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- Title: Crosses in the Sky: Jean de Brébeuf and the Destruction of Huronia
- Author: Mark Bourrie
- Genre: Non-Fiction
- Publisher: Biblioasias
- Pages: 440
Mark Bourrie writes Canadian history for a generation raised on gotcha journalism, Game of Thrones and the board game Settlers of Catan. After producing bestselling biographies of the fur trader Pierre Radisson and one-time Globe owner George McCullagh, his latest subject is Rev. Jean de Brébeuf – the French priest who spent a quarter of a century as a missionary in early 17th century New France, before being scalded, burned, cut, dismembered and eviscerated. But Bourrie is also telling a bigger story: the impact of the colonizing efforts of French Jesuits, or Black Robes as they were known, on Indigenous peoples. In this fresh look at those events, the author gives a new perspective on a crucial period of pre-Confederation history that, he argues, has hitherto been smothered with mythology.
Gone are the standard tropes of missionaries as well-meaning if misguided explorers; in Bourrie’s account, the Jesuits who arrived in North America in the early 17th century were invaders – the Roman Catholic Church’s arrogant shock troops. Most came from wealthy, sometimes noble French families: Some were “the kind of adventure-seeking, privileged young men who, today, work for aid organisations doing voluntourism in interesting, dangerous places before applying to law school.” The Samuel Champlain who emerges from these pages is not a benevolent, brave explorer who treated Indigenous people with respect, but a ruthless schemer. “The Father of New France’s biographers have always been sympathetic cheerleaders, but he was hated by many of the people who knew him best.”
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And yes, Jean de Brébeuf underwent a ghastly martyrdom, but this “big, troubled man … nursing deep feelings of insecurity” was perhaps schizophrenic and certainly had a masochistic hunger to be martyred. Moreover, he and his colleagues had watched Hurons, Iroquois and other peoples mete out on each other the same cruel tortures as he would undergo.
Bourrie has a knack of contextualizing facts with punchy modern comparisons. In 1608, Quebec’s French garrison, “the entire population of New France … was smaller than the staff of a suburban Home Depot store.”
Do eye-catching comparisons and a delicious irony make “good” history? In this case, absolutely, because Bourrie is a rigorous researcher. He may have a 21st-century sensibility, but his work is securely grounded in primary sources, new archeological finds and site visits, plus groundbreaking scholarship by Georges Sioui, Bruce Trigger and others. In particular, he has paid careful attention to the 72 volumes of Jesuit Relations, the chronicles of Jesuit missions in New France to which Jean de Brébeuf was a major contributor.
The Relations were always intended as propaganda, geared to raising funds and justifying Jesuit activities. By the time they were printed and sold in the streets of Paris, Brébeuf’s despatches had been shaped into “thrilling copy,” in Bourrie’s words, about danger, ritual torture and misery. Well-off Parisians “followed the stories of their endangered priests in a sort of seventeenth century game show where contestants were eliminated for real.” Brébeuf, who mastered several Indigenous languages, did not despise the different peoples he met, although many of his brethren did. He described in detail many aspects of Indigenous life – medicine, food, health care, farming practices, sexuality, social behaviours, death rites, beliefs. Bourrie has used these descriptions to build a portrait of well-developed societies living in harmony with their environment (although not with each other).
However, it was intellectually impossible for Jean de Brébeuf to recognize that the Hurons, among whom he lived, had a cohesive civilization of their own, and were not thirsting for a new way of looking at the world. He could not see beyond the rigid 17th-century Roman Catholic view developed in a Europe torn apart in religious struggles, that, if they wanted to save their souls, the Indigenous peoples of North America must abandon their own rituals, accept baptism into the Christian faith, and submit to the church’s rules and dogma. Unless they did this, the priests told them, they would burn in hell. No matter that there were no words for “sin,” ‘resurrection” or “hell” in their languages.
“This is the story,” writes Bourrie, “of the collision of two worlds. One was drenched in the blood of religious strife and sought to spread its version of truth to the world. The other was trying to cope with wrenching technological changes, pandemics, and the existential threat of encroaching European colonialism.”
Born into a family of minor nobles in Normandy, Jean de Brébeuf entered the Jesuit order in 1622, when he was 26. Five years later, he was sent to New France. He spent most of the next quarter-century in the Great Lakes country, a period during which most of its people would be captured, torn away from their families, reduced to refugee status or would die. The region in which he preached was known as Huronia, where a confederacy of Iroquoian people was living between Lake Couchiching and Georgian Bay. The great fur-trade rivals of the Hurons were the Algonquins and the Iroquois, who lived on Huronia’s eastern flank and with whom the Hurons were continually at war.
In 1636 a wave of smallpox, spread by French fur traders, reached Huronia; it would kill at least 10 per cent of the Huron population. In a contest of sweat lodges and incantations versus masses and baptisms, a famous Huron healer named Tonneraouanont proved more successful than Jean de Brébeuf in curing the sick. (Perhaps not surprising, since many of the Jesuit baptisms were deathbed affairs, and most of the converted died within 24 hours.) The Huron became increasingly hostile to the missionaries in their midst, whom they blamed for the carnage. By 1638, Jesuit superiors in France could see that the Huronia mission was a failure. After a quarter of a century of efforts, there were only about 30 converts in the region, and most didn’t practise their faith. The Jesuit authorities replaced Brébeuf as head of mission with a more authoritarian priest, Rev. Jerome Lalemant, and Brébeuf was sent off to distant small communities. Soon, writes Bourrie, “the stress of six years of Huron hostility caused Brébeuf to lose his mind.” He started having visions.
By the mid-1640s, Huronia was doomed, not by black-robed priests disrupting traditional practices, but by the epidemics and guns that Europeans had brought to the continent. As Iroquois aggression became more deadly and the Huron population shrank, Brébeuf could see that the end was coming. But this simply accelerated his yearning for martyrdom. Bourrie spares no gruesome detail in his descriptions of Iroquois slaughter and Brébeuf’s agonizing end.
Bourrie knows how to tell a great story; Crosses in the Sky is dramatic and enthralling. But the author also reminds today’s readers that the efforts of Brébeuf and his colleagues to “do good” had terrible consequences. Jesuit assumptions of superiority rippled down the years, and “generated outrages like residential schools and Canadian laws that stripped Indigenous people of their political rights, … took their land base and even banned their dances and ceremonies.”
Bourrie has done more than any other Canadian historian writing for a general audience to disinter the root causes of degenerating settler-Indigenous relations and disrupted Indigenous societies in the 400 years since Brébeuf’s death. And he has done it with attention-grabbing panache. Crosses in the Sky is reliable history and would make a stirring movie.
Charlotte Gray is the author of 12 books of history and biography, including Passionate Mothers, Powerful Sons: The Lives of Jennie Jerome Churchill and Sara Delano Roosevelt.