"Comment peut un muet prescher l'évangile?" Jesuit Missionaries and the Native Languages of New France

Evidence from the seventeenth-century Jesuit relations suggests that on the linguistic frontier, at least, there was more reciprocity in exchanges between Europeans and native people than we have imagined. Before they could preach the gospel to the native people of New France, the Jesuits had to master one or more of the indigenous languages. The relations, unique and compelling accounts of the psychology of encounter, contain detailed descriptions of the Jesuits' effort to understand and to make themselves understood in these languages. Some of the missionaries, Jean de Brébeuf, especially, were more successful than others; subsequent Jesuit linguistic work built on Brébeuf's discovery of the polysynthetic feature of Indian languages. The contributions of native informants, tutors, and translators were critical to the success of the Jesuits' language project; their decisions to cooperate (or, in some cases, to subvert) were clearly based on a keen awareness of the power of language.