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Mary-Ann Shantz defends Jean-François Lozier’s Flesh Reborn: The Saint Lawrence Valley Mission Settlements through the Seventeenth Century

As Andrea noted in her Introductory post for CHA Reads 2019, I am not a specialist in the field of the book I have chosen to champion as the best book in Canadian history this year, Jean-Francois Lozier’s Flesh Reborn: The Saint Lawrence Valley Mission Settlements through the Seventeenth Century. But I jumped at the opportunity to read, review, and champion this study because, in my experience teaching North American and Canadian history survey courses over the past decade, the history of northern North America in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and of colonial contact with the French, has become one of my favourite areas to teach. It is an area that engages, surprises, and challenges students; in particular, I have enjoyed sharing with students the work of scholars such as Kathryn Magee Labelle and Allan Greer, which dismantles misconceptions about Indigenous history (among settler students in particular), highlights Indigenous agency, and complicates and nuances students’ understanding of the nature of colonialism and its evolution over time. Jean-Francois Lozier’s book also furthers these objectives. At the same time, it represents a new and welcome intervention into scholarship through its re-framing of Algonquian, Wendat, and Iroquois decision-making, warfare, diplomacy, and community with a geographical focus on the St. Lawrence valley.

 

It is Lozier’s focus on place that is the book’s great strength. Through the lens of place, Lozier makes abstract concepts such as colonialism, conversion, community dispersal, relocation, and reconfiguration concrete, providing detailed evidence about how these processes played out on the ground. In contrast to existing scholarship organized around the study of particular groups, such as the Wendat, the Iroquois, the Jesuits, or the Ursulines, or centred on topics such as the fur trade, religious missions, or disease, Lozier’s study concentrates on region. Lozier observes that the establishment of Indigenous communities in the Saint Lawrence valley defies “the expected narrative of contact in early America,” namely an advancing colonial frontier pushing back Indigenous populations. Instead, Lozier argues that “even as [the Saint Lawrence valley] became the center of French colonial settlement, [it] became a space of renewal and regeneration for a range of Indigenous peoples who were experiencing great upheavals.” (5) Diverse peoples – Algonquian, Iroquoian and French – moved in and out of this geographic space, coming into relationship and into conflict, and Lozier captures this beautifully. He writes, “Conflict was at once a destructive process, and an integrative, incorporative, and creative one. Even as it tore populations apart and from their lands, it brought people together spatially, politically, and culturally. It challenged, reconfigured, and created personal and collective identities and solidarities, in ways often unexpected. Flesh Reborn…is about how blood was at times spilled and at times mingled, and how bodies, individual and political, were destroyed and remade.” (9)

The first two chapters of Lozier’s book focus on the Algonquian peoples – Innu and Algonquin – who inhabited the Saint Lawrence valley when the foundations of a French Empire were laid in the first half of the seventeenth century. Lozier describes French efforts to encourage the Algonquians to embrace a settled, agricultural way of life, while critiquing the dichotomy the French drew between their own way of life and the “nomadism” of the Algonquians; Algonquian peoples had established patterns of settlement and mobility, adapted in response to subsistence and security needs, while the early French settlers themselves lived highly mobile lives. For Lozier, more significant than the influence of French missionaries in encouraging the formation of Algonquian settlements in the Saint Lawrence valley was the growing threat posed by the Iroquois over the course of the 1630s and 1640s. An argument Lozier develops throughout the book is that the Indigenous mission settlements that formed in the Saint Lawrence valley represented a strategic decision to seek security through alliance with, and close proximity to, the French. While some of these settlements proved to be short-lived – “a variation on the traditional pattern of the season encampment” (51) – a more permanent Algonquian settlement eventually formed near Quebec at Kamiskouaouangachit (Saint Joseph or Sillery). Many of the residents, however, continued a seasonal pattern of hunting outside the settlement. Nevertheless, Lozier argues that “a new community emerged there – people came to share a sense of collective belonging, associated with a place and with a way of life that blended tradition and innovation. Public dedication to Christianity and to the French alliance marked the distinctive identity that emerged there.” (55)

Chapters three and four trace the impact of the Iroquois destruction of Wendake and the decision of some of the Wendat refugees to seek safety and re-establish themselves in the Saint Lawrence valley. Lozier emphasizes the ways “this relocation represented both a dramatic upheaval and a continuation of well-established patterns of Iroquoian mobility.” (88) But since “the enemy’s aim was not to destroy, but rather to absorb” (86), the Wendat remained a target of Iroquois attack within the Saint Lawrence valley, “a great human prize to be incorporated through diplomacy and violence.” (88) Eventually, many of the Wendat refugees were killed or captured by the Iroquois, but “under pressure from the Iroquois, families and individuals from different Wendat villages and, significantly, different constituent nations of the Wendat confederacy, converged to form a new community and remake a new Wendake” near Quebec (121).

With the conclusion of peace treaties between the Iroquois nations and the French during the 1660s, many Wendats and others that had been captured and incorporated into Iroquois communities began leaving Iroquoia for the Saint Lawrence valley, a sign of the challenges the Iroquois faced in effectively integrating such large numbers of captives. Lozier distinguishes “Old Iroquois” from “New Iroquois,” in other words, those of Iroquois descent versus those who were foreign born, while noting “the crucial caveat that in the Iroquoian context biological descent did not strictly determine personal identities.” (155) What really distinguished “Old Iroquois” from “New” was the extent to which old identities had been shed and an Iroquois identity embraced. Significantly, many of the “New Iroquois” who were Wendat captives chose to settle in the Montreal region, forming the basis for a new mission settlement, rather than joining the existing Wendat community near Quebec. Lozier offers a fascinating discussion of the ethnic diversity and “range of hyphenated identities” of those who moved to the original settlement of Kentake in the late 1660s and 1670s. As Jesuit missionaries made inroads at proselytizing within Mohawk country, combined with the impact of disease and the liquor trade, increasing numbers of Mohawks swelled the number of people re-locating from Iroquoia to the Saint Lawrence valley, specifically the settlements near Montreal.

By 1685, as Lozier notes, the combined population of the mission settlements of Kahnawake and Kahnesatake was around 900; by comparison, the estimated population of Mohawk villages at the time was around 1500, that of the Onondagas slightly higher, while the Oneidas numbered 600 to 800. Lozier convincingly argues that “due to the arrival of Old Iroquois who had come in from these villages, and to the need for a common identity and mutually intelligible language among New Iroquois of diverse origins, the process of assimilation that had begun in Iroquoia was completed on the shores of the Saint Lawrence.” (193) Christianity also constituted an essential element of identity within these mission settlements, a means of cementing the alliance with the French, and a source of division amongst the Iroquois, with the people of Kahnawake and Kanehsatake taking up arms alongside the French when hostilities resumed with the Iroquois League in the 1680s and 1690s. Eventually, Lozier argues, having “demonstrated their ability to achieve results both as warriors and as diplomats,” the Christian Iroquois played a significant part in bringing about the Great Peace of Montreal in 1701, a development which enabled the renewal of friendly relations between residents of the Saint Lawrence mission settlements and their relations in Iroquoia (285-89).

Lozier’s book is clearly written and extensively researched. Largely relying on the Jesuit Relations for his primary source material, Lozier also makes significant use of Indigenous language dictionaries. An aspect of the book that I found especially interesting was his attention to the constituent Wendat and Iroquois nations, considering where they remained distinct within the Saint Lawrence mission settlements and where they blended into broader Wendat or Iroquois identities. As the best histories do, Lozier’s book encouraged me to examine the past in a new light. His depiction of the mission settlements that formed in the Saint Lawrence valley as “heterogeneous, multiethnic, and multinational communit[ies]” that formed “long-lasting collective identities” (298) by the late seventeenth century is a story of destruction, loss and change, but also one of continuity, adaptation and renewal. I have no doubt that Flesh Reborn will become an essential source for scholars and students alike.

Mary-Ann ShantzMary-Ann Shantz has a PhD in history from Carleton University and lives and works in Edmonton, Alberta. She has published on the history of nudism in postwar Canada, and her new research projects explore the history of Canadian children in urban public space, and the history of child runaways on the Canadian prairies.

Be sure to join us later today for Heather Green’s defence of Shirley Tillotson’s Give and Take: The Citizen-Taxpayer and the Rise of Canadian Democracy! See you then!

 

Don’t forget to check out the other posts in the series:

 

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