American Indian Culture and Research Journal

The Montagnais kin groups which entered the Canadian mission at Sillery in 1639 throw signrficant light on the process of religious change. The Jesuit Relations richly document the Montagnais’ culture, and describe in detail their struggle to comprehend Catholicism. As a result, it is possible to achieve an Indian history grounded in the reality assumptions of a particular Native American people. The Montagnais demonstrate that when religious change is described as conversion, both Native Americans’ role in missionization and their syncretic intentions are missed. The Montagnais resisted Jesuit teachings for the better part of ten years, but some of them settled at Sillery for their own reasons. The challenge remains to reconstruct the reasoning by which some Montagnais adopted what appears to be the radically alien lifestyle the missionaries offered. To begin with, it is useful to ask how we can achieve the insiders’ view of missionization. The answer consists in identifying the common theoretical ground which has emerged between religious studies and several social science and humanistic disciplines. A good place to start is Susanne K. Langer’s Philosophy in a New Key. Langer heralded what might be thought of as a radical humanism focusing on meaning as an empirical, cross-disciplinary field of inquiry. Although Langer is seldom cited in social science literature or, for that matter, in the study of the humanities, the problem of meaning she highlighted has received concerted attention in the post-war era.