The Innu and the Jesuit

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 prominent family in Tadoussac; his eldest brother, Carigonan, later became a respected shaman. The second eldest, Maestigoït, became highly admired for his hunting skills; and the youngest, Sasousmat, would eventually emulate Pastedechouan by seeking baptism—in fact, from the hands of Saint Jean de Brébeuf.

Pastedechouan, at age seven or eight, first encountered Christianity in the person of Père Jean Dolbeau, a young Récollet missionary who arrived in Quebec in June 1615 and who, after accompanying Innu bands on their winter hunt, had decided to adopt “a child-focused missionary policy,” the idea being to educate Innu youngsters into French culture and so make it easier for them to convert their parents by practising Christian virtue. The parents, it seems, had little objection to this biculturalism, since they were not unaccustomed to inter-tribal exchanges of children as a cement to economic and military alliances. Thus it came about that in 1620 the young Pastedechouan was offered by his parents to the Récollets to be educated in France. For the missionaries, of course, the young teenager’s presence in France would attract wide attention and help generate support for their ministry.

For the next five years Pastedechouan was a boarder at the celebrated 15th-century Récollet convent of La Baumette (yes! a residential school), built by le bon Roi René high above the cliffs at Angers. His baptism on the feast of Saint Mark, 1621, in St. Maurice Cathedral, became one of the great liturgical spectacles of the decade. A prince and marshal of the Realm, Pierre-Anthoine de Rohan, stood as his godfather and Antoynette de Bretagne, a daughter of the ancient sovereign family of Brittany, was the godmother, while a dense throng of bishops and other ecclesiastics, nobles and commoners, so tightly packed the nave, choir galleries and courtyard that it was “impossible to turn around.” (Was this a subtle Récollet rejoinder to the splendid joyeuses entrées prepared by the Jesuits in the 1580s to welcome the newly converted Christian Japanese princes?)

By 1625 Pastedechouan had become fluent in classical Latin and elegant French; he ate, dressed and deported himself as a well-mannered and very devout young Frenchman. The Récollets, however, wanted him back in Canada and, despite his strong objections, put him on the next ship to Tadoussac one day short of exactly four years after his magnificent baptism. Soon he was plunged into a maelstrom of conflicting identities, interests, issues and loyalties.

Between 1600 and 1632, which included the three years when the Kirke Huguenot adventurers in British employ occupied Tadoussac and Quebec and threw the French Catholics out, the European population in the Upper St. Lawrence grew from 28 to about 100 or so, infinitesimal next to the hundreds of surrounding Innu, yet numerous enough to create an increasingly complex milieu; in fact, to provoke a deep and difficult cultural and social clash. It was a clash between opposing Amerindian and European cultures, yes, but as well it was between the values carried within the subcultures of each of these two: between those of a nomadic and of a sedentary society, between the traditional native religion and Christianity, between a Catholic and a Huguenot tradition, between a Franciscan and an Ignatian spirituality, between a colony dedicated to a missionary ideal and to that of traders, between allegiance to the French king and to the British. (“C’est un dur métier d’être Canadien,” Jules Léger once explained). Thus, for the last decade of his short life, Pastedechouan was forced unexpectedly to struggle at the confluence of all these alternatives.

Enter Paul Le Jeune, a refined intellectual and very straight-laced spiritual director. He was the superior of the Jesuit missionaries, who now were, after 1632 and for reasons still mostly unknown to historians and scholars, the only clergy allowed into Canada. Until 1657 they would in fact be the only priests in the St. Lawrence Valley. At 40, Le Jeune—a cradle-Calvinist turned Catholic at 16 and Jesuit at 22—was looked up to as an experienced administrator, a talented and well-connected organizer, and dutifully rigorous and strictly religious. He was one of the very few Jesuits (a half-dozen of the 327 who came to New France between 1625 and 1764) who had not “volunteered” for the mission but was sent to strengthen the renewed Jesuit mission in the colony. He stepped ashore at Quebec on July 5, 1632, eleven months ahead of Champlain, and immediately sought out Pastedechouan to help him in learning Innu. The young man refused. In fact, his reinsertion into his homeland had proven to be a psychological disaster.

Poor boy! He had not been allowed to grow into maturity either as an Innu hunter or as a French gentleman. He had been untimely ripped, as Anderson suggests, at the onslaught of puberty from the traditional education that would have sharpened his skill and affirmed his identity as an Innu hunter and provider. Then, as an adolescent who had learned to excel in the courteous manners and mindset of a fervent, young Frenchman, he was once again ordered away from the European culture he was growing into. Forced to return before his Catholic faith had matured, he felt abandoned and betrayed. For a half-dozen years he struggled to be loyal to the French, but had to work with the occupying British. He tried to draw closer to his brother Carigonan, but the shaman never trusted him. His wives (he had four or five successive ones) each left him because he was a bad provider. His Innu peers mercilessly made fun of him because he was a failed hunter. He soon began to act erratically. He took to drink. He went berserk. He was obviously unable to cope with the multicultural reality that had been thrust upon him.

At the beginning of the six-month-long winter hunt of 1633, Le Jeune insisted on accompanying Pastedechouan, his three brothers and their small band. He still wanted the young man as a language teacher, but he also wanted to bring Pastedechouan back to Catholic practice. However, he did everything wrong and failed miserably. (I am loath to reveal all the dramatic details of the story: suffice it to say that Le Jeune more or less coerced the starving hunting party into returning or coming to the faith in exchange for the Christian God’s provision of game, but was out manouevred when the brothers seemed to renege—and eventually met untimely deaths.)

The distinguished American Jesuit historian John W. O’Mally has written about Anderson’s study that “it is a morality tale relevant to efforts today to impose values on peoples not particularly yearning for them.” Indeed.

Emma Anderson’s book is, in fact, a masterpiece. Her research is spectacularly impressive; the bibliography is exhaustive; the methodology is admirable and excitingly original; her understanding, whether of the mindset of an Innu youngster, for example, or of an adult fundamentalist, post-Tridentine Catholic convert, is deep and sympathetic; her conclusions and questions on Pastedechouan’s legacy are finely pointed and variously provocative. She makes one think.

For example, Pastedechouan’s story and Le Jeune’s rigidity are so very remote from the theory and practice promoted by Dolbeau and Le Jeune’s missionary contemporary, Alessandro Valignano, the Jesuit “visitor” to the Far East. He was the first to articulate inclusive missionary principles about “inculturation,” the process of so “entering into” a culture and becoming part of it on its own terms that one’s life and activity actually enrich it. In Valignano’s wake followed such outstanding inclusivist “missionaries” as Roberto de Nobili and Saint Juan de Brito who lived in India as Swamis; or as Matteo Ricci and Adam Schall who wrote treatises on Christian doctrine based on quotations from Confucius. Much closer to home for Le Jeune was the example of his friend Saint Jean de Brébeuf, an accomplished linguist and orator who wrote a Huron grammar and who, by 1632, had come to appreciate how the spiritual values of the native people brought them easily to see all of life—human and non-human—as permeated by the divine, an insight he had already derived from St. Ignatius Loyola’s injunction to “seek and find God in all things.”

But Paul Le Jeune was not into inculturation. He was a major player in the “épopée mystique” that was ushering in the Grand Siècle of French and Catholic culture, during which was being implanted by French settlers in Canada a new race blessed by God with “tous les éléments d’une supériorité,” as Lionel Groulx proudly—and falsely—described it 300 years later in 1922.

Another puzzle of the Pastedechouan story is how different his experience was from that of other Frenchified Amerindians who were sent for instruction in France. The first known Native person to become a Christian in New France is Membertou, the great Sagamo and shaman who was solemnly baptized near Port Royal with 21 members of his family in 1610. While preserving many of the traditional religious customs of his people, he renounced being a shaman, refused to practise polygamy and bequeathed a strong Catholic faith to his descendants. Negabamat, an Innu from the Tadoussac area, was baptized at Sillery in 1638. He dressed elegantly in European clothes and toward the end of his life once declared: “I am growing old, but the faith is not growing old in me. I am almost entirely French.” Another Amerindian leader in whom the faith never grew old was Joseph Chihwatenha, a Wendat who was baptized in Ossossanë in 1637. Three years later, at Sainte-Marie-among-the-Hurons, he became the first Native person to make the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius. Also, in the Mohawk territory there was a young woman, Kateri Tekakwitha, in whom the Jesuits would recognize the traits of true sanctity. All of these do not seem to have had difficulties integrating their new faith and their traditional culture. Nor do the teenagers: Savignon, whom Champlain brought to France in 1610 to be trained very successfully as an interpreter; Amantacha, another Wendat who, like Pastedechouan, was sent over by the Récollets in 1626 to be educated and, after his baptism, returned to Wendake, and reverted to his former lifestyle, although he never forgot his baptism.

So what went wrong with Pastedechouan? Not being given time to mature, through the Innu practices of “shaking tent,” vision quest and the successful hunt, as a self-confident provider? Not being given time to mature as a devout Christian? So concludes Anderson. Or was it the severe personality conflict between a pious neophyte and a rigorous, strict religious superior? (The early 17th-century Puritans were not all in the Church of England.)

It was probably both.

Finally, it is interesting, to say the least, to compare the tragic Pastedechouan episode of Le Jeune’s life with what was otherwise a brilliant career for the French cleric. After his early return from the tragic winter hunt that almost cost him his life, Le Jeune did not travel much or far out of Quebec. He concentrated on his principal responsibility: establishing the Catholic church in Canada. In 1634 he built the first parish church, in which at Christmas a year later, he preached Champlain’s funeral oration. In 1635 he began the Collège des Jésuites, which grew in the 19th century to become Laval University, the oldest institution of higher learning north of Mexico. Then, four years later, he was the person mainly responsible for bringing to Quebec the Ursulines and the Hospital Sisters of the Hôtel-Dieu, the first nuns in all of recorded Roman Catholic history to leave their cloister for a foreign mission. Most famously, Le Jeune began in 1632, and continued to edit until his death in 1664, the renowned Relation de ce qui s’est passé de plus remarquable aux Missions des Pères de la Compagnie de Jésus en la Nouvelle-France. This was a compilation of reports and documents from the ever-widening field of Jesuit activity in the colony. It became an inspiring bestseller throughout France and has continued, of course, to this day as an invaluable and priceless source for archeologists, ethnographers, historians and social scientists of all kinds.

Le Jeune was recalled to Paris in 1649 to be put in charge of very successful fundraising for the missions, his career by all accounts a resounding accomplishment. His contemporaries admired his strength and consistency of purpose; historians ever since have considered him to be one of the principal founders of the Canadian church. And rightly so.

Le Jeune’s handling of Pastedechouan, however, was a calamitous disaster. Was it his only failure? An indictment of his arrogant, exclusivist, rigid spirituality? Did the fatal hunt of 1633 lead to his decision to stick to a desk job? Certainly, he was much better at that.

And Pastedechouan in all of this? The victim of a deficient, misguided, unsound and very wrong policy. Emma Anderson deserves every congratulation and thanks for resurrecting him into the history books.

Yes. Being or becoming a bridge between cultures is an exciting and lofty ideal. But Pierre-Anthoine Pastedechouan’s and Paul Le Jeune’s sad story reminds us that being a bridge brings great pain: one is vigorously walked upon from both sides.

And in this sorrowful tale the pain is all the more terrible for having been inflicted in God’s name. I’m reminded of the beautiful prayer recited together by Pope John Paul II and King Hassan II during the Pope’s visit to Morocco: “O God, grant that we may never again use Your Name to justify our human failings.”