the Christian charity of Le Jeune and his brethren and has blocked
the road of salvation for many of his tribespeople by manipulating their beliefs
with “a thousand absurdities, which he [has] invented” (34). Le Jeune thus identifies
the sorcerer as a regressive enemy with whom the Jesuits are “in a state of open
warfare” and against whom they must “fight[] with all [their] might” (35).
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offers forth his own worldly flesh in sacrifice for spiritual purity while the scurvy
savage trickster seeks his delights in lewd thoughts, behaviour and speech.
What is interesting here is that Le Jeune feels no need to recuperate Carigonan
into the category of redeemable indigene. Unlike the earlier strategies for depicting the Native as simultaneously self and Other, Le Jeune does not seek to identify
both characteristics in a single individual but rather invokes the sorcerer as a sort
of absolute Other, who through the extremity of his Otherness creates a space in
which the identification with additional Natives can occur. Insofar as he is inseparable from a pre-contact theological system that is itself perceived by Jesuit theology as pagan and irredeemable, the sorcerer becomes a repository in Le Jeune’s
letter for all that is negative about the indigene, thereby freeing all others—all nonsorcerers—to the possibility of redemption. The sorcerer becomes, in Le Jeune’s
hands, the paradigm of the unsalvageable savage, who through his unique position
within the Native community confirms the possibility of others’ Christian indoctrination. Thus Le Jeune strategically portrays the sorcerer to produce an assurance among doubting superiors in France of the capacity of the Native population,
once delivered from his corrosive presence, to be converted en masse.
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Le Jeune’s depiction of the sorcerer is therefore historically specific, designed in
relation to particular material circumstances and executed in deference to a power
dynamic peculiar to a specific religion, sect, time and place. Yet it has informed
numerous later literary depictions of Native people as historically distant as Pratt’s
Brebeuf and His Brethren (1985). According to biographer David G. Pitt, Pratt immersed himself in The Relations in preparation for his 1940 poem, hoping to “grasp
the essential character of ... Jean de Brebeuf ” (1987: 238), a man the poet has
described as “one of the most dramatic and ineffaceable characters of history”
(qtd. in Pitt 1987: 233). Intrigued by the dramatic and symbolic potential of Brebeuf ’s
martyrdom at the hands of the Iroquois in 1649, Pratt laboured through The Relations’ more than six thousand pages to enable a meticulous poetic revisitation of
what he considered to be “a national drama [and] a saga of the human race’” (qtd.
in Pitt 1987: 233). So fastidious was Pratt’s attention to The Relations as source
material that James F. Johnson describes the poem as a “highly objective interpretation,” claiming it “approaches transparency as [Pratt] allows the Jesuits’ own story,
from The Jesuit Relations, virtually to tell itself ” (1984: 145). While I agree that the
poem allows “the Jesuits’ own story” to resurface, Pratt’s artistic re-presentation
calls into question the very idea of objectivity Johnson suggests it exemplifies. By
neglecting to interrogate the political and theological agendas concealed within the
Jesuits’ epistles or the network of circumstantial pressures underlying their composition, Pratt recapitulates the semiotic contents of the Jesuits’ correspondence,
giving new life to the images of Natives found therein, but never moving beyond
the initial representation to suggest the objective indigenous reality which The Relations claimed to report. Pratt remains trapped within the semiotic field, writing
“objective[ly]” about an earlier text but not about the historical subject matter of
that text. Furthermore, by re-presenting the Jesuits’ words as poetry in the voice of
a single speaker, Pratt obscures their subjective nature, reifying their contents and
endorsing their historical validity.
Writing in an industrialized Canada during the Second World War, Pratt shares
few circumstantial affinities with Le Jeune and yet his depiction of Shaman sorcery bears the imprint of his missionary predecessor:
The sorcery of the Huron rhetoric
Extorting bribes for cures, for guarantees
Against the failure of the crop or hunt!
The time would come when steel would clash on steel,
And many a battle would be won or lost
With weapons from the armoury of words. (1985: 8)
In a similar fashion, Le Jeune’s scapegoat sorcerer makes an appearance in both
Brian Moore’s Black Robe: A Novel (1985) and Bruce Beresford’s 1991 film adaptation thereof, produced by Robert Lantos. Largely composed with The Relations in
hand—a fact Moore acknowledges in a prologue designed to establish the historical validity of this his only work of historical fiction—Black Robe tells the story of
Father LaForgue, a fictional Jesuit priest who in 1634, the year of Le Jeune’s battle
with the sorcerer, travels from Quebec to the Huron settlement at St. Marie with
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Falling back upon Le Jeune’s military rhetoric, Pratt identifies the sorcerer as the
symbolic enemy against whom the war over souls will be waged in the same moment he presents Native religious practice as corrupt. In homage to Le Jeune’s
winter of 1634, Pratt portrays the sorcerer
as a pathetic adversary wielding his pretence of spiritual power as an entirely
feigned bartering chip designed to “extort”
what Le Jeune might call “the dainty
pieces.” For both Pratt and Le Jeune, Native theology is a by-product of human greed
rather than a complex spiritual system. As
Monkman suggests, “Pratt presents...the
beliefs of the red man [as] simply superstitions. The opposition between white missionary and red savage is ‘the rosary against
the amulet,’ and the poem repeatedly reflects Pratt’s interpretation of the relative
significance of each symbol” (Monkman
1981: 21). In Brebeuf, Pratt revitalizes with
startling clarity a three-hundred-year-old
hierarchical relationship between Catholic
spirituality and Native paganism strategically articulated in The Relations. Lifting his
poetic material directly from their pages, Sandrine Holt playing the dusky libidinous
Pratt produces a brilliant award-winning Montagnais maiden Annuka.
poem5 whose images bear the epistemological stamp of an earlier work and an earlier time. By failing to interrogate the
motives unique to The Relations’ composition and unproblematically transplanting
their material into his own work, Pratt renders his poem vulnerable to the recapitulation of oppressive strategies for depicting Native people.
35
a group of Montagnais. Replete with episodic references to material from The
Relations and containing lines lifted virtually verbatim from Le Jeune’s correspondence,6 the novel betrays a “degree of ... closeness” to its historical source that “can
hardly be exaggerated” (Flood 1989: 47). Moore’s narrative dependence on The
Relations is exemplified by Laforgue’s encounter with a cantankerous Montagnais
Shaman who immediately conjures up Le Jeune’s depictions of Carigonan; however, given the relative narrative freedom of the novelist over the missionary, Moore
is able to expand on Le Jeune’s characterization to render the Shaman’s ill qualities
symbolically evident in both his actions and his physical person. Moore writes:
[Laforgue met] a small figure which, at first, [he] took to be a child. But this was
no child. It was the only deformed Savage he had yet seen, a small hunchback,
his wizened face painted a bright yellow, a strange pigtailed hat perched on his
naked skull.... The hunchback ... walked around the clearing, peering at the faces
of the women and children like an actor taking his bow, but stopped abruptly
when he reached Laforgue. His glittering black eyes narrowed and blinked as
though he faced a blinding light. (Moore 1985: 67)
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36
Again the majesty of Catholic spirituality is portrayed as the opposite of Native
paganism, and although Moore at times questions the morality of proselytization
and the sincerity of his protagonist’s faith in a way that, for obvious reasons, cannot be found in The Relations, Black Robe is abundantly clear about which spiritual
system ought to attain supremacy. Native spirituality, as emblematized by the hunchback Mestigoit, appears childish and deformed when placed into sharp contrast by
the great truth carried by Laforgue, a truth symbolically evident in the “blinding
light” reflecting off the ignorant sorcerer’s “black eyes.” Towering over his adversary, Father Laforgue becomes a parental figure destined to mould the immature
body of Native spirituality into manhood while the sorcerer becomes the impudent
child, peevishly and pointlessly spiting his father and so compromising the salvation
of his people. He is “the only deformed Savage [Laforgue] had ever seen” because, as Shaman, he is the symbolic core of Native paganism and is therefore
incapable of redemption. His tribe, however, maintains its capacity for salvation
because the paganism impeding Christianity’s advent is portrayed as the product of
a conniving individual—“an actor before his audience” (Moore 1985: 68)—rather
than as an integral part of tribal culture. Like Le Jeune’s Carigonan who “acted the
Prophet, amusing [his] people with a thousand absurdities, which he invented,”
Moore’s Mestigoit is a “mask[ed]” “actor” who “would wait until [another] had
spoken, then claim the wisdom for himself ” (123). The sorcerer is different, aloof,
segregated; he is not indicative of Native culture, but actively attempting, through
falsification and posturing, to satiate his bodily desires and rid himself of the nuisance of his adversaries, the entirely selfless Jesuit missionaries. Native spirituality
is continually denied the status of a complex and intricately formulated theological
system in the writings of Le Jeune, Pratt and Moore, remaining forever
overdetermined by earthly impulses. Thus Moore’s sorcerer not only resembles Le
Jeune’s Carigonan in his actions, but also functions in a symbolically similar way, as
a repository for latent prejudices about Native culture due to the diligence of
Moore’s adherence to the Jesuits’ words.
In his author’s note to Black Robe, Moore carefully distinguishes between historical
and fictional depictions of indigenous people, arguing that the former are based in
“fact” while the latter remain fabrications. Calling The Relations “the only real
record of the early Indians of North America,” Moore claims they “introduce us
to a people who bear little relationship to the ‘Red Indians’ of fiction and folklore”
(1985: vii-ix, emphasis added), thereby suggesting the inadequacy of existing literary representations of early Native people that diverge from the ur-text of The
Relations and vicariously implying the historical authority of his own text on the
basis of its allegiance to this historical source material. Unlike other fanciful portrayals of Native peoples, Moore’s, he promises, will be well researched, historically accurate, nearly authentic. The problem that emerges from Moore’s optimistic interpretation of the historical validity of his novel, however, is that The Relations do not provide the unmediated access to the past implied by their reported
status as “the only real record” of Native history. The Relations were composed by
highly intelligent and rhetorically sophisticated members of an ideologically entrenched religious order who made strategic use of their epistles to battle the environmental and circumstantial extremity of the New World. The letters were not
wholly objective presentations of an historical reality; they couldn’t be. Moore’s representation of material from The Relations does not give us profound insight into
the nature of Native identity in seventeenth century New France, but rather resurrects an earlier image of Native identity extracted from that period.
What is disturbing about this ongoing repetition is not necessarily Moore or
Beresford’s unproblematized re-presentation of an exchange articulated by Le Jeune
over three and a half centuries earlier, but rather main-stream society’s uncritical
acceptance of this regurgitation as historical truth. As Ward Churchill notes, upon
its release, public opinion immediately exalted the film for its historical accuracy.
Jay Scott of the Toronto Globe and Mail, for instance, praises Black Robe as an
“honest, historically sound film [with a] journalistic rather than moralistic ... tone”
(qtd. in Churchill 1996: 426), and Vincent Canby of the New York Times heralds
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In the case of Black Robe the resurrection of Le Jeune’s semiotics of savage shamanism is not confined within its pages but is subsequently revitalized in Beresford’s
film adaptation, which similarly depicts the clash of Laforgue with a dwarfish
sorcerer, this time one who actually plots against the Jesuit’s life. All the elements
of Moore’s narrative construction of the Shaman return in the film: the childishness, the deformity, the posturing, the maliciousness, and are more readily consumed by the passive spectator through the art of movable images. Mestigoit’s
inaugural scene opens with Montagnais children joyously frolicking on the beach
with Laforgue’s hat, which they’ve impishly borrowed, as the Father looks on warmly,
taking respite from his breviaries. As the camera pulls back this cheerful ensemble
is blocked out by a dark figure emerging from the forest. The tiny form of Mestigoit
struts down toward the shore, his diminutive stature highlighted by the backdrop
of children whose innocent smiles contrast sharply with his ferocious glare. Coming upon the seated Laforgue, the sorcerer emits a series of shrill howls before
stating in his tongue, “I am Mestigoit” and vainly adding “you heard of me?” The
Shaman’s conspicuous pout upon Laforgue’s admission of not recognizing his name
betrays not only his childishness, but also the pride and posturing that identify the
Shaman figure from Le Jeune to Pratt to Moore. Beresford’s Mestigoit remains an
“actor taking his bow;” he is a conniving adversary lusting after recognition and
reward, embodying in his dwarfish frame the deformed and largely feigned nature
of Native spirituality.
37
the film’s “historical authenticity” (qtd. in Churchill 1996: 427). What reviews
such as these ask us to do is to swallow the copy of a copy of a copy. By failing to
interrogate his source material for its biases and hidden agendas, Moore resurrects with all its ideological baggage a created image of the indigenous “Sorcerer.”
As Beresford transforms Moore’s already transplanted image into a visual spectacle on the silver screen, he further removes the image from its original context and
exacerbates its discontinuity with what might be deemed its actual historical moment. If we as an audience uncritically accept the historical validity of the image
thus offered without urgently seeking to uncover its underlying causes, we commit
a treble-fraud: we endorse as an historical reality an illusory image whose process
of creation has been obscured by the authorizing power of the semiotic field and
we invite that image to play beyond the segregated world of art within our minds,
thereby permitting its influence on our perception of social reality.
Notes
I would like to give sincere thanks to Lynn Magnussen, Laura Murray, Glenn Willmott,
and Tim Weis whose critical advice on this article was pointed, intelligible, and
generously bestowed. I would also like to thank Wendy Saffer and Blaine Allan for their
assistance in helping me acquire the stills accompanying this article and producer
Robert Lantos for copyright permission for their reproduction.
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1. Goldie also contextualizes these appearances within white literature from Australia
and New Zealand to make certain claims about the uniformity of the image of the
indigene in these specific colonial societies.
2. Miller, J. R. Shingwauk’s Vision: a History of Native Residential Schools. Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 1996; Trigger, Bruce G. “The Jesuits and the Fur Trade.” In
Sweet Promises: A Reader on Indian-White Relations in Canada. Ed J. R. Miller. Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 1991. (2-18); Pratt, E. J. Brebeuf and His Brethren. Toronto:
The Macmillan Company, 1985; Moore, Brian. Black Robe: A Novel. New York:
McClelland and Stewart, 1985.
3. In Fear and Temptation Goldie theorizes the cause and ramifications of what
Monkman recognizes as the tendency “throughout [Canada’s] literary history, [for] the
Indian and his culture [to function as] vehicles for the definition of the white man’s
national, social, or personal identity” (Monkman 1981: 163). Goldie argues that
although, as Gayatri Spivak claims, “[t]he project of imperialism has always already
historically refracted what might have been the absolute Other into a domesticated
Other that consolidated the imperialist self” (qtd. in Goldie 1989: 234), the specific
colonial conditions in Canada, Australia and New Zealand intensified this
domestication process until it troubled the very division between self and Other.
Because, as Goldie argues, the colonial populations of these countries sought to claim
some form of authentic ownership over the land, they needed to reconcile their lack of
indigeneity. To illustrate their epistemic problem, Goldie offers the following scenario:
“The white Canadian looks at the Indian. The Indian is Other and therefore alien. But
the Indian is indigenous and therefore cannot be alien. So the Canadian must be alien.
But how can the Canadian be alien within Canada?” (12). Responding to the crisis of
belonging thus created, the colonial populations of these countries experienced the
paradoxical desire for the Native to be “Other and Not-self” and yet “become self”
(12); they recognized a need for simultaneous identification with, and separation from,
indigenous people which manifests itself in the twin poles of attraction and revulsion
that dominate white literary representations of Natives in Canada; hence Goldie’s title,
Fear and Temptation.
4. Le Jeune even recognizes the need for proactive agricultural assistance designed to
aid the Montagnais’ transition from migratory hunters to sedentary farmers as a priority
over actual religious instruction, suggesting that the needs of the body must be met
before the needs of the spirit can be adequately addressed. Le Jeune argues that
without the proper implements and instructions the Montagnais will “kill[] themselves
with hard work, [and] they [will] not get from the land half their living”(31), leaving
them without “the time, so to speak, to save themselves”(30).
5. Brebeuf won a Governor-General’s award in 1940.
6. Because the correspondences between Black Robe and The Relations have been so
well documented, I will not rehearse them here. For discussions of Moore’s use of
material from The Relations please see Jo O’Donoghue (1990) pp. 187-190, Denis
Sampson (1998) pp. 261-265, and particularly Jeanne Flood (1990) pp. 45-50.
References
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Blackburn, Carole. 2000. Harvest of Souls: The Jesuit Missions and Colonialism in North
America 1632-1635. Kingston: McGill University Press.
Eagleton, Terry. 1981. Walter Benjamin, or, Towards a Revolutionary Criticism. London:
Scholier Books.
Flood, Jeanne A. 1990. Black Robe: Brian Moore’s Appropriation of History. EireIreland: A Journal of Irish Studies. XXV(4): 40-55.
Goldie, Terry. 1989. Fear and Temptation: The Image of the Indigene in Canadian,
Australian, and New Zealand Literatures. Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press.
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Churchill, Ward. 1996. And They Did It Like Dogs in the Dirt...: An Indigenist Analysis
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