On The Bookshelf: Crosses in the Sky

Bourrie’s history of the attempted colonization of Huronia by the Jesuits and French is a torrent of information. Open the first page and you will be taken down a treacherous river full of gigantic rapids and waterfalls, and around every turn there is a skirmish or drought, an epidemic or blackflies!

There are single paragraphs that could fill an action-packed movie.

The 1600s was an era in which the Church controlled money, farmland, peasants, hospitals, universities. It could even brand you a heretic and burn you at the stake. Protestants and Catholics were at each other’s throats. In the eyes of Catholic Jesuits, anyone not Catholic was considered a heretic.

The Jesuits, often second sons of wealthy landowners, imbued with visions of God, were given the mission to stake their claim in the New World and rout out the beliefs of those who had lived there for years. Convert them to the glories of Christ. Although Bourrie is a white man, he comments over and over again, how civilized and generous a culture the Jesuits encountered in the Huronia area and how intolerant the Jesuits were of the many rituals and beliefs of their hosts.

Brebeuf, unlike most Jesuits of the time, never earned an academic degree, but was generally kind and as this story continues, you see how willing to endure any kind of suffering. “I am an ox, only fit for carrying loads.” He enjoyed suffering and mortifications and yearned to become a martyr. His greatest asset was his facility with learning languages – of which there were so many. As head of the North American mission, he was one of the few who could speak the languages of the region.

It didn’t take the Hurons long to conclude that Jesuits were idiots, and children of the privileged. They thought that their beards reduced their intelligence and couldn’t understand why most were incapable of learning their language. They also stunk of garlic. The one thing that they did have were copper pots which held up better cooking corn.

Part of Brebeuf’s and the Jesuit’s game plan was to spend a lot of time with children. Here was fertile conversion ground. But due to the constant ravaging of various epidemics, children and elders were the first to die. The Jesuits stuck to this flawed strategy and were foolish enough to convert children on their death beds, dying from illnesses they had brought. This did not endear them to any Hurons left alive. Bourrie makes constant commentary on the fact that the Hurons tended to be generous hosts to the men in black robes.

There is so much history here and the fulsome annotation, notes and bibliography at the end make this a very important book in the writing of Canadian history. I have learned so much about the Indigenous cultures of the Georgian Bay area. His description of their death rituals and reverence for the bones have given me a deeper understanding of the need to reclaim the bodies of murdered indigenous women.