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“Ravishing Odors of Paradise”: Jesuits, Olfaction, and Seventeenth-Century North America

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 January 2016

ANDREW KETTLER*
Affiliation:
History Department, University of South Carolina. Email: kettlera@email.sc.edu.

Abstract

In seventeenth-century North America, efforts at cultural accommodation through similarities in olfactory inclusive spiritual sensoriums helped to create cross-cultural concordance between Jesuit Fathers and Native Americans in New France, the St. Lawrence Valley, and the Pays d'en Haut. Jesuits engaged Native Americans towards Catholic conversion by using scentful tactics and sensory rhetoric. Jesuits increased their own respect for the olfactory during their North American encounters due to a siege mentality born of the Counter-Reformation and from a forcefully influential Native American respect for multisensory forms of environmental and spiritual literacy which included a heightened reverence for odors.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press and British Association for American Studies 2016 

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References

1 Quoted in Tracy Leavelle, The Catholic Calumet: Colonial Conversions in French and Indian North America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), 137–38.

2 James Axtell, The Invasion Within: The Contest of Cultures in Colonial North America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 278.

3 For this understanding of the “great divide of the senses,” which argues that the eye moved higher above the lower senses with the rise of civility and literature diachronically over the early modern era, see Dominique Laporte, History of Shit (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000); Constance Classen, Worlds of Sense: Exploring the Senses in History and across Cultures (London: Routledge, 1993); and Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000; first published 1939).

4 For this debate on whether scenting declined with modernity, including the importance of the Reformation, see Smith, Mark, “Transcending, Othering, Detecting: Smell, Premodernity, Modernity,Postmedieval, 3, 4 (2012), 380–90CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Jenner, Mark, “Follow Your Nose? Smell, Smelling, and Their Histories,American Historical Review, 116, 2 (2011). 335–51Google Scholar; and Jonathan Reinarz, Past Scents: Historical Perspectives on Smell (Champagne: University of Illinois Press, 2014), esp. 42–47.

5 Heightened senses can emerge in such a “situational framework” and then fade thereafter. Anika Konig, “Smelling the Difference: The Senses in Ethnic Conflict in West Kalimantan, Indonesia,” in Susanna Trnka, Christine Dureau, and Julie Park, eds., Senses and Citizenships: Embodying Political Life (New York: Routledge, 2013), 120–32.

6 White, Richard, “Creative Misunderstandings and New Understandings,William and Mary Quarterly, 63, 1 (2006), 914 Google Scholar, 13; White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991). For similar cross-cultural borrowing, regarding changes in slave systems throughout the French Atlantic, see Brett Rushforth, Bonds of Alliance: Indigenous and Atlantic Slaveries in New France (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012).

7 These religious modifications are essential to understand how Native Americans realized the Great Awakening. Linford D. Fisher, The Indian Great Awakening: Religion and the Shaping of Native Cultures in Early America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012). For New Indian History and religious conversion as malleable rather than dogmatic see Kenneth M. Morrison, The Solidarity of Kin: Ethnohistory, Religious Studies, and the Algonkian–French Religious Encounter (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002).

8 Matt Cohen, The Networked Wilderness: Communicating in Early New England (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010). The reading of sounds and gestures, within published texts and ethnographically, highlighted by Cohen as essential to understanding moments of Native American self-representation, has recently been expanded to discuss the importance of gestures in communication between participants in the French Atlantic. Céline Carayon, “Beyond Words: Nonverbal Communication, Performance, and Acculturation in the Early French–Indian Atlantic (1500–1700),” PhD dissertation, College of William and Mary, 2010.

9 For multisensory literateness see Heidi Bohaker, “Indigenous Histories and Archival Media in the Early Modern Great Lakes,” in Matt Cohen and Jeffrey Glover, eds., Colonial Mediascapes: Sensory Worlds of the Early Americas (Lincoln: Nebraska, 2014), esp. 106–110.

10 Robert Michael Morrissey, “The Terms of Encounter: Language and Contested Visions of French Colonization in the Illinois Country, 1673–1702,” in Robert Englebert and Guillaume Teasdale, eds., French and Indians in the Heart of North America, 1630–1815 (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2013), 43–75, 64. For Jesuit sensory encounters with Native Americans see Tracy Leavelle, “The Catholic Rosary, Gendered Practice, and Female Power in French–Indian Spiritual Encounters,” in Joel W. Martin and Mark A. Nicholas, eds., Native Americans, Christianity, and the Reshaping of the American Religious Landscape (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 159–178; and Morrissey, Robert Michael, “‘I Speak It Well’: Language, Cultural Understanding, and the End of a Missionary Middle Ground in Illinois Country, 1673–1712,Early American Studies 9, 3 (2011), 617–48Google Scholar.

11 Bohaker, esp. 106–10; Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), esp. 35–38. For “sensory skills” see Jenner, Mark, “Tasting Litchfield, Touching China: Sir John Floyers' Senses,Historical Journal 53, 3 (2010), 647–70CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

12 Analyses of Jesuit immersion into other cultures can be accessed in Eduardo C. Fernandez, “Jesuits in the U. S. Southwest during the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: Agents and Chroniclers of Cross-cultural Ministry and History,” in Michal Jan Rozbicki and George O. Ndege, eds., Cross-cultural History and the Domestication of Otherness (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 83–102; William Farge, “Adapting Language to Culture: Translation Projects of the Jesuit Missions in Japan and China,” in ibid., 67–81; Paul Shore, Jesuits and the Politics of Religious Pluralism in Eighteenth-Century Transylvania: Culture, Politics, and Religion, 1693–1773 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), esp. 147–52. For historiography on Jesuits and cross-cultural literacy activities in China see discussions of the famed Jesuit Matteo Ricci in Sangkeun Kim, Strange Names of God: The Missionary Translation of the Divine Name and the Chinese Responses to Matteo Ricci's Shangti in Late Ming China, 1583–1644 (New York: Lang, 2004), esp. 29–31, 67–82, Michela Fontana and Paul Metcalfe, Matteo Ricci: A Jesuit in the Ming Court (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2011), esp. 99–111; and R. Po-chia Hsia, A Jesuit in the Forbidden City: Matteo Ricci, 1552–1610 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).

13 For the history of sensation in European encounters with Native America see Keyes, Sarah, “‘Like a Roaring Lion:’ The Overland Trail as a Sonic Conquest,Journal of American History, 96, 1 (June 2009), 1943 Google Scholar; and Peter Charles Hoffer, Sensory Worlds in Early America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003). For general New France historiography analyzed throughout this article see Allan Greer, The Jesuit Relations: Natives and Missionaries in Seventeenth-Century North America (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2000), 1–2, 16–18.

14 For “subversion and containment” see Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 21–65; and for aesthetic manipulation see Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell, 1990).

15 Peter N. Moogk, La Nouvelle France: The Making of French Canada: A Cultural History (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2000), 235.

16 For legitimization see Dominique Deslandres, “In the Shadow of the Cloister: Representations of Female Holiness in New France,” in Allan Greer and Jodi Bilinkoff, eds., Colonial Saints: Discovering the Holy in the Americas, 1500–1800 (New York: Routledge, 2003), 129–52.

17 Evans, Suzanne, “The Scent of a Martyr,Numen, 49, 2 (2002), 193211 Google Scholar; Susan Ashbrook Harvey, Scenting Salvation: Ancient Christianity and the Olfactory Imagination (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006).

18 Constance Classen, “The Breath of God: Sacred Histories of Scent,” in Jim Drobnick, ed., The Smell Culture Reader (Oxford: Berg, 2006), 375–90; Gale Largey and Rod Watson, “The Sociology of Odors,” in ibid., 29–40. For example, smell was vital to the “seeing” of the icon and the manifestation of its holy power within the Byzantine Catholic Church. Bissera V. Pentcheva, The Sensual Icon: Space, Ritual, and the Senses in Byzantium (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010), 31–43.

19 Trope of devotion from Holly Dugan, The Ephemeral History of Perfume: Scent and Sense in Early Modern England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011), 25.

20 As Constance Classen stated concerning the demiurgic cultures of which these patterns derived, “the aesthetic cornucopia of earlier cosmologies was not simply a hedonistic reveling in sensation. The myriad sensory characteristics of such cosmologies, their colors and odors, tastes and temperatures, were coded with cultural values and linked in chains and hierarchies of meaning … multiplicity of sensory channels of communication meant that one could taste or breathe in the order of the cosmos and society, as well as visualize it.” Constance Classen, The Color of Angels: Cosmology, Gender, and the Aesthetic Imagination (London: Routledge, 1998), 1. For synthesis of sound and scent in the ideal of the odor of sanctity see Saucier, Catherine, “The Sweet Sound of Sanctity: Sensing St Lambert,Senses and Society, 5, 1 (2010), 1027 Google Scholar.

21 Quoted in Classen, Color of Angels, 45.

22 For debates on the “disenchantment of the world” see Walsham, Alexandra, “The Reformation and ‘the Disenchantment of the World’ Reassessed,Historical Journal, 51, 2 (2008), 497528 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

23 Richard Allestree, The Ladies Calling in Two Parts (Oxford: n.p., 1673), 56–57, Allestree's italics.

24 Classen, Worlds of Sense, 28. For nuanced comments on the deodorization thesis see Matthew Milner, The Senses and the English Reformation (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), 4, 348; Dugan, 31, 41.

25 Ignatius and George E. Ganss, Ignatius of Loyola: The Spiritual Exercises and Selected Works (New York: Paulist Press, 1991), 141. Stages from Thurlkill, Mary F., “Odors of Sanctity: Distinctions of the Holy in Early Christianity and Islam,Comparative Islamic Studies, 3, 2 (2009), 133–44Google Scholar.

26 Jeffrey Chipps Smith, Sensuous Worship: Jesuits and the Art of the Early Catholic Reformation in Germany (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), 31–40, 152–53. For a similar understanding of sensation within a relatively closed community which extrapolated on “the effect of religious homogeneity on sensory heterodoxy” see Nicky Hallett, The Senses in Religious Communities, 1600–1800: Early Modern “Convents of Pleasure” (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), esp. 24, 203–4.

27 For Jesuit sensation as part of the Counter-Reformation within Europe see John W. O'Malley, “Trent, Sacred Images, and Catholics' Senses of the Sensuous,” in Marcia B. Hall and Tracy Elizabeth Cooper, eds., The Sensuous in the Counter-Reformation Church (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 28–48; and Mark M. Smith, Sensing the Past: Seeing, Hearing, Smelling, Tasting, and Touching in History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 63–65.

28 Molina, J. Michelle, “Technologies of the Self: The Letters of Eighteenth-Century Mexican Jesuit Spiritual Daughters,History of Religions, 47, 4 (2007), 282303 Google Scholar, “self-narration” on 289, 298.

29 John W. O'Malley, The Jesuits: Cultures, Sciences, and the Arts, 1540–1773 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), 531–32.

30 Healy, George R., “The French Jesuits and the Idea of the Noble Savage,WMQ, 15, 2 (1958) 144–67Google Scholar, 147.

31 Alan Taylor, American Colonies (New York: Viking, 2001), 107–11.

32 Gioseppe Bressani, “Breve Relatione d'alcune missioni de’ PP. della Compagnia di Gies nella Nuova Francia. Macerata, Italy, July 19, 1653,” in Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents Travels and Explorations of the Jesuit Missionaries in New France 1610—1791, 73 vols., ed. Reuben Gold Thwaites (Cleveland: Burrows Brothers, 1898), Volume XXXVIII, Abenakis, Lower Canada, Hurons, 1652–53, 257–58.

33 Pierre-Francçois-Xavier de Charlevoix and Louise Phelps Kellogg, Journal of a Voyage to North America, Volume II (Chicago: Caxton Club, 1923; first published 1761), 75.

34 Louis Hennepin, A New Discovery of a Vast Country in America (London: Printed for M. Bentley, I. Tonson, H. Bonwick, T. Goodwin, and S. Manship, 1698), 313.

35 For Jesuit relations, community creation, and the use of hagiographic texts see Julia Boss, “Writing a Relic: The Uses of Hagiography in New France,” in Greer and Bilinkoff, Colonial Saints, 211–34.

36 Pierre Biard, “Relation de la Novvelle France, de Ses Terres, Natvrel du Pais, & de ses Habitans. Paris, 1616,” in Jesuit Relations, Volume III, 134–35.

37 Ronald Dale Karr, Indian New England, 1524–1674: A Compendium of Eyewitness Accounts of Native American Life (Pepperell, MA: Branch Line Press, 1999), 127; Daniel K. Richter, The Ordeal of the Longhouse: The Peoples of the Iroquois League in the Era of European Colonization (Chapel Hill: Published for the Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia, by the University of North Carolina Press, 1992), esp. 28.

38 James E. Seaver and William Pryor Letchworth, A Narrative of the Life of Mary Jemison, De-He-Wa-Mis, the White Woman of the Genesee (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1898), 227.

39 James Adair, The History of the American Indians (New York and London: Johnson Reprint Corporation, 1968; first published 1775), 122.

40 Hierosme Lalemant, “Relation de ce qui s'est passé en la Novvelle France, en l'année 1642. Ste. Marie aux Hurons, June 10, 1642,” in Jesuit Relations, Volume XXIII, 54–55.

41 Jerome Lalemant, “Relation de ce qui s'est passé en la Novvelle France, és années 1640. et 1641. Paul le Jeune; Kebec and Paris, undated. Jerome Lalemant; Ste. Marie aux Hurons, May 19, 1641,” in Jesuit Relations, Volume XXII, 94–95.

42 Jerome Lalemant, “Relation de ce qui s'est passé en la Novvelle France, en l'année 1640. Paul le Jeune; Kébec, September 10, 1640. Jerome Lalemant; Des Hurons, May 27, 1640,” in Jesuit Relations, Volume XIX, 69–70.

43 Paul Le Jeune and Hierosme Lalemant, “Relation de ce qvi s'est passé en la Novvelle France, en l'année 1639. Paul le Jeune; Sillery, September 4, 1639. Hierosme Lalemant; Ossossané, June 7, 1639,” in Jesuit Relations, Volume XVI, 195–96.

44 Nicolas Perrot, “Memoir on the Manners, Customs, and Religion of the Savages of North America,” in Emma Helen Blair, ed. and trans., The Indian Tribes of the Upper Mississippi Valley and Region of the Great Lakes (New York: Kraus Reprint Co., 1969; first published 1911), 89–92, 91.

45 Pierre Biard, “Relation de la Novvelle France, de Ses Terres, Natvrel du Pais, & de ses Habitans. Paris, 1616,” 115–16; Paul Le Jeune, “Relation de ce qui s'est passé en La Novvelle France, en l'année 1634. Nouvelle France, August 7, 1634,” in Jesuit Relations, Volume VII, 41.

46 Charlevoix and Kellogg, Journal of a Voyage to North America, 163.

47 Mathurin Le Petit, “Lettre au Père d'Avaugour, Procureur des Missions de l'Amérique Septentrionale. Nouvelle Orleans, July 12, 1730,” in Jesuit Relations, Volume LXVIII, 153.

48 John Lawson. The History of Carolina (Raleigh: Printed by Strother & Marcom, 1860; first published 1714), 346–49, 348. In the New World olfactive orders persisted in societies dependent on the odor categorization of specific animals. The Eastern Tukanoan Indians, separated into twenty tribes, living in the Amazon of modern Colombia, follow hunting practices that fixate on the aromatic. Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff, “Tapir Avoidance in the Colombian Northwest Amazon,” in Gary Urton, ed., Animal Myths and Metaphors in South America (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1985), 107–24. The late twentieth-century South American tribes portrayed by Reichel-Dolmatoff elicited similar conclusions in 1740 when Don Antonio Ulloa and Don George Juan traveled in Peru from Guayaquil to Motupe. Ulloa's relation of his expedition described that a specific South American tribe's olfactive “method of discovering the way … is to take in their hands, in different places, handfuls of sand and smell it; they distinguish by the odor whether the mules have passed that way, perhaps because the ordure of these animals leaves some scent upon the sand.” Don Antonio Ulloa, “The Desert of Motupr,” in Barnard Shipp, ed., The History of Hernando De Soto and Florida (Philadelphia: Collins Publishing, 1881), 603–4.

49 For modal anthropological investigation into the sensory aspects of hunting see Marvin, Garry, “Sensing Nature: Encountering the World in Hunting,Etnofoor, 18, 1 (2005), 1526 Google Scholar.

50 Quoted in Karr, Indian New England, 86.

51 Thomas Morton, New English Canaan (London: Printed for Charles Greene, 1637), 48–49.

52 Karen Kupperman, Indians and English: Facing off in Early America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000), 168–70, 170.

53 James Smith, “Of the Remarkable Occurrences in the Life and Travels of Colonel James Smith,” in Samuel Gardner Drake, ed., Tragedies of the Wilderness, or, True and Authentic Narratives of Captives Who Have Been Carried Away by the Indians (Boston: Antiquarian Bookstore and Institute, 1844), 168–264, 210.

54 Colin G. Calloway, New Worlds for All: Indians, Europeans, and the Remaking of Early America (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 72.

55 Adair, The History of the American Indians, 117.

56 For aromatic hunting, origin histories, and Native American place-naming customs that represent Native American odorphilia see Brian Swann, Voices from Four Directions: Translations of the Native Literatures of North America (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004), 448–51; Richard Erdoes and Alfonso Ortiz, American Indian Myths and Legends (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), 15–19, 39–41; C. C. Trowbridge and C. E. Schorer, Indian Tales of C. C. Trowbridge: Collected from Wyandots, Miamis, and Shawanoes (Brighton, MI: Green Oak Press, 1986), 55–66; Jeremiah Curtin, Creation Myths of Primitive America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1899), 318–20, 494–97; and Howard L. Harrod, The Animals Came Dancing: Native American Sacred Ecology and Animal Kinship (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2000), 59–60.

57 For debates on sensory skills within the environment regarding the trope of the noble savage see Shepard Krech III, The Ecological Indian: Myth and History (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1999), esp. 16–27.

58 Paul Le Jeune, “Relation de ce qui s'est passé en La Novvelle France, en l'année 1634. Maison de N. Dame des Anges, en Nouuelle France, August 7, 1634,” in Jesuit Relations, Volume VI, 260–61.

59 Tracy Leavelle, The Catholic Calumet: Colonial Conversions in French and Indian North America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), 85–96.

60 Hierosme Lalemant, “Relation de ce qui. s'est passé en la Novvelle France, en l'année 1639. Ossossané, June 7, 1639,” in Jesuit Relations, Volume XVII, 145.

61 Jerome Lalemant, “Relation de ce qvi s'est passé en la Novvelle France, en l'année 1640. Paul le Jeune; Kébec, September 10, 1640. Jerome Lalemant; Des Hurons, May 27, 1640,” in Jesuit Relations, Volume XIX, 9.

62 Allan Greer, The People of New France (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), 54–55.

63 For new spring see Claude Dablon, Jacques Fremin, Jacques Bruyas, Pierre Raffeix, Julien Garner, Francois de Crepieul, Henry Noevel, Charles Albanel, and Marie de l'Incarnation, “Relation de ce qui s'est passé en la Nouvelle France, les années 1671, & 1672. Claude Dablon [Quebec, October, 1672; Jacques Fremin, St. Xavier des Prez, August 14, 1672; Jacques Bruyas, Onneiout, [1672]; Pierre Raffeix, Goiogouen, June, 1672; Julien Garnier, Tsonnontouan, July, 1672; François de Crepieul, Tadoussac, June 2, 1672; Henry Nouvel, Ste. Marie du Sault, [1672]; Charles Albanel, n.p., n.d.; Marie de l'Incarnation, n.p., n.d,” in Jesuit Relations, Volume LVI, 205–7.

64 Gabriel Marest, “Lettre au Père Germon. Cascaskias, November 9, 1712,” in Jesuit Relations, Volume LXVI, 227, Marest's italics.

65 Charles Simon, “Relatio Terraemotus in Nova Francia, 1663, translated into Latin by François Ragueneau. Bourges, December 12, 1663,” in Jesuit Relations, Volume LXVIII, 199–201.

66 Quoted in Virginia Louise Snider Eifert, Tall Trees and Far Horizons: Adventures and Discoveries of Early Botanists in America (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1965), 17.

67 James Phinney Baxter, The Pioneers of New France in New England, with Contemporary Letters and Documents (Albany, NY: J. Munsell's Sons, 1894), 137–38.

68 Hierosme Lalemant, “Relation de ce qui s'est passé la Novvelle France, sur le Grand Flevve de S. Lavrens en année 1647. Quebek, October 20, 1647,” in Jesuit Relations, Volume XXXI, 105–6. For Jogues as a discursive construct see Paul Perron, “Isaac Jogues: From Martyrdom to Sainthood,” in Greer and Bilinkoff, Colonial Saints, 153–68.

69 Vincent Bigot and Claude Dablon, “Relation de ce qui s'est passé en la Nouvelle France en l'année 1679. Vincent Bigot, revised by Claude Dablon; [Quebec, 1679],” in Jesuit Relations, Volume LXI, 219.

70 The final fate of Mother Catherine de Saint Augustin, Hospital Mother of Quebec in 1688, likewise furnished occasion for the Jesuits to represent the retention the odor of sanctity in New France. Father François Le Mericer stated the “odor of her virtue was diffused over all this new world.” François Le Mercier and Marie de S. Bonnaventure de Jesus, “Relation de ce qui s'est passé en la Novvelle France, aux années mil fix cens foixante-fept & mil fix cens foixante-huit. François le Mercier, n.p., n.d.; François de Laval, Quebec, November 8, 1668; Marie de S. Bonnaventure de Jesus, Quebec, October 4, 1668,” in Jesuit Relations, Volume LII, 31–33, 79–81. One similar tale of such pious odors was that of Father Jean Pradere who, when ill, “sank, as it were, into a sweet sleep; upon awaking therefrom, he felt extremely comfortable, and discovered a perspiration on his leg, bathing it and exhaling an odor so sweet that he had never smelt anything like it. Immediately afterward, he saw his leg entirely free from moisture, and as completely restored as if it had never been affected.” François Le Mercier, Claude Jean Allouez, Thomas Morel, and Marie de S. Bonaventure, “Relation de ce qui s'est passé en la Novvelle France, les années mil six cens soixante six, & mil six cens soixante sept. François le Mercier, Kebec, November 10, 1667; Claude Jean Allouez, n.p., n.d.; Thomas Morel, n.p., n.d.; Marie de S. Bonaventure, Kebec, October 20, 1667,” in Jesuit Relations, Volume LI, 99–101.

71 Allan Greer, Mohawk Saint: Catherine Tekakwitha and the Jesuits (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 1–24; Daniel Richter, Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of Early America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 78–80. For the transmission of Tekakwitha's narrative to New Spain, regarding debates on the possibilities of virginity among Native Americans, see Allan Greer, “Iroquois Virgin: The Story of Catherine Tekakwitha in New France and New Spain,” in Greer and Bilinkoff, 235–50.

72 Claude Charles Le Roy, Bacqueville de la Potherie, “History of the Savage People who are Allies of New France,” in Blair, The Indian Tribes of the Upper Mississippi, 344–47, 345–46.

73 Dablon et al., “Relation de ce qui s'est passé en la Nouvelle France, les années 1671, & 1672,” 175.

74 Tracy Leavelle, The Catholic Calumet: Colonial Conversions in French and Indian North America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), 74.

75 For tobacco in making alliances see Pierre Gaultier de Varennes La Vérendrye and Lawrence J. Burpee, Journals and Letters of Pierre Gaultier De Varennes De La Vérendrye and His Sons (Toronto: Champlain Society, 1927), 95–167, 99.

76 For use of tobacco in religious rites within Native North American oral histories see Joseph C. Winter, “From Earth Mother to Snake Woman: The Role of Tobacco in the Evolution of Native American Religious Organization,” in  Joseph C. Winter, ed., Tobacco Use by Native North Americans: Sacred Smoke and Silent Killer (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2000), 265–304, esp. 275–86.

77 Father Jean de Brebeuf described the Huron spiritual use for tobacco in 1639, writing that the smoke “enables them to see clearly through the most intricate matters.” Springer, James Warren, “An Ethnohistoric Study of the Smoking Complex in Eastern North America,Ethnohistory, 28, 3 (1981), 217–35Google Scholar, 219–20.

78 George Croghan, “Croghan's Journal; May 15–September 26, 1765,” in Reuben Gold Thwaites, ed., Early Western Travels, 1748–1846: A Series of Annotated Reprints of Some of the Best and Rarest Contemporary Volumes of Travel: Descriptive of the Aborigines and Social and Economic Conditions in the Middle and Far West, During the Period of Early American Settlement, Volume I (Cleveland, OH: A. H. Clark Co., 1904), 156–57, 157.

79 George Croghan, “Croghan's Journal; October 21, 1760–January 7, 1761,” in Thwaites, Early Western Travels, Volume I, 114–17, 116.

80 James Axtell, The Invasion Within: The Contest of Cultures in Colonial North America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 114. Many of the first visitors to the New World believed themselves to be exorcists. Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, Puritan Conquistadors: Iberianizing the Atlantic, 1550–1700 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006), esp. 7–19.

81 Raymond A. Schroth, The American Jesuits: A History (New York: New York University, 2007), 41. Material history from Louis Nicolas, François Marc Gagnon, Réal Ouellet, and Nancy Senior, The Codex Canadensis and the writings of Louis Nicolas: The Natural History of the New World (Tulsa, OK: Gilcrease Museum, 2011), 288–300.

82 For the difficulty of writing of the smells of the past due to the nature of the olfactive as subjectively classified see Press, Daniel and Minta, Steven, “The Smell of Nature: Olfaction, Knowledge and the Environment,Ethics, Place & Environment, 3, 2 (2000), 173–86CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 180–82.

83 Michael T. Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses (New York: Routledge, 1993), 150; see also esp. 66, 90–94, 106.

84 Quoted in Carole Blackburn, Harvest of Souls: The Jesuit Missions and Colonialism in North America, 1632–1650 (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2000), 148.