archaeological and textual records - eCommons@Cornell - Cornell ...

ecalled how a party of Iroquois hand-delivered a letter from Garnier to him. Xavier
asked the party how Garnier and his charges were doing and was given some vexing
news. He wrote:
The 11th. They summoned me to the council, where the ambassadors who
came From the Iroquois handed me Reverend Father Garnier’s Letters. When I
had read Them, they asked me whether matters were right. I replied that they
were, provided The Iroquois kept their word; that there was, however, one
thing wrong, and this was that they had talked too much while with the
Iroquois, — that they had said that they had driven the black gown away from
their country, and would no longer have any Relations with the French. They
were so surprised at such a deception that they remained for a long time
without uttering a word. Finally they cried out: “It is the Iroquois who have
invented that; they love not the French. But we love the black gown. We beg
thee to continue to take care of us, to instruct our children, and to love us.” (JR
58:51-53)
This passage dates to sometime around June 1673 and is yet another example
of how the missions were often at the mercy of politics. The identities of the Iroquoian
messengers are not clear from the text, and so the correlation of this passage to a
historical event remains, for now, uncertain. However, later on in the volume, Father
Raffeix and Garnier write in detail of the missions at St. Michael, La Conception and
St. Jacques, and no mention of expulsion is made.
Of his charges at St. Michael and St. Jacques, Father Garnier seems to have felt
that indigenous “superstition” was the last remaining obstacle to Catholicism:
[if they] had detached themselves from the superstitions of the country as
thoroughly as they have hitherto preserved themselves from the vice of
drunkenness, we would have no trouble in making true Christians of them. Most of
them ask Father Garnier for baptism, and he is obliged to refuse them, because
they will not renounce some dances and other superstitious ceremonies which they
use as remedies in their illnesses. Two things render follies of this kind more
difficult to cast off: the first is the false hope of recovering health by this means;
the second is the profit that many of them derive from it. This has not prevented
two of the poorest families of the village from giving an example of generosity and
fidelity to God, — all the more admirable since, in abandoning the practice of
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