Jesuit Responses to Native American Dreams in the Early Seventeenth Century
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DISCERNING DREAMS IN NEW FRANCE: JESUIT RESPONSES TO NATIVE AMERICAN DREAMS IN THE EARLY SEVENTEENTH CENTURY THESIS Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Master of Arts in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University By Deirdre C. McMurtry, B.A. ***** The Ohio State University 2009 Thesis Committee: Approved By Professor Dale K. Van Kley, Advisor Professor Matt Goldish ____________________________________ Professor Alice Conklin Advisor History Graduate Program ABSTRACT Recent scholarship on the seventeenth-century Jesuit-Amerindian encounter in New France has emphasized the cultural disruptiveness and loss of the various native groups as a result of the missionary project. Crucial to understanding this loss of traditional Amerindian culture, however, is a parallel understanding of the cultural and intellectual forces coming from Europe which shaped and often restricted the Jesuits’ attitudes toward native customs. Examining the first fifty years of the cross-cultural encounter through the lens of dream interpretation, this paper argues that the Jesuits made several adjustments to their initial assumptions and responses toward native dreams. Although the Jesuits originally denounced all native dreams as superstitious, the advent of native convert dreams forced the Jesuits to recognize the placement of at least some native dreams within traditional Christian categories of visions and miracles, even though some of these dreams retained characteristics which they condemned in traditional native dreams. Over time, however, the Jesuits’ accommodating policy drew criticisms from competing missionaries. Because the dispute centered on events in China rather than Canada, the acceptability of convert dreams was resolved first by a silence on the issue in public records and later by a retraction of the papal condemnation of the Chinese Rites ruling and certain accomodationist practices. Ultimately, the issue of dreams reveals the deep tensions faced by the Jesuits in evaluating and accepting practices, even in part, that ii did not fit precisely into orthodox categories during a period when the Catholic Church, an institution that, like many other European centers of power, strove to buttress their institutional authority and to reduce the varieties of acceptable worship and belief in the face of enormous expansion in intellectual ideas and varieties of cultural practices around the world. iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I wish to thank my advisor, Dale Van Kley, for his comments, suggestions and guidance on this project. Without his enormous patience and intellectual support this project would have never emerged from the shadows and deep recesses of my mind to reach publication. I am grateful for his willingness to allow me to pursue topics and interests that inched further and further from his own areas of comfort, and for exploring these questions with me. I would also like to thank Professors Matt Goldish, Alice Conklin, David Cressy and Alan Gallay for their comments and insights on previous research projects and papers which led to this thesis. Many thanks also to Kathryn Magee whose background on native customs and the Jesuit missionaries and whose stimulating conversation was invaluable to my research and creativity. I owe a special debt to Lucy Murphy, the Ohio State Department of History, Susan Sleeper-Smith and the CIC American Indian Studies Consortium whose help brought me to a conference at which I met several invaluable contacts and deepened my understanding of and interest in native history. Additionally, I am especially grateful for funding from the French Atlantic History Group at McGill University which allowed me to attend a workshop on science in the Atlantic world. The topics and discussion opened up new connections for me between science and culture that was pivotal in my research. iv VITA August 1, 1978 . Born – Norfolk, Nebraska 2000. B.A. English, University of Nebraska-Lincoln 2004. B.A. History, University of Nebraska-Lincoln 2005 - present . Graduate Teaching and Research Associate, The Ohio State University FIELDS OF STUDY Major Field: History Specialization: Early Modern Europe Minor Fields: Atlantic World Intellectual History v TABLE OF CONTENTS Page Abstract..........................................................................................................................ii Acknowledgements.......................................................................................................iv Vita.................................................................................................................................v Sections: Introduction........................................................................................................1 Rejecting the Natural.......................................................................................14 Reevaluating the Spiritual................................................................................38 A Mysterious Silence.......................................................................................79 From Silence to Celebration..........................................................................100 Conclusion.....................................................................................................108 Bibliography..............................................................................................................115 vi INTRODUCTION As any scholar of colonial New France or the Jesuit missions of New France well knows, the European missionaries who encountered the people of the northeastern woodlands were horrified by many native customs and spiritual practices, denouncing their superstitions and wild pagan rites. However the story of Jesuits reactions to dreams is more complex than such a simple rejection implies, and the Jesuits themselves struggled to fit native dreaming beliefs into their carefully constructed European categories. Because both Catholic Jesuits and the various Amerindian tribes of the St. Lawrence valley held firm beliefs about the active and spiritual power—for good and evil—of spirits in nature, dreams provided a unique cultural bridge as well as cultural barrier to cross-cultural interaction. When they first arrived, the missionaries rejected all native dreaming practices, but as several of their converts began to have dreams or visions, they began cautiously to accept a few extraordinary native Christian dreams, attempting to fit them within the sacred tradition of mystical encounters. However, about the time that the Jesuit Fathers began their guarded approval of certain convert dreams, they stopped reporting on dreams altogether. For nearly a decade the Jesuits maintained a public silence on their spiritual direction of native converts until, in the 1650s, they once again reported on the miraculous wonders God was working in their midst. Although they continued to maintain their rejection of traditional native dreaming practices, the Jesuits’ final 1 acceptance of convert dreams incorporated a far broader inclusion of the very night dreams and visionary messengers than their earlier attitudes would suggest. In the beginning the priests had been careful to circumvent in their first converts, but gradually they demonstrated a greater readiness, almost excitement, to see miraculous significance in their converts’ dreams. How do we account for the tortuous journey of their policy on dreams? It is difficult to explain their shifting judgments solely as a function of their goal to convert the Canadian tribes or even because of the social and political crises multiplying in New France. While many changes in the practice of evangelism and spiritual development can be mapped along with the growth of knowledge of the geography and ethnography of the new world the Jesuits found themselves inhabiting, other changes are more difficult to explain. At least part of the motivation and direction of the missionaries’ dream strategy can be explained by the social and religious developments in France, Catholic Europe and other international Jesuit missions, particularly the Chinese mission, during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In the end, the story of Jesuit dream interpretation among their native audiences is a lesson, perhaps slowly and poorly learned, that native forms of spirituality even among converts fit awkwardly into the categories developed locally in Europe through centuries of practice and debate. Before turning to the evidence, however, it is necessary first to paint the backdrop and present the actors of this drama. Since this project is primarily an investigation of the Jesuit mentality in New France, shifting in reaction to circumstances and needs, it is essential to understand both the drive of the Jesuits and the particular spiritual and intellectual focus they brought to bear on colonial forms of hybridized spirituality. 2 Because they attracted a wide variety of zealous members from many nationalities and with diverse ideological and spiritual backgrounds, the Jesuit order sought very early in its institution to establish uniformity in goals, training, and spiritual disciplines. The great Spiritual Exercises of the founder Ignatius of Loyola of course formed the bedrock for Jesuit spirituality, but the interpretation of the Exercises was officially more intellectual than emotional and emphasized the mental practices of meditation more often than the affective practices of contemplation. While tongues of fire appeared to have descended