Black Robe

“We have become as bad as the Normans themselves. All we think of is things. We have become greedy and stupid like the hairy ones.”

“Yes that is true,” said Awandouie. “Perhaps that is how the Normans will destroy us. Not in war, but by a spell that makes us like them.”

Black Robe was recommended to me as being similar to The Orenda (one of my all time favourite reads), and after finishing it, I can say that the two books are not only similar but share many of the exact same details – the seventeenth-century Quebec/Ontario setting, a Jesuit travelling and living with “the Savages”, horrifying “caressing ceremonies”, an attempt to astound (and thereby control) the Natives with “Captain Clock” – and I can only assume that that means that both authors consulted the same source materials in an attempt to bring this era to life. While Black Robe is the much shorter (and, as one might infer, less in-depth) work, it did have some interesting things to say.

Laforgue is a Jesuit (what the Natives called a “black robe”) who came to Quebec from France with the fervent desire to spread the gospel to the Savages, and hopefully, martyr himself in the process. When news reaches Champlain that a fever has been ravaging a far away outpost (so far as I can tell, Ihonatiria was on the shore of Lake Huron in the Upper Bruce Peninsula; over a thousand km from Quebec City by road today), and with reports of one of the mission's priests having died, Laforgue's wish to enter the wilderness is granted. Having been paid in muskets, a group of Algonkians promises to lead the priest and his young assistant to a place “beyond the rapids”, but when the band's leader has a disquieting dream, a foreboding pall is cast over the trip.

The majority of Black Robe concerns this journey and is a tale of hard days of paddling, the nightly building of a communal shelter, the hunt for food, and the shifting points of view of the French men and the Algonkians as they consider each other and outline what they don't like or trust about each other. Laforgue is disgusted by the Natives' general uncleanliness (even if smearing themselves with dirt and grease keeps the mosquitoes away), their pagan beliefs, but mostly, their loose sexual ways (and the fact that this challenges his own vow of celibacy). The Natives don't understand the Normans' refusal to share everything they own, their insistence on living in private quarters, their disrespect for the spirits of the animals and trees. But the biggest difference between the two groups – and this is what I found to be the most significant difference between Black Robe and The Orenda – is the way that the Jesuits' beliefs are presented as a death cult: There is nothing that Laforgue wants more than to be martyred for his faith and thereby guarantee his place in heaven. This more than anything is what turns off those whom he would hope to convert –

How can we believe you? You have not seen this paradise of which you speak. I have not seen our world of night, but I know it is no paradise. You have no sense, Nicanis. No man should welcome death...Look around you. The sun, the forest, the animals. This is all we have. It is because you Normans are deaf and blind that you think this world is a world of darkness and the world of the dead is a world of light. We who can hear the forest and the river's warnings, we who speak with the animals and the fish and respect their bones, we know that is not the truth. If you have come here to change us, you are stupid. We know the truth. The world is a cruel place but it is the sunlight.

This idea of fundamentalist-religion-as-death-cult – even Lafargue's mother back in France wished for him to give his life for the faith – has resonance with the world we live in today, and if nothing else, it highlights the fact that belief systems can evolve; by the end of the book, both sides had doubts about their own traditions and were willing to make compromises. Black Robe was a worthwhile read, and although it pales in comparison to The Orenda, it would make an easy introduction to the era for anyone who doesn't have the time or interest for the heftier book.