Empire by Collaboration. Robert Michael Morrissey
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did not feel fully integrated into the dominant culture. The most important tension at the Grand Village and Pimitéoui was clearly related to gender. The Illinois had survived and expanded by creating a mode of reproduction based on slavery and polygamy. But in this context, many women resented their treatment. In a violent culture, they were victimized at home, abandoned in battles, and oppressed as slaves. Under the surface, Illinois society simmered with conflict between the sexes.
In the 1690s, disempowered women among the Illinois found one place they could turn. Jesuits had been in Illinois since the 1670s trying to establish an Illinois church. Frustrated by the presence of fur traders, they probably considered abandoning the mission and mostly neglected the Immaculate Conception project after Marquette’s death in 1674. But in 1689, a new group of priests, led by Jacques Gravier, reestablished the mission. This second generation of Jesuit priests in Illinois soon had a thriving presence. Unlike most others in the transitory Illinois frontier, they committed themselves to staying in Illinois for a long time and began to build intimate relationships with their hosts. One index of their intimate relations was their expertise in communication. As one observer in this period said, “the reverend Jesuit fathers speak the Illinois language perfectly.”2
They spoke it most perfectly with Illinois women, who found in Christianity lessons that were useful for them. Working together with Gravier and other Jesuits in the 1690s, Illinois women created spiritual principles that helped them combat unfavorable polygamous marriages and the oppressions they experienced in the slavery-dominated social world of Great Kaskaskia. Their society had been shaped by slavery, and Christianity gave them a perfect way to resist.
It is not surprising that this produced conflict and threatened the accommodations that had allowed people to get along in the Illinois to begin with. Gravier criticized Illinois men and French fur traders and helped his female students refuse their abuses. No longer convinced like Marquette that most of the Illinois were “near Christians,” Gravier confronted Illinois shamans and disrupted their ceremonies. Illinois men, for their part, rejected the priests and Christianity, subjecting their daughters to punishments when they attended mass. Meanwhile, disturbed by the tension that Gravier created, fur traders and the officials in La Salle’s tiny fort in Kaskaskia refused to support the Jesuits and even openly opposed them. It was an uneasy situation, dividing the outpost and destroying early intercultural harmonies.
But then, on the verge of a crisis in the community, several of the competing interests in Illinois found a sudden and surprising way to get along: marriage. In 1694, the Jesuit priest Gravier solemnized a wedding between the fur trader Michel Accault and Marie Rouensa, daughter of the chief of the Kaskaskia. This marriage, which represented a complex compromise among many different interests, was the beginning of a new era in the colony, when pragmatic compromise brought people together. Importantly, unlike the early transitory collaborations in Illinois, this marriage was not just a temporary or expedient accommodation. Accault, Marie, Gravier, and the Rouensas came together without any of the “creative misunderstandings” that characterized early frontier relations. To the contrary, thanks to their sophisticated intercultural communication, these people knew and understood each other quite well. Their compromise was the beginning of a real community, a genuine collaboration.3
This would shape the rest of Illinois Country history in unique ways. Totally unplanned and contrary to the agenda of most people in the colony, let alone the government, the new community was an improvisation. With the marriage of Accault and Rouensa, Illinois was no longer just a bunch of defiant fur traders, opportunistic Indians, and schemers. The marriage created the kernel of an interracial Christian community, around which an idiosyncratic colonial culture would soon develop. Even as the consolidated Kaskaskia village at Pimitéoui was coming apart, this community would persist.
It is Gravier who gives us a window into this set of events. Not a totally reliable narrator, he probably exaggerated many things in the long letters he wrote to his Jesuit superiors. But Gravier’s accounts of intercultural collaboration cannot be dismissed as mere propaganda, nor as the consequence of naïve misunderstanding, delusions of grandeur, or the failure to try to see the Native perspective.4 Like other Jesuits of his generation in the Grand Village, he deeply understood the Illinois, had close alliances with them, and thus was probably one of the most sensitive observers of the Illinois’s culture, ever.5 His dictionary and writings are the best sources to understand this period of transformation, and together they reveal a depth of knowledge about the Illinois.6 And if Gravier’s accounts were based on real understanding, so too were those of other eyewitnesses, such as Pierre-Charles de Liette, Tonty’s nephew and a military officer who arrived in the Illinois Country as commandant in 1687. Like Gravier and the other Jesuits, Liette studied the Illinois and deeply understood them, producing a 195-page manuscript, perhaps the most sensitive quasi-ethnographic description of any Algonquian people in the seventeenth century.7 Through sources like these, we can witness so much about the beginnings of this idiosyncratic, pragmatic colonial community. Moving beyond transitory frontier relations, the inhabitants of Illinois began a new era of real intercultural understanding.
Jesuits and Illinois Indians made early and opportunistic accommodations at the mission of the Immaculate Conception in the 1670s. But for various reasons, the earliest Jesuits did not spend much time in their new mission after 1675. Indeed, the initial conversions and baptisms, all the optimistic descriptions of the early mission in the Jesuit Relations, rested on surprisingly little contact between the Illinois and the priests. Marquette was only able to spend about three months in Illinois villages before his death in 1675. His partner, Claude Allouez, spent most of his time traveling and moving throughout the Great Lakes region from 1666 through 1689.8 He thus spent no more than a few months with the Illinois prior to 1676 and only a short time with them during the 1680s.9 When Allouez and Marquette wrote their reports of harmonious accommodation in Illinois, they were really describing a highly itinerant and impermanent frontier in which they themselves were sojourners.
When Jacques Gravier arrived to reestablish the neglected mission project of Illinois in 1689, he ushered in a whole new phase of the missionary frontier. In many ways, he brought the same goal that had motivated the early Jesuits: an idiosyncratic Christianity on Illinois terms. But although he had the same hopes, he and his fellow second-generation missionaries in Illinois had a very different experience. The biggest difference was permanence. Because they lived in Illinois for such a long period of time, Gravier and his partners among the second generation came to truly know the Illinois.
The differences between the first and second generations of Jesuits in Illinois are many, but the most important place to begin is with numbers. Before 1676, Marquette and Allouez spent no more than a few months in Illinois villages, in total. By contrast, the second generation—including Gravier, Gabriel Marest, Jean Mermet, Jean Baptiste Le Boullenger, Sébastien Rasles, Jacques Largillier, and Pierre-François Pinet—began a period of truly remarkable stability for Jesuits in the mission. By the end of his life, Gravier had spent fifteen years in Illinois. Marest spent sixteen, Pinet spent close to four years, and Mermet was an eighteen-year veteran of the mission by the time of his death. Le Boullenger, who arrived in Illinois in 1702, would spend fully thirty-seven years in Illinois. And Jacques Largillier would also spend more than thirty years of his life there.10 Meanwhile, a number of other non-Jesuits also became particularly rooted in the colony. Most important, Pierre-Charles de Liette would spend many years in the colony through the early eighteenth century.
Because they lived there on a permanent basis, the French in Illinois, and particularly the Jesuits, were able to establish much better channels of intercultural communication with the Illinois in the 1690s. Allouez and Marquette had been able to achieve a basic competency in the Illinois language, which they viewed as “somewhat like the Algonquian.”11 Using an Illinois prayer book and assistance from a slave Marquette had received from Ottawa allies at St. Esprit, the early priests were able to communicate with the Illinois sufficiently to, as Allouez put it, “make myself understood.”12 By contrast, the men of the second generation expended heroic efforts to develop true fluency in the Illinois language. Indeed, the second generation