Ir's oNe rHING To MAKE A MovtE ABour A
historical event; it's much harder to
depict a cultural process. Brian Moore
BTACI(
ROBI
CAST
Fdror Lafo4lqe (bthalre Bluteau)
Danlol
Annuka
(AdenYoung)
(Sandrine HoIt)
James Axtell
wrote the screenplay for Black Robe after
writing a novel of the same name about
Jesuit attempts to convert the Hurons of
early Canada to Catholicism. Inspired by
Graham Greene's essay on Francis
Parkman, himself a keen critical student
of The Jesuits in North America, Moore
immersed himself in the Jesuit
Relations-their field reports to their
superiors in France and Rome-and located a storyline based not on the trials of an
actual missionary but on the drama of one
religious culture's attempts to underThe lrcquois and the Hurons
The lroquois and the Hurons who clashed so tragically were more alike than different. Each was a
confederacy of five tribes, or "nations," probably
formed during the sixteenth century, numbering
twenty to twenty-five thousand people. Each spoke
languages of the lroquoian family. Each farmed
vegetables for the mainstays of their diet. Each
reckoned kinship matrilineally (through the mother), and women owned the fields and longhouses.
Clan mothers had a direct role in the appointment
and removal of male chiefs and in the adoption of
prisoners.
Despite these similarities, they were inveterate
enemies by geography and history. When French
traders settled Quebec in 1608, they had to ally
themselves with the tribes north of the St.
Lawrence River: the Algonquins and the
Montagnais, who had access to the best furs.
These tribes were, in tum, allies of the Hurons,
who lived in southem Ontario near the Geo€ian
Bay. All three groups were lonelime foes of the
lroquois nations that stretched across central New
York. Moreover, the lroquois traded on the Hudson
with the Dutch, from whom they obtained guns.
When epidemic diseases scythed through lroquois
villages ih the 163Os and 1640s, their war parties
increased in size, range, and ferocity as they
sought to capture cuhurally similar Hurons as
replacements for their fallen kin.
.*-
(r\
.tA
lroquols warrlors retumlng ftom a 1666 rald
7a
stand, compromise, and transform another.
To personalize this clash of cultures, Moore hangs his tale on the
physical and mental journey of young Father I:forgue, recently arrived
in New France, to a distressed Huron Jesuit mission. He is accompanied
by Algonquin trading partners, led by Chomina, and an Algonquinspeaking French youth, l)aniel, who has his eye-and soon hands-+n
Annuka, the chief's daughter. After being deserted by most of the party
as liabilities, the Frenchmen and their loyal Algonquin friends are
viciously attacked and taken prisoner by an Iroquois war party. After
they're tortured and Chomina's young son's throat is cut, the captives
escape from the Iroquois village and make their way upriver to Huronia.
When l-aforgue finally reaches the mission, he finds it stricken with disease and despair and realizes that the Christian gains have come at
tremendous expense to the Indians. The point is underscored by a postscript noting that the Christianized Hurons were subsequently wiped out
by the Iroquois.
irector Bruce Beresford has taken great pains to recapture the spirit
of the time, the place, and the cultural clash. The aufumn beauty of
the lac St-Jean-Saguenay region-standing in for the Ottawa River
Valley-is spectacular. The reconstructed Huron village at Midland,
Ontario, lends authenticity, as do seventeenth-century buildings in
Rouen, France, used for Laforgue flashbacks. Best of all is the film's
evenhanded depiction of the bafling otherness of both native and French
cultures. Neither culture is morally privileged; each is presented to the
viewer in its undiluted strangeness, as it was to the other in 1634. Indian
speech (Cree rather than Algonquin and Montagnais, as well as correct
Mohawk) is translated in subtitles, though for non-Quebec audiences the
Frenchmen speak English.
it is not stricfly relevant to the plot, we are not told that the
to the five large Huron nations near Georgian Bay began
missions
Jesuit
Because
BLACI{
ROBE
The lesuits
The Black Robes in
Canada were mefiF
be(s of the Society
of Jesus, an order of
missionary priests
founded in 1534 by
lgnatius Loyola, a
former Spanish soldiercourtier studying
theolog/ at the
University of Paris.
Six years later, the
pope gave the order
his blessing after
its members took
vows of perpetual poverty, chastity, and obedience. By 1626 the Jesuits numbered over fifteen
thousand and had established Catholic missions
not only in Reformation Europe but also in Asia,
Africa, and the Americas.
The Jesuits were known for
their educational foundations
{some 444 colleges, 56 seminaries, and 44 houses of
training by 1626), their ser'
vice as royal confessors
(especially to the French
kings), and their international missions. Trained at
length in their own schools,
the Jesuits were among
the most learned men in
Europe. They were accomplished linguists who learned myriad native
languages, practiced students of alien cultures,
and keen debaters. Their task was to attack
'paganism' by supplanting native religious leaders
with their own evangelical authority and to lead
entire tribes to embrace "the Faith."
The Jesuits served in French Canada from
1611 to 1613, 1625 to 1629, and 1633 to 18OO.
ln the seventeenth century alone, 115 priests
maintained thirty missions and baptized more than
ten thousand healthy adutt lndians after considerable catechizing and moral testing. The keystone
of the Canadian mission was the Huron confedera
cy with its la€e sedentary villages of trading
partners and allies. From their headquarters at
SainteMarie, the Black Robes fanned out to villages in all five nations, where they built churches,
cared for the sick, and baptized the dying.
Paul Le Jeune (1591-1664) was the Jesuit
superior in Canada during much of the 1630s and
the editor of the first eleven Relations. Published
in Europe annually between 1632 and 1672, the
Relations sought to publicize the Canadian activities of the Jesuits, raise funds for the order, and
attract settlers and nuns to Canada to help civilize
les sauva4es. However, their efforts were halted
by the ferocious lroquois raids of the 164Os.
1623 with the Recollects, an understaffed mendicant order of
Franciscans who invited the Jesuits to Canada to join them two years
later. After the English captured New France in 1629 and expelled the
French for the next three years, only the Jesuits refurned to resume their
assault on the "paganism" of their Huron trading partners. But we are
shown in memorable detail just how durable and consistent native values
and practices were. We are also made to see French culture through
native eyes, just as we know laforgle interprets theirs. Only Daniel, the
new hybrid Canadian, navigates
the cultural rapids as a surehand-
in
ed relativisl
In the film, the Jesuits-and
particularly Laforgue-have to
overcome two major obstacles if
they are to conquer the native reli-
gion: a dream and a shaman.
Shortly after leaving Quebec,
Chomina dreams of a black crow
"I have in mind a
Heart of Dark
?ess
tale, a story of a
.))
journey uprtver.
Brian Moore
pecking out the eyes of an unidentified Indian on a deserted winter
island. Because dreams were
regarded as 'wishes of the soul" that needed to be fulflled to prevent
misfortune, the Algonquins seek out a famous Montagnais shaman
(anomalously) to interpret the dream. Iaforgue and this dwatt sorcerer
engage in a contest of will ant' power over the next few days. When
Iaforgue baptizes a dead $sonduin infanL the lndians decide that he has
"cast a spell on
it'
and stolen its spirit They then abandon the Jesuil
Native life posed other challenges to French proselytizers. Endemic
warfare hindered missions dedicated to the cause of peace, particularly
when the "pagan" Iroquois conducted revenge raids against their ageold
Huron rivals. Many native men also had more than one wife, which contravened the Catholic sacrament of marriage. Native warriors had difficulty appreciating French priests, who wore feminine robes, carried no
weapons, and showed no interest in women, beaver skins, or hunting.
Unlike Counter-Reformation Catholicism, native religion was inclusive
and tolerant" adding new deities and rituals to old as hedges against the
growing uncertainties of life.
But as Black Robe makes clear, the Jesuits had several weapons in
their arsenal.They quickly learned the natives' languages. (At the Jesuit
house in Quebec, Iaforgue has studied Algonquin and Huron.) The
desire for French trade goods-particularly cloth, metal tools, and guns
(which the French initially sold or gave only to convefts)-also gave the
Jesuits leverage among the tribes and, historically, kept the Huron missionaries alive. In the film, one Jesuit is tomahawked by a grieving father
who does not wish his dead child to be baptized. Imported epidemic diseases, which did not seem to afflict the French, frightened and weakened
native villagers and disposed them to listen to explanations and spiritual
BLACK
IOBE
remedies offered by the Black Robes, as the missionaries were known.
So did the French possession and control of "miraculous" technology. In
the film, Indian visitors at a Quebec church are astonished by the chiming of its clock-"Captain Clock is aliver"-and at the ability of the literate French to "read" minds at a distance, as only their own shamans sup
posedly could. The film rings true on such points as these.
Yet despite a valiant effort to be faithful to historical Irtth, Black Robe
contains a number of anomalies. The plot turns around the fifteenhundred-mile journey of an untried, rather wimpy Jesuit, accompanied by
only a lovesick French lad lacking any religious convictions. But the
Constitutions of the Jesuits mandated that priests be sent in pairs, partly
to avoid the kind of sexual temptation to which I:forgue succumbs when
he happens on a nocturnal bout of (missionary-position) lovemaking
between Daniel and Annuka. Only in the late 1630s did the Jesuits resort
to d.onnis-lay domestics who signed a civil contract and took a vow to
serve the order in equal chastity, poverty, and obedience-to accompany
them on missions. And no sensible Canadian would have embarked on
such a long journey so close to the winter freeze-up. Scenes of the
escrpees dragging and paddling fragile bark canoes over and through
the ice are simply ludicrous.
l,ess noticeable to most viewers are the unhistorical location of the
Iroquois village on the Ottawa River west of Montreal (Algonquin territory) and the puzzling behavior of the Iroquois captors. The film shows
scaffold burials outside longhouses, which (correctly) suggest that the
Iroquois, too, were suffering from epidemics. However, they would never
have gratuitously killed a young prisoner who could have been adopted
into a family to replace a fallen kinsman. Nor would a guard have attempted to have sex with a female prisoner. A strict taboo applied to war prisoners in general throughout the native East, but the Iroquois in particular
eschewed sex with future adopted kinswomen. The filmmakers also have
no documentary grounds for depicting two incidents of lndian-Indian sex
in the animal position. Finally, no Iroquois guard was ever posted in a
scaffold tower in the cold dead of a winter night. Sensibly, native war parties stayed home in winter.
Background Reading
James Axtell, The Inaasion Within: The Contat of Culturu in Colonial North
Ameica (Oford University Press, 1985)
Bruce G. Trigger,The Children of Aataentsic: A History of the Huron People to
1660 (McGill-Queen's University Press, 1976)
199 lr0anada-AustraliarGolor
DIRECT0R: Bruce Beresford; PR0DUGER: Robert Lantos, Stephane Reichel'
Sue Milliken; SGREB{PLAY: Brian Moore; SIUDIO: Samuel Goldwm; VIDEO: Vidma*;
RUiINING TIME:
ITilES
lfi)
min.
AXTELL
lesuit Baptisms
ln the drawing above {from a map cartouche), a
Jesuit missionary, wearing a distinctive Catholic
biretta, baptizes a Canadian lndian. Unless
the candidate was near death, the Jesuits in
Canada did not baptize natives except after rigorous instruction and moral testing, sometimes for
years. Those lndians who were converted worshiped their new Christian deity instead of
(or perhaps in addition to) their ancient deity,
the sun.
later,,,
La€e lroquois armies, drawing waniors from all
five nations, mercilessly attacked the dasease
weakened Hurons. The Jesuits torched their
headquarters at SainteMarie and fled west with
their native converts, first to Christian lsland in
Lake Huron and then, the following year' to
Quebec. Several priests were captured and martyred, often with tortures mocking Christian
ceremonies. Resisting Huron villagers were either
killed or marched to lroquoia, where they were
adopted en masse. Those who fled south and
west became known as Wyandots and figured in
eighteenthtentury AnglcFrench rivalries.
After the lroquois destroyed Huronia, the
Jesuits moved on to other tribes in the Great
Lakes region, lllinois, and later Louisiana. When
New France fell to the British in 1763, the
lndians were allowed to keep their.,esuit priests
but not replace them. The last French Black Robe
died in service in 18OO, twenty-seven years after
the pope had officially suppressed the order
worldwide.