More Than Just a Missionary: The Jesuits, the Wyandot, and Colonial Crises in French Detroit, 1728-1751

Abstract

The Michigan Historical Review 46:1 (Spring 2020): 1-28©2020 Central Michigan University. ISSN 0890-1686 All Rights Reserved More Than Just a Missionary: The Jesuits, the Wyandot, and Colonial Crises in French Detroit, 1728-1751 By Eric Toups Fort Pontchartrain du Détroit was perhaps the most important French outpost in the pays d’en haut from its establishment in 1701 to the British conquest of New France in 1763. The fort acted as a preeminent staging ground for the western fur trade and an important site for EuroNative alliances and negotiations far beyond immediate oversight by colonial officials at Quebec or Montreal. Hundreds of Odawa, Ojibwa, Potawatomi, and Wyandot settled along the banks of the Detroit River between Lakes Superior and Erie, near to the fort and the resident French habitants, soldiers, and missionaries. Maintaining indigenous support for, and attachment to, the French required constant diplomacy and an uninterrupted flow of gifts and supplies to grease the wheels of crosscultural alliance. Many of the alliance’s most serious crises, most notably a 1747 plan organized by Wyandot dissidents led by Nicholas Orontony to destroy the fort and expel the French, erupted from the important Native and French joint settlement. Key to Detroit’s operation as a critical nexus of diplomacy and cooperation was the presence of several Jesuit priests, most importantly Armand de la Richardie. These Jesuits played significant roles in the wideranging relationships and events that arose in the interior in the second quarter of the eighteenth century.1 Histories of the Jesuits as pivotal agents of empire are numerous and comprehensive for mid-seventeenth1 For an overview of seventeenth-century Jesuits and their actions among the Huron/Wendat, see Bruce G. Trigger, Natives and Newcomers: Canada’s “Heroic Age” Reconsidered (Montreal and Kingston, ON: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1985), especially 226-297. For the importance of Jesuits to alliance in the seventeenth century, see Denys Delâge, Bitter Feast: Amerindians and Europeans in Northeastern North America, 1600-64, trans. Jane Brierly (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1993), 166168 . See also Kathryn Magee Labelle, Dispersed but Not Destroyed: A History of the SeventeenthCentury Wendat People (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2013), 101-102. 2 The Michigan Historical Review century New France, but relatively unexplored beyond the temporal and geographic scope of Quebec’s “heroic age.” The nature and extent of French North America changed enormously during the eighteenth century, and Jesuit actions and goals changed with it. As French military and commercial endeavors pushed into the pays d’en haut, the colonial project changed dramatically in a geographic, cultural, and political landscape far removed from the St. Lawrence River. The French increasingly committed to their role as mediators in alliances with and among the disparate sovereign tribes of the western Great Lakes. Historians examining the eighteenth-century pays d’en haut acknowledge the Jesuit presence, of course, but the Black Robes’ significance and dayto -day operations as ambassadors has not been closely analyzed. Exceptional studies have typically focused on military officials, secular diplomats, French fur traders, indigenous women, and tribal headmen while neglecting the ever-present missionaries. Jesuits adapted to political realities far removed from the St. Lawrence River as they pushed into the west. The unchallenged Jesuits of the early seventeenth century could monopolize French interactions with the Iroquois and Wendat tribes, but the presence in the eighteenth century of rivals like French military officers and an imperial program that often conflicted with the Jesuits’ priorities changed their interactions with French colonial authorities and sovereign tribes. The Black Robes’ missionary goals frequently interlocked with and often contradicted French imperial and colonial goals (themselves often at variance with one another). Jesuit engagement with indigenous groups and individuals was most important at the intersection of disjointed colonial projects.2 The Jesuits are in no danger of being forgotten or neglected in present-day historical narratives. However, historians of eighteenthcentury New France, Native history, and French colonialism elsewhere tend to narrowly assess the Jesuits as cultural arbiters due to their objections to indigenous practices and attempts to impose their moral vision onto the colonial and indigenous communities.3 The bulk of the 2 Richard White...