“One of our missionaries will visit them every 2nd day throughout the winter and do the same for the Kaoukia, who have taken up their winter quarters 4 leagues above the village.”28 Marest once traveled thirty leagues (seventy-five miles) to the winter quarters of some of his neophytes.29 With tasks like these he was thankful that he was “fitted to travel over the snow, to work the paddle in a canoe,” and that he had, “thanks to God, the necessary strength to withstand like toils.” But it was all in the life of the Illinois missionary: “I range the forests with the rest of our Savages, of whom the greater number spend part of the winter in hunting.”30 As Marest concluded, “These journeys which we are compelled to take from time to time … are extremely difficult.”31
In addition to travel, the Jesuits adopted many other aspects of Indians’ lifestyle. For example, the Jesuits embraced the Indian diet and used mealtimes as an opportunity to converse with the Illinois. As Rasles wrote, an exotic diet was the price they paid to remain close to the Illinois. Rasles related how a chief urged him to stay for a meal: “I answered that I was not accustomed to eat meat in this manner, without adding to it a little bread.” But Rasles learned that he would have to adapt. “Thou must conquer thyself, they replied; is that a very difficult thing for a Patriarch who thoroughly understands how to pray? We ourselves overcome much, in order to believe that which we do not see.” Rasles realized that he had to accommodate some of the Indians’ lifeways if he wanted them to accommodate Christianity: “We must indeed conform to their manners and customs, so as to deserve their confidence and win them to Jesus Christ.”32
The Jesuits were extremely enthusiastic about this collaborative project. After all, the ideal of Jesuit missionary activity was to live with the Indians in order to make a version of Christianity that was, as Loyola put it, “accommodated to those people.”33 Perhaps the most visible and important part of this project was language. The Jesuits had to translate their ideas into terms that made sense to the Indians. Surviving Jesuit dictionaries from the Illinois mission reveal the important intercultural cooperation that enabled them to learn and to translate as they lived together with the Indians. Le Boullenger’s dictionary, for example, suggests a happy collaboration between the priests and the Natives: “I help him to think, to speak.”34 Gravier’s dictionary reflects the assistance he received from Native instructors: “I try to speak; examine what I say.”35
Through such collaboration, Jesuits cultivated the ability to thoroughly converse in the Illinois vernacular. Not content just to read translations and preach to the assembled Indians—simply to “make myself understood,” as Allouez had put it—the Jesuits’ goal now was to both “understand and be understood.”36 Sébastien Rasles spoke of the challenges of understanding Indian speech, which required, in effect, becoming a student of the Illinois: “I spent part of the day in their cabins, hearing them talk. I was obliged to give the utmost attention, in order to connect what they said, and to conjecture its meaning; sometimes I caught it exactly, but more often I was deceived, because, not being accustomed to the trick of their guttural sounds, I repeated only half the word, and thereby gave them cause for laughter.”37
Gabriel Marest, arriving in his first mission assignment in 1695, emphasized the importance of being able to comprehend what the Indians themselves said about their religious experience. This was an extra challenge: “I have still more difficulty in understanding the Savage tongue than in speaking it, [even though] I already know the greater number of the words.”38 To help himself, Marest created a dictionary of the language: “I have made a Dictionary of all these words according to our alphabet, and I believe that, considering the short time that I could spend among the Savages, I had begun to speak their language easily and to understand it.”39
It is worth considering the form of the dictionary Marest made. Although it did not survive, his description of it implies it was similar in form to Gravier’s dictionary that is extant. Significantly, this was an “Illinoisto-French dictionary,” not a “French-to-Illinois dictionary.” Such a dictionary would likely have been useless for a Frenchman who was trying to speak Illinois, or translate concepts from French into the Illinois language. Instead, its more appropriate use would be to listen and understand what the Indians were saying in their own language. This reflects the idea that, for these Jesuits, learning language was not simply about introducing new ideas into the Illinois culture but fundamentally being able to understand the language in all its complexity. The form of the Gravier dictionary (and presumably Marest’s as well) thus signals that the Jesuit often was a passive listener, struggling to understand. Such language tools differed fundamentally from prayer books such as the one carried by Marquette and Allouez and reveal the much greater comprehension that the second generation of Jesuits was able to attain in their mission over the course of time. Gravier’s dictionary is a 590-page testament to the increased sophistication of his abilities as a listener.
By the early 1700s, one observer noted that the Illinois priests “speak [the Illinois] language perfectly.”40 With this ability, the Jesuits were no longer clumsy observers of Illinois lifeways and culture, misunderstanding all they witnessed. Instead they became, over time, almost like modern-day anthropologists—participant observers in the foreign culture that they increasingly came to understand on its own terms.
The results of improved communication were ambiguous, however. Better able to understand the Illinois, the Jesuits now learned that they were not as universally enthusiastic about Christianity as Marquette and Allouez had said. As his dictionary makes clear, Gravier had a much more sophisticated understanding of the spiritual worldview of Natives. “Manitou” was not an equivalent concept to the Christian God, “feasting” was not the same as communion, and “traditionalism” was still strong.41 One word in Gravier’s dictionary meant “I still have my old superstitions.”42 Jugglery, or what the Jesuits identified as Indian traditionalism, was still widespread among the Illinois, and Gravier knew it. As he wrote in a Relation of 1694, there were many non-Christians in the villages, and he spent much more time now “disabus[ing] them of the senseless confidence they have in their manitous.”43 His dictionary showed a much more sophisticated understanding of Illinois spirituality. In many ways, better understanding destroyed old naïve accommodations.
Figure 10. Illinois-to-French dictionary by Jacques Gravier, 1690s. Like Liette’s 190-page ethnography, Gravier’s dictionary was a 590-page monument to his sophisticated understanding of the Illinois.
Courtesy of the Watkinson Library Special Collections, Trinity College, Hartford, Conn.
This might have produced pessimism as the Jesuits realized that the Illinois were far from Christianity and that Native spirituality remained strong. And yet there was another consequence of improved communication. As they learned more about the Illinois, they became expert observers of a culture in the process of transformation. Even as they learned about the persistence of Illinois’s non-Christian spirituality, the Jesuits could tell that the lifeway of the Illinois was full of tension and contradictions. And they especially understood the costs of these tensions for one group of people in Great Kaskaskia: women.
The Grand Village of the Kaskaskia, and now Pimitéoui, had been built on bison and slaves and exploitation. In Iroquois attacks and other warfare throughout the second half of the seventeenth century, the Illinois had lost lots of people and had used slavery and adoption as a means of replacing lost kinsmen with outsiders. As we have seen, this strategy allowed the Illinois to experience strength during a period when many Algonquians were reeling. Arriving right at the height of the Illinois’s power, Gravier became a kind of sociologist observing this community’s strategy and its result: the might and dominance of the Illinois in the borderlands. And yet Gravier and his
