Maistre et Escolier: Amerindian Languages and Seventeenth-Century French Missionary Politics in the Jesuit Relations from New France

Abstract

Abstract From the earliest days of European contact with the New World, explorers, traders, and missionaries sought ways to communicate with the Amerindian groups they encountered. Knowledge of Amerindian languages was, in this context, sometimes jealously guarded in the early days of New France as various actors on the colonial stage sought to protect their advantage over rivals. This article examines how seventeenth-century Jesuit missionaries in the colony used Amerindian languages as an exclusionary principle to grant themselves access to New France's spiritual riches in the pages of the published Jesuit Relations while simultaneously locking out potential rivals. I argue that Jesuit characterizations of themselves as mere schoolboys and as stammering children in describing their initial linguistic efforts paint a portrait of a missionary organization that was steadily gaining power, and that was uniquely able to bring Christianity to New France. The clear influence of missionary politics on the contents of the Jesuit Relations, I argue, suggests that texts produced by the missionaries — often lauded for their ethnographic richness — must be regarded as the products of a specific political context, and not only of Jesuit-Amerindian interactions on the ground in New France.