Being or becoming a bridge between cultures is an exciting and lofty ideal. In our day and in this country it has often, and in many ways, become an accomplishment unremittingly sought after. We Canadians did, after all, invent the word “multicultural.” Some of us are born and brought up with two or several cultural identities; some, with courage and perseverance, choose to “achieve” them; some others have the multicultural reality thrust upon them. Pierre-Anthoine Pastedechouan is one of these. And The Betrayal of Faith: The Tragic Journey of a Colonial Native Convert, Emma Anderson’s captivating and compelling book, tells his story.
Pastedechouan was born early in the 1600s into a nomadic community of Innu who were then, perhaps, at the apex of their economic influence and territorial dominance, controlling the north shore of the St. Lawrence River from Tadoussac to as far west as the new French settlement at Quebec. He was the third son of four in a...
Jacques Monet, S.J., the director of the Canadian Institute of Jesuit Studies, recently published the chapter on “The Jesuits in New France” in The Cambridge Companion to Jesuits (Cambridge University Press, 2008), edited by Thomas Worcester.
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