The Catholic Calumet: Colonial Conversions in French and Indian North America

Abstract

In the first chapter of The Catholic Calumet the historian Tracy Neal Leavelle, an associate professor of history at Creighton University, writes that “it has been all too easy for scholars to deny the sincerity of missionaries and to dismiss the genuine engagement of Native peoples with Christianity” (p. 15). This historiographic dismissal resulted, he argues, from the ambiguity surrounding the nature of Jesuit conversion efforts and Indian converts in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French and Indian Great Lakes region. Leavelle suggests that French missionaries were more than just extensions of a larger colonial project. Vast records such as Jesuit Relations demonstrate that they often worked earnestly toward the spiritual salvation of the Indian peoples they encountered, and the desires of empire were even ancillary within the larger context of the divine. Likewise, Leavelle further argues that such assumptions undermine the historical importance of Christianity within Indian communities, both past and present. They frame conversion as inauthentic, and they ignore how the indigenization of Christianity “represented thoughtful and varied responses to colonization” (p. 16). Within the pages of The Catholic Calumet the processes of Christian conversion become a vibrant site of historical study that reveals the complicated intricacies of religious contact and encounter, where the “pervasive element of ambiguity … supported the formation of new relationships and the creative exchange of spiritual gifts” (p. 18).