The Church of the Immaculate Conception: Inculturation and Identity among the Anishnaabeg of Manitoulin Island

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Incursions by the Iroquois quickly forced the Jesuits from the island, and it was not until 1844 that a permanent mission was established at Wikwemikong. Within fifteen years, the mission work had reached West Bay where a church was built in 1910. Missionary activities have since been continuous and here, as elsewhere, have served not only to promote Christianity but frequently to deny the sacrality and legitimacy of Anishnaabe tradition. As was the case with the religion of earliest missionized Algonquians-the Montagnais2Anishnaabe beliefs, practices and symbols were not only replaced by Christian ones but were denounced as demonic in origin. Sixteen years before Poncet set foot on Manitoulin, Paul Le Jeune had set the tone for centuries of Roman Catholic interaction with Native lifeways, declaring that is the forerunner of faith,3 and rejoicing that dread of punishment is beginning to gain such an ascendancy over their minds that, although they do not soon amend, yet they are little by little giving up their evil customs.4 This is not to say that evangelizing through fear mongering is or was exclusive to the Jesuits or even to the Roman Catholics. Nor was it, as Kenneth Morrison has pointed out, entirely or consistently successful despite the cleared ground of cultural anomie available for these seeds in seventeenthcentury North America.5 As Le Jeune, himself was to note: savages agree very readily with what you say but they do not, for all that, cease to act upon their own ideas.6 In other words, the practical political and economic necessity for nominal conversion did not always entail the transformation of consciousness for which the Jesuits had hoped. The life-worlds of many Algonquians, while deeply scarred and changed by political and religious invasion, still provided islands of continuity with tradition. These islands like the one founded by Nanabush after the primordial flood may have rested upon chaos and yet they, too, were constructed from bits of the old order. Taken together, these remainders of tradition have been used to create-on