The Jesuit Martyrs and Champlain’s Dream

By Gary Topping–

I always try to remember October 19.  It is the Memorial of the eight Jesuits martyred in Canada at the hands of the Iroquois Indians in the 1640s.  Most people who celebrate the Memorial consider only of the unthinkable tortures endured by the Jesuits as heroes of the faith.  But there is a much larger story, which I have learned from Fr. Francis X. Talbot, S.J.’s biography, Jean de Brebeuf: Saint Among the Hurons, written during the 1940s and recently reissued by Ignatius Press.  Brebeuf was one of the primary creators of the Huron mission in the 1630s, and whose death in 1649 ended the project.

Brebeuf, who comes to life memorably in Fr. Talbot’s pages, was physically a giant of a man, apparently well over six feet tall, whose appearance was noted everywhere he went.  The Hurons at first refused to allow him as a passenger in their light canoes—until he proved to be as strong a paddler and bearer of baggage over long portages as they themselves.  He also impressed them by his willingness to subsist on the raw meat and cornmeal gruel which was their fare during frequent hard times.  But his great asset as a missionary was his energy in attempting to bridge the immense cultural chasm between the French and the Hurons and his linguistic genius in mastering the Huron language which had eluded other Europeans.  The Hurons were impressed that he took them seriously and attempted to deal with them and communicate with them on their own terms.

In his missionary efforts, Brebeuf was part of the program of his friend and collaborator, the great French colonizer Samuel de Champlain.  “Champlain’s Dream,” as defined by his biographer, David Hackett Fischer, was a vision of a peaceful, multi-racial community of French settlers and diverse Indian tribes along the St. Lawrence River from the Atlantic Ocean to the Great Lakes.  It would be based on cultural toleration and mutual economic benefit in the exchange of European manufactured goods for the raw materials of the Canadian interior.  Elsewhere in the world, European colonization meant military conquest, forcible conversion, and exploitation of native peoples and resources.  Brebeuf’s role in “Champlain’s Dream” was to promote peace by persuading the Indians to convert to Christianity, which would curb the tendencies to extreme violence and cruelty which were fundamental elements in their culture.  At the same time, Champlain would enforce French law to rein in the greed and materialism of many of the French settlers.

It was not to be.  Champlain’s death on Christmas Day, 1636 was a blow to the program, but Brebeuf and the other Jesuits soldiered on until forces beyond their control brought it to an end.  A smallpox epidemic reduced the Huron population by almost two-thirds, which placed them at a crippling disadvantage against their sworn enemies, the Iroquois, whereupon the Hurons were either exterminated or scattered into the wilderness.

Brebeuf, who had repeatedly prayed for martyrdom, was granted his wish after being captured by the Iroquois and subjected to the most unspeakable tortures over a two-day period.  With the death of its founder, the Huron mission collapsed, and by 1650 the French had temporarily withdrawn from the Canadian wilderness and given up on “Champlain’s Dream.”  Thereafter, the story of French colonization followed the same tragic pattern as European colonization throughout the rest of the Americas: brutal military conquest and subjugation and exploitation of native peoples.  It is a legacy from which we have yet to recover.