As a historian, Emma Anderson has taken on an exceedingly difficult task. She wants to complicate the discourse (extending over a period of almost 400 years) surrounding a particular instance of martyrdom: the killing of eight Jesuit missionaries to North America by Native people. These Jesuits—collectively known as “the North American martyrs”—are not so well known today, even among Catholics, as they once were. Hence Anderson must re-narrate the tradition, so to speak, as she critiques it. She does so, in part, by breaking away (at intervals) from the conventions of dispassionate historical analysis:
Below, others had already begun to feast …. Flapping their glossy feathers, they poked at the frozen forms with their sharp beaks, black eyes glinting. Some tugged, obscenely, at human intestines. Bending back their dark heads, they pulled the red ribbons taut, as if doing up a bloody bodice. Death had made no distinction among those who fell during the sacking of Taenhatentaron. Nor did the snow that covered them during the tiptoeing night …. The ravens did not distinguish between saint and sinner, murdered or martyred, as they feasted indiscriminately, glad for a meal in the scarcity of a Canadian March, whose bleakness always belies spring’s coming. No, it is only people who have made distinctions among these fallen.
This is but one notable example of how Anderson invites her readers into the narrative she expertly crafts. Though some historians will balk at her emotive approach, Anderson states her intention at the outset: “This book seeks to evoke as well as to inform, objectives that I see as being so complementary as to be virtually two aspects of the same thing. In my view, trenchant analysis need not preclude vivid description, nor thinking eclipse sensing and feeling.”
With this framework in place, she proceeds to tell the story of the eight men who, in 1930, became North America’s first canonized saints. Beginning with their deaths in the 1640s, through multiple iterations of their cult, and continuing to the present day, Anderson constructs a narrative intentionally distinct from, though not dismissive of, the hagiographical/devotional accounts that dominate the historical record. Of the eight French Jesuits—René Goupil, Isaac Jogues, Jean de la Lande, Antoine Daniel, Jean de Brébeuf, Gabriel Lalemant, Charles Garnier, and Nöel Chabanel—six were priests and two were lay assistants. While most hagiographical accounts of these men focus on their lives and end with their deaths, Anderson’s account begins with their deaths and proceeds from there. Her overall approach “eschews the encyclopedic for the intimate.” Even so, she succeeds in illuminating the martyrs’ long afterlife, sketching along the way some major contours of Canadian history while keeping American and French contexts in mind as well.
Anderson’s primary aim is to show that the dominant interpretation of the eight men as martyrs for the Christian faith is not the only possible or true interpretation of their deaths or legacies—nor has it been the only interpretation of the last four centuries. Alongside European Jesuit perspectives, there are also the views of the Wendat and Iroquois aboriginals and their descendants. In addition to this religious and ethnic diversity, Anderson demonstrates that even within Christian frameworks, the events and their meanings varied across time and space, and continue to do so. Specifically, she argues that many native Christians died under equally distressing circumstances, but these women, men, and children and their stories have been largely forgotten because of a deep racism and indifference. A troubling instance is how many of the hagiographical, visual representations of the martyrs have characterized traditionalist natives as bloodthirsty, murderous savages, reinforcing this abiding one-sided narrative.
Anderson traces the changing and contested meanings of the martyrs’ deaths through detailed and poignant touchpoints, which function like zoomed-in snapshots of various times and places. Her first chapter narrates the eight deaths in the 1640s, arguing that though they have been represented as a group, they died very differently from each other. Likewise, Anderson is careful to point out the simple but often overlooked fact that many native people were killed alongside the French Jesuits. She also contextualizes the deaths in terms of Wendat, Iroquois, and Jesuit understandings of what a “good death” meant, demonstrating that each group drew on their distinct religious frameworks and worldviews to interpret and frame these encounters. This reclamation of multiple understandings and narratives of the events in the 1640s leads Anderson to suggest that the canonization process was “artificial, subjective, and inherently unfair.”
The next vignette is from the late 17th century, in the first decades after the martyrs’ deaths. Here Anderson highlights how a young Hospitalière nun, Catherine de Saint-Augustin, and Jesuit Paul Ragueneau created the nascent martyrs’ cult in New France. From these small beginnings, Anderson jumps to the 19th century, when the martyrs’ cult was appropriated by French-speaking Catholic clerics, who were also ardent nationalists, seeking to distinguish themselves from Protestant, Anglo-dominated Canada. In the same period south of the international border, American Catholics also “discovered” the martyrs, capaciously designating them as North American, as a part of their project of combating anti-Catholicism and constructing a historical legacy as pioneering early Americans. For a short time, an unlikely alliance of French Canadian and American Catholics formed to work toward their shared goal of achieving the canonization of the North American martyrs.
In Canada after World War II, Anderson shows, the cult became increasingly Anglicized and Protestantized. This shift was exemplified by the martyrs’ incorporation into children’s textbooks as model Canadian pioneers and patriots and in a 1949 pageant called Salute to Canada, which contained a scene where a “red man” (an Iroquois medicine man) stripped off his 17th-century “war dance” clothes to reveal a 20th-century Red Army communist soldier. The increased civic acceptance of the martyrs in Anglo-Canada tracked with a concurrent diminishment of their tradition in French Canada, due to the rapid secularization and “quiet revolution” underway in Quebec in the 1960s and subsequent decades.
Anderson next turns to how representations of the cult and the martyrs have been increasingly challenged by native groups in the past few decades, as native traditionalists and native Catholics have voiced a plurality of concerns and perspectives. She analyzes the responses of leadership at the Midland Martyr’s Shrine in Ontario and Our Lady of Martyrs Shrine in New York State to challenges about the one-sided and at times overtly racist martyr imagery on display at the two shrines.
In her final chapter, Anderson switches to first-person, participant-observer mode, as she journeys with modern-day Catholic pilgrims to the New York and Ontario shrines, as well as to a small village chapel in Normandy, France (the childhood home of Jean de Brébeuf). She concludes with hypotheses about how these multiple contemporary understandings of the martyrs might continue to evolve in the coming years.
In the course of her narrative, Anderson draws from sources as varied as 17th-century primary documents, a rich variety of images and artifacts from visual and material culture across the whole span of her study, and 21st-century oral interviews. Particularly striking is her identification of the increased “racialization” of aboriginal subjects from the 19th century onward. Likewise, her analysis of the concept of martyrdom is intriguing. Throughout the book, martyrdom functions as a ritual in its Jesuit context, and it also takes on multiple meanings in a variety of situations. Anderson herself suggests that reframing martyrdom as a collective (rather than individual) experience leads to a critique of traditional definitions of martyrdom in the face of the “common, collective, and continuing” suffering of native North Americans.
As a comparative and multinational work, this book is exemplary. Even so, I imagine that some readers would desire to hear more from the Vatican’s side. Other than acknowledgement of the watershed differences between pre- and post-Vatican II, the Catholic hierarchy is one of the only static aspects of her otherwise evolving, dynamic, and nuanced cast of characters. In the same vein, the French cult of Brébeuf gets a small scene in the final chapter, yet some might feel Anderson underemphasizes the French side of this story, given that all eight of the martyrs were born and raised in France.
Anderson argues that the ritual actions of death and suffering (for the Jesuits and natives) were “hybrid events,” seen from a “range of perspectives” that must necessarily be considered in any “responsible interpretation.” And in the end, she practices what she preaches. She avoids the trap of reverse discrimination in treating her historical subjects. She does not overlook or dismiss the Catholic perspective, even as she advocates for a “profoundly needed corrective to the historical narrative,” with an emphasis on Native perspectives and voices—including Native Catholics. From the first page to the last, this beautifully written, smartly crafted, and assiduously researched book models the kind of empathetic, honest, and nuanced approach that characterizes history at its best. I hope that more historians will follow Emma Anderson’s example, wherein lively prose, thoughtful advocacy, and rigorous thinking go together.
Danae A. Jacobson is a PhD student in history at the University of Notre Dame.
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