Crafting Quebec’s Seventeenth-Century Past: A Birch Bark Letter by Twentieth-Century Hospitalières

Abstract

This article examines a letter written by the Quebec City Hospitalières to the Society of Jesus in 1925. Written on birch bark, the letter stands out from other notes of congratulation received by the city’s Jesuits on the tercentenary of their arrival at Quebec. Drawing on queer theory ― in particular, Sara Ahmed’s theory of “affective economies” ― this article analyses the ways in which this letter was crafted in order to shape feelings about ― and to colonize ― the seventeenth-century past. Feelings, Ahmed argues, are not “in” objects, but are created through “circulation.” As an object for which circulation is embedded in its purpose, the Hospitalières’ letter provides a useful case study for the examination of the ways in which encounters with objects could shape feeling in twentieth-century Quebec. While the Hospitalières claimed to be able to feel the seventeenth-century past ― and sought to evoke these feelings in the letter’s recipients ― they were, in fact, crafting a feeling for it.

Keywords:

• Queer theory
• emotion
• letters
• birch bark
• Hospitalières
• Society of Jesus
• Canada

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank the editors of this special issue, Louise D’Arcens and Andrew Lynch, for their invaluable critical comments throughout the editorial process. Mark Jenner and Kathryn Prince also generously shared their insights. Further thanks are due to the archivists at the Centre d’archives du Monastère des Augustines in Quebec City and the Archives des jésuites au Canada in Montreal for their invaluable assistance in sourcing materials for this article. Any errors are my own.

Notes

1. Today known as the Augustines de la Miséricorde de Jésus, the Hôtel-Dieu’s Augustinian community has had a number of names since its inception (Rousseau 1989, 23). The 1925 letter is signed “Les Hospitalières reconnaissantes” from the “Monastère des Hospitalières de la Miséricorde de Jésus, O.S.A.” This was not the first time the Society of Jesus had sent missionaries to Canada, but it was the beginning of a sustained missionary presence (with the exception of 1629–32 when the English occupied Quebec). Previously, there had been one short-lived attempt (1611–13) to establish a mission in Acadia. See Deslandres 2003, 201–05.

2. Unless otherwise stated, all translations are my own.

3. These men are often referred to as “the North American martyrs.” I will set off the word “martyr” with quotation marks since, as Anderson (2013) has argued, “martyrdom” is an “interpretation,” and an often-contested one (8–9).

4. The Haudenosaunee (“people of the longhouse”) is a confederacy of six nations: Mohawk, Onondaga, Oneida, Cayuga, Seneca, and (from 1722) Tuscarora.

5. Cf., letters from Soeur Sainte Amélie, superior of the Quebec Ursulines (June 20, 1925) and from Mgr. C.-A. Marois, Vicar General of Quebec (June 19, 1925).

6. The frontispiece of the Constitutions of the Dieppe Hospitalières (from which the Quebec Hospitalières were selected) gave the community’s title as “Religieuses hospitalières de l’ordre de saint Augustin, dites Filles de la Miséricorde.” See Rousseau 1989, 23.

7. On Canadian medievalism, see also Brush 2010.

8. The term “early modern” has been hotly debated, since many scholars argue that it implies an inevitable movement towards the “modern” (Walker 2005, xi.). For a staunch defence of the utility of this term, see Withington 2010, 1–15.

9. On the tension between “linear” and “circular” societies, see Sioui 1999, xi–xii, 43–44).

10. On Le Jeune and the foundation of the Quebec community, see Rousseau 1989, 31–53.

11. See, for example, British artist Frank Craig’s oil painting, The Arrival of the Ursulines, 1639 (1908–11), oil on canvas, Library and Archives Canada, Frank Craig fonds, R13630-0-0-E.

12. Wendake was situated between Georgian Bay and Lake Simcoe; see Labelle 2013, 1–2. On the dispersal of the Wendat people, see Labelle 2013. On the marshalling of the histories of the “martyrs” for French-Canadian nationalist purposes, see, for instance, Anderson 2013, 102.

13. In French, the term sauvage connoted wildness, rather than “barbarity,” as implied by the English term, “savage”. See Nancy Senior’s “Translator’s Preface” in Nicolas 2011, esp. 261–62.

14. Although the Society of Jesus had never been suppressed in Canada, its activities were severely curtailed following the British Conquest in 1763, when it was forbidden from recruiting new members. When Jean-Joseph Casot, the last Canadian Jesuit, died in 1800, he bequeathed the order’s treasures to various religious communities in Quebec, including the Hospitalières of the Hôtel-Dieu who became the custodians of Jean de Brébeuf’s skull. See Meehan and Monet 2014, 392, 395. Before the tercentenary, the Jesuits proposed a “fraternal sharing” of this relic. After lengthy deliberations ― still ongoing at the time of the tercentenary celebrations ― the Hospitalières agreed to divide the relic between the two communities, provided that the top section of the skull remained intact. See Annales 1915–26, 445, 451.

15. At present no Indigenous men from Canada have been canonized. Catherine Tekakwitha (1656–80), a Mohawk convert to Christianity, was beatified in 1980 and canonized in 2012. See Anderson 2016 on the dominance of white Europeans in hagiographic narratives.