The Shattered Cross: French Catholic Missionaries on the Mississippi River, 1698-1725 by Linda Carol Jones

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Shattered Cross: French Catholic Missionaries on the Mississippi River, 1698-1725 by Linda Carol Jones Kenneth C. Carstens Linda Carol Jones. The Shattered Cross: French Catholic Missionaries on the Mississippi River, 1698-1725. Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 2020. Pp. 297. Figures. Index. Maps. Notes. Cloth: $50.00. I have been fascinated by early (colonial) New World Catholic missionaries since 1959, when my parents first took me to Fort Michilimackinac at the tip of Michigan's Lower Peninsula, then farther north to St. Ignace and Sault Ste. Marie, both in the Upper Peninsula. There, I learned firsthand about the work of the early Jesuit fathers, and their attempts (some successful, some not) to bring Native Americans to Christianity. By the mid-1960s, I had read Vernon Kinietz's book Indian Life in the Upper Great Lakes, 1615-1760 (1965), which further fostered my interest about the assimilation and acculturation process behind culture change. As a budding anthropologist, I read Reuben Thwaites's seventy-three-volume work Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents, 1610-1791 (1853-1915) through my college years at Central Michigan University. Now, added to these noted works, is a new book written by Linda Carol Jones. Jones, an associate professor of language area studies at the University of Arkansas, has further documented the influence of Jesuits from the Great Lakes area into the middle and lower Mississippi River valley. After reading Jones's work, I am confident her book will be considered of equal importance to the writings of Kinietz and Thwaites whenever studies about early colonial Jesuit history of the pays d'en haut are mentioned. Jones details the extraordinary, often reciprocal, and dynamic interactions (both good and bad) among different Native and European groups along the Mississippi River during the colonial (contact period) era. These dynamic cultural interactions might be Natives (various Illini groups and groups located further south along the Mississippi, like the Tamarois, Quapaw, Chickasaw, Natchez, or others) with other Natives; Natives and Europeans—the world of European traders (both French and English), coureurs de bois, and metis—and Europeans with other Europeans (e.g., Jesuits with various political leaders such as Cadillac, Iberville, or Bienville), explorers (e.g., LaSalle and Tonti), religious leaders (whether back in Montreal with the Petit Séminaire de Québec, in Paris, or with the Holy See at the Vatican), or different missionary sects also vying for Native converts to baptize. Indeed, Jones's book details the significant, and extremely complex, ideological and political considerations Jesuit fathers needed to "stay alive" (although martyrdom was not a bad thing if done for the right reasons), and how best to convert Natives to Christianity: force-feeding Christianity and European values to Native Americans in what Jones calls "Frenchification" (that is, forcefully [End Page 151] making Natives French men and women), or finding ways (linguistically or culturally) that Native Americans themselves selected to adopt; that is, letting the choice of acceptance or rejection be a Native one, whether for what the idea was, or a modification of the idea as it would best fit a Native cultural need or understanding. Indeed, when Frenchification was forced on Natives, the results ended in a "shattered cross." Although I considered my background in Jesuit history in North America better than average, I learned so much more about Colonial Jesuit history that I did not know previously, especially regarding the political climate between Jesuits and church leadership (that is, "Jesuits in the field" versus church leadership in Montreal, Paris, or the Vatican). Nor was I aware that the idea to begin missionary work among Native Americans along the Mississippi River had its origin in seventeenth-century Jesuit fathers in China. And although church philosophy in the late 1600s and early 1700s was to force "Frenchification" on the Natives, Jesuits who were the most successful as Christian missionaries were those who practiced love, allowing Natives to accept or reject on their own terms what part of French culture and Catholicism best served their needs. Colonialism, including intentional forms of assimilation, acculturation, and—yes—genocide, is not to be condoned in today's world. But it did happen. Ignoring that it happened presents an incomplete...