We non-natives who live in the mountains of the Carolinas, Georgia and Tennessee, remember and lament the tragedies which befell the Indians who preceded us. We remember discovery of gold in Dahlonega which removed the Cherokees along the Trail of Tears. We remind one another that high schools should think twice before calling their sports teams by names which some feel disparage native Americans, words such as Squaws or Braves.

From the days of the northern voyages of Leif Ericson to Vinland and of Christopher Columbus much later and much farther south, Europeans  pressed themselves upon Amerindians. The mighty colonizing powers encountered across two continents and the Caribbean Sea several levels of West Indies civilization and entered into many relationships: including trade, intermarriage, enslavement, war and extermination.

Some historians of this cross-cultural encounter are more readable than others. Some better convey the texture of the landscape. Others evaluate the intentions of the colonial powers. Each author brings debatable presuppositions and prejudices.

Consider a classic work of early American history. In 1867 Francis Parkman (1823-1893) published THE JESUITS IN NORTH AMERICA IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. A wealthy Bostonian and a Protestant  minister's son, the young Parkman consecrated himself to understanding colonial North America. He showcased France and Britain as they struggled to control the northeast. His focus in THE JESUITS IN NORTH AMERICA is, however, even narrower than its title suggests. For French Jesuit priests ranged farther than Canada and worked with many Indian tribes. One Jesuit, Father Jacques Marquette (1637-1675),  explored the Mississippi river. But Parkman, in THE JESUITS, focused on Catholic missionary activity to one group: the Hurons, a group virtually extinguished in 1650 by the Iroquois Confederation.

Parkman believed that the world's future for all time lies with impulses
from 16th Century Protestantism and especially from Anglo-Saxon passion for liberty of conscience and dislike of autocracy. He described his own version of Christianity as "cooler" than that of 17th Century French Catholics. He reported on but largely disbelieved people who passionately embraced mysticism or metaphysics or who believed in spirits. Among such were both Catholics and Indians. The latter he regularly styled "savages." 

To Francis Parkman the French were predestined to fail as colonizers of North America because of the absolutism and medieval nature of both their faith and their political system. English love of free institutions would inevitably trump the French. Any Indians were similarly doomed in encounters with any European power. For Indians were genetically inferior (their brains were smaller, thought Chapman), too violent and too inflexible to prevail against trans-Atlantic men. The French Jesuits, he judged, were wrong to regard Indians as their brothers, capable of being civilized, yet without being made over into Frenchmen. Finally the Iroquois were bound to defeat the Hurons because the  Iroquois were tougher. Of course, Dutch-supplied muskets did their part too.

All this drama was to Parkman's mind a key building block in the historical foundation of the United States. By defeating the Hurons and breaking up the French trade in beaver pelts with the interior, the Iroquois unwittingly saved the British position in North America and thereby advanced the inevitable unfolding of constitutional government and liberty of conscience.

Francis Parkman was a close student of nature and enriched his narrative through on-site observations during extensive travels to the wilds of New England and Canada. He was a vivid, memorable, accurate story teller. Parkman was among the first American writers to consult and display original sources from the period in question. In particular he used the famous French language JESUIT RELATIONS. For 40 years between 1632 and 1672 the Jesuit superior in New France sent home those narratives written by his heroic colleagues in the interior.

In any summer you can recapture the spirit of Parkman's era if you drive north from Toronto and visit the reconstructed Jesuit village of Sainte Marie Among the Hurons. Canadian university students, in period costumes, portray Jesuits, Indians and others as they were in the 1650s. You see how the Hurons fortified themselves against their enemies and how the Jesuits introduced the latest French developments in insulating buildings and constructing small canals and boat lifts. You learn how Christian and non-Christian Hurons lived together, how the Frenchmen unwittingly infected Indians with European illnesses against which the Indians had built no immunity. Saint Mary of the Hurons represents as important a part of the
European-Amerindian saga as the Trail of Tears.

Within the limitations of his prejudices and presuppositions, Parkman, who often called himself a "heretic," did justice to both the strengths and weaknesses of Jesuits and Indians. His generalizations may be right or wrong, but are never insipid or flat. Here are representative quotations from THE JESUITS IN NORTH AMERICA IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY.  They are from the University of Nebraska Press's 1997 paperback edition.

-- "Spanish civilization crushed the Indian; English civilization scorned
and neglected him; French civilization embraced and cherished him" (p. 131)
.
--"The Jesuits never had the folly to assume towards the Indians a
dictatorial or overbearing tone. Gentleness, kindness and patience were the rule of their intercourse. ... Far from treating the Indian as an alien and barbarian, they would fain have adopted him as a countryman (p. 225f)

--"The Roman Church, sunk in disease and corruption when the Reformation began, was roused by that fierce trumpet-blast to purge and brace herself anew. Unable to advance, she drew back to the fresher and comparatively purer life of the past; and the fervors of mediaeval Christianity were renewed in the sixteenth century. In many of its aspects, the enterprise of (founding ) Montreal belonged to the time of the first Crusades." (p. 301)

American Indian history and European colonial history are bone of the bone of today's United States and Canada. Though over 120 years old, Francis Parkman's works are still the most readable introductions to this neglected portion of our multi-cultural past.

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