Dissertation Information for Tracy Neal LeavelleNAME:
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SCHOOL: ADVISORS: COMMITTEE MEMBERS: MPACT Status: Fully Complete Title: Religion, encounter, and community in French and Indian North America
Abstract: This dissertation is an ethnohistorical reconstruction of religious culture in the French-Indian communities of the upper Great Lakes and Mississippi Valley during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. French missionaries, especially from the Society of Jesus, interacted with a number of primarily Algonquian speaking peoples in the region, creating new communities and cultures. This research shows that these encounters involved the active engagement of people representing diverse perspectives, the exchange of ideas and information across cultural boundaries, and the creative transformation of individuals and communities. Building on recent scholarship that concentrates on the political and social dimensions of the interaction, the study concentrates on the actual content and experience of religious and spiritual life on this cultural frontier. A thorough understanding of Jesuit beliefs and experiences, for example, illuminates more vividly the Jesuits' changing goals and expectations, the nature of their own personal spiritual growth, and the impact of missionization on Native peoples. Specific subjects of investigation include the challenges of intercultural communication and the multiple meanings of conversion and resistance in evolving Native communities and cultures. This work examines the concept of the self and its relation to larger ideas of religion, kinship, and community and evaluates changes in the concept initiated through contact with Christian missionaries and new religious ideas. Importantly, the study also attempts to account for the influence of gender and generational differences within the Native communities. Finally, it includes an analysis of the "geographies" of these cultural encounters, that is, the competing visions of missionaries and Indian communities for the creation of ordered cultural landscapes that would both reflect and reinforce notions of the sacred, interpretations of the past, and plans for the future. Although examples for this study come from throughout the upper Great Lakes and Illinois country, the experiences of the Ottawas and the Illinois receive the most intensive treatment. Sources include missionary accounts, such as the Jesuit Relations , colonial memoirs, ethnographic descriptions, and some unpublished linguistic and archival material. |
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