Beginning to See the Jesuit Relations Differently by Micah True

The Jesuit “Relations:” A Biography by Micah True explores the intricate relationships between the published Relations and the many other texts written in New France, revealing a rich picture of a historical source that has shaped public understanding of colonial North America.

In the piece below, Micah True gives us some fascinating backstory about the writing of his book.

At the end of May 2017, my friend Dr. Chris Parsons, of Northeastern University’s Department of History, emailed me a link to a news story about then-Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s visit to the Vatican to request an apology from Pope Francis for the Catholic Church’s role in Canada’s residential schools. “What edition is this?” he asked, referring to the six-volume boxed set of the Jesuit Relations that Trudeau gave the Pope as a gift after their private conversation. I recognized the yellow box in the picture accompanying the article as Édition du Jour’s 1972 reprint of a mid-nineteenth-century edition of these famous annual reports of Jesuit missionaries in New France, which were first printed in Paris from 1632 to 1673. I’ve been joking ever since about how lucky Pope Francis was that Trudeau chose this compact and easily portable edition for his gift, instead of Reuben Gold Thwaites’s seventy-three-volume edition The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents.

As I write in the The Jesuit Relations: A Biography, this unexpected appearance of centuries-old mission reports in a diplomatic setting with clear relevance to ongoing discussions of Canada’s history and national identity planted the seed of this book. Echoing a long string of scholars, Trudeau called the Relations “an essential tool for historians to understand the early years and stories of Jesuit missionaries documenting the origins of Canada.” In this particular context, this description of the Relations struck me as odd. Trudeau was asking for the Pope’s participation in righting a long history of wrongs committed against Indigenous peoples, but simultaneously describing the Relations in a way that reasserted the centrality of European settlers in Canada’s earliest history. Surely, I thought, we can find better ways to think of and use texts like the Relations now that early Canadian history tends to be regarded not as the story of great men laying the groundwork for a nation but as one of exchange, exploitation, and domination. A desire to tell more nuanced stories about the relationship between Indigenous peoples and the Jesuit Relations was one my main motivations for writing this book.

But of course, one moment does not a book make. As I began to sketch out plans for this book, I found myself remembering that Chris’s email wasn’t the first time I was suddenly brought to see the Relations in a new light. Three such moments in more than two decades of reading the Relations stand out to me in particular, and can help explain how I came to understand these texts the way I describe them in the book.

At the end of my dissertation defense at Duke University in January 2009, one of my examiners pointed out that women were absent entirely from my analysis of the Relations, and suggested that this might be an area for future research. I nodded, but was inwardly perplexed. Of course I didn’t write anything about women, I thought to myself. The Jesuits are an all-male religious order. I was, of course, aware of the letters and spiritual writings of the Ursuline nun Marie de l’Incarnation who lived and wrote in Quebec for much of the time the Relations were appearing in France. But she hadn’t written the Relations, had she? For many years, I found my mind returning to my examiner’s comment, wondering if Marie de l’Incarnation and other women writers might have something to tell us about the Relations after all. As I show in the book, it turns out that there is quite a lot that can be said about how the Jesuit Superiors interacted and collaborated with women religious as they prepared their annual reports.

Around the time I was finishing graduate school, a friend suggested I might enjoy reading Mary Doria Russell’s 1996 science fiction novel The Sparrow, which tells the story of a future Jesuit mission making first contact with extra-terrestrial life. Russell’s novel follows its missionaries as they leave home, experience unfamiliar forms of intelligent life, and then return home permanently changed. Its attention to events on earth – and not only on a distant planet – made me wonder about the religious, political, and cultural structures in France that shaped and supported the New France mission and its annual reports. Although The Sparrow can’t be said to have directly inspired any particular part of my new book – unlike my first book, Masters and Students: Jesuit Mission Ethnography in Seventeenth-Century New France – I doubt I would have come to write so much about the role of various figures in Paris in shaping the New France mission reports had I not paused my scholarly reading to indulge in some science fiction. The scholarship on the Relations with which I have been in dialogue for many years usually focuses only on the events that took place in North America.

Finally, about ten years ago an anonymous reader’s report on one of my journal articles pointed out that the way I referred to the New France Jesuits’s annual reports – as the Jesuit Relations, with both terms italicized – conflated the seventeenth century texts with one particularly popular edition of them, Reuben Gold Thwaites’s Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents. This was only a single, offhand line in one of the dozens of readers’ reports I’ve received over the years, but it sent my thinking down a most fruitful path: how much of the way we now perceive the Relations is attributable to the characteristics of the modern editions we use, as opposed to the texts themselves? Quite a lot, it turns out. My book shows at length how these editions – especially but not only the Thwaites edition – have unmistakably shaped the way scholars think about and use the texts.

What happened in the Vatican in 2017 was certainly a eureka moment for me, one that soon led to a coherent book project. But in truth this was only one of many times I found myself rethinking the conventional wisdom about the Relations in light of a question or comment from a friend or colleague – or even a science fiction plot point. These moments put me on a path to unearthing many stories about the Relations – stories about how women, Indigenous people, lay settlers in New France, various figures in Paris, and even nineteenth- and twentieth-century book collectors, editors, and librarians had a hand in shaping the texts as we now know them. At a time when the common perception of the New France Jesuits’s annual reports that Justin Trudeau echoed after his meeting with Pope Francis seems out of touch with the needs of our historical moment, I hope this book will help its readers come to see the Relations differently.

Micah True is professor in the Department of Modern Languages and Cultural Studies at the University of Alberta.