American Indian Culture and Research Journal

The Age of Discovery brought to western Christianity a missionary challenge of epic proportions. Medieval Christianity had always claimed to be universal, but it was the geographical discoveries of the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries that moved the claim towards reality. By the seventeenth century the frontier of the Christian mission stretched from China to Paraguay, and from Mexico City to Quebec. On that frontier the Society of Jesus was perhaps the best organized and most effective force for the spread of Christianity. Jesuit missions in the New World were a major institution on the frontier and a crucial arena for the confrontation of European and Native American cultures. It is that arena and the meeting of cultural values in one mission region that is the subject of this essay. While historians of the Christian mission and of Indian-white relations have been quick to see the importance of Jesuit missionaries on the frontiers of the Americas, these same observers have done little to explore the theories and methods of the missionaries, and even less quick to examine the impact of the mission on Native Americans. This historiographical failure is nowhere more evident than in studies of the Jesuit missions in New France. From Francis Parkman to the most recent comprehensive history of the Christian mission, the treatment of the missionaries and the Indians has been remarkably similar. The Fathers, so goes this interpretation,