Historical Introduction to North American Missions
by John Corrigan, 2004

Figure 1: The missionization of the New World began soon after Columbus reached the Caribbean.

Christians and Indians

Religion has played a central role in much of the history of European exploration of the world, and especially so in the colonization of the Americas. Europeans cast themselves as Christians wherever they went in the New World, and identified the people they encountered there as Indians. We can sense this line of demarcation in the words of Ferdinand Columbus, the explorer's second son, as he described his father's encounter of the indigenous Tainos upon landing on the island of San Salvador ¹ in 1492:

At daybreak they saw an island about fifteen leagues in length, very level, full of green trees and abounding in springs, with a large lake in the middle, and inhabited by a multitude of people who hastened to the shore, astounded and marveling at the sight of the ships, which they took for animals. These people could hardly wait to see what sort of things the ships were. The Christians were no less eager to know what manner of people they had to do with. Their wishes were soon satisfied, for as soon as they had cast anchor the Admiral went ashore with an armed boat, displaying the royal standard. . . . Many Indians assembled to watch this celebration and rejoicing, and the Admiral, perceiving they were a gentle, peaceful, and very simple people, gave them little red caps and glass beads, which they hung around their necks, together with other trifles that they cherished as if they were precious stones of great price. ²

For Ferdinand and his father the encounter between Europeans and the North American Native was in essence a meeting of Christians with non-Christians. European explorers and settlers in the New World fixed their identities within the frameworks of specific cultures: Spanish, Portuguese, French, English, Dutch. Yet in gauging their relationship with the inhabitants of the Americas, Europeans conceived themselves above all as representatives of Christian culture. Accordingly, Columbus and those who followed him undertook the exploration of the New World under a conceptual umbrella that equated Christianity with civilization, and viewed indigenous cultures as "primitive" aggregations of "customs and ceremonies." Such a view was reinforced over the centuries in a shorthand that identified persons as either Christians or Indians. Censuses, captains' logs, mission registers, royal charters, plantation reports, military communications, and virtually every other official document of colonial rule repeatedly drove home the perception of the essential difference in the casual usage of those two words, Christian and Indian.³ That conception of difference no doubt proved serviceable to Columbus in his eventual harsh treatment and enslavement of the Tainos, just as it set the terms for the process of the Christian missionization of the Native peoples of the Americas.

The Taino story of what they saw that day has been lost. The people who met Columbus in the West Indies farmed and fished, played ball on rectangular courts, danced, organized authority in complex systems of chiefdoms, extolled the deeds of their ancestors, looked to shamans to heal their sick, and worshipped Yucahu, the lord of Cassava and the sea, and Atabey, his mother, who was associated with fresh water and human fertility.⁴ The Tainos were but one language group among hundreds in North America, and one small fraction of the continent's 15 million inhabitants.⁵ Over a period of thousands of years, their ancestors had explored the great American landmasses, built civilizations, and developed distinctive religious worldviews. Click here to see more maps of the New World

Figure 2: The Tainos were one of many Indian populations in the Caribbean.	Figure 3: Columbus sought trading relations with some of the Native Americans that he encountered.

Spain: The Old World and the New World

Figure 4: Tristan de Luna was one of many explorers who sought glory in the New World.

Spanish first impressions of the Americas, and the visions and ambitions that they excited, varied greatly. In the wake of Columbus, thousands of Spanish explorers saw other beaches, other forests, other birds and mammals, other villages and cities. Accounts of those impressions sometimes corresponded. Frequently they did not. Even when groups of Spaniards viewed the same terrain, they saw it differently-but equally "truly"-and often professed as much. An example is the preamble in a letter sent to Don Tristan de Luna, the regional governor, by a group exploring the Florida interior in 1560: "Inasmuch as accounts given by each one in particular, although very true, cannot fail to disagree in something because ordinarily the judgments and opinions which many persons have of one and the same thing are diverse...we have agreed to relieve your Lordship of the confusion...[by reporting] with one opinion...." 6

Different views of the New World sparked different plans for exploiting it. The Crown, together with aspiring importers and merchants, saw gold, slave labor, and commodities for trade. The military saw opportunities for establishing reputation, a stage for distinction and personal honor, pundonor. The church saw an unprecedented harvest of converts. But even within these groups, there was much difference of opinion about the role of Spain in the New World. Especially where religion was concerned, Spaniards struggled in coming to terms with the meaning of their mission. Various explorers sought out in the Americas the keys to the restoration of life and harmony: the Fountain of Youth, the Golden Cities, and the Garden of Eden itself. The church likewise saw in the New World a chance to restore itself, to reinvent itself, to close ranks in one monumental venture that would demonstrate unity and purpose-and in the process purify Christianity of the ambiguities, contradictions, and conflicts apparent everywhere in its Spanish incarnation. This part of the mission, like the search for the Fountain of Youth, failed.

Figure 5: Some explorers came to the New World seeking the salubrious waters of The Fountain of Youth.

Spanish Christianity in the fifteenth century embodied several distinct personalities, and those personalities, even though sometimes contradictory, survived into later centuries. Religious orthodoxy was enforced through Draconian measures, yet attraction to rituals and beliefs outside orthodox Christianity remained lively and widespread. Church and state were closely linked, yet sometimes broke out into open warfare with each other. Spanish Christianity was shaped by a keen ethnocentric sense of superiority, yet in comparison to other Christian nations it was arguably the most outspoken in its defense of the human rights of non-Europeans. Spain itself, on the eve of the voyages of Columbus, existed as an ambiguous union of the kingdoms of Aragon and Castile-Leon, ruled, respectively, by Ferdinand and Isabella. These monarchs, though married, presided over their respective realms with a significant degree of independence from each other.

Figure 6 & 7: The marriage of King Ferdinand (left) and Queen Isabella (right) established a tenuous union between Aragon and Castile.

Spain advanced significantly in power and prestige in 1492 - not principally because of the discovery of America by Cristóbal Colón, but as a result of the Christian kingdoms' victory over the Moorish state of Granada to the south. Undertaken in the spirit of the medieval crusades against Islam, the war had dragged on for decades, and in the process had sharpened the militant, authoritarian, and formal elements of Roman Catholicism in Spain. It also made more familiar the Crusader's simple designation as a "Christian" - a prelude to "Christian" as a generic term for those who later encountered the Native inhabitants of the Americas. Religious unity, which was deemed essential to political unity, at last seemed possible. And so, having driven out the Moors, the Catholic rulers delivered an ultimatum to those Spanish Jews who had not converted to Christianity: convert or be expelled.

Figure 8: Christopher Columbus believed that he had found a trade route to Asia.

Jews and Muslims in Iberia in fact had been converting to Christianity for hundreds of years. Converted Jews were known as conversos, and Muslims as moriscos. But as Spain began to coalesce as a political and religious entity in the years before the conquest of Granada, leaders of both church and state had begun to question the authenticity of Jewish and Muslim conversions. The instrument that they settled upon to investigate suspicious conversions was the Inquisition, which had been in existence in parts of Christendom for 250 years and was imported to Castile in 1481. From there it was extended in 1570 to New Spain (Mexico) and other parts of the Americas to police the faith of the colonists. Though its colonial administrators did not initially import it specifically to inquire of the faith of Native Americans, the Inquisition quickly set the tone for dealings with indigenous populations. The well-known excesses of the Inquisition - the slightest deviation of a person from Christian orthodoxy could lead to torture and execution - made it a poisonous gift to Spanish society. Yet in the Inquisition is revealed the full devotion of early modern Spain to the ideals of pure doctrine, formal ritual, and the moral authority of the church.

Figure 9: Spain brought the Inquisition to the Caribbean and New Mexico in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Alongside this embrace of orthodoxy, Spanish Christians - from the aristocracy to the peasantry - constructed their everyday religious lives out of beliefs and rituals that did not always square with official traditions. Spanish devotions included worship at local shrines, pilgrimage to those further away, and the cultivation of visions of the saints in heaven. The faithful anxiously sought relics - ranging from the bones and clothes of saints to splinters of the cross on which Jesus was crucified - and prized them for their ability to cure illnesses, relieve doubt, and free persons from the controlling powers of demons. The pursuit of mystical experiences frequently outpaced interest in learning catechism, and some practices that were of scant interest to Catholic authorities in Rome (or even discouraged by them) were essential to Spanish devotions. Of particular importance were rituals associated with death. Blending Christian doctrine with folk beliefs and local funeral customs, such rituals ranged from "masses for the dead" performed in ornate cathedrals to rural ceremonies involving ancient notions of the land, fertility, and the cycle of seasons. ⁷

Figure10 and 11: Saint Teresa of Avila (left) and Saint John of the Cross (right) were the models of piety for many Franciscans coming to New Spain.

Sixteenth-century Spanish mystics St. Teresa of Avila and her friend St. John of the Cross represented some of these patterns of religious life in their example and in the attention paid to them after their deaths. Both invested themselves in the institutional life of the church, but they also manifested the monastic ideal of withdrawal from the world and the quest for communion with God through solitude and meditation. Both adhered strictly to formal church doctrine but interwove it with their own beliefs about the nature of spiritual advancement. And Teresa's corpse eventually became a relic. Her followers reported that her body did not undergo corruption after death, and hat an intoxicating jasmine and violet perfume emanated from it, even after it was exhumed in 1583, nine months after burial. Shortly thereafter began the process of carving her into relics, and in time she was distributed piecemeal to Christians around the globe. Pieces of her bones accordingly entered into the religion of private devotions, relics, and folk/agrarian rituals and ceremonies - a Spanish style of "popular religion" - that existed alongside the more formal, bureaucratic, and authoritarian Catholic orthodoxy. This blending of impulses-the mixed but not necessarily contradictory messages of popular and formal religion - set an example for Spanish missionaries in the New World. So, for example, we discover Bishop Juan de Zumárraga reporting in 1531 that he had engineered the destruction of 500 temples and 26,000 idols in New Spain - at the same time that Christian and Aztec myths were being represented alongside each other in the decoration of Catholic churches there.

Figure 12: Bishop Juan de Zumárraga instigated the destruction of Native American religious artifacts in New Spain.

Figure 13: In their attempts to facilitate peaceable relations with the Aztecs, missionaries blended indigenous and Christian practices.

Just as there was a good bit of play between formal elements of religion and those derived from extra-ecclesiastical sources, so also was there a significant amount of give and take between church and state in Spain. The state and the church were closely linked throughout the period of the Spanish empire in the Americas, but during that same time the conflicting interests of the two parties frequently made for an abrasive relationship.

State control of the church increased as Spain's star rose in Europe, so that by the latter sixteenth century, during the reign of Philip II, the crown exercised authority over not only clerical appointments, but also over church finances, the interpretation of doctrine, and the implementation of papal and conciliar directives. Spanish religious leaders and state officials joined forces under the assumption that a well-funded church, a regulated clergy, and the coordination of moral teachings with civil policies were essential to the stability of both church and state. Rome assisted in the process by granting the crown the rights to all religious offerings collected in the New World, as well as a central role in the appointment of church officials there.

Figure 14: Miguel Hidalgo was the spirited leader of the first Mexican war of independence.

Against the background of this relationship between the church and the crown, a continuous series of conflicts severely tested the resolve of each party to uphold the arrangement. Debates between clerics and royal authorities about Spanish policies in the Americas frequently revealed fissures in the church-state alliance.⁸ Church leaders on occasion were forced to choose between their loyalty to Rome and their duties to a Spanish monarchy that sometimes snubbed its nose at Rome. When riots broke out in Madrid in 1766, the government blamed the Jesuits (from whose dress came the name the "Hat and Cloak Riots"). The state subsequently undertook to expel the Jesuits from Spain and its overseas empire, and to confiscate Jesuit property, which was enormous. (In most cases, Franciscans assumed authority over the missions that had been founded by Jesuits, as in the cases of Florida, Arizona, and other areas now part of the United States.) Those proceedings reaped a whirlwind of ill will among some New World populations that had worked constructively with the Jesuits. In response, the government strove even more determinedly to reduce the power of the church. The clergy, in turn, protested individually and collectively in various ways. Clergy in the New World sometimes advocated radical responses, as in the case of Miguel Hidalgo, a Native priest who led the first Mexican war of independence.

For the Spanish, the project of converting the inhabitants of the Americas to Christianity began with the second voyage of Columbus. Onboard was a Benedictine priest charged with the evangelization of the Indians. Representatives of other religious orders followed, especially Dominicans, Franciscans, and Jesuits. Spanish domination exacted an immense toll in lives - especially as it brought European diseases to populations that carried no immunities to them - but by degrees the missionary enterprise unfolded. Spreading outward from the Caribbean, it developed along the paths of conquest in the Americas.

Figure 15: Pedro de Gante claimed he baptized 14,000 Indians in one day.

From the beginning, the Spanish debated how the Native were to be evangelized and introduced into the fold of Spanish culture. The hard-line approach, which was taken by the government and by contingents within the clergy, proposed that Native Americans were to be forcibly brought into the church. Juan Gines de Sepulveda declared that the scriptural passage "force them to come in" (Luke 14:24) be acknowledged as a guide to relations between Christians and Indians; and the Jesuit Alonso Sanchez argued that the New World would be Christianized only through Spanish domination.⁹ This approach rested on assumptions about the Indians themselves, and above all on the view that Indians were incapable of choosing what was best for them. Missionaries concluded that the New World "noble savages" had to be resettled into communities centered upon the church, and there immersed in Christianity until they agreed to embrace it. The spectacle of a Spanish garrison outfitted in armor frequently expedited the process of conversion. But such conversions even then were frequently challenged. The Council of Lima (1552) decided to withhold the Eucharist from Native Americans because it viewed their conversions as superficial.¹⁰ Moreover, the problem sometimes arose from the methods of the missionaries themselves: Pedro de Gante's announcement that he baptized 14,000 Indians in a single day suggests a style of evangelizing that counted heads first and asked questions later.

Some of the clergy advocated the return to a view of evangelizing common in Europe before the fields of missionary glory were opened in the Americas. It conceived evangelizing as an enterprise that allowed potential converts to choose freely to become Christian. Alongside of this they proposed sweeping revisions in the treatment of Indians: the abolition of slavery, respect for Native cultures, and civil justice. These threads of protest were intertwined as a movement to defend Indians from the cruelties of Spanish conquest. The movement to defend them grew to significant proportions in the sixteenth century, and included a wide assortment of clergy and lay advocates. Preeminent among those who argued the case for the Indians was Bartolomé de las Casas, a priest and plantation overlord (encomendero) in Hispaniola and Cuba. In 1514, las Casas suddenly renounced his office as encomendero, took up the cause of the Indians, and over the course of the next 20 years experimented with new models for relations between Indians and missionaries. He also immersed himself in the study of theology, and authored groundbreaking works on the nature of the missionary enterprise. Returning to Spain, he gained influence at court and helped to bring about the New Laws of 1542, which called for an end to further enslavement of the Indians and mandated far-reaching reforms in the encomienda system.

Figure 16: Bartolomé de las Casas became know as the protector of the Indians.	Figure 17: Juan Ponce de Leon was the first Spaniard to lead an expedition to present day Florida.

"The Friars Were Watching"

As conquistadores and explorers widened the sphere of Spanish influence in the New World, gold and other commodities, shipped eastward on the swift Atlantic current, found their way into the treasuries and storehouses of the government. The arrangement between church and state dictated that from this treasure the Crown would fund missions to the Indians. The church organized a system by which to search out candidate populations for conversion and to administer the ecclesiastical apparatus once it was put into place. The enthusiasm and determination of the religious orders in this regard brought them renown, but at the same time it kindled conflicts with the military and the supervisors of commerce over exploration priorities and the distribution of resources. But the clergy continued to see the New World in their own way, or, as an observer to an expedition in Florida wrote in 1560: "And the friars were watching, hoping that a greater population might be discovered to convert and maintain in the Christian creed." ¹¹

Florida disappointed the hopes of the Franciscan friars who traveled with the military along its coast and across the interior. Some of Spain's most accomplished explorers, including Juan Ponce de Leon and Hernando de Soto, came looking for treasures, but the land yielded neither a Fountain of Youth nor golden cities. Click here to see a map of De Soto's 'March into the Wilderness. An incentive for the settlement of Florida was found, however, in the 1560s, when the discovery of French Huguenot settlements nearby to the north alarmed the sensibilities of both the friars and their military escorts. Spain subsequently established a base for operations against the Protestant French, naming it San Agustín, in keeping with the occasion of the first Roman Catholic mass offered there, the feast of St. Augustine, in 1565. Its Jesuit founders were replaced by Franciscans in 1566, who operated missions in San Agustín and other coastal towns for the next century. Their labors occasionally were rewarded by dramatic mass conversions, but were plagued by equally dramatic mass defections.

Figure 18: The chapel of Our Lady of La Leche y Buen Parto is on the grounds of present day Nombre de Dios in Saint Augustine, FL.

Spanish missionary activity in Florida developed very slowly. In 1680, the Province of St. Helen (the Franciscan administrative designation for the region of Florida) was the smallest of the 17 provinces in the Americas, with a clerical population of about 90 friars. The mission compounds were of humble wattle-and-daub construction, insubstantial compared to the commanding structures that would be built on the other side of the continent. The Indians, by the eighteenth century, were beginning to discover the benefits of alliance with the English, and so drifted away from the influence of the Spanish clergy. The Franciscans themselves were plagued by internal conflicts, the most important being the erosion of cooperation between clergy who were born and trained in the Americas and those imported from Spain. Governor Manuel de Montiano in 1738 described the situation as a "deep abyss of enmity and disunion" between the two groups. ¹² When Florida passed into the hands of the English in 1763, little more than an empty husk of Catholicism remained.

Figure 19: Mission San Luis in present day Tallahassee, FL was one of the many thriving missions in North Florida.

New Spain, or Mexico (and points further south), proved more profitable both to church and state than Florida. The spectacle of the magnificent Aztec civilization fired the imaginations of the government bureaucrats and clergy who dreamed of empires of gold and God, respectively. The religious orders found their work less difficult in New Spain than in the borderlands because Spanish domination in the region was decisive, and the environment accordingly offered a greater measure of stability and familiarity than did Florida. But the interests of neither clergy nor crown could be confined to familiar territory. Tales of fabulous wealth to the north began circulating in Mexico City-some from the mouth of Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca, a shipwrecked bureaucrat who had walked across half the continent, from Galveston Island to northern Mexico, in the 1530's. In 1540, a soldier by the name of Francisco Vásquez de Coronado, together with Fray Marcos de Niza, a young priest, led an expedition northward from New Spain on a journey that would take them all the way to Kansas. They found no streets paved with silver and gold, but discovered in the Pueblo villages and the camps of Plains Indians a target population for evangelization. Click here to see a map of Coronado's 1540-42 expedition. Click here to see a map of the routes of Cabeza de Vaca, Coronado, deSoto and Moscosco. Click here to read Cabeza de Vaca's account of his experiences in the Southwest.

Figure 20 and 21: The linguistic and territorial information provided by Cabeza de Vaca (left) helped facilitate Coronado's (right) exploration of the Spanish Borderlands.

The Franciscan missionary ventures in New Mexico began in 1581, eight years after the Spanish Ordinances of Discovery outlined a strategy replacing "conquest" with "peaceful and charitable" encounters with Indians.

By 1598, whatever regulation the Ordinances might have brought to exploration of the lands north of Mexico City was subverted when Juan de Oñate was granted a contract to colonize New Mexico. Oñate, the son of a fabulously wealthy Spanish silver mine owner in Mexico, visited a host of cruelties upon the Pueblo Indians in the course of establishing Spanish authority in the region. The Franciscans who accompanied Onate in turn portrayed themselves to the Indians as powerful wonder-workers, who could bring rain, heal the sick, and attract game. And they did not hesitate to remind the Indians of the Spanish conquest by regularly staging dramatic reenactments of it (in which the Indians played the roles) and by requiring that Indians greet a priest by kissing his feet. Such rituals clothed the friars with an authority over public life. That authority was essential to the efforts of Franciscans to bend the life of the people into a strict framework of Christian moral behavior-especially in the area of marriage and sexual relations. For it was the Franciscan strategy to reach the soul by first changing everyday behavior, the conduct of the "outer" person.

However, as was the case in Spain, the exercise of ecclesiastical power and the drive for conformity (at least in terms of everyday behavior) was accompanied by flexibility in certain areas. Franciscans adopted a strategy of introducing Indians to Christian rituals by performing those that bore the appearance of similarity to Indian rituals. And the missionaries sought out ways in which to absorb Native conceptualizations of religious power into their presentations of Christianity. Accordingly, Christian chapels were constructed on the sites of Indian shrines. The katsina cult - the Pueblo devotion to a variety of powerful spirits - was blended with the Christian veneration of the saints. Native rituals celebrating the passage of persons from childhood to adulthood, and others connected with the fertility of the land and the abundance of game likewise were allowed to mix with Christian practices. The Pueblo prayer-stick coalesced with the Christian cross. The calendar for the celebration of Christian feasts and holy days was adjusted to fit the cycle of Pueblo ceremonialism, so that Christmas and the rituals of the winter solstice were merged in the Pueblo mind. The drama of the crucifixion of Christ paralleled the ritual ordeals required of tribal leaders and male warriors. In short, the missionary endeavor in New Mexico, and, consequently, the religion of the converted, were characterized by a complex blending of strictness and adaptation. New Mexico was not Spain, however. In Castile, a certain amount of ambiguity in religion did not pose a threat to church or state because the culture had deep roots in Christianity. In New Mexico, the circumstances of Pueblo conversion were markedly different: Recent domination, not a long history of shared cultural presuppositions, proved inadequate as a glue to hold together the tensions present in the Christianity of the Indians. ¹³

The superficiality of the Pueblo Christianization became apparent in 1680 when the Indians revolted and chased the Spanish from New Mexico. Reflecting on the event, the Franciscans maintained that the antichrists-the colonial governors-were responsible for the revolt because they poisoned the relationship between the missionaries and Indians by their brutality in establishing dominion over them. This accusation against the civil authority, which had made possible the missionary enterprise from the start, mirrored in some regards the conflicted relationship between church and state in Spain at the time. It also significantly altered the plans of missionaries for how they would go about their work.

Figure 22: Mission San Juan (in ruins) in Texas once housed many Indians and missionaries. (Click on image for enlarged view)

Christianity returned to New Mexico, but very slowly, as the socio-religious environment had been spoiled by Spanish rule. Missionary initiatives in adjacent areas (Texas and Arizona) met with limited success. By the late seventeenth century, about the time that the Franciscans were driven from New Mexico, the Jesuits had carved out a thriving mission enterprise of their own among the Yaqui Indians, in the rich mining country of northwestern New Spain. Jesuit influence extended northward into the Pimería Alta in the person of Eusebio Kino, who founded a mission among the Pima Indians near present-day Tucson, Arizona. Kino proved more effective as an itinerant evangelist and sometime rancher than as a mission administrator, however, and in any event the changes he brought to the religious life of the Indians were largely diminished by the Yaqui revolt of 1740. In Texas, on the other hand, a battle between Mexicans and American settlers in 1836 brought lasting fame to a mission-the Alamo-that otherwise was undistinguished.

Prior to their expulsion from the Spanish dominions in 1767, the Jesuits had established a string of missions in Baja California. The Franciscans took control of these in 1768. The following year, news of Russian posts in the Pacific Northwest made its way to the chambers of Jose de Gálvez, a representative of the Crown in New Spain. Gálvez subsequently ordered the settlement of California to buffer Russian encroachment on Spanish interests. Guided by Fray Junípero Serra and his successor Fermín Lasuén, the Alta California venture eventually numbered 18 missions, founded between 1769 and 1823. The mission buildings that have survived evoke moods both of this-worldly practicality and otherworldly spirituality, and are frequently cited as evidence of the success of Spanish missionaries in the land that became the United States. In fact, there were fewer missions in California than in Florida, and the efforts of numerous extraordinary missionaries in California resulted in no extraordinary record of Christianization of the Indians. Click here to see a map of the Baja missions. Click here to see a map of the California missions.

Figure 23: Fray Junípero Serra began the missionization campaign of Alta California.

What, then, is the legacy of the Spanish mission to the Indians in America? The Spanish missionaries faced a number of exceedingly difficult challenges in the New World. Indian cultures were strange to them, and the translation of religious language into the Native idioms proceeded slowly and imperfectly, especially when notions such as the Christian Trinity were involved. The mission enterprise was usually shorthanded, only occasionally well funded, and always locked in a complicated relationship with military and commercial interests. Large-scale missionary ventures had not been a part of Spanish Catholicism for hundreds of years, and so the friars and priests were forced to improvise almost every step of the way. Finally, Spanish missions in Florida, California, and the Southwest suffered as operations located on the periphery of real Spanish interests far to the south.

Against this background it is more appropriate to speak of the significance of the Spanish missionary enterprise than of its success. It is significant because it set the tone for a style of Christianity grounded in the interpenetration of Catholic orthodoxy and local traditions. The reinterpretation of the Virgin Mary as a nurturing goddess, the coincidence of specific saints with local deities, the confluence of ritual traditions, the connections between Indian and Spanish religious objects, and a host of other instances of religious syncretism characterized the Catholicism of the Indians. The remnants of this syncretism are still alive within twentieth-century Hispanic Catholicism in America-in celebrations of the Day of the Dead, in the de-emphasis of institutional Catholicism, in the attention given to the passion of Christ, and in numerous other ways.

The missions themselves are largely lost - either in ruins or vanished - except in cases where they have been preserved as museums or archaeological sites, and in a few instances as houses of worship. Through the efforts of preservationists, historians, and community organizations, the rich history of the missions is being brought to light - especially in California, which has made a place for the study of the missions in the primary school curriculum.

Figure 24 & 25: As the name suggests, the Mexican Day of the Dead produces a multitude of macabre folk art.

French Missions and Institutions

Figure 26: In the mid 1530s, the Frenchman Jacques Cartier explored the Saint Lawrence region.

Religious Disagreements and the Problem of Organization

Figure 27: Samuel de Champlain was instrumental in France's development of the St. Lawrence.

French exploration of North America began with the voyages of Jacques Cartier, whose reconnoiterings in the Gulf of St. Lawrence and the St. Lawrence River in 1534 and 1535 set the stage for permanent French settlement in the New World. The islands and landmass charted by Cartier were not the sites of initial French ventures, however. Failed attempts in Brazil and, as we have seen, by French Huguenots near Florida preceded the founding of Acadia at the mouth of the St. Lawrence in 1604. Now included in the Canadian maritime province of Nova Scotia, Acadia-with its trading center of Port Royal-was settled by both Catholics and Protestants and was geared from the outset to the exploitation of commercial possibilities rather than religious missions. Clergy, who were present at the founding, soon died or returned to France. The Huguenot merchant underwriters of the colony balked at sending Catholic priests to Acadia, and when Jesuits finally did arrive in 1611, their doctrinal and personal quarrels with Protestants undermined the missionary work of both parties. The repercussions of those public disputes over doctrine were not lost on Samuel de Champlain, founder of Quebec (1608), explorer of the St. Lawrence River and name giver of Port Royal. Click here to see Champlain's travels displayed on a map of Exploration before 1675. Champlain reported to Cardinal Richelieu years afterward that "the Indians sometimes took one side, sometimes the other, and the French taking sides, according to their different beliefs, said everything that was bad of both religions."¹⁴ When the English captain Samuel Argall of Virginia reduced Port Royal in 1613, thereby ending for a while the French experiment in Acadia, French missionary policy in North America was still without a blueprint.¹⁵   Click here to see early maps of New France.

The floundering start of French missionaries in the New World was not simply the consequence of personality conflicts, language barriers, and English terrorism. Church authorities who envisioned the spread of Christianity in the New World were slow in developing a strategy for evangelization because of complex and deep-rooted problems in France. Not the least of those problems was the diversity of Christian belief. The dawn of the seventeenth century witnessed not only the obvious differences between Catholics and Protestants in France, but also considerable latitude in belief among Catholics themselves. Old agrarian traditions in the form of "folk beliefs" lived alongside official Catholic doctrines in the everyday lives of many French, and the combination was vexing to church leaders. The clergy lamented the ignorance of the peasantry, the shabby education of priests, and the ineffective efforts of church leaders to engage and channel the religious interest of the populace. Typical was the complaint of a priest of Nanterre that his congregation was ignorant of "those most common things that one must absolutely understand in order to receive the sacraments and be saved." ¹⁶ Though clergy sometimes exaggerated in their estimations of the religious state of affairs, such sorry judgments about religious education at home help to explain why French missions abroad in North America fared poorly. In neither case was there a proven strategy of religious education.

Figure 28: In the 1630s, Cardinal Richelieu established a firm Catholic rule in French colonies.

In contrast to the Catholic state of affairs (and it was not limited to France) was the Protestant world of concisely articulated doctrines, compact ritual, and church organization that favored strict local control of religious life. In France, Protestantism took the form primarily of the Huguenots, or French Calvinists, who after a period of conflict with Catholic authorities lived more or less peaceably alongside the majority Catholic population in the early seventeenth century. In time, however, as Catholicism was renewed in France, this arrangement deteriorated. The production of a lively culture of Catholic devotion, guided by the earlier reforms of the Council of Trent (1545-1563), together with government maneuvers to consolidate power, nurtured the political will of French Catholicism. One consequence was renewed persecution of Huguenots, most of whom fled to neighboring kingdoms, though some sought refuge in North America. After Cardinal Richelieu consolidated his power over government in the 1630s, Huguenots and other Protestants were forced to leave French territories even in North America.

The religious changes in France in the first half of the seventeenth century included reforms in several areas. French clerics and laypersons organized an assortment of men's and women's religious orders, the church enlarged seminary education and more diligently enforced church discipline, and the nation experienced a resurgence of pride in the distinctive features of the "Gallican" (French) church. Among the religious orders for women that were founded or greatly expanded during this time were the Ursulines, the sisters of the Congregation of Notre Dame, and a congregation of sisters organized by John Eudes in 1641. Counterpart male orders were the Recollects, Capuchins, and Sulpicians. Some organized missionary campaigns to rural France, and other places in Europe where religious life was not yet up to Tridentine orthodoxy. All found work in New France alongside the Jesuits, although their associations were marked by disagreements about the relation of church to state, claims to financial resources, and the nature of the missionary enterprise.

Figure 29: The order of the Ursuline Nuns was one product of French reforms during the first half of the seventeenth century. (Click on image for enlarged view)

Catholicism in the St. Lawrence Valley

Figure 30: Jean de Bre'beuf's martyrdom in New France made him a legend among French Catholics.

In spite of their disagreements, French missionaries made significant progress in organizing Catholicism in the St. Lawrence Valley. Immediately after the reoccupation of Quebec, which had been in English hands from 1629 to 1632, missionary activity in New France unfolded primarily as a Jesuit enterprise. French Jesuits at first sought, like the Spanish, to reshape the behavior of Native, believing that regeneration of interior life would follow. They abandoned this approach, however, for one that focused on immediate transformation of the soul, the "inner" person, on the assumption that such a conversion would necessarily produce behavioral fruits. Jesuit missions to the Huron and the Five Nations of the Iroquois met alternately with success and disaster, but even the failures succeeded in producing tales of heroism, suffering, and martyrdom. Those tales enshrined as legendary servants of God "Black Robes," such as Jean de Bre'beuf, Isaac Jogues, and Charles Garnier, and nurtured missionary zeal for generations of Canadian clergy and laypersons. At the same time, the Society of Jesus (the Jesuits) launched a series of initiatives aimed at developing an institutional base for Catholicism in New France. Fundamental to these efforts was the support of the Compagnie du Saint-Sacrement, a powerful society founded by wealthy Catholics in France in the mid-1630s, and so secret in its operations that it remained invisible to historians for 300 years. With influential friends in France, and hostilities with the English to the south temporarily suspended, Jesuits in Quebec were able to found a college, the College des Jesuites (1635), a seminary for French and Indian males (1636), and, in joint ventures with Augustinian and Ursuline nuns, a hospital and a convent school (1639). At the same time they developed means by which to nurture the faith of New France Catholics, through religious instruction and the administration of worship, and in other ways to fashion a religious infrastructure to serve their stated purpose of building "A New Jerusalem, blessed by God and made up of citizens destined for heaven."¹⁷ English Protestants, recently arrived in Massachusetts Bay, were at that very moment using virtually identical language to describe their own vision of Protestant destiny in North America.

Quebec thrived as a fur-trading center and soon became the hub of French activity in North America. From there the French moved again upriver to settle Montreal in 1642. Under almost constant siege by the Iroquois, Montreal managed so little progress in commerce that in a matter of a few years the balance of power in administrating the town shifted from representatives of the Company of New France to Jesuits who were determined to preserve Montreal as a base from which to evangelize the Indians. The religious infrastructure, accordingly, began to grow. Marguerite Bourgeois, who was canonized a saint in 1984, founded a school for girls. Jeanne Mance established a Catholic hospital. Various other enterprises slowly advanced so that by the late 1650s, Montreal boasted 400 residents (half the population of Quebec), a growing contingent of priests and nuns, a government that favored local control, and at least one miraculous healing.

Figure 31: Marg-uerite Bourgeois founded a school in New France.

Jesuit missions among the Hurons to the west rose and fell depending on the mood of the powerful Iroquois, who waged intermittent campaigns against Hurons and French alike. And the fur trade carried on in the territory between Montreal and Lake Superior was unsteady, and would remain so until the glut of beaver fur at the end of the century finally caused the bottom to fall out of the European market. Nevertheless, the French settlement of North America, in its religious as well as governmental aspects, had begun to evidence the rough contours of a colonial order, as if the blueprint lacking at Acadia had at last been discovered and implemented. Catholicism in New France, carried forward by the financial and political support of pious Catholics back in France, was essentially shaped not through sparkling achievements in the mission field, nor through partnership in a thriving trade venture. Rather, it defined itself in the relentless elaboration of institutional religious life in churches, schools, hospitals, ecclesiastical hierarchy, a college, a seminary, boarding houses, and the formalized sharing of power with civil magistrates. In short, it began to approximate the religion of its Catholic benefactors in France. ¹⁸

Institutional Support

Figure 34: Jacques Marquette was one of the early French explorers of the Great Lakes region. (Click on image for enlarged view)

The development of institutional support lurched ahead in 1659 with the arrival of François de Laval as the first bishop of New France. Laval urged the crown to intercede in North America, to unite Quebec, the maritime colonies (some of which were under the control of the English), and the semiautonomous settlement of Montreal under the umbrella of royal authority. In 1663, with France at peace with its European neighbors, and with Louis XIV's power consolidated at home, Louis took control of New France from its merchant board of governors, and made it a royal province. The subsequent reconfiguration of power in New France proved advantageous for the church in at least one sense, namely, that the authority of the bishop to shape policy was formally recognized alongside that of the governor and intendant (or "chief manager"). Royal control also provided a kind of ballast for the ship of state that enabled it to endure the growing disagreements among Jesuits, Sulpicians (who began arriving in 1657), Ursulines, Recollects, and the missionary priests trained at the Paris Seminary for Foreign Missions (founded in 1663). On the negative side, the church discovered that its enhanced status was sometimes not sufficient to carry forward its programs against the interests of a strengthened civil government. Typical was the case of Laval's proposed banning of the brandy trade with the Indians, a measure that the civil magistrates overruled.

Figure 32: In 1682, Rene Robert Cavelier La Salle traveled down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico

The development of French interests in North America, including the activities of French missionaries, were significantly broadened after 1663. Expeditions to survey the Great Lakes and their tributary waterways set off from Montreal and Quebec with increasing frequency. Jesuits played a key role in many such ventures. Jacques Marquette arrived in Wisconsin in 1669, and a few years later, paired with Louis Jolliet, came upon the Mississippi River, exploring it as far as its junction with the Arkansas River. In 1682, Rene Robert Cavelier de la Salle charted the remainder of the river to its labyrinthine delta at the Gulf of Mexico, naming the territory after the King of France. This Louisiana Territory eventually made its way into the United States, after a period of occupation by the Spanish, when the nation purchased it during the presidency of Thomas Jefferson in 1803.

Between 1663 and 1803, the work of priests and nuns in French territories progressed in fits and starts. In the valley of the St. Lawrence missionaries continued to approach Indians who had shown only slight interest in Christianity. Occasionally, their efforts would be rewarded, as in the case of a Mohawk woman, Katéri Tekakwitha, who was baptized in 1676 by Jesuits. At the age of 20 she relocated to the Christian Indian village of St. Francis Xavier near Montreal where she remained until her death a few years later. Her example of piety impressed French and Indians alike and her remains were brought to the Indian reservation of Kahnawake, where they have been revered as relics. In the west, a string of forts and missions in the Great Lakes region had appeared by 1690. Jesuit priests such as Claude Allouez, Claude Dablon, Henri Nouvel, and Charles Albanel worked among the Illinois Indians, and Jesuits visited the Cahokia, Tensa, Natchez, and other tribes along the length of the Mississippi from its source to New Orleans, which was founded in 1718. By the early eighteenth century, however, the turf war between Jesuits and the seminary-trained priests had reached a critical juncture. Neither group wished to share mission territory with the other, and the Jesuits balked at teaching the Native languages to their missionary competitors. As the number of priests trained in the seminaries in Paris and Quebec grew larger in North America, the influence of religious orders was diminished, so that by 1704, all Jesuits were gone from Louisiana, and those who remained in the mission field were limited in their activities by policies hatched in Quebec.

Figure 33: Baptized in 1676, the Mohawk Katéri Tekakwitha became a model of Christian piety.

Back in Quebec and in the towns in the St. Lawrence valley, Christianity was reasonably well established but by no means was it flourishing. The supply of locally trained clergy was insufficient to meet all of the religious needs of Canadian Catholics. By 1700, 60 secular priests (i.e., those not associated with a specific religious order) served a population of 15,000. There was one church for every 223 persons, a difficult situation for a population scattered over a very large area. The formal machinery of ecclesiastical bureaucracy had been put into place, but the state of affairs at the parish level was less than what church leaders had hoped. Jacques de Meulles, the intendant in New France, reported in 1683 that the French inhabitants rarely attended church and that their knowledge of Christianity barely surpassed that of Indians encountered by missionaries. ¹⁹ Partly to blame were the paltry funds appropriated for the support of parish priests, and frequently clergy opted for the mission fields to the west and south. More important, the experiences of many settlers simply did not correspond with the clergy's visions of a religious future. The notion of a "New Jerusalem" meant little to traders who gathered periodically at Montreal's fur fairs or to soldiers (a substantial part of the population) who polished their bayonets and counted the days before they could return to France. Other events further complicated the situation. When war with Britain ended with the capitulation of New France in 1760, the British enacted anti-Catholic measures, chasing entire religious orders back to Europe and hobbling the remaining ecclesiastical bureaucracy-a process expedited by the suppression of the Jesuits in France and its territories in 1764. In 1774, on the brink of conflict with its American colonies, England sought to shore up its position with Canadians by restoring civil rights to Catholics. And so, church leaders once again flexed their political muscle, the ranks of the clergy grew, and the infrastructure of religious life was revived.

The steady growth of Catholicism in Canada after 1780 did not go unnoticed in the United States. From the early days of the English settlement of Massachusetts, Protestants in New England looked suspiciously upon their Catholic neighbors. England's war with the French and Indians in North America during the 1740s-1750s was fueled by inflammatory British rhetoric about the designs of French Catholics to overrun and dismantle the Protestant regime in New England. In the nineteenth century, church leaders in the United States again characterized Canadian Catholicism as a danger to the destiny of Protestantism in North America. And in the late nineteenth century, the growth of Protestant churches in Canada itself brought Protestant Anglo-Saxon prejudice to English-speaking Ontario. That prejudice, or nativism, was particularly evident during periods of internal migration of French Catholics from Quebec to Ontario. Canadian Catholics, in turn, closed ranks and embraced a distinctly conservative and ultramontane (i.e., characterized by a close adherence to Roman leadership) Catholicism. Some Catholics, including clergy, left Canada for the United States. In fact, by the late twentieth century, the number of Franco-Americans of Canadian origin exceeded the number of French Canadians in Canada. ²⁰ Some of these immigrants settled in places where the French legacy remained strong, such as Louisiana, northern New England, and parts of the Midwest. Others mingled with immigrant Catholics recently arrived in the United States from various European countries, including France.

The projects of French Catholics in North America differed from those of the Spanish. Like their Spanish colleagues, French missionaries saw in North America a potential harvest of souls for Christianity. Both the Spanish and French spilled blood-their own as well as that of the indigenous peoples-in the process of claiming those souls. French missionaries, more so than Spanish, were encouraged in their work by stories about martyrdom, including the possibility of their own. And the Black Robes who were active in New France typically undertook their evangelization of the Indians as an ongoing series of forays into Indian villages and lands, rather than through the establishing of mission complexes to which Indians were invited for catechizing and acculturation (although these strategies were also used). Nevertheless, the French in Quebec, like the Spanish in Mexico, produced enduring and highly elaborated machinery for the administration of Catholicism in the New World. For the French, that machinery developed in the service of French colonists, so that even as missionary efforts brought discouragement, the institution building continued in the centers of French trade. The fact of the durability of those Catholic institutions, together with recurrent ultramontanism in Canada, shaped the development of Catholicism both north and south of the Canadian border. That Catholicism, in presenting theological and ideological challenges to Protestants in the United States, has at the same time influenced the formation of American Protestant understandings of nationhood.

Figure 35: French and Spanish mission enterprises differed in many ways, but both sought to expand Christian influence and imperial power in North America.

Notes

Parts of this Introduction were published in John Corrigan and Winthrop S. Hudson, Religion in America: An Historical Account of the Development of American Religious Life, 7th ed. (Pearson, 2004), 11-40.

1. The location of the beach where Columbus landed on his first voyage is debated by historians. Other places that historians have proposed as landing sites include the Turks and Caicos Islands, Rum Cay, Samana Cay, Rum Cay, the Plana Cays.

2. The Life of the Admiral Christopher Columbus by his Son Ferdinand, translated and annotated by Benjamin Keen (New Brunswick, N.J., 1959), 59, 60. See also, The Diario of Christopher Columbus's First Voyage to America 1492-1493, trans. Oliver Dunn and James E. Kelley, Jr. (Norman, Okla., 1989), 63-69.

3. For a discussion of the manner in which Columbus and the European explorers who followed him sought "the universal victory of Christianity," see Tzvetan Todorov, The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other, trans. Richard Howard (Harper & Row, N.Y., 1984; Harper-Perennial, N.Y., 1992).

4.Irving Rouse, The Tainos: Rise & Decline of the People Who Greeted Columbus (New Haven, 1992), 5-25.

5. See "On Pre-Columbian Settlement and Population," in David E. Stannard, American Holocaust: Columbus and the Conquest of the New World (N.Y., 1992), Appendix A, 261-68.

6. Fray Domingo de la Anunciacion and others to Luna, Coosa, August 1, 1560 in Earliest Hispanic/Native American Interactions in the American Southeast, ed. Jerald T. Milanich (N.Y., 1991), 223.

7. On rituals of death, see Carlos M. N. Eire, From Madrid to Purgatory: The Art and Craft of Dying in Sixteenth Century Spain (N.Y., 1995).

8. See Rev. Maynard Geiger, O.F.M., "The Franciscan Conquest of Florida (1573-1618)" in The Missions of Spanish Florida, ed. David Hurst Thomas (N.Y., 1991), 252-57.

9. Charles H. Lippy, Robert Choquette, and Stafford Poole, Christianity Comes to the Americas 1492-1776 (New York, 1992), 124.

10. See John McManners, "The Expansion of Christianity (1500-1800)" in The Oxford Illustrated History of Christianity, ed. McManners, (N.Y., 1990), 300-12.

11. Narrative of Fray Augustin Davila Padilla (1560) in Milanich, ed., 232.

12. Geiger, 247; Thomas, 301.

13. See Ramón A. Gutiérrez, When Jesus Came the Corn Mothers Went Away: Marriage, Sexuality, and Power in New Mexico, 1500-1846 (Stanford, 1991), 46-94.

14. Cited in Elizabeth Jones, Gentlemen and Jesuits: Quests for Glory and Adventure in the Early Days of New France (Toronto, 1986), 25.

15. See ibid.; W. J. Eccles, The Canadian Frontier 1534-1760 (N.Y., 1969); and the excellent survey by Robert Choquette in Charles H. Lippy, Stafford Poole, and Choquette, Christianity Comes to the Americas 1492-1776 (N.Y., 1992), 131-242.

16. Jean Delumeau, Le Catholicisme entre Luther et Voltaire (Paris, 1971), 256-57.

17. Quoted in W. J. Eccles, Essays on New France (Toronto, 1987), 27.

18. See Choquette, Christianity Comes to the Americas; Eccles, 56ff; Elaine Allan Mitchell, Fort Timiskaming and the Fur Trade (Toronto, 1977).

19. Eccles, Canada Under Louis XIV, 224; Essays, 29.

20. For a summary of the French-Canadian diaspora see J. E. Robert Choquette, "French Catholicism in the New World," The Encyclopedia of the American Religious Experience, ed. Charles H. Lippy and Peter W. Williams, vol. 1 of 3 vols., 233-37.

Figure 1: Map of the Caribbean. From the Candle Light Stories website at: http://www.candlelightstories.com/Pirates/PiratesHome.asp.

Figure 2: Image of the Tainos. From the Purdue University's Multicultural Web Page at: http://abe.www.ecn.purdue.edu/~agenhtml/agenmc/haiti/history.html.

Figure 3: "Friendly Indians" by Antonio Herra (17th century). From the Trainweb.org website at: www.trainweb.org/panama/history.html.

Figure 4: "Luna lands at Santa Maria de Ochuse-1559." From the Pensacola Archeology Lab website at: http://sites.gulf.net/pal/luna.html.

Figure 5: Stamp of the Fountain of Youth. From the Stamp Augustine website at: www.stampaugustine.com/sadesig4.htm.

Figure 6 & 7: Ferdinand and Isabella. http://www.louis.co.il/henry/spain.html.

Figure 8: Portrait of Christopher Columbus. Found at The Reformation Online: www.reformation.org/rome_robs_fort_knox.html.

Figure 9: "Wheel torture." From the Temple Worship Ministries website at: http://www.templeworship.org/newsletters/news_23/Newslt23.htm. Originally from Dell F. Sanchez's The Last Exodus. San Antonio, Tex.: Jubilee Alive Books, 1998.

Figure 10: Saint Teresa of Avila. From the ICS Publications website at: http://www.icspublications.org/bookstore/avila/.

Figure 11: Saint John of the Cross. From the Theosophical Society website at: http://www.theosociety.org/pasadena/sunrise/51-01-2/xt-elo.htm.

Figure 12: Juan de Zumárraga. From the Humanities-Interactive website at: http://www.humanities-interactive.org/newworld/fact_fict/ex036_10a.htm.

Figure 13: Aztec temple. From the Discover Learning website at: http://www.discoverlearning.com/pole2pole/mexico/aztecs.html.

Figure 14: Miguel Hidalgo. From the TareasYA.com website at: http://www.tareasya.com/noticia.asp?noticia_id=2197.

Figure 15: Pedro de Gante. From the Humanities-Interactive website at: http://www.humanities-interactive.org/newworld/fact_fict/ex036_10c.htm.

Figure 16: Bartolomé de las Casas. From the ASOCIACION JUSTICIA Y PAZ website at: http://www.jp.or.cr/fray/. Originally from Juan Friede and Benjamin Keen, Eds. Bartolome de las Casas in History: Toward an Understanding of the Man and His Work. (Dekalb Ill.: Northern Ill. Press, 1972).

Figure 17: Ponce de Leon. From the Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology website at: http://www.rose-hulman.edu/~delacova/colonization.htm.

Figure 18: Chapel of Our Lady of La Leche y Buen Parto on the grounds of Nombre de Dios. Photo courtesy of Eric Johnson, Director of Nombre de Dios. From the Mission of Nombre de Dios website at: http://userpages.aug.com/mission/chapel.html.

Figure 19: "Afternoon at Mission San Luis", by John LaCastro, 1993. From the Spanish Colonial Military Artifacts website at: http://www.artifacts.org/Mission.htm. Originally from Bonnie G. McEwan's The Spanish Missions of La Florida, (University Press of Florida, 1993).

Figure 20: Cabeza de Vaca. From the University of California Press website at: http://www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/9547/9547.excerpt.html. Originally from Michael Wood's Conquistadors (Berkley CA: University of California Press, 2000).

Figure 21: Francisco Vásquez de Coronado. From the Florida History website at: http://www.floridahistory.com/coronado.html.

Figure 22: The ruins of Mission San Juan in Texas. From The National Parks of the American Southwest website at: www.americansouthwest.net/.../sanjuan2_l.html.

Figure 23: Junípero Sera. From the El Fornio Historical Society website at: http://www.elfornio.com/serrastory.html.

Figure 24: "Day-of-the-Dead" Skeleton with fiddle. From the Canadian Museum of Civilization website at: http://www.civilization.ca/tresors/treasure/143eng.html.

Figure 25: Day of the Dead Honeymoon Coach. From the Holidays on the Net website at: http://www.holidays.net/halloween/calacas4.htm.

Figure 26: Jacques Cartier. Portrait of Jacques Cartier by Théophile Hamel (1817-1870). From the National Archives of Canada website at: http://www.archives.ca/05/0512/espace_f/05120301_f.html.

Figure 27: Samuel de Champlain. From the Lake Michigan Foundation website at: http://www.lakemichigan.org/facts/stats.asp.

Figure 28: Cardinal Richelieu. From the History of Dumas' Musketeers website at: http://www.hoboes.com/html/FireBlade/Dumas/History/Richelieu.html.

Figure 29: The Ursulines. Arrival of the Ursulines and the Sisters of Charity in New France (1928) by Sister Marie-de-Jésus. Photo: François Lachapelle, 1980. From the Virtual Museum of Canada website at: http://www.virtualmuseum.ca/Exhibitions/Annodomini/THEME_07/EN/theme7-3-sec.html.

Figure 30: Jean de Bre'beuf. From the Canadian Heritage website at: http://www.canadianheritage.org/reproductions/10078.htm.

Figure 31: Marguerite Bourgois. By Rachel Bourque, photo by Donald Savoie. From the Musée acadien de l'Université de Moncton website at: http://www.museevirtuel.ca/Exhibitions/Gestes/francais/r_mam.html.

Figure 32: Rene Robert Cavelier La Salle. From the New Geneva website at: http://www.newgenevacenter.org/movers/enlightenment2.htm.

Figure 33: Katéri Tekakwitha by Paul Coze. From the Kateri On-Line website at: http://www.tekakwitha.org/tekakwitha/Homex.html. Originally from Robert Rumilly's Kateri Tekakwitha: Le Lys de la Mohawk. La Fleur du Saint-Laurent (Paris: Bouasse-Jeune et Cie, 1934).

Figure 34: Jacques Marquette. From the California State University, Long Beach website at: http://www.csulb.edu/projects/ais/nae/1600-1750.html.

Figure 35: Map of New France and Louisiana. From the National Library of Canada website at: http://www.nlc-bnc.ca/2/8/h8-255-e.html.

Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative

Copyright © John Corrigan, Tracy Leavelle
December 2004

Website maintained by:
Information Systems and Services
International and Area Studies
University of California, Berkeley