Missionaries: From Alaska to Patagonia · Episode 4 of 10 · 47 min
Black Robes and Praying Towns: Two Ways to Convert a People Who Outnumbered You
In the 17th-century Eastern Woodlands, outnumbered Europeans made two opposite bets. French Jesuit 'Black Robes' lived among the Huron-Wendat, while New England Puritans gathered converts into Praying Towns and demanded total surrender. Both ended in catastrophe, yet the Bible printed to erase one language later helped revive it.
Who's who
- Jean de BrébeufJesuit among the Huron-Wendat; killed by the Iroquois in 1649
- John EliotPuritan minister who founded the Praying Towns and printed the Massachusett Bible
- James PrinterNative printer essential to Eliot's Bible
- Job NesutanNative translator of Eliot's Bible
- CockenoeNative translator of Eliot's Bible
- MetacomWampanoag leader of King Philip's War, 1675-76
- Kateri TekakwithaMohawk-Algonquin woman canonized in 2012 as first Native American saint
- Jessie Little Doe BairdMashpee Wampanoag linguist who revived Wôpanâak
Where it happens
- HuroniaHomeland of the Huron-Wendat, destroyed by 1650
- Natick, MassachusettsFirst of Eliot's Praying Towns, founded 1651
- Deer Island, MassachusettsWhere about 500 Praying Indians were interned in 1675
- Wendake, QuebecSurviving Huron-Wendat community
Timeline
- 1649Iroquois forces destroy Huron villages; Brébeuf killed
- 1651Eliot founds Natick
- 1663Eliot's Massachusett Bible, first Bible printed in North America
- 1675-1676King Philip's War; Praying Indians interned on Deer Island
- 2012Kateri Tekakwitha canonized
- 2004Baird's daughter becomes first native Wôpanâak speaker in a century
Still debated
Historians weight disease, the gun trade, Iroquois strategy and internal division differently in the fall of Huronia. The main sources, including the Jesuit Relations, were written by the missionaries themselves. Whether conversion was coercion or choice is held open, since genuine Indigenous embrace, as with Kateri, existed alongside leverage.