Harvest of Souls: The Jesuit Missions and Colonialism in North America, 1632-1650 (MCGILL-QUEEN'S NATIVE AND NORTHERN SERIES) - Hardcover

Blackburn, Carole

9780773520479: Harvest of Souls: The Jesuit Missions and Colonialism in North America, 1632-1650 (MCGILL-QUEEN'S NATIVE AND NORTHERN SERIES)

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0773520473 ISBN 13: 9780773520479

Publisher: McGill Queens Univ, 2000

In "Harvest of Souls", Carole Blackburn uses the Jesuit Relations to shed light on the dialogue between Jesuit missionaries and the Native peoples of northeastern North America, providing a historical anthropology of two cultures attempting to understand, contend with, and accommodate each other in the new world. In 1632 Jesuit missionary Paul Le Jeune, newly arrived at the fort of Quebec, wrote the first of the Relations to his superior in Paris, initiating a series of biannual mission reports that came to be known as the Jesuit Relations. Blackburn presents a contemporary interpretation of the 1632-1650 Relations, arguing that they are colonizing texts in which the Jesuits use language, imagery, and forms of knowledge to legitimize relations of inequality with the Huron and Montagnais. By combining textual analysis with an ethnographic study of the Jesuits Blackburn is able to reveal the gap between the domineering language of the Relations and the limited authority that the Jesuits were able to exercise over Native people, who actively challenged much of what the Jesuits tried to do and say. She highlights the struggle between the Jesuits and Natives over the meaning of Christianity. The Jesuits attempted to convey their Christian message through Native languages and cultural idioms. Blackburn shows that this resulted in the displacement of much of the content of the message and demonstrates that the Native people's acts of resistance took up and transformed aspects of the Jesuits' teachings in ways that subverted their authority. "Harvest of Souls" is essential for all those interested in new approaches to historical and contemporary relations between Europeans and Native peoples in North America.

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Review:

"A solid contribution which anyone with an interest in the interaction between Native peoples and the French in the first half of the seventeenth century would read with profit." Thomas Abler, Department of Anthropology, University of Waterloo "Harvest of Souls is immensely important for historical, ethnohistorical, anthropological, and history of religious studies of seventeenth century Canada." Jordan Paper, Religious Studies Programme, York University

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