The Shattered Cross: French Catholic Missionaries on the Mississippi River, 1698–1725 by Linda Carol Jones (review)

Reviewed by: The Shattered Cross: French Catholic Missionaries on the Mississippi River, 1698–1725 by Linda Carol Jones Carole Blackburn The Shattered Cross: French Catholic Missionaries on the Mississippi River, 1698–1725. By Linda Carol Jones. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. 2020. Pp. xiv, 297. $50.00 ISBN: 978–0–8071–7356–5.) In The Shattered Cross author Linda Carol Jones shines a light on the missionary work of the Séminaire de Québec in the Mississippi River Valley at the beginning of the eighteenth century. Between 1698 and 1725 five seminary priests embarked on missions among the people of the Taensas, Tamarois, Tunica, Natchez and Quapaw nations. These missions resulted in little in the way of conversion to Christianity. While conversions were few Jones argues that some of the priests managed to find a degree of cultural understanding, approaching a middle ground, with their Indigenous hosts. The Shattered Cross is a well written and important addition to our understanding of Christian missions in New France. Jones' primary source materials are archives located in France, Canada, and Italy, with a focus on the archives of the Séminaire de Québec. These include private letters between the priests and their leadership, supply lists, discussions of administrative matters and frank depictions of the conditions of the missions that together provide unique insight into the motivations of the priests and the challenges they faced as they descended the Mississippi. The missions were not well planned or adequately funded. Fathers Antoine Davion, François de Montigny, Jean-François Buisson de Saint-Cosme, Nicolas Foucault and Marc Bergier struggled with logistical difficulties, isolation, a climate for which they were not equipped, and their inability to speak the languages of their Indigenous interlocutors. In the case of the Tamarois they were also in direct competition with the Jesuits. Fathers Foucault and Saint-Cosme were killed in the field, Father de Montigny left for France after twelve months, and Bergier succumbed to disease in a few short years. Father Davion alone remained along the Mississippi for 25 years before returning to France. While Jones uses the archives to excellent effect in the retelling of the main events of these missions the book is not able to paint as full a picture of the Indigenous peoples the missionaries lived among. As she notes, "we know very little about the interactions that took place between Seminary missionaries and Native peoples along the Mississippi during the early part of the eighteenth century" (p. 228). Jones relies on the work of historians, anthropologists and other secondary sources to frame the cultural contexts in which the priests found themselves. This is a large task. Jones also draws on Richard White's The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991) [End Page 621] with its concept of the middle ground to characterize the accommodations she suggests occurred between some of the priests and their Indigenous hosts. This is where the book is least convincing. White used the middle ground to characterize what happens when "diverse peoples adjust their differences through what amounts to a process of creative, and often expedient, misunderstandings" (White, p. xii). Not all accommodations to the 'customs of the country' amount to a middle ground. That aside, Jones's emphasis on the transformative potential of attempts to bridge cultural differences in contact zones is an important theme throughout her analysis of these missions and enhances the contribution of this book. Carole Blackburn University of British Columbia Copyright © 2023 The Catholic University of America Press

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