The Spanish and the English knew how to take care of business. They efficiently carved up and took possession of their respective portions of the Western Hemisphere. The Spanish came with crucifixes, but soon developed a knack for plucking the hearts out of native Empires: first Mexico, then Peru. The rest was just mop up. The English were a bit shaky for a decade or so, but by the latter part of the 17th century they were taking enthusiastic bites out of the North American continent. After rebranding themselves as Americans, they developed a system of treaty and relocation that steadily swept the original inhabitants of the continent out of their way. By the time they reached California in the 1840s and 50s they were exterminating Indians matter of factly. Missionary zeal was a distant memory. Here’s a quote from a New York Times review of a book titled An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe, 1846-1873, by Benjamin Madley:
The slaughter of California’s Indians was rapid and thorough even by the grim standards that had been set elsewhere in North America. Before 1846, California’s native peoples suffered great losses from diseases and dispossession. Spanish colonizers and their Mexican successors wanted to preserve Indians as mission inmates or as cheap and dependent farm labor. The American newcomers, however, came by the thousands and treated natives as menaces best destroyed, the sooner the better.
It’s incredible that I had no more than an inkling of any of this until I read that review. And to think that all this was going on while, not far off, Mark Twain was writing about jumping frogs. Did he know? If he did, maybe that helps to explain the jarring depictions of mass slaughter in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court.
But the Spanish and the English were not the only nations with American franchises: the French were here too. They came in smaller numbers, but the crucial difference is that they did not sweep native societies before them, but rather injected themselves deep into the heart of the continent, along the St. Lawrence at Quebec and Montreal. This made them vulnerable in a way that the Spanish and English were not. The French led primarily with priests—Jesuits—rather than soldiers. Militarily, they were no stronger and far less numerous than the Iroquois of New York State, with whom they battled for supremacy for over 100 years.
I first became interested in the French experience in North America while reading Francis Parkman’s seven-volume history, France and England in North America, republished by the Library of America in the 1980s. The series was originally published between 1865 and 1892. I had known little about the French experience in America, other than the gory tales of martyrdom I heard in Catholic school, but it’s a great story, from initial explorations and settlements through an extended if stunted colonial phase to a might-have-been attempt to master the entire continent, with settlements and trade networks deep into the Midwest and northern Rockies. Beyond Quebec, little remains of these ambitions other than place names—St. Louis, Des Moines, and of course New Orleans. I’d love to ramble on about things like the battle for Atlantic Canada, culminating in the French defeat at fortress Louisbourg in Nova Scotia in 1758. The result of this defeat was that French settlers near the Atlantic coast were shipped off to Louisiana, while unruly Catholic Scots from the Highlands were brought it to take their place. Another remarkable episode is that of the coureurs de bois, literally “runners of the woods,” French agents who set up trading networks that spread across thousands of miles of the North American interior. Daniel Greysolon, Sieur du Lhut, was one such, and from him we get the name of a northern city—Duluth.
But perhaps the best story of all is that of the mission to the Hurons. This took place in the 1640s. The Hurons were related to the Iroquois but not allied with them. They had established a set of agricultural settlements near the southeastern shore of what is now called Lake Huron. The French decided that the Hurons would make good partners, and so they sent several of their Jesuits out to live with and preach among them. They wanted a strategically placed ally, and they wanted to save souls. The journey from Montreal, the nearest French settlement, to the country of the Hurons required a difficult canoe journey through potentially hostile territory lasting several days. Once ensconced in Huron territory, the Jesuit priests were as far from rescue as astronauts would be on Mars.
So far from home, the Jesuits could not rely on weapons or technology to testify to the superiority of their religion. In a way they relished the challenge—saw it as a test of faith. Parkman describes one incident where a priest shows a picture of Jesus to some Hurons. Instead of noticing the white man in the picture, they noticed the animals—I think they were sheep, which no Huron had ever seen. The priest’s next annual letter to his superiors in Quebec requested some new pictures, this time without any distracting animals or vegetation that might detract from the primary pedagogical purpose of these visual aids.
Writers have not failed to recognize the dramatic potential of French Canada in general, and of the mission to the Hurons specifically. Irish author Brian Moore’s 1985 novel Black Robe, which later became a pretty good movie, is one example. Now another writer, critically acclaimed Canadian novelist and short story writer Joseph Boyden, has mined this episode for The Orenda.
Boyden sticks very close to the facts, in terms of dates and events. Some of his characters can be identified with actual people from the historical record; others seem to be composites; still others are made up.
Boyden speaks through three main characters: a Huron leader named Bird, a young female Iroquois captive named Snow Falls, and a French priest generally identified just as “The Crow.” Through the eyes of the Indians we see a strong society with rich traditions. It would be perfect, except that it is precarious, because when the hunting is not good, or when a fungus strikes one of their staple crops, they face starvation. And then there are the Iroquois—a numerically superior nation that seeks to annihilate the Huron. Perhaps only such precarious societies, where survival requires cooperation and courage, and when a people must rely entirely on themselves for everything, can ever seem perfect.
Boyden knows everything that Parkman knew, and he also knows about things that anthropological studies have turned up since Parkman’s time, like the Huron feast of the dead, which involved digging up the cemetery when it was time for the residents of a village to relocate. For a couple of days the corpses, in various states of decay, took up residence with their families.
Once all of the families have had sufficient time to see and to mourn over the bodies of their loved ones again, they then cover them with magnificent beaver robes. And when this stage of the mourning comes to a close, the families once again uncover the bodies and set to work stripping off the flesh and skin that might still be left, taking special care to burn this in the fire, along with any old furs and mats used in the original burial. Those bodies that have not yet putrefied enough are covered by a robe and left on a bark mat.
This reportage is in the context of a letter the priest is writing to his Superior. He continues:
Now, it may seem barbaric and ghastly to hear of this practice of picking bones clean, but I must tell you, dear Superior, that I have never witnessed such absolute and pure love for a relative who has passed.
The priest has by this point in the story mastered the Huron language and is sensitive, compassionate, and intelligent enough to understand how the natives think and why they do what they do. And yet he remains convinced that their lives are ruled by Satan and that he is justified to use threats, bribes, and deception to pry them away from their beliefs and practices—the term Orenda, to borrow from Wikipedia, is “an Iroquois name for a spiritual power inherent in people and their environment.”
Boyden never suggests that the priest experiences any doubt or internal conflict. Nor does he show any interest in making the priest’s Christianity appealing in any way—there’s no passion or feeling in the priest’s faith, though he is absolutely willing to die for it.
Boyden, a Canadian writer with some Indian ancestry, seems more comfortable inhabiting the minds of his Indian characters. The Orenda is the final volume of a fictional trilogy dealing with a single Indian family through the generations, though the first two volumes take place in the 20th century (I haven’t read them). As astonishing and strange as such customs as the feast of the dead are, there is a vaguely unsetting familiarity in the way Boyden presents the inner lives of his Indian characters. The language with which he renders their thoughts has an easy kind of modernity to it:
How is it that I lose one family, a family that I love so much, only to be ensnared by these two demanding and difficult children, these two being who drive me mad? I guess this is the way of our world.
I realize that depicting the lives of people so different from ourselves is a no-win situation. If you show only as much of their articulation as could authentically be gleaned through the language and cultural barriers, you end up with the kind of clichéd utterances we know from movies—Many moons have passed since the buffalo has roamed our lands, etc. But if you take Boyden’s strategy, opting to equip his Indian with a full set of emotions and thoughts, you have no emotions or thoughts to equip them with except our own modern-day emotions and thoughts, rendered in modern day language. It just doesn’t feel authentic, no matter how well researched or how true it may be to actual events.
What Boyden might have done is to include some discontinuities in his tale, some jagged pieces that don’t quite fit together, to at least acknowledge the bits that must inevitably be lost in rendering their world in our words. But I can appreciate that Boyden might not be that kind of writer. You can’t just sprinkle obfuscations into a text to create the impression of authenticity. Some writers have a knack for that sort of thing, and some don’t.
Like a lot of people, I am fascinated by Native American culture. I took an anthropology course in college titled “Prehistory of North America,” but I was disappointed to discover that after a few weeks the syllabus came down to differentiating among various types of arrowheads—how they were shaped, how they were serrated, etc. It’s works like Parkman’s history, or Edward Curtis’s The North American Indian, a 20-volume work combining photography with descriptions of native language and customs, that connect with our imaginations. Works that don’t try to inhabit the minds of the Indians, but merely the experience of encountering those minds, and trying to present them with sympathy and scrupulousness.
Which is not to say that Boyden hasn’t written an engaging and beautiful novel. If I touch on what left me unsatisfied about The Orenda, it is because it feels like a single nagging defect in an otherwise wonderful novel. Details of how people lived, what they ate, what their experience of the natural world was like, and how the various tribes, along with the French, competed and cooperated by turns, are all rendered perfectly. The fictional lives of his characters mesh perfectly with the historical disaster that ultimately befell the Huron.
But does such a book keep those people, in the their time and place, alive, or does it just add one more filter, one more set of assumptions, between us and them?
