Comparative American Studies An International Journal

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The Historiography of New France and the Legacy

of Iroquois Internationalism

Scott Manning Stevens

To cite this article: Scott Manning Stevens (2013) The Historiography of New France and the
Legacy of Iroquois Internationalism, Comparative American Studies An International Journal,
11:2, 148-165, DOI: 10.1179/1477570013Z.00000000037

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comparative american studies, Vol. 11 No. 2, June 2013, 148–65

The Historiography of New France and

the Legacy of Iroquois Internationalism
Scott Manning Stevens
Newberry Library, Chicago, USA

This article examines the French portrayal of Haudenosaunee culture and

politics in the historiographic tradition established by the Jesuit writers in
seventeenth-century New France. I argue that over the centuries the Haude-
nosaunee have reframed the portrayal of our culture as hostile to civilization
and instead embraced the notion of our ongoing resistance to colonialism
and our right to assert and promote our role as spokespeople in indigenous
affairs throughout the Americas.

keywords Haudenosaunee, Iroquoia, New France, Jesuits, historiography,

resistance

The Iroquois League, as history has fashioned the Haudenosaunee or ‘People of the
Longhouse’, holds an almost mythic position in American history and literature.
Some three decades ago, Francis Jennings examined the roots of what he called
the ‘Ambiguous Iroquois Empire’ in a book of the same name. There he traced an
Anglo-American historiographic tradition from Cadwallader Colden in the eighteenth
century, to Francis Parkman and Lewis Henry Morgan in the nineteenth century, to
a host of popular and scholarly histories in the twentieth century (1984: 10–24). Those
histories portrayed the Haudenosaunee as an expansive military and political power
whose influence ranged from Maine to the western Great Lakes and south into
Kentucky. The Iroquois of those histories subjugated their enemies by violent force
and for almost two centuries acted as the fulcrum in the balance of power in colo-
nial North America. I wish to refocus our attention on the French historiographic
tradition concerning New France and the place of the Haudenosaunee in their
writings. Specifically, I will examine how that tradition in effect creates an image of
the Iroquois as an interventionist and resistant indigenous force. This is a largely
historiographic and sometimes literary tradition but it is a tradition that, like the
Anglo-American tradition, has found its way into popular notions of the Iroquois.
I believe that many Haudenosaunee today have come to embrace this image at a
certain level even as we reject earlier French characterizations of our culture. One
could argue that we have appropriated this image of our intransigence in the face of

© W. S. Maney & Son Ltd 2013 DOI 10.1179/1477570013Z.00000000037

THE HISTORIOGRAPHY OF NEW FRANCE AND THE LEGACY OF IROQUOIS INTERNATIONALISM 149

European notions of civilization and acknowledged it as resistance to asserting and

promoting our role as spokespeople in indigenous affairs throughout the Americas.

The invention of Iroquoia

Long before there was scholarly discussion of an ‘Atlantic World’, members of
Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) communities were traveling far from their traditional
homelands to trade and fish on the Atlantic coast at the mouth of the St Lawrence
River. Scholars have found evidence pointing to Haudenosaunee encampments as
far away as Newfoundland (Parmenter, 2010: 11–13). That long-ranging freedom
of mobility, as one historian has argued, is central to the Haudenosaunee sense of
identity and collective rights (Parmenter, 2010). Such mobility was not synonymous
with nomadism or the ‘wandering’ one so often encounters in early European
accounts but rather with trade and diplomacy (see especially, Jennings, 1984: 58–84).
The theme of diplomacy and extensive foreign relations would come to define the
Haudenosaunee even as their confederation was coming to be known to Europeans
as the ‘Iroquois’ or ‘Five Nations’.
Anyone exploring that legacy in Haudenosaunee or Iroquois history must be aware
from the outset that they are entering still-contested territory (see especially, Trigger,
1978; Johansen, 1982). Like all historical research into the problematically chronicled
past, there exist considerable debates surrounding the data available and its interpre-
tation. Though this observation might hold for countless histories, Haudenosaunee
history is a particularly vexed field. When the Jesuit fathers chronicled what they saw
and experienced firsthand they stood on firmer ground; but when they attempted to
discern the contours of the pre-contact past, they met many unexpected challenges.
Primary among the difficulties faced by the European historians who first attempted
to write a history of the Iroquois Confederacy was the general lack of writing in
North America. The Jesuit chroniclers of New France acknowledged this problem as
one that might ultimately defeat their task. One of the anonymous authors of this
Relation wrote: ‘we cannot go very far back in our researches in their history, as they
have no Libraries other than the memory of their old men; and perhaps we should
find nothing worthy of publication’ (Thwaites, 1899, Vol. 45: 205).1
The above statement is telling because it reveals the persistent and enduring author-
ity of the written word over oral traditions and cultures, as well as the nascent
techno-ethnocentrism of early modern Europeans. That particular manifestation
of ethnocentrism would contribute greatly to the racialized version of the same
prejudices, which was expressed as savagery, barbarism, or primitiveness into the
nineteenth century and beyond — the shadow of this notion covers even contempo-
rary works like Jarrod Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997), which takes a
markedly determinist view about the decline of certain cultures and the success of
others. Besides the absence of a written history among the Indians of the northeast
was the absence of the other primary indicator of civilization — the permanent city
or town. With scant architectural evidence of an ‘urban’ presence and relatively little
in the way of what we might now call manufactured goods, the Haudenosaunee
people could be lumped into the macro-category of the ‘savage’ (or Lewis Henry
Morgan’s ‘barbarous’ stage, just above savagery) with little or no problem. In a way,
150 SCOTT MANNING STEVENS

contemporary American society has not come too far from those earlier poles
opposing the savage and the civilized. Though figures like Morgan championed
Haudenosaunee culture, it was still placed far lower on an evolutionary scale than
his own Euro-American culture. Historiography would continue to rely on written
documentation and marginalize native oral culture. This would have lasting effects
on how the history of the Haudenosaunee would be depicted in the written record.
In effect, the Jesuit chroniclers could be said to have invented ‘Iroquoia’ in a way
similar to Edmundo O’Gorman’s argument that ‘America’ was invented; that is, since
‘America’ did exist before Europeans first encountered the Western Hemisphere, they
invented it. Likewise, the French and the Jesuit chroniclers invented a notion of
Iroquoia long before they understood the nature of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy.
Iroquoia came to represent a nation-state, in European terms, and an oppositional
one to French colonial aspirations. The Haudenosaunee concept of the Great League
of Peace was considerably different in nature than French notions of it.
We need only attend to the caustic debates over the possible antiquity and influence
of Iroquoian political institutions to realize how deep the divisions are between those
that see themselves as the ‘authorized’ historians of the academic establishment and
those who would questions its axioms. The vituperative and ad hominem nature
of these debates is not adequately captured in Kathleen Bragdon’s reference in the
Columbia Guide to American Indians of the Northeast (2001), where she writes the
following on the issue of ‘influence’: ‘Judging by the number of publications concern-
ing it, the history and influence of the League of the Iroquois [on the “Origins of the
Constitution”, in the section’s title] ranks among the most controversial topics of the
past several decades’ (236). Did complex native institutions precede European influ-
ence, and did native institutions in turn contribute to American culture more gener-
ally? Many native people argue that both were so. Still, what is clear in this judicious
note on the state of affairs in Iroquois historiography is that the opposing sides are
often (though not exclusively) divided by ethnicity. Here too we have conflicting
readings of evidence, both documentary and oral. This serves only to take us back to
the original problems that faced the Jesuit chroniclers as they sought to better under-
stand their frequently bitter rivals in the struggle for hegemony and survival in the
northeastern territories of North America.
My purpose here is not to join in on that debate but rather to trace briefly the
trajectory of historiography of Iroquoia (as distinct from Haudenosaunee oral his-
tory) back to its earliest manifestation amongst the Jesuit chroniclers of the seven-
teenth century and consider its legacy among the Haudenosaunee today (O’Gorman,
1961). In what is commonly known as the ‘Beaver War thesis’, historian José António
Brandão has recently challenged the longstanding historigraphical tradition that
interpreted the seventeenth-century conflicts between the Haudenosaunee and the
colonial efforts of the French and the Dutch (and later the English) as primarily
motivated by economic competition centered on the fur trade. Brandão demonstrates
how this thesis evolved from the racialist and ethnocentric cultural mythmaking of
the great nineteenth-century historian, Francis Parkman, whose work — as indicated
by several scholars — has shown a heavy-handed Whiggish Protestant agenda
(Brandão, 1997: 5–18). Yet, the historiography of Iroquoia does not start with
Parkman, for his work merely marks the co-opting of the story of the rise and fall
of New France into United States history. The American nationalist historiography
THE HISTORIOGRAPHY OF NEW FRANCE AND THE LEGACY OF IROQUOIS INTERNATIONALISM 151

developed by Parkman is very different to that of his primary source — The Jesuit
Relations. Parkman simply created a national narrative that was consistent with his
own Protestant prejudices and which continued to insist that the Indian was a ‘true
child of the forest and desert. The wastes and solitudes of nature are his congenial
home’ (1909 [1851]: 3). When Parkman needed to portray the loose but enduring
confederacy of the Haudenosaunee as a more centralized society, a prototype
conforming to a European nation-state, he drew on the historians of New France,
including the authors of the Relations, Lafitau, Lahonton, and Charlevoix.
Because of the vastly different agendas that exist among the historiographers of the
Haudenosaunee, I think that scholars who analyze the trends that mark Iroquois his-
tory would do well to attend to the earliest inception of the Iroquois as a particular
people and nation in European accounts. Brandão has also noted that many of the
historical observations of the eminent mid-twentieth century historian of Iroquoia,
George Hunt, though not so partisan in nature, find their roots in Parkman’s writing.
But Brandão does not pursue Parkman’s writings beyond the Jesuit Relations, which
he sees as the primary source. Conversely, I believe we need to reexamine Jesuit
historiography as a distinct genre, different from the Jesuit Relations themselves,
because the authors of the Jesuit Relations did not set out to write history per se,
even if their reports are seen as the primary source of firsthand accounts of life in
New France. The Jesuit missionaries wrote the Jesuit Relations to promote their
work in North America and chronicle their own struggles and perseverance; theirs is
a spiritual record as much as a historical chronicle. Figures such as Francois Du Creux
and Francois Charlevoix set out instead to write histories, which were as much prod-
ucts of French nationalism and records of the universal Catholic Church. This would
mean a critical reengagement with the major historiographic work of the Jesuits in
order to asses those non-spiritual or evangelical elements which would continue to
influence the more secular histories of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Jesuit historiography
Over the last four centuries, a unique historiography developed as Europeans sought
to chronicle their encounters with the Haudenosaunee and record their understanding
of Haudenosaunee history. This resulted in one of the largest bodies of scholarship
devoted to any one indigenous group in North America (Wallace, 1984: 2). Though
the French, Dutch, and English would all leave considerable accounts of the indige-
nous nation they frequently figured on their maps as inhabiting the region they called
Iroquoia, it was the French Jesuits who would create one of the most extensive
archives concerning the Haudenosaunee.
The Jesuit chroniclers of early modern Canada, or New France, wrote in a uniquely
transitional period, historiographically speaking. If we accept historian François
Furet’s distinction that history is the study of time and ethnology the study of space,
then the notion of ‘Canada’ required that the first writers of New France somehow
synthesize their concepts of the ‘history’ of a people whose societies did not readily
conform to European notions of the nation-state with their perceptions of a New
World space that was to be written into French history (Furet, 1984: 68–69). Part of
the charge, then, of Jesuit historiography was to historicize space and by extension
152 SCOTT MANNING STEVENS

stake political and cultural claims on the original inhabitants of that space. I wish
here to examine how the conceptualization of Iroquoia, and beyond that, the notion
of Iroquois culture, emerged from the missionary accounts of the Jesuits and
the Jesuit historians who based their works on those devotional records from the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. I hold that this notion of Iroquoia provided a
necessary foil to the concept of Canada and would come to occupy an oppositional
position in relation to the nascent French overseas empire.
One may discern three distinct movements that can be associated with the produc-
tion of a Franco-Iroquoian historiographic tradition. I see this as a generic evolution
from the first written reports of the French explorers and Récollet missionaries in the
unfamiliar wilds of Canada, to the self-conscious compositions by Jesuit missionaries
in the Jesuit Relations, to the later Jesuit scholars who set out to write the history of
New France. The vantage point of my investigation is from that of a literary scholar.
I am thus especially interested in the generic shifts that occur in the writings associ-
ated with indigenous and French encounters during the early modern period. In
considering both the Jesuit Relations and the formal histories based upon them, I am
not asking readers to extend their definition of what is literary and what is not;
rather, I am urging us to reclaim these texts as literary in an older sense of that term.
As Louis van Delft (1993) has pointed out, the term ‘literature’ in the early modern
period principally signified erudition. At the time that they were composed, the texts
I am considering here would have been regarded by scholars as nothing less than
species of differing ‘literatures’.
The beginnings of this tradition are to be found in the secular writings of Jacques
Cartier and Franciscan Récollet authors such as Sagard. Clearly these accounts found
their roots in the récit de voyage genre that we associate with the writings of the age
of the encounters and the conquest of the Americas. We might do well to revisit a
point suggested by Rosalie Colie in her discussion of the nova reperta as an early
modern genre. For Colie, the nova reperta is a category into which we can place
writers ‘striving for new forms to express new ideas’ (1979: 91).2 Not surprisingly,
this putative genre is advanced in Colie’s discussion of inclusionism or ‘mixed kinds’,
and it is among such uncanonical genres that we can find much of what makes up
a shifting corpus of New World writings. This particular literature has a complex
history of its own, beginning with the earliest accounts of the voyages of Columbus,
Vespucci, Verazanno, Cartier, and others as their accomplishments were published,
popularized, and disseminated throughout sixteenth-century Europe. The force of the
nova reperta is in its documentary immediacy rather than in its moral or historio-
graphic dimension. Unlike the poetic fiction of Luís de Camões’s Portuguese discov-
ery epic, The Lusiads, the nova reperta’s power lies in its supposed facticity or, in the
case of the literature of the New World, in its being a ‘true account’.
But the missionary writings of the Jesuit fathers who followed in the early seven-
teenth century were not strictly travel narratives. To be sure, they had their origins
in the reports sent back to Europe by Francis Xavier while on proselytizing missions
in Asia. But we might consider other literary categories in relation to what would
become the monumental Jesuit Relations. Given the influence of the Jesuits across
North and South America, they themselves now form an almost a prior generic
category in the writings associated with the New World. To the early modern travel
THE HISTORIOGRAPHY OF NEW FRANCE AND THE LEGACY OF IROQUOIS INTERNATIONALISM 153

narratives we should of course add the religious testimonials and counter-Reformation

martyrologies that grew exponentially during the religious conflicts of the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries, whose influence on the Jesuit Relations is immeasurable.
The Jesuit Relations, of course, did report on the novelty of this so-called New World,
but the theological impulses behind their composition predetermined many of what
came to be their defining characteristics.
The Jesuit Relations themselves, usually printed in the vernacular for a generalist
audience, also differed from the martyrologies produced in Reformation Europe,
where the contest was between heresy and orthodoxy. Conversely, with the Jesuit
martyrs of the New World, the authors could return to the paleo-Christian world of
the old Roman martyrology while simultaneously demonstrating the now global
reach of the ‘universal church’. The remoteness of the wilds of Canada from urban
Paris and Rome only added to this notion of universality. The Relations also differ
from the Spanish accounts of mass conversions and a variety of martyrdoms in the
early sixteenth-century chronicles of the New World. Accounts of Canada stem from
the counter-Reformation period that followed the Council of Trent (1545–1563);
whereas the earliest Spanish accounts of the conquests of Mexico and Peru predate
the founding of the Jesuit Order in 1540, French Canada is largely viewed through
the lens of counter-Reformation theology. And like the Spanish in Central and South
America, they must not only demonstrate the triumph of the church among the
heathen, but simultaneously counter the heresies at home through examples of a
reinvigorated orthodoxy that proves itself triumphant both in successes of the spirit
and demonstrated failures of the flesh. The French never experienced triumphs over
indigenous empires, as the Spanish had, nor realized the fabulous wealth of those
conquests. They were forced to cast their belated colonial efforts in Canada as both
a commercial venture and epic spiritual struggle for the souls of the natives.
The impact of the Relations on the popular imagination in France was considerably
greater than the actual success of the Jesuits in the production of converts in Canada.
For many scholars, the value of the Relations is largely historical and ethnographic.
Historian Francis Jennings contends that the Jesuit Relations are ‘today an invaluable
mine of ethnological information in spite of their bias and cant’ (Sayre, 1997: 17). As
a student of missionary writings, particularly of their literary qualities, I find myself
often submersed in the ‘bias and cant’ of the period. For similar reasons, Gordon
Sayre, in his excellent study Les Sauvages Américains, chooses to focus on secular
accounts describing the natives of New France because the religious accounts
purported to represent the collective and authorized views of missionary societies
rather than individual accounts of those less constrained by ecclesiastical and royal
authority.
But my concern here is with the varied accounts of the Jesuit missionaries who
acted as the first European historians of Iroquoia and created what I would hold up
as an incipient notion of Haudenosaunee culture as oppositional to French culture
and interventionist in colonial politics. Many scholars have noted that early accounts
of European encounters with the indigenous peoples of the Americas were often
framed in terms of lack. The Indians are said to lack government, law, letters, and
religion, and thus are in a savage state, if not altogether subhuman. As Allan Greer
explains it, the worldview that divided humankind into civilized and savage insisted
154 SCOTT MANNING STEVENS

that the savage could have no culture (2000: 82). This may have at first inspired hope
in the early missionaries. They came to fill a cultural void and thus should be received
as culture-bearers once they succeed in communicating with the unlettered natives.
If native society was a tabula rasa, then it need only be inscribed by the superior
Catholic intellect.
This desideratum, of course, was repeatedly frustrated as generations of missionar-
ies met with rejection among the native societies that they aspired to serve. Beginning
with the Jesuit experience in Asia, missionaries had learned the benefits of accom-
modation and probabilism — some to a scandalous degree. As Dominique Deslandres
has demonstrated, the Jesuit missions of North America can most readily be com-
pared to the so-called internal missions at home in France (1999: 258–73). In the New
World and the Old, the savage and the peasant both shared the same culture of lack
and yet the same potential for salvation. While paternalistic and presumptive, this
notion did extend to native peoples the rudiments of culture and a recognition that
they did, in fact, constitute indigenous societies. For, in effect, the inhuman savage
did not serve the narrative needs of the Society of Jesus well if that life represented
no culture at all — one might hear in this the echoes of the mid-sixteenth century
debates between Sepulveda and Las Casas as to whether or not Indians were
barbarous and thus natural slaves (Hanke, 1974).

Du Creux and the Haudenosaunee

One of the first instances of an attempt of Jesuit historiography to articulate a notion
of specifically Haudenosaunee culture was in Father François Du Cruex’s (1596–1666)
ten-volume History of Canada or New France first published in Latin in 1664 by
Cramoisy of Paris, the original royal publisher of the Relations (1951). In this
account, the Iroquois would play the foil to France’s efforts to found a colony and
recreate its own francophone culture in native North America. Du Creux, like many
New World chroniclers, lacked firsthand knowledge of his subject. His source
materials were drawn from not only the vast amount of information contained in the
Relations themselves but also the rich holdings of travel and commerce materials
available to him in Bordeaux. If anything, Du Creux’s work benefits from its depend-
ence on the Relations. As Yvon Le Bras (1993) has argued, the writings of Father
Le Jeune stand up well to scholarly scrutiny when we take into consideration the
missionary’s painstaking compositional practice. Le Jeune approached his task as a
pious intellectual, checking his facts and verifying sources. Whereas Le Jeune wrote
to chronicle the efforts of his company, Du Creux sought to transform these works
by reframing them in an historical tradition founded upon humanist models. It may
be this reframing and the nominalist sleight of hand that are the most significant of
Du Creux’s contributions. By calling on the ecclesiastical history of the missions to
New France, Du Creux expanded the claims for the centrality of the Jesuit project
and helped make it into an indelible part of the national historical consciousness of
all Canadians.
Du Creux begins his history with a dedicatory address to Louis XIV in which, in
the opening lines, he calls for the king to avenge the colony of New France and its
inhabitants against the ‘cruel Iroquois’. The Iroquois had stood poised to ‘uproot the
name of France and Christ at one and the same time’ (Du Creux, 1951: 6) had not
THE HISTORIOGRAPHY OF NEW FRANCE AND THE LEGACY OF IROQUOIS INTERNATIONALISM 155

divine intervention established a fragile peace. But it is now up to the monarch to

take direct and conclusive action against this enemy. For Du Creux, the History of
Canada is nothing less than a call to arms. The Iroquois represent a dire and immedi-
ate threat in his estimation and it is in contradistinction to them that he hopes to
define Canada. Addressing the king, Du Creux summarizes his task as follows: ‘It is
enough for me to describe with the pen the calamities of the Canadian people; you
will crush with the sword the obstinacy and cruelty of the Iroquois’ (7). Also in the
paratext of this account is Du Creux’s defense of what others have seen as a fruitless
task — writing the history of a place presumed to have none. His detractors claim
that so little has been accomplished in Canada (and that already reported on by the
Jesuits) that Du Creux’s task is meager and redundant. For his part, Du Creux sees
the history of New France as providential. The glory of counter-Reformation France
is in the glorious death of its Canadian martyrs who give testimony to France’s will
to establish the true faith in North America. Central to that project is the need to
differentiate between the indigenous converts of New France and the bestial enemies
represented in the Iroquois. Du Creux, like the authors of so many New World nar-
ratives, creates a polarized world of ‘our Indians’ and the ‘cruel savages’ just beyond
colonized territory. Though these polarities are reductive and provide far from a bal-
anced treatment of the opposing sides, Du Creux’s work marks a desire to introduce
the French missionary project and their nascent colony to the wider republic of
letters. By reformatting material drawn almost exclusively from the Jesuit Relations
and translating this material into Latin, the lingua franca of all educated Europeans,
Du Creux makes a claim for Canadian history, even if only a nominal one. The
Haudenosaunee are depicted as occupying a position of an inevitable clash with
European civilization; they are an obstacle to be overcome.
But Du Creux was no Samuel Huntington avant le lettre; his life was that of a
scholar, hagiographer, and apologist for the Society of Jesus in seventeenth-century
Bordeaux.3 Before being commissioned to write a definitive history of New France in
the early 1640s, Du Creux had published two hagiographies, on St Francis Regis and
St Francis De Sales. Later, two popular editions of Greek and Latin grammars attest
to his humanist training as well. Clearly, in an age given to strict attention to literary
genre and literary decorum, the writing of history provided different ‘horizons of
expectation’ than that of classical grammar or counter-Reformation hagiography.
Like many historians, Du Creux lacked firsthand knowledge of his subject. Without
the autoptic authority of such face-to-face knowledge, Du Creux was ever more
dependent on the rhetorical qualities of his historical narrative. His version of the
history of Canada functions almost as an epitome of the tremendous amount of
information presented in the Jesuit Relations.
Though the standard edition of the Jesuit Relations edited by Ruben Thwaites in
the last century (with parallel French or Latin texts with English translations) covers
the period from 1610 to 1791 and runs to 73 volumes, Du Creux was primarily
concerned with the Jesuit Relations of 1632–1658. It was these reports that were
published annually for mass circulation among the French reading public. They were
partly consumed as ‘literature of the New World’ and helped popularize the image of
the so-called savages of that place, as well as the heroic feats of the Jesuit missionar-
ies. After 1673, a Papal Brief (Creditae nobis coelitus) ordered the cessation of further
156 SCOTT MANNING STEVENS

publication of mission reports unless approved by the office of Propaganda Fide. This
was due in part to the controversy surrounding the so-called Chinese rites, but it
affected all foreign missions under the Holy See.4 In the vast collection of reports
amassed over those 41 years of publication, one finds the accounts of the martyrdom
of the eight Martyrs of North America (Rene Goupil, Isaac Jogues, Jean de la Lande,
Antoin Daniel, Jean de Brebeuf, Gabriel Lalemant, Charles Garnier, and Noel
Chabanel). Du Creux’s History of Canada is more precisely a history of the Jesuits
in Canada, but it was aimed at both ecclesiastical and courtly audiences. His Latin
text focuses on the most violent period of conflict between the Haudenosaunee and
the native allies of the French in the mid-seventeenth century and does much to create
the enduring image of the vicious Iroquois and their enmity with the French.
Du Creux’s account seems intent on creating Iroquoia as the homeland to the
villain in France’s colonial drama and as the locale of an inhuman specter haunting
French and native relations — one that demands conquest or exorcism. From its
inception, it is clear that Du Creux’s history has a different task than his source, the
Jesuit Relations. What the missions produced, and the Jesuit Relations so vividly
celebrate, were martyrs; Du Creux, on the other hand, calls a military conquest to
remove the obstacle to France’s evangelical and colonial ambitions.
Du Creux held that if we were to compare the events recorded in the missionary
ventures of others in Japan, China, and Mexico, we would find very different
histories there because
they have to do with human beings, that is with peoples who have received the long
impress of civilization; whereas our missionaries in Canada, who share their other
dangers as well, are confronted with this truly grave peril in addition, that they have had
to do, not perhaps with stocks and stones according to the hitherto prevailing opinion
about the savages, but certainly up to the present time with barbarous and uncivilized
men abandoned to every form of cruelty (16).

Du Creux, like the authors of many New World narratives, creates a polarized world
of ‘our Indians’ and the ‘evil-doers’ just beyond colonized territory. I would argue,
given the centrality of the Iroquois throughout his text, that ‘savages’ here pertains
primarily to the Haudenosaunee.
It should be noted that Du Creux’s take on history is largely ecclesiastical and
theological and not political. With that understood, it comes as no surprise that
he concentrates on Iroquois resistance to French missionary efforts rather than on
policy. But here is where we must attend to the intertwined nature of religious and
political life for the native communities’ struggle against the invading Europeans.
Clearly, the missionaries on both the Catholic and Protestant side saw the connection
between religious conversion and assimilation (what the Europeans would have called
‘civilization’). We must presume that native resistance to missionary efforts under-
stood the consequences of conversion equally. The Iroquoia created by Du Creux is
a place of baroque cruelty. All of the most spectacular accounts of torture from the
Jesuit Relations are here transcribed almost verbatim, save for Du Creux’s habit of
adding references to classical literature. Thus a purported cannibalistic attack on the
Algonquians by the Iroquois becomes a ‘feast of Polyphemus’, underscoring not only
Du Creux’s education but also the theme of Iroquois savagery (1951: 337).
THE HISTORIOGRAPHY OF NEW FRANCE AND THE LEGACY OF IROQUOIS INTERNATIONALISM 157

A famous visual feature of Du Creux’s history is the inclusion of an imperfect

version of Sanson’s 1655 map of New France, which, as Percy Robinson long ago
pointed out, is printed to emphasize the threat that the Iroquoia posed to New France
and to try to orient the French view toward Hudson Bay as the best source of furs
rather than with the peoples beyond Iroquoia to the west (Du Creux, 1952: 68). Also
printed in the quarto edition is the image of the Canadian Martyrs included with Du
Creux’s text as a remarkable foldout plate by the artist Gregoire Huret, titled ‘The
Noble Death of Certain Fathers belonging to the Society of Jesus in New France’
(Figure 1).
The engraving depicts a synoptic view of some nine martyrdoms at the hands of
the Iroquois that took place between 1642 and 1650. The viewer sees represented in
one tableau the various accounts of Jesuit martyrdom that may be familiar from the
Jesuit Relations or from Du Creux’s accompanying text. The artistic quality of this
large engraving is considerably finer than the other illustrations appearing with Du
Creux’s text. Here, the Iroquois are represented with more individualized features,
though they remain unidentified. This adds to the image’s realism but the narrative
focus remains decidedly on the martyrs themselves. By conflating the various martyr-
doms found in the Jesuit Relations into a single image, Huret collapses multiple
narratives into a single high-impact image — thus concentrating the suffering, its
variety, and Jesuit stoicism. These two graphic accounts of the threat of the Iroquois

figure 1 Gregoire Huret: The Noble Death of Certain Fathers belonging to the Society of
Jesus in New France.
Courtesy of the Newberry Library.
158 SCOTT MANNING STEVENS

are signal aspects of Du Creux’s history itself. They serve to reify visually what his
text attempts to do through narrative — that is, the overlaying of the imperial and
socio-religious aspects of the struggles in New France.
What Du Creux’s text primarily accomplishes is the invention of a monolithic
savage people — the Iroquois. The description given the reader is devoid of any
sustained political analysis of the Confederacy’s structure and institutions of govern-
ance. While Du Creux acknowledges the division of the five nations, their more
democratic and egalitarian traditions are ignored. Iroquoia is a place on the map to
be avoided and yet unavoidable:
[I]t is impossible to pass from the French to the Huron without skirting the country of
the Iroquois. This is an additional danger, for all the Iroquois are the inveterate enemies
of the allies of the French, with whom they have been for many years continually at war,
and are even yet, as I write these words, at war. (Du Creux, 1952: 406)

We note the sense of imminence here. It is this tone of urgency, I would argue, that
predominates Du Creux’s conception of historiography. The French must face their
foreign enemy immediately if New France is to survive and the greater mission of the
counter-Reformation church is to proceed.
Du Creux, as I mentioned earlier, sees world history in binary terms based on a
religious/moral conception of human affairs. His discussion of competing European
powers in North America centers on the struggles between the ‘true faith’, heresy,
and paganism. The Dutch and the English are not so much commercial rivals in Du
Creux’s telling as they are heretics. Though the dangers of figuring national and
proto-nationalist struggles in terms of ‘good-vs.-evil’ should be obvious to us now,
this was at the heart of Du Creux’s conception of an international Realpolitik. With-
out the spiritual conversion of the Iroquois (and the cultural conversion or assimila-
tion that would be its inevitable by-product), there could be no peace in New France.
For Du Creux, this necessitated the destruction of the Haudenosaunee. It is all
the stranger, then, that Matthew Dennis can read the conclusion of The History of
Canada as an instance of Du Creux reserving judgment on the Iroquois and offering
hope to his readers when the historian writes: ‘and yet of a certainty that Faith still
lives in some of them, who are perchance to be the seed which the Lord God of
Sabaoth has left that the whole race may not perish as Sodom’ (1993: 215). What
stands out to me in this reference by Du Creux is his conception of the Iroquois as
the enemy of God and one whose nation will meet the same fate as Sodom. That a
seed might remain as a remnant of the faithful does deflect the implicit suggestion
that France should act as the smiting hand of God toward the Iroquois.
It would be reckless to suggest a causal connection between Du Creux’s history and
the anti-Iroquois policies of the French after Louis XIV’s assumption of personal
government in 1661. Still, by 1666, the Marquis De Tracy had marched on Iroquoia
and burned several villages and crops in an effort to subdue the Mohawk and
intimidate the Confederacy (Jennings, 1984: 131–32). I turn now to exploring further
the influence of other Jesuit chroniclers and observers of New France beyond the
Jesuit Relations. In this vein, I hope to return to Lafitau and other minor Jesuit
accounts in pursuit of a better picture of the early creation of a notion of Iroquoia
and Haudenosaunee culture.
THE HISTORIOGRAPHY OF NEW FRANCE AND THE LEGACY OF IROQUOIS INTERNATIONALISM 159

Jesuit historians of the eighteenth century

Du Creux’s text should also serve to remind us of the power of a theologically driven
historiography and, far from requiring a simple secular corrective, we should look at
the trends of Iroquois historiography as it has been written by non-native peoples.
We should recall Brandão’s critique of such positions as the ‘Beaver War thesis’, with
its almost exclusively economic explanation for the violence of the seventeenth
century in this region of North America. Du Creux’s text might serve to remind us
that historians may have grossly discounted the importance of Haudenosaunee
religious practice and its survival as a central explanation of hostilities toward the
missionary-led interactions with New France. Just as historians eschewed Parkman’s
Protestant biases against what he saw as the doomed Catholic and feudal powers
of France and Spain for a secular and economic model, so too may contemporary
historians, in their zeal for secular histories, be inadvertently ignoring the centrality
of the religious/cultural traditions of native peoples. Surely, the Haudenosaunee had
to be aware of the fate of native peoples to the east of them who had been in longer
contact with the Europeans. The decimation of those populations by disease and war
only exacerbated the social calamity brought on by the destruction of their tradi-
tional cultures. My ultimate hope is that we can begin to seek an understanding
of Haudenosaunee resistance to both missionaries and colonists from indigenous
sources as well as in the tainted documents of a one-sided historiography.
The most dramatic departure from a singular dependence on the Jesuit Relations
comes in the form of the moral history of the American Indians published by Father
Joseph François Lafitau in 1724. His Moeurs des Sauvages Amériquains, Comparées
aux Moeurs des Premiers Temps [Customs of the American Indians] (1974 [1724]) is
not a history proper but rather an early work of comparative ethnology framed
around a universalist concept of cultural history. Unlike Du Creux, Lafitau knew
Canada and its indigenous population firsthand. His work carries the authority of the
rhetorical claims of autopsy (i.e. that of the eyewitness). The theorist of historiogra-
phy Michel de Certeau and the scholar Anthony Pagden have both convincingly
argued for the centrality of this trope in the historiography of the New World and
its relation to ethnology (de Certau, 1988: 209–43; Pagden, 1993: 51–87). And if
we return to Furet’s notions concerning history and ethnology, it is in the works of
Lafitau that we begin to see the coalescence of these two fields. Lafitau attempts to
collapse the differences in culture marked by great expanses of space by going back
in time to re-familiarize the Other to his readers.
This was of course a strategy that would not convince everyone familiar with his
works. Thomas Jefferson was dismayed that Lafitau’s system seemed to overwhelm
his judgment as an historian. He writes in a letter to John Adams dated 11 June 1812
that, if he (Adams) wishes to know more about the traditions of the Indians, he might
consult Lafitau. He also, however, adds the following caveat:
unluckily Lafitau had in his head a preconceived theory on the mythology, manners,
institutions and government of the ancient nations of Europe, Asia, and Africa, and seems
to have entered on those of America only to fit them into the same frame, and to draw
from them a confirmation of his general theory. He keeps up a perpetual parallel, in all
those articles, between the Indians of America and the ancients of the other quarters of
the globe. (Jefferson, 1894: 1260–61)
160 SCOTT MANNING STEVENS

Jefferson attributed this habit of thought to Lafitau’s education in the classics and in
theology. Even his five years spent among the Mohawk of Kahnawaké and other
natives of New France could not displace his overall dedication to a theoretically-
informed practice. Still, Lafitau’s work would mark a landmark in ethnography and
add considerably to the characterization of the Jesuits as more ‘liberal’ than other
Catholic orders. Allan Greer rightly steers us away from this presumption by remind-
ing us that whatever broad-mindedness existed in New France was due more to what
he calls ‘the product of a peculiar balance of power’. This is made clear, Greer points
out, if we contrast this level, supposedly liberal position with Jesuit work in Latin
America (2000: 81–82).
In terms of Lafitau’s legacy, it is almost exclusively his ethnographic contributions
for which he is remembered and admired, rather than his larger theological project
in which he attempted to counter what he perceived as the imminent threat of atheism
at the dawn of the Enlightenment. If he could prove a universal monotheology while
extrapolating the distant history of ancient cultures through his study on ethnology,
then the indigenous cultures of Canada might become paradoxically the salvation of
orthodoxy in France. As de Certeau points out, it would be the intelligentsia that
eventually rejected his work for its theological system in spite of continuing interest
in his ethnological observations (1980: 64).
We should likewise attend to Father Pierre François Xavier de Charlevoix’s mag-
isterial Histoire et description generale de la Nouvelle France [History and General
Description of New France], first published in 1744. Like Lafitau and the Jesuit mis-
sionaries of the mid-seventeenth century, Charlevoix could speak from the position
of an eyewitness, and a very well-traveled one at that. His voyage through the Great
Lakes region brought him to the Mississippi and down to New Orleans. This autop-
tic authority coupled with his tremendous erudition makes his writing a particularly
rich source for contemporary historians. The six-volume History and General
Description of New France takes the year 1504 as its starting point, with the Basque
and Norman fishing fleets visiting the Grand Banks off of Newfoundland. Before
beginning his narrative proper, Charlevoix provides a chronological table that acts as
an overview of European voyages beyond Europe and the Mediterranean. Though
Charlevoix does not mention Ramusio or Hakluyt, his overview shares strong paral-
lels with those archivally-based scholarly projects. More impressively, he follows his
chronological table with a 72-entry annotated bibliography of the authors he has
consulted in the writing of this work. It is in this section that we can better discern
Charlevoix’s opinion of his fellow Jesuit chroniclers.
Not surprisingly, he honors the Jesuit Relations, and Paul Le Jeune (1591–1664) in
particular, as invaluable resources for the historian, but he also offers commentary
on such predecessors as Du Creux and Lafitau. Of the former, he notes that this is
‘an extremely diffuse work composed exclusively from the Jesuit Relations’, adding
‘Father Du Creux did not reflect that details read with pleasure in a letter become
insupportable in a continuous history’ (de Charlevoix, 1962 [1744]: 81). But, of Lafi-
tau, he notes that the author’s firsthand knowledge of Indian life contributed greatly
to his work: ‘We have nothing more exact on this subject. The parallels between
ancient nations and the Americans is very ingenious, and shows a great familiarity
with [classical] antiquity’ (91). Charlevoix was anxious to demonstrate his genuine
THE HISTORIOGRAPHY OF NEW FRANCE AND THE LEGACY OF IROQUOIS INTERNATIONALISM 161

critical familiarity with the corpus of the historiography of New France before writ-
ing his own work — a work based in lived experience as well as scholarly research.
His work would hold authority among both the Encyclopedists and secular authors
such as Chateaubriand, who would mine his work for authoritative information and
inspiration (see Hayne, 1974).
Curiously, there has been relatively little critical response to Charlevoix’s work
itself except to note the occasional inaccuracy or supposed biases. He is frequently
cited as a repository of information, but there remains little in the way of sustained
engagement. Parkman, himself no fan of the Jesuits, said of Charlevoix: ‘Of all the
early histories of French America [his] is incomparably the best; indeed, it is the only
one fairly entitled to be called a history’ (quoted in Bannon, 1962). I would urge read-
ers, especially Native American and First Nations readers, to return to Charlevoix
and apply the same critical and scholarly attention that scholars such as Michel de
Certeau and Frank Lestringant have devoted to figures such as Jean de Léry. The
conjoining of history and ethnography is at the inception of a Franco-Iroquois histo-
riography, but much remains to be done to fully comprehend the lasting effects of the
Jesuit chroniclers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries on subsequent histories
of the Haudenosaunee.

Haudenosaunee diplomacy and historiography

New France and its historians helped formulate the notion of Iroquoia in European
historiography, even if it primarily functioned in an oppositional manner to their
imperial project.5 Both the French and English, in equal measure, stressed the diplo-
matic and military significance of the Five Nations in their respective histories, which
in turn placed the Haudenosaunee within the larger context of North American his-
tory. To be sure, the English were more engaged in the diplomatic sphere of Iroquois
political life than the French. This is amply represented in English historiography and
visual culture with the recording of various Iroquois diplomatic missions to England,
from the so-called Four Kings painted by John Verelst in 1710 to the many images of
Joseph Brant in the late eighteenth century. Haudenosaunee leaders, at least since the
various parlays at Albany beginning in the late seventeenth century, have likewise
embraced and internalized this notion of the League as a player on the international
stage, if only to protect our own interests. Traditionalists trace this diplomatic tradi-
tion back to the Mohawk–Dutch ‘Tawagonshi Treaty’ negotiations in1613, which
are said to have resulted in one of the first treaty wampum belts (Parmenter, 2010:
22–23). Later, the publication of Anglo-Iroquoian treaty proceedings such as those
printed by Benjamin Franklin between 1736 and 1762 underscored this notion of the
centrality of international diplomacy to Haudenosaunee political identity (van Dorn,
1938).
Nor were the Haudenosaunee people ignorant of the things written about us by
these European and American historians. Figures like Joseph Brant, educated at
Wheelock’s school, the predecessor of Dartmouth College, was completely bilingual
and sufficiently learned to translate the Gospel of Mark and the Book of Common
Prayer into Mohawk. His skills as a diplomat in London and among the nations
west of the Six Nations were well known. Likewise the Moravian missionary, John
162 SCOTT MANNING STEVENS

Heckewelder, admonished a correspondent to be careful of what he printed concern-

ing the Iroquois as they were likely to read it and take offense.6 This self-awareness
of the image they projected should not surprise us. It is commonly known that
the Haudenosaunee also demanded their diplomatic protocols, developed over the
centuries, be followed scrupulously whenever they entered into negotiations. French
and British agents alike frequently complained about the drawn out formality of
Haudenosaunee oratory in these situations.
Likewise the advent of the book in North America made it inevitable that members
of the Haudenosaunee community would not leave it to the likes of Charlevoix or
Colden to write their history. In 1848 the Tuscarora writer, David Cusick, published
his Sketches of the Ancient History of the Six Nations, which blended oral tradition
and written history while marking a significant step in representing Haudenosaunee
history for a broader reading audience. Other formally educated figures such as
Seneca Ely Parker, who would later serve as a brigadier general in the Union army
during the civil war, acted as informants for Lewis Henry Morgan as he composed
his famous League of the Ho-de-no-sau-nee, or Iroquois (1851). Other works of
ethnohistory and anthropology by Iroquois scholars such as John N. B. Hewitt
(Tuscarora, 1859–1937) and Arthur C. Parker (Seneca, 1881–1955) would follow over
the next hundred years. Equally important would be the work of Haudenosaunee
women, including the activist Minnie Kellogg (Oneida, 1880–1949) and the journalist
Alice Lee Jemison (Seneca, 1901–1964). These are but a few examples of those
who took up the pen to help Haudenosaunee people define ourselves and our own
aspirations.
The complex negotiations that have taken place over centuries, from colonial trea-
ties to those of the modern US courthouse, have helped us retain what little territories
we have left to us. The fact that we were not removed westward, like so many indig-
enous nations of the East, is a tribute to the diplomatic skills of our leaders. These
men and women drew on the legacy of Haudenosaunee internationalism and diplo-
macy in order to ensure that settler powers acknowledge our identity as a people. We
can see this in the appeal of Levi General (also known as Deskaheh) (Cayuga, 1873–
1925) to members of the League of Nations in Geneva in the early 1920s (Hauptmann,
2008: 124–42). Though he was ultimately not allowed to address the Assembly, he
did manage to manifest a Haudenosaunee claim to sovereignty in an international
forum long after our political powers had waned. This would be reiterated some
55 years later in Geneva when representatives of the Six Nations addressed the
United Nations International Non-Governmental Organization Conference on
Discrimination against Indigenous Populations in the Americas in 1977.
The appearance of the Six Nations delegation in Geneva that year made a tremen-
dous impression in the media at the time because of the fact that the members traveled
on Haudenosaunee passports issued by the traditional council at Onondaga. This
insistence on our national status beyond our ethnic identity was a watershed event in
contemporary indigenous politics (Akwesasne, 1986: 36–48). Indigenous delegations
from communities in Bolivia and Panama noted this assertion by the Haudenosaunee
and it likely contributed to the Six Nations presence at the negotiations held seven
years later in Colombia to address the conflict between the Miskito Indians and the
Sandinista government of Nicaragua (Macdonald, 2010). What began as a prominent
THE HISTORIOGRAPHY OF NEW FRANCE AND THE LEGACY OF IROQUOIS INTERNATIONALISM 163

part of the critique of Haudenosaunee political culture, portrayed as interventionist

and militant, has become a key aspect of our sense of ourselves as active and vocal
members of the international indigenous rights movement. As recently as 2010, when
a group of young Mohawk environmental activists traveled on Haudenosaunee pass-
ports to participate in a forum on the environment in Bolivia, we saw a challenge to
their passport by the Canadian government (Horn, 2010). The Canadians demanded
that any Mohawks living on Mohawk territory within the borders of Canada must
travel on Canadian passports. This led to a standoff that was only settled when the
United States allowed the Mohawk participants to enter the United States with their
Haudenosaunee passports from whence they could return to Canada under the
provisions of the Jay Treaty. Apparently we are not too far from Du Creux’s
oppositional thinking when assessing the value and validity of Haudenosaunee inter-
nationalism. Haudenosaunee people have been able to appropriate and transform the
historical record’s characterization of our culture as hostile to civilization and inter-
ventionist in colonial policy. The productive place to which we have taken it is a
rhetorical position from which we declare ourselves hostile to settler colonialism and
willing to intervene on behalf of indigenous civilizations.

Notes
1 5
Concerning this passage, Thwaites notes, ‘In
reprinting the Relation of 1659–1660 (Paris, 1661),
we follow a copy of the original Cramoisy edition
in Lenox Library. No author’s or editor’s name is
attached to this annual; it cannot, therefore, be said
who was individually responsible for its issuance.’
2 6
This category, which takes its name from Johannes
Stradanus’s 1582 work of the same name, is organ-
ized not around formal qualities but rather the sub-
ject matter of the diverse reports of new findings or
inventions in the early modern period and is thus set
up against the much older category, de inventoribus,
those catalogues of the achievements of the gods
and men of antiquity.
3 anything said of them that does not please them,
I am alluding here to the controversial thesis of
Samuel P. Huntington in his The Clash of Civiliza-
tions and the Remaking of World Order (New
York: Simon & Schuster, 1996).
4 papers, BV vol. 1, John Heckewelder to Rev.
See The Chinese Rites Controversy: Its History and
Meaning (Chicago: Loyola Press, 1995).
The French were by no means consistent in referring
to the lands of the Haudenosaunee as Iroquoia, used
here as a shorthand for the French characterization
for their polity. It was just as frequently called ‘Pays
des Cinq Nations Iroquoise’ or noted by individual
constitutive member nations.
Heckewelder, writing to Rev. Samuel Miller, com-
plained: ‘My friend Dr Barton did not altogether
attend to my request, when I desired him “never to
make mention of my name, in his publications when
he should say anything of the Politicks of the 5
Nations”. Suffice it to say, my reason for asking this
favor was well grounded. Indians are a revenging
People. The Mingoes, or Five Nations in particular,
they take notice of. Were I out of their reach the
case would be otherwise with me & I could speak
more freely.’ New York Historical Society, Miller
Samuel Miller, 28 August 1800.

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Notes on contributor
Scott Manning Stevens is Director of the Newberry D’Arcy McNickle Center for
American Indian and Indigenous Studies and a member of the Akwesasne Mohawk
Nation. He regularly contributes essays to books about early modern European
colonialism, while participating in and delivering papers at American Indian Studies
and other academic conferences internationally. Since receiving his PhD in English
from Harvard University in 1997, Stevens’s research interests have revolved around
the diplomatic and cultural strategies of resistance among North American Indians in
the face of European and American settler colonialism, as well as the political and
aesthetic issues that surround museums and the indigenous cultures they put on dis-
play. Stevens is currently at work on a book-length research project entitled Indian
Collectibles: Encounters, Appropriations, and Resistance in Native North America.
Correspondence to: Scott Manning Stevens, The Newberry Library, 60 West
Walton Street, Chicago, IL 60610, USA. Email: stevenss@newberry.org