Jesuits

The Jesuits, also called the Black Robes, are Catholic missionaries whose presence in the novel links religious instruction and literacy to colonial power. Their role is not one-sided: a Jesuit’s teaching gives Charles Duquet access to reading and writing, and missionaries advocate new work and food supplies, while other clerical voices condemn Mi’kmaq ways of life and promote the idea that French settlers earn ownership by clearing land. The order’s encounters with Indigenous knowledge expose the distance between providing service and demanding cultural change.

Missionaries and Literacy

When Charles Duquet recognizes that illiteracy leaves him vulnerable to merchants, Toussaint Trépagny recommends obtaining a Jesuit, whom he describes as capable of reading and writing extensively. The plan turns missionary literacy into a commercial resource: the captive priest is to teach Duquet while also converting Indigenous people. Toussaint, Fernand, and Duquet watch a group of missionaries and their Huron guides before seizing Père Naufragé when he steps away. They gag and bind him, then take him to their camp.

Duquet tells Père Naufragé that he must stay until Duquet learns to read and write, and warns him against trying to escape. Although the abduction is coercive, Duquet says the priest will be treated well. Père Naufragé initially objects that he was traveling to the Hurons and that his companions expect him, but eventually accepts the arrangement while insisting on daily devotions, weekly mass, and time for theological disputation. Fernand supplies a worn copy of Les Quatrains de Pibrac as an instruction book. Duquet practices letters and numbers on hundreds of pieces of birch bark, learns arithmetic, and quickly absorbs information; at the end of the first year, he has memorized the book’s contents. In early spring two years after the capture, Père Naufragé leaves reluctantly, dressed as a woodsman because his cassock has worn out in the brush. Duquet arranges to take him to the Hurons before leaving on business in France. The episode makes missionary education consequential even when its immediate purpose is appropriated by a would-be trader.

Conversion and Colonial Authority

The novel also presents clerical authority as a vehicle for French political priorities. In a conversation with a missionary, a French official dismisses appeals to Mi’kmaq sensibilities and insists that the people’s duty is to care for their souls, respect the French king, and fight the English. He treats Indigenous people as unreliable forces to be used when French territory is threatened, including at Louisbourg. The missionary’s account of Mi’kmaq decline and diminishing knowledge is thus set against an official demand that missionaries advance loyalty and military service.

In a letter to his sister, Père Crème describes Mi’kmaq understandings of time as shaped by seasonal abundance and reports that they regard trees, plants, fish, moose, and bears as equals. He notes stories of people marrying animals or changing into bears, and describes people speaking to toads and beetles as acquaintances. He admits that he sometimes feels they are teaching him. Yet he also frames this knowledge through a project of correction: he says they should use trees to build houses and ships, grow grain, and impose a more ordered routine on their days. The tension between his attentive observation and his prescriptions shows how recognition can coexist with an expectation of conversion to European norms.

Père Crème makes that hierarchy explicit when he argues that land belongs to the person who improves it. In his letter, he characterizes fishing, hunting, and gathering as idleness, contrasts them with clearing forest and building a household, and presents French settlement as a morally earned title to Indigenous homelands. His account converts a disagreement about land use into a religious and legal justification for dispossession: forest clearing becomes evidence of virtue, while Mi’kmaq relationships to land are treated as proof that the land has not been improved.

Work, Medicine, and Practical Knowledge

Missionary influence also reaches everyday subsistence. After a sawmill begins operating in the interior, Père Crème urges Mi’kmaq people to set aside trapping and fishing and take wage work. Earnings could purchase salt pork and flour; although salt pork is described as unappealing, bread made from flour has become valued. Elphège, Theotiste, and Achille work long hours clearing forest with René and find employment with Duquet et Fils; Rouge Emil joins as well. The account marks the work as a departure from Mi’kmaq practice, undertaken because it seems necessary, rather than presenting wage labor as an uncomplicated improvement.

A contrasting clerical encounter is associated with medical and botanical learning. Monsieur Bouchard says Mari’s reputation for healing the sick and injured has reached Kébec, and Dr. Sarrazine travels west to see her with a notebook, specimen papers, and French needles for her. He returns ten days later with wild vegetable specimens, some intended for the Jardin des Plantes. The episode places a learned European observer in the presence of Mari’s established healing knowledge, while also showing how that knowledge and the surrounding natural world can be gathered into written records and scientific collections.

The Limits of the Missionary View

Père Crème’s response to the Sel family reveals the order’s concern with language and literacy as instruments of authority. He is troubled that the family speaks French and that the two older brothers can read and write using the Roman alphabet, calling their literacy a serious error by an earlier cleric. He fears they could cause trouble, while also objecting to their preference for seasonal work in the woods, on rivers, and at other jobs rather than farming. The passage exposes a contradiction: missionaries promote literacy when it serves instruction, but clerical authority can regard Indigenous people’s command of French and writing as dangerous when it supports independence.

Across these encounters, the Jesuits are neither simply educators nor a uniform force. Père Naufragé’s literacy instruction is taken up for Duquet’s commercial ambitions; Père Crème advocates wage work and articulates a theology of land improvement that supports colonial claims; and the medical and botanical episode registers a different, more practical exchange around Mari’s expertise. Their narrative significance lies in this unstable conjunction of learning and control. Missionary contact can transmit useful skills and engage Indigenous knowledge, even as its institutional language ranks that knowledge below European religion, labor, and property conventions.