Bourrie’s consistent errors in historical judgment are compounded by a breezy, snarky tone that vilifies the Jesuits and romanticizes the Hurons
Review by Dr. Christopher Shannon (M.Phil. Yale, Ph.D. Yale)
Crosses in the Sky: Jean de Brébeuf and the Destruction of Huronia. Mark Bourrie. Biblioasis, 2024.
ON MAY 21, 2021, members of the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation claimed to have discovered evidence of 215 unmarked graves at the Kamloops Indian Residential School, a Canadian government institution formerly operated by the Catholic Church. Since that announcement, roughly 85 Catholic Churches in Canada have been vandalized, some set on fire, resulting in approximately $7.9 million of damage. The accusers have yet to discover any evidence of human remains, much less indigenous remains, but have yet to issue any apology or retraction of the accusation. The story even seeped into American popular culture, as 1923, a television show within the wildly popular Yellowstone franchise, featured a plotline set in an American residential school staffed by sadistic priests and nuns.
Mark Bourrie’s Crosses in the Sky explores European-Native interaction in a context that predates the residential schools by centuries: the Jesuit mission to Huronia in 17th-century New France. He provides a generally reliable and accessible chronological account that could serve as a starting point for interested readers with no prior knowledge of the topic. The spirit of the recent controversy nonetheless hovers over the book. Its subtitle, “Jean de Brébeuf and the Destruction of Huronia” clarifies the subject matter but also seems to imply causality. The Catholic Church stands convicted and condemned from the start. Bourrie’s protestations notwithstanding, his open contempt for all things Catholic leads him to abandon all nuance and turn a complex, tragic story of a cultural encounter into a simple, black and white morality tale of virtuous natives versus evil missionaries.
A work of popular history intended for a general audience, Crosses in the Sky marks Bourrie’s second foray into the world of 17th-century New France. His best-selling 2019 work, Bush Runner, tells the story of Pierre-Esprit Radisson, a hustler and adventurer whom reviewers likened to Forrest Gump for his uncanny ability to seem to be everywhere all at once in the world of the fur trade of 17th-century North America. Crosses follows Bush Runner’s history-through-biography formula with a very different figure: the great Jesuit missionary martyr Jean de Brébeuf.
TO BOURRIE'S CREDIT, he places Brébeuf’s story in the broad historical context of Reformation-era religious strife within France and France’s efforts to carve out a space in the New World empire-building initiated by Columbus’s “discovery” of “America” in the late-15th century. Through most of the 16th century, the battle between Catholics and Protestants for control of France inhibited French efforts at empire building. During the 1590s, Henry of Navarre, the Calvinist claimant to the throne, converted to Catholicism and issued the Edict of Nantes (1598), granting toleration to Protestants. Sectarian tensions and conflict continued. By the 1620s, the Catholic churchman Cardinal Richelieu rose to power with the goal of unifying the kingdom under a strong monarchy and the Catholic Church. Richelieu succeeded in reducing Protestant power within France only to suffer a serious setback in the struggle for empire: in 1629, France surrendered Quebec and all its New World possessions to Protestant England.
Beset by its own religious strife among rival Protestant groups, England could not manage its new possessions and returned them to France. Richelieu renewed his efforts at building up a New World empire, understood in terms of both profits and piety. The fur trade would provide the profits; the Jesuits would provide the piety. Richelieu not only forced Protestants out of the imperial enterprise but envisioned an empire in which Natives would share a common faith with French Catholics. The Jesuits had already proved useful in his efforts to build up Catholicism in France, so Richelieu turned to them to carry out his vision of incorporating Natives into the French Catholic empire. In 1634, Jean de Brébeuf, S.J., a veteran of earlier French missionary efforts, returned to New France as superior of the mission to the Hurons, an indigenous group living primarily in what is now southern Ontario.
Richelieu envisioned the Indians as submissive subjects who would supply the furs needed to enrich France and enhance royal power through world empire; he saw Catholicism as a useful means to achieve these worldly ends. Brébeuf and his fellow Jesuits saw the Indians as souls in need of salvation. In Bourrie’s telling, the Jesuits were the greater threat to native life. Richelieu’s imperial ambitions aside, the Indians enthusiastically embraced the fur trade because they valued access to European trade goods such as metal axes and copper kettles; they proved much less welcoming to the Christianity on offer from the Jesuits.
THIS IS, AT ONE level, true to the historical facts. Through most of the 1630s, the Hurons seemed merely to tolerate the presence of the Jesuits as the price of maintaining the good relations with the French necessary for the fur trade. Brébeuf understood these facts and expressed constant frustration at his failure to achieve conversions. He attributed his failure to the powerful demonic forces at work among the natives; he also blamed himself and saw his failure as a consequence of his own sins (100). For Bourrie, the failure is a sign of the superiority of Huron culture and religious beliefs over the Catholic religion.
I suppose every historian has a right to their sympathies and inevitably takes sides in recounting historical conflicts. Still, a good historian will first give the various historical actors their due by trying to understand them in their own terms and their own times, reserving presentist sermonizing for a concluding chapter. Bourrie begins his book in the spirit, with a provocative quote from John Lockman’s 1743 work, Travels of the Jesuits into Various Parts of the World that captures two conflicting views of the Jesuits as either saints or scoundrels. Would that Bourrie had the balance of Lockman. Instead, he quickly abandons all subtlety and nuance for a smug, presentist, secular modernist attack on Christianity in general and Brébeuf and his Jesuits in particular. The Catholic Church on the eve of the Reformation was an “international corporation without shareholders or government oversight” that “controlled millions of acres worked by hundreds of thousands of peasants.” When not exploiting the poor, the Church branded its enemies heretics and handed them over to local authorities to be burned at the stake (26). Loyal sons of the Church, the Jesuits arrived in New France only to establish a “police state” (104). According to Bourrie, Brébeuf saw “all Huron religious ceremonies and spiritualism … [as] devil worship by wayward, ignorant people.” The evangelization of natives required a total eradication of their culture, with “no tolerance, no mutual learning, no fusion of ideas” (68).
For all the fury of his assault on the Jesuit mission, Bourrie insists that he is no “revisionist” and simply believes that “this story needs a serious rethink” (22). Apparently the dominant “story” today still presents the Jesuit mission as a morality play of heroic, self-sacrificing Jesuits protecting meek, defenceless Hurons from the savagery of the Iroquois. This may indeed have been the story at one time, but that time has long since passed.
Bourrie writes as if pious Catholics still control the narrative. He emphasizes the role of Catholic grammar schools in filling children with pious myths about the Jesuits. Maybe this is true in Canada but I doubt it. I attended Catholic grammar school in western New York in the 1970s. Yes, the nuns told me stories of Indians gnawing the fingers of Isaac Jogues so that he could not lift the Host to say Mass (fact, not myth); they also taught a New York State that celebrated the history of the Iroquois and said nothing about their role in the destruction of the Huron people in Canada (again, fact not myth).
The target of Bourrie’s revisionism would seem to be the tendency of Canadian public historians to smooth over historical conflicts to promote intercultural harmony. True, interpreters at the historic Jesuit mission site of Sainte-Marie-among-the-Hurons struggle “to explain the Huron story in a way that is acceptable to Roman Catholics and to people who do not share the same beliefs” (369). This attempt to find a middle ground only shows the weakness of earlier, more triumphantly Catholic interpretations. Still, Bourrie emphasizes the dangerous bias of Catholic historians: Jesuit scholars “are often brilliant and dedicated researchers,” but their work remains too “bound by faith” (22). As a corrective to Catholic piety, he draws heavily on the work of anthropologists and ethno-historians who seem to be his guide to an authentic Indigenous worldview obscured by the incomprehension of Brébeuf and his companions.
Contemporary scholars no doubt understand Indigenous culture in greater depth than the Jesuit missionaries, but their work rises on the foundations built by the documentation of the early Jesuits. The Jesuit Relations, a series of reports on mission activities published annually from 1632 to 1673 to inspire donations and recruits for the New France mission, provide the most extensive account of a foreign mission in early modern literature.
The Relations not only tell of the Jesuits’ evangelization efforts, but provide detailed, proto-anthropological accounts of native culture, along with extensive observations on North American flora, fauna, and topography. Bourrie occasionally acknowledges this, but more often attacks the Jesuits as absolutely dismissive of native culture. Repeatedly, his own evidence works against him. After the passage on “no mutual learning, no fusion of ideas” cited above, Bourrie immediately notes that the Jesuits studied Huron myths and found many parallels to stories in the Bible; nonetheless, he seems utterly dismissive of this example of intercultural bridge building. Any honest reading of the Relations will find numerous examples of the Jesuits identifying “natural” virtues among the natives, even comparing them favourably to the “noble pagans” of antiquity. Jesuit writings were in fact a major source for the “noble savage” myth that would prove so powerful in modern Western thought. Much of Bourrie’s account reflects the persistence of this myth in its most naive, secular version.
BOURRIE'S ROMANTICISM reflects the worst dimension of modern primitivism: the savage as a mirror of modernity. Not content to idealize the Huron as unattainably “other,” the last remnant of a pure, natural culture destroyed by the advance of modernity, Bourrie presents the Huron as brothers (and sisters) under the skin with secular modern intellectuals. In one of the most laughable examples of this line of interpretation, Bourrie celebrates the Huron belief in the power of dreams and defends the dignity of this belief against Jesuit efforts to eradicate it as the sin of divination. Does Bourrie share the Huron belief in the spirit world? Of course not. Rather, he sees in the Huron efforts to interpret dreams a proto-modern “dream psychotherapy,” similar to the later work of Freud and Jung, which enabled “people living in a physically crowded and somewhat emotionally repressive society to deal with inner conflicts and powerful desires” (132). Bourrie more than compensates for the hint of criticism suggested by the phrase “emotionally repressive” by praising the natives for their ability to achieve psychic harmony and peace through dream interpretation: “in terms of psychiatry, [they were] much more advanced than the French” (132). Here, romantic moderns and primitives join forces against the evil Jesuits, whom Bourrie scapegoats for all the sins of modern rationalism.
No doubt the Jesuits believed in reason and saw the native dreamworld as pagan superstition. They were not, however, simple rationalists. By Bourrie’s own account, Jesuits were just as obsessed with dreams as were the Huron (131). Brébeuf had many mysterious, mystical visions that he accepted as cryptic messages from God as he struggled to discern the proper path for his mission. Bourrie’s gloss on Brébeuf’s experiences: “the apparitions seemed to come to Brébeuf at times of intense stress and could easily be interpreted as symptoms of a serious and worsening mental illness” (101). Who is the rationalist now? Bourrie condescends to Jesuits in exactly the same manner he accuses them of interpreting the Hurons. Aside from the anti-Catholic bigotry on full display, this interpretation obscures the true cultural fault lines of this triangulation of primitive-modern-Christian: the Jesuits and the Hurons stand together in their belief in spiritual beings against the modern who insists that pre-modern spirituality is really just a less advanced form of psychology. The Jesuits tried to drive out bad spirits and replace them with good spirits; Bourrie wishes to equate the spirit world with mental health. If Bourrie were to time travel to Huronia and explain to Hurons that spirits were not real but dream interpretation was nonetheless good psychology, he would likely have gotten a tomahawk to the head.
Despite his own modernizing prejudices, Bourrie repeatedly judges the Jesuits guilty of the unforgivable sin of corrupting the innocence and integrity of Huron culture by imposing Christianity. Again, his own evidence works against him. The Jesuits were in no position to impose anything on the Hurons. They were more often than not totally at the mercy of the Hurons for their very physical survival. Despite their outrage at native sexual habits and religious beliefs, the Jesuits had no power to force Christianity on the Huron; what success they had came only toward the end of the mission when some Hurons, despairing at the mass death from European diseases, came to adopt Christianity as what they themselves concluded was the only viable path forward in life.
STILL, BOURRIE TREATS Jesuit efforts as the equivalent of Cortez’s conquest of Mexico. The closest equivalent to Cortez in New France was actually the Iroquois, the people most responsible for the final destruction of Huronia. True, the Iroquois war on the Hurons arose within the context of struggle over market share within the lucrative, trans-Atlantic fur trade introduced by Europeans: the Iroquois sided with the Dutch and the English against the French and the Hurons. By Bourrie’s own account, the Hurons and the Iroquois were both willing and enthusiastic participants in the fur trade.
Though resistant to Christianity, the Huron embraced those European material advances (metal works, for both peace and war) made available through trade. European military technology made native warfare more deadly than prior to contact, yet no native group showed any hesitancy about acquiring technology that could enhance their power vis-a-vis other native groups. Overall, I fail to see how acknowledging the Iroquois’ desire to use European gun technology to exterminate the Hurons amounts to a “vilification” when it is simply a historical fact. Europeans would later use this technology against the Iroquois, leaving them not much better off than the Iroquois had left the Huron.
Bourrie’s consistent errors in historical judgment are compounded by a breezy, snarky tone that vilifies the Jesuits and romanticizes the Hurons, doing a disservice to both groups. This tone may have worked when telling the story of a frontier hustler such as Pierre-Esprit Radisson, but is totally inappropriate for the tragedy of Huronia. For those searching for a more nuanced treatment of this tragedy, I recommend Bronwen McShea’s Apostles of Empire: The Jesuits and New France (2022).
Christopher Shannon is associate professor of History at Christendom College. He has degrees from Rochester and Yale and is a member of the Philadelphia Society. He is the author of The Past as Pilgrimage: Narrative, Tradition, and the Renewal of Catholic History (Christendom, 2014).