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Chapter 3

Collaboration and Community

At the dawn of the 1690s, the French empire included an unintentional colonial outpost in the Illinois Country. Containing Jesuits, fur traders, Indians, and the defiant inheritors of La Salle’s early Louisiana concession, it was a far cry from what anybody—whether in the government of New France or on the ground in Illinois—might have hoped it to be. Only the strategic imperative of Indian affairs, the all-important alliance against the Iroquois, kept imperial officials and the people in and around Fort Saint Louis collaborating. But while the resulting collaboration followed nobody’s ideal design, there were measured successes. The Jesuits baptized hundreds of Indians during brief sojourns at their small mission. La Salle’s concession contained a bustling fur trade center. Fur traders like Michel Accault profited. And the government had “infrastructure” to secure its important alliance with the Illinois.

Of course, the real success story of this period belonged to the Illinois themselves. In part owing to French support, the opportunistic Illinois at the Grand Village had reached the climax of their power, built on slaves, bison, and French merchandise. Having reached its maximum strength at twenty thousand persons in the early 1680s, the Grand Village complex still contained an enormous population, so many people that they were forced to relocate to Lake Peoria for more fuel in the early 1690s. From here, the new village known as Pimitéoui, or “fat lake,” the Illinois continued to dominate the Illinois Valley corridor, funneling slaves from Siouan- and Caddoanspeaking communities in the West to Great Lakes Algonquians in need of captives to replace their war dead.¹ Exploiting their unique opportunities in the borderlands, the Illinois were some of the most powerful people in North America. But pressures inside the village, pulling at the very fabric of Illinois society, were about to change everything.

Inside the village, tensions went along with the great power of the Illinois. Since their arrival in the prairie borderlands, Illinois-speakers had built power by assimilating outsiders. Much of this assimilation rested on violence and slave trading. In the melting pot of Kaskaskia, this produced resentment among certain individuals who did not feel fully integrated into the dominant culture. The most important tension at the Grand Village and Pimitéoui was clearly related to gender. The Illinois had survived and expanded by creating a mode of reproduction based on slavery and polygamy. But in this context, many women resented their treatment. In a violent culture, they were victimized at home, abandoned in battles, and oppressed as slaves. Under the surface, Illinois society simmered with conflict between the sexes.

In the 1690s, disempowered women among the Illinois found one place they could turn. Jesuits had been in Illinois since the 1670s trying to establish an Illinois church. Frustrated by the presence of fur traders, they probably considered abandoning the mission and mostly neglected the Immaculate Conception project after Marquette’s death in 1674. But in 1689, a new group of priests, led by Jacques Gravier, reestablished the mission. This second generation of Jesuit priests in Illinois soon had a thriving presence. Unlike most others in the transitory Illinois frontier, they committed themselves to staying in Illinois for a long time and began to build intimate relationships with their hosts. One index of their intimate relations was their expertise in communication. As one observer in this period said, “the reverend Jesuit fathers speak the Illinois language perfectly.”²

They spoke it most perfectly with Illinois women, who found in Christianity lessons that were useful for them. Working together with Gravier and other Jesuits in the 1690s, Illinois women created spiritual principles that helped them combat unfavorable polygamous marriages and the oppressions they experienced in the slavery-dominated social world of Great Kaskaskia. Their society had been shaped by slavery, and Christianity gave them a perfect way to resist.

It is not surprising that this produced conflict and threatened the accommodations that had allowed people to get along in the Illinois to begin with. Gravier criticized Illinois men and French fur traders and helped his female students refuse their abuses. No longer convinced like Marquette that most of the Illinois were “near Christians,” Gravier confronted Illinois shamans and disrupted their ceremonies. Illinois men, for their part, rejected the priests and Christianity, subjecting their daughters to punishments when they attended mass. Meanwhile, disturbed by the tension that Gravier created, fur traders and the officials in La Salle’s tiny fort in Kaskaskia refused to support the Jesuits and even openly opposed them. It was an uneasy situation, dividing the outpost and destroying early intercultural harmonies.

But then, on the verge of a crisis in the community, several of the competing interests in Illinois found a sudden and surprising way to get along: marriage. In 1694, the Jesuit priest Gravier solemnized a wedding between the fur trader Michel Accault and Marie Rouensa, daughter of the chief of the Kaskaskia. This marriage, which represented a complex compromise among many different interests, was the beginning of a new era in the colony, when pragmatic compromise brought people together. Importantly, unlike the early transitory collaborations in Illinois, this marriage was not just a temporary or expedient accommodation. Accault, Marie, Gravier, and the Rouensas came together without any of the “creative misunderstandings” that characterized early frontier relations. To the contrary, thanks to their sophisticated intercultural communication, these people knew and understood each other quite well. Their compromise was the beginning of a real community, a genuine collaboration.³

This would shape the rest of Illinois Country history in unique ways. Totally unplanned and contrary to the agenda of most people in the colony, let alone the government, the new community was an improvisation. With the marriage of Accault and Rouensa, Illinois was no longer just a bunch of defiant fur traders, opportunistic Indians, and schemers. The marriage created the kernel of an interracial Christian community, around which an idiosyncratic colonial culture would soon develop. Even as the consolidated Kaskaskia village at Pimitéoui was coming apart, this community would persist.

It is Gravier who gives us a window into this set of events. Not a totally reliable narrator, he probably exaggerated many things in the long letters he wrote to his Jesuit superiors. But Gravier’s accounts of intercultural collaboration cannot be dismissed as mere propaganda, nor as the consequence of naïve misunderstanding, delusions of grandeur, or the failure to try to see the Native perspective.⁴ Like other Jesuits of his generation in the Grand Village, he deeply understood the Illinois, had close alliances with them, and thus was probably one of the most sensitive observers of the Illinois’s culture, ever.⁵ His dictionary and writings are the best sources to understand this period of transformation, and together they reveal a depth of knowledge about the Illinois.⁶ And if Gravier’s accounts were based on real understanding, so too were those of other eyewitnesses, such as Pierre-Charles de Liette, Tonty’s nephew and a military officer who arrived in the Illinois Country as commandant in 1687. Like Gravier and the other Jesuits, Liette studied the Illinois and deeply understood them, producing a 195-page manuscript, perhaps the most sensitive quasi-ethnographic description of any Algonquian people in the seventeenth century.⁷ Through sources like these, we can witness so much about the beginnings of this idiosyncratic, pragmatic colonial community. Moving beyond transitory frontier relations, the inhabitants of Illinois began a new era of real intercultural understanding.

Jesuits and Illinois Indians made early and opportunistic accommodations at the mission of the Immaculate Conception in the 1670s. But for various reasons, the earliest Jesuits did not spend much time in their new mission after 1675. Indeed, the initial conversions and baptisms, all the optimistic descriptions of the early mission in the Jesuit Relations, rested on surprisingly little contact between the Illinois and the priests. Marquette was only able to spend about three months in Illinois villages before his death in 1675. His partner, Claude Allouez, spent most of his time traveling and moving throughout the Great Lakes region from 1666 through 1689.⁸ He thus spent no more than a few months with the Illinois prior to 1676 and only a short time with them during the 1680s.⁹ When Allouez and Marquette wrote their reports of harmonious accommodation in Illinois, they were really describing a highly itinerant and impermanent frontier in which they themselves were sojourners.

When Jacques Gravier arrived to reestablish the neglected mission project of Illinois in 1689, he ushered in a whole new phase of the missionary frontier. In many ways, he brought the same goal that had motivated the early Jesuits: an idiosyncratic Christianity on Illinois terms. But although he had the same hopes, he and his fellow second-generation missionaries in Illinois had a very different experience. The biggest difference was permanence. Because they lived in Illinois for such a long period of time, Gravier and his partners among the second generation came to truly know the Illinois.

The differences between the first and second generations of Jesuits in Illinois are many, but the most important place to begin is with numbers. Before 1676, Marquette and Allouez spent no more than a few months in Illinois villages, in total. By contrast, the second generation—including Gravier, Gabriel Marest, Jean Mermet, Jean Baptiste Le Boullenger, Sébastien Rasles, Jacques Largillier, and Pierre-François Pinet—began a period of truly remarkable stability for Jesuits in the mission. By the end of his life, Gravier had spent fifteen years in Illinois. Marest spent sixteen, Pinet spent close to four years, and Mermet was an eighteen-year veteran of the mission by the time of his death. Le Boullenger, who arrived in Illinois in 1702, would spend fully thirty-seven years in Illinois. And Jacques Largillier would also spend more than thirty years of his life there.¹⁰ Meanwhile, a number of other non-Jesuits also became particularly rooted in the colony. Most important, Pierre-Charles de Liette would spend many years in the colony through the early eighteenth century.

Because they lived there on a permanent basis, the French in Illinois, and particularly the Jesuits, were able to establish much better channels of intercultural communication with the Illinois in the 1690s. Allouez and Marquette had been able to achieve a basic competency in the Illinois language, which they viewed as “somewhat like the Algonquian.”¹¹ Using an Illinois prayer book and assistance from a slave Marquette had received from Ottawa allies at St. Esprit, the early priests were able to communicate with the Illinois sufficiently to, as Allouez put it, “make myself understood.”¹² By contrast, the men of the second generation expended heroic efforts to develop true fluency in the Illinois language. Indeed, the second generation of Illinois priests included five of the most exceptional linguists in the history of New France—Marest, Pinet, Gravier, Le Boullenger, and Rasles.¹³ Jacques Largillier, a lay brother who lived in the Illinois Country from 1676 to 1714 and who copied Gravier’s dictionary into the final form that survives today, was also an impressive linguist.¹⁴ Together this group of priests achieved mastery of the language, as surviving sources demonstrate.¹⁵

How they mastered the Illinois language matters for our story. Like other Jesuits throughout North America, Gravier and his partners practiced, by necessity, a kind of “total immersion” language acquisition program in Illinois.¹⁶ One aspect of their method consisted of constant practice and a great deal of solitary study.¹⁷ Upon his arrival in the Illinois colony in the late 1690s, Gabriel Marest demonstrated the typical dedication to language learning: as one of his fellow Jesuits described it, Marest threw himself into the task.¹⁸ In addition to working “excessively during the day,” he reportedly sat “up at night to improve himself in the language.”¹⁹ Sébastien Rasles worked hard to master pronunciation, noting the various phonetic sounds in Illinois that were difficult for French-speakers.²⁰ Other Jesuits worked tirelessly to master the mechanics of the language, to comprehend rules of grammar, and to master the operation of verbs.²¹

But independent study and practice were not enough. As Rasles wrote, learning Indian languages like that of the Illinois was “very difficult; for it is not sufficient to study its terms and their signification, and to acquire a supply of words and phrases—it is further necessary to know the turn and arrangement that the Savages give them, which can hardly ever be caught except by familiar and frequent intercourse.”²² They simply had to go and live with the Indians, since “there are no books to teach these languages, and even though we had them, they would be quite useless; practice is the only master that is able to teach us.”²³

The second generation of Jesuits lived and traveled with the Illinois throughout their yearly cycle. This had always been Allouez’s plan, to “live among them in the beginning … after their own mode.”²⁴ But while Allouez seems to have spent just one winter traveling with Illinois hunters,²⁵ Gravier and his partners pursued the Illinois wherever they went, all year long, for years on end. As Marest wrote, the winter bison hunt was a major challenge.

“It is then that we wish that we could multiply ourselves, so as not to lose sight of them. All that we can do is to go in succession through the various camps in which they are, in order to keep piety alive in them, and administer to them the Sacraments.”²⁶ But if this was “all they could do,” it was a lot. Following the Illinois, the Jesuits traveled through the country in order to maintain constant relations: “During the winter we separate, going to various places where the savages pass that season.”²⁷ Rather than hanging back at the fort at the Grand Village or returning to Michilimackinac, Gravier and Marest followed the Indians through the prairies nearly every year, sometimes splitting time between two different camps. As Gravier recalled of the Kaskaskias, “One of our missionaries will visit them every 2nd day throughout the winter and do the same for the Kaoukia, who have taken up their winter quarters 4 leagues above the village.”²⁸ Marest once traveled thirty leagues (seventy-five miles) to the winter quarters of some of his neophytes.²⁹ With tasks like these he was thankful that he was “fitted to travel over the snow, to work the paddle in a canoe,” and that he had, “thanks to God, the necessary strength to withstand like toils.” But it was all in the life of the Illinois missionary: “I range the forests with the rest of our Savages, of whom the greater number spend part of the winter in hunting.”³⁰ As Marest concluded, “These journeys which we are compelled to take from time to time … are extremely difficult.”³¹

In addition to travel, the Jesuits adopted many other aspects of Indians’ lifestyle. For example, the Jesuits embraced the Indian diet and used mealtimes as an opportunity to converse with the Illinois. As Rasles wrote, an exotic diet was the price they paid to remain close to the Illinois. Rasles related how a chief urged him to stay for a meal: “I answered that I was not accustomed to eat meat in this manner, without adding to it a little bread.” But Rasles learned that he would have to adapt. “Thou must conquer thyself, they replied; is that a very difficult thing for a Patriarch who thoroughly understands how to pray? We ourselves overcome much, in order to believe that which we do not see.” Rasles realized that he had to accommodate some of the Indians’ lifeways if he wanted them to accommodate Christianity: “We must indeed conform to their manners and customs, so as to deserve their confidence and win them to Jesus Christ.”³²

The Jesuits were extremely enthusiastic about this collaborative project. After all, the ideal of Jesuit missionary activity was to live with the Indians in order to make a version of Christianity that was, as Loyola put it, “accommodated to those people.”³³ Perhaps the most visible and important part of this project was language. The Jesuits had to translate their ideas into terms that made sense to the Indians. Surviving Jesuit dictionaries from the Illinois mission reveal the important intercultural cooperation that enabled them to learn and to translate as they lived together with the Indians. Le Boullenger’s dictionary, for example, suggests a happy collaboration between the priests and the Natives: “I help him to think, to speak.”³⁴ Gravier’s dictionary reflects the assistance he received from Native instructors: “I try to speak; examine what I say.”³⁵

Through such collaboration, Jesuits cultivated the ability to thoroughly converse in the Illinois vernacular. Not content just to read translations and preach to the assembled Indians—simply to “make myself understood,” as Allouez had put it—the Jesuits’ goal now was to both “understand and be understood.”³⁶ Sébastien Rasles spoke of the challenges of understanding Indian speech, which required, in effect, becoming a student of the Illinois: “I spent part of the day in their cabins, hearing them talk. I was obliged to give the utmost attention, in order to connect what they said, and to conjecture its meaning; sometimes I caught it exactly, but more often I was deceived, because, not being accustomed to the trick of their guttural sounds, I repeated only half the word, and thereby gave them cause for laughter.”³⁷

Gabriel Marest, arriving in his first mission assignment in 1695, emphasized the importance of being able to comprehend what the Indians themselves said about their religious experience. This was an extra challenge: “I have still more difficulty in understanding the Savage tongue than in speaking it, [even though] I already know the greater number of the words.”³⁸ To help himself, Marest created a dictionary of the language: “I have made a Dictionary of all these words according to our alphabet, and I believe that, considering the short time that I could spend among the Savages, I had begun to speak their language easily and to understand it.”³⁹

It is worth considering the form of the dictionary Marest made. Although it did not survive, his description of it implies it was similar in form to Gravier’s dictionary that is extant. Significantly, this was an “Illinoisto-French dictionary,” not a “French-to-Illinois dictionary.” Such a dictionary would likely have been useless for a Frenchman who was trying to speak Illinois, or translate concepts from French into the Illinois language. Instead, its more appropriate use would be to listen and understand what the Indians were saying in their own language. This reflects the idea that, for these Jesuits, learning language was not simply about introducing new ideas into the Illinois culture but fundamentally being able to understand the language in all its complexity. The form of the Gravier dictionary (and presumably Marest’s as well) thus signals that the Jesuit often was a passive listener, struggling to understand. Such language tools differed fundamentally from prayer books such as the one carried by Marquette and Allouez and reveal the much greater comprehension that the second generation of Jesuits was able to attain in their mission over the course of time. Gravier’s dictionary is a 590-page testament to the increased sophistication of his abilities as a listener.

By the early 1700s, one observer noted that the Illinois priests “speak [the Illinois] language perfectly.”⁴⁰ With this ability, the Jesuits were no longer clumsy observers of Illinois lifeways and culture, misunderstanding all they witnessed. Instead they became, over time, almost like modern-day anthropologists—participant observers in the foreign culture that they increasingly came to understand on its own terms.

The results of improved communication were ambiguous, however. Better able to understand the Illinois, the Jesuits now learned that they were not as universally enthusiastic about Christianity as Marquette and Allouez had said. As his dictionary makes clear, Gravier had a much more sophisticated understanding of the spiritual worldview of Natives. “Manitou” was not an equivalent concept to the Christian God, “feasting” was not the same as communion, and “traditionalism” was still strong.⁴¹ One word in Gravier’s dictionary meant “I still have my old superstitions.”⁴² Jugglery, or what the Jesuits identified as Indian traditionalism, was still widespread among the Illinois, and Gravier knew it. As he wrote in a Relation of 1694, there were many non-Christians in the villages, and he spent much more time now “disabus[ing] them of the senseless confidence they have in their manitous.”⁴³ His dictionary showed a much more sophisticated understanding of Illinois spirituality. In many ways, better understanding destroyed old naïve accommodations.

Figure 10. Illinois-to-French dictionary by Jacques Gravier, 1690s. Like Liette’s 190-page ethnography, Gravier’s dictionary was a 590-page monument to his sophisticated understanding of the Illinois.

Courtesy of the Watkinson Library Special Collections, Trinity College, Hartford, Conn.

This might have produced pessimism as the Jesuits realized that the Illinois were far from Christianity and that Native spirituality remained strong. And yet there was another consequence of improved communication. As they learned more about the Illinois, they became expert observers of a culture in the process of transformation. Even as they learned about the persistence of Illinois’s non-Christian spirituality, the Jesuits could tell that the lifeway of the Illinois was full of tension and contradictions. And they especially understood the costs of these tensions for one group of people in Great Kaskaskia: women.

The Grand Village of the Kaskaskia, and now Pimitéoui, had been built on bison and slaves and exploitation. In Iroquois attacks and other warfare throughout the second half of the seventeenth century, the Illinois had lost lots of people and had used slavery and adoption as a means of replacing lost kinsmen with outsiders. As we have seen, this strategy allowed the Illinois to experience strength during a period when many Algonquians were reeling. Arriving right at the height of the Illinois’s power, Gravier became a kind of sociologist observing this community’s strategy and its result: the might and dominance of the Illinois in the borderlands. And yet Gravier and his partners could also see something else: the way that this system of exploitation produced tension. Gravier and his partners realized how slavery and adoption failed to create a fully integrated society.

As a social strategy, the Grand Village was based on certain assumptions and ideas. Most important, it was premised on a borderlands faith in the flexibility of identity and in the potential for assimilation of outsiders. Illinois-speakers at the Grand Village welcomed outsiders as they had always done throughout their protohistoric migration into the Illinois prairies: by adopting and assimilating them into patrilineal kinship lines. This is what it meant when Oumahouha adopted Father Membré or La Salle “became” Ouabicolcata. Behind this practice was an ideal: fictive kinship and adoption would allow for complete identification and assimilation of newcomers and captives within Illinois familles. But if this was an old strategy, in the 1680s and 1690s, the Illinois-speakers did it on a much greater scale.

Gravier and other second-generation Frenchmen in Illinois understood the logic of assimilating outsiders. Gravier’s dictionary contained many terms that express these ideals of assimilation. “Relatives who I hardly remember are not my real relatives” was the sentiment expressed by a word for “relative” in the Illinois language.⁴⁴ Liette described how the expansive Illinois kinship system was designed for solidarity and inclusion: “It should be stated that they almost all call each other relatives.”⁴⁵ All of the Illinois were supposed to feel connected to powerful men, identifying as “sons and relatives of chiefs.”⁴⁶ Adoption was meant to incorporate newcomers and strangers fully as kin.

But if the Illinois hoped to make strangers into kin in the mixed-up world at Grand Village, there were people in this society who were not so well integrated. As words in Gravier’s dictionary make clear, not everybody felt assimilated. Examples include words that meant “I don’t love him like a real brother” or “I don’t regard him as a relative.” There were kinsmen who were totally powerless: “They don’t notice me. I am not the master of it being a stranger.” Another Illinois term could express alienation from a family lineage: “I am regarded in my family like a stranger. The others are more beloved.” Gravier’s list of such expressions was extensive: “Here I am like a stranger. I am not the master of anything.”⁴⁷ And finally: “I am out of my country, of my village.” “You don’t treat me as a relative.”⁴⁸ As these “definitions” suggest, in the mixed-up, slavery-dominated world at the Grand Village, there were many divisions. Although adoption and shapeshifting were supposed to turn strangers into family, some kinsmen continued to feel as “strangers” or simply as second-class kinsmen. Furthermore, fictive kin lines, and even real kin lines, did not always produce such strong bonds. As Liette said, “I have got men to agree a hundred times that their fathers, their brothers, and their children were worse than dogs.”⁴⁹

As Gravier and other Frenchmen learned, some men felt alienated from their kin lines. But if this produced a level of anomie for certain men of the Illinois society, it was nothing compared to the alienation experienced by many women. By the 1690s, Frenchmen like Gravier had a fuller understanding of how slavery affected women in Illinois society, especially through the polygamous and violent relationships that were part of the slave system.

Polygamous households among the Illinois seem frequently to have contained great tension. For instance, according to terms in Gravier’s dictionary, one wife in a polygamous household was “the best loved wife” and one was “the wife who is the master of all the others.”⁵⁰ One word in the dictionary, “onsam8eta,” referred to “jealousy” and alluded to conflict, such as “she prevents him from going to her rival, to his second wife.”⁵¹ It seems clear that some Illinois women resisted marriage to a man already married, suggesting that the practice had clearly recognized downsides. Later in the contact period, a Frenchman noted that “The husband has full power and authority over his wives, whom he looks upon as his slaves, and with whom he does not eat.”⁵²

In addition to polygamy, Frenchmen understood that some Illinois women endured oppression and even violence in their relationships in the 1690s. Whether slaves or free, many women in Illinois had very little control over their own bodies.⁵³ According to Liette, brothers at the Grand Village made marriage arrangements on their sisters’ behalf, forcing them to marry into families that they did not want.⁵⁴ Father Julien Binneteau put it this way: “According to their customs, [Illinois women] are the slaves of their brothers, who compel them to marry whomsoever they choose, even men already married to another wife.”⁵⁵ Perhaps worse, as Hennepin noted, parents frequently pressured their daughters (possibly slaves) to use their sexuality for material gain.⁵⁶ Brothers even used their sisters to cover wagers “after having lost all they had of personal property.”⁵⁷ Liette also noted how Illinois women were seduced and abused by powerful medicine men, “who they dare not refuse.”⁵⁸ This produced strong alienation on the part of Illinois women.

If women could not choose their mates or avoid unfavorable polygamous marriages, these were not the only downsides of the Illinois gender order in the Grand Village. For women also endured a double standard when it came to fidelity. Several French eyewitnesses by the 1690s noted that Illinois husbands were free to have sex with other women but that women were expected to remain faithful and chaste. Some Illinois husbands abandoned their wives, and several terms in Jesuit dictionaries reflect the pain of a scorned wife.⁵⁹ For instance, Gravier listed words to express “I believe that he loves another; [said by] a wife who suspects him of loving a woman other than his wife.” Another term meant “I believe that he wants to leave me. I believe that he loves another woman.”⁶⁰ To be sure, these descriptions and terms contain the biases of Europeans for whom monogamy was the norm. However, while we cannot be sure philandering husbands were such an oppression for Illinois wives, violence is a different story.

In the 1690s, Frenchmen witnessed how women in Illinois experienced violence at the hands of their husbands and in their relationships. Frenchmen in this period took note of mutilation, including the cutting off of noses and ears, inflicted by “jealous” husbands on their wives.⁶¹ In the most dramatic account, Liette described a gang rape of an Illinois woman who was caught in an extramarital relationship.⁶² This was clearly a bad situation for many women. Living in Illinois households, whether as the direct subject of violence or even as the “best loved wife,” was likely unpleasant. And while much of the harsh treatment was probably directed most importantly toward slave women, there is evidence that even some native Illinois women experienced a degraded status.⁶³ This may explain why, as Liette said more than once, it “rarely” happened that there was true affection in an Illinois marriage.⁶⁴ As another French observer wrote in this period, these patterns of violence and oppression made the Illinois distinctive: “Perhaps no nation in the world scorns women as much as these savages usually do.”⁶⁵ Almost all of this was likely a consequence of the slave mode of reproduction in Illinois, which led to female oppression.

Meanwhile, in addition to violence, women in Illinois simply had hard lives. In traditional Algonquian communities, a division of labor separated the female agricultural and domestic labor and the male hunting and military work. But the bison economy in Illinois had skewed this balance in the 1600s. By the 1690s, according to Sébastien Rasles, the Illinois were killing two thousand bison each year.⁶⁶ Since hide processing and meat preservation were both gendered female, women had tremendous work burdens in the bisonbased culture.⁶⁷ And while it was fairly standard for contact-era Europeans to remark on the disparity of work between genders in Native cultures, the Jesuits understood that the bison economy in Illinois actually did create an exceptional burden for Illinois women, adding to their agricultural duties.⁶⁸ As one Jesuit remarked, the women in Illinois were “humbled by work.”⁶⁹

The upshot was that Illinois culture was defined by great tension in its gender relations. Women looked for an escape, a way to resist. Gravier could perceive this. He began to work with them, in particular, building a Christianity catered to their needs. The initial goal of the Jesuits, as Gravier said, had been to convert the “whole nation” in Illinois. But if the divisions he now perceived made that less likely, they also created the opportunity to divide and conquer, to use the tensions within the society to make Christianity attractive to a portion of the whole. By the 1690s, many Illinois men “still had their old superstitions,” so the Jesuits began focusing on the women. Together the Jesuits and young women made an Illinois Christianity based on a mutual understanding of each other’s values and needs.

Right from the start of the mission, Illinois women were among the most faithful attendees at church. As one Jesuit commented, “The women are … more disposed to accept the truths of the Gospel.”⁷⁰ While men stayed home, the women and children went to mass regularly.⁷¹ Even among the Peoria, more resistant than other Illinois-speakers to Catholicism, many women and children went to mass.⁷² In Gravier’s words, “The young women here greatly contribute to bring prayer into favor, through the instructions and lectures that I hold for them.”⁷³ In the first few years, the Illinois Jesuits thus experienced exceptional success in baptizing women: “The women and girls … are very well disposed to receive baptism; they are very constant and firm, when once they have received it; they are fervent in prayer, and ask only to be instructed; they frequently approach the sacraments; and, finally, are capable of the highest sanctity.”⁷⁴

Gravier noted the remarkable ways in which the Illinois women approached the sacrament of confession. Importantly, this intimate, one-on-one interaction was only possible because the Jesuits had made tremendous strides in their linguistic skills. As Gravier wrote, “most of the older girls confess themselves very well, and some have made general confessions to me of their whole lives, with astonishing accuracy.”⁷⁵ One girl, Gravier wrote, “has bared the depths of her soul to me, with much ingenuousness, I am convinced that she has a horror of everything that may be contrary to purity.”⁷⁶ But she was not alone in making confession a popular sacrament in the Illinois church: “There are many who confess frequently and very well; and two young girls from 13 to 14 years of age began by making a general confession of their whole lives.”⁷⁷ Confession was a site where Indian women and Jesuits established an intimate bond.

Illinois women were active agents in the creation of their version of the Christian faith. According to Gravier, they were especially skilled as translators, helping transform the Jesuits’ sometimes broken Illinois speech into more eloquent and rich language. To the Jesuits, this assistance in expressing Christian ideas “in their manner” was invaluable. On one occasion, for example, Gravier relied on a woman to help him explain the Old Testament to an assembled crowd. “She explains each [Bible story] singly,” he wrote, “without trouble and without confusion, as well as I could do—and even more intelligibly, in their manner.”⁷⁸ When it came to the catechism, Gravier deferred to a young woman who showed a knack for creating effective translations. She “taught it as well as I … to the children.”⁷⁹ In fact, Gravier admitted that because the women themselves were such good instructors, and held their own prayer meetings alongside those of the priests, the attendance at his own catechism lessons declined. This was no problem, Gravier wrote, since Illinois women were just as capable of giving Christian instructions as he was.⁸⁰ In any event, Illinois women were key participants in the construction of Illinois Christianity.

As the Jesuits no doubt understood, Christianity gave young Illinois women a value system and authority by which to resist the oppression that many experienced from their male relatives. While Gravier and his partners were not feminists, they nevertheless realized that lessons about Christian marriage and female piety were particularly interesting to women who they thought could “profit from [our] teaching.”⁸¹ Clearly the most important themes of Illinois women’s Catholicism were chastity and piety. Gravier’s dictionary shows how he helped cultivate a spiritual language against the common Illinois marriage and sex practices. For example, he most likely glorified ideas of chastity, such as “ac8api8a avare: A girl who is difficult to have in marriage, or to corrupt [sexually].”⁸² He also probably emphasized monogamous values: “She prohibits her husband from going to a rival, a second wife.”⁸³ Gravier almost certainly lamented the fate of prostitutes, as in “all the young boys abuse that prostitute.”⁸⁴ He chastised practices that allowed for “debauched girls and daughters.” Through all of these, and many more terms, the Jesuits and Illinois women constructed a Christianity for resisting the Illinois gender order.

Jesuit accounts from the Illinois mission in this period are filled with anecdotes about how women used Christianity to resist arranged marriages and polygamy and to preserve autonomy and chastity. In one case, for example, an Illinois woman, skeptical about the man her brother had chosen for her to marry, announced her intention never to marry but to remain celibate. Her reasons were rooted in the authority and meanings of Christianity: “Despite the threats that her family gave her” and the “persecutions that they continually forced her to undergo in her family,” this woman insisted that no one would “change the resolution that [she had] made.” As she concluded: “No, my Father, I will never have any other spouse than Jesus Christ.”⁸⁵

Other women used Christian-based arguments to resist polygamous marriages. One girl, for example, made her father promise never to marry her in a polygamous union. As she reasoned to him, “God forbids those who marry to espouse a man who already has a wife.”⁸⁶ More dramatically, another girl first refused to consummate her marriage to the man her parents had chosen and then refused to marry that man’s brother when the first died. It was Christianity that provided her with reasons to reject the Illinois practice of marriage whole cloth. As she explained to a priest, “The resolution that she had taken to live always alone—that is, never to marry—was due to the aversion that she felt for all that she heard and saw done by the married people of her country.”⁸⁷ Thus did Illinois women resist the slave-based polygamy that now dominated their culture.

And if women used Christianity to resist polygamy and unwanted marriages, they also adopted Christian models of femininity and Christian wifehood as templates for their lives. Gravier’s conversations with the Illinois women featured discussions about important female saints like St. Cunegonde, who reluctantly married St. Henry and then convinced him to take a vow of chastity. Gravier encouraged his neophyte women to model their marital behavior after Cunegonde and other “Christian Ladies who have sanctified themselves in the state of matrimony—namely, St. Paula, St. Frances, St. Margaret, St. Elizabeth, and St. Bridget.” In a culture like that at Kaskaskia—violent and frequently oppressive to women—the role models of these pious saints were a means for women to resist.⁸⁸

Soon there was a whole female subculture in Illinois that was built around Christianity. As Gravier observed, “most of the older girls confess themselves very well.”⁸⁹ Binneteau wrote that “the women and girls have strong inclinations to virtue.”⁹⁰ Thanks to Christianity, “the number of nubile girls and of newly-married women who retain their innocence is much greater” than among other groups, according to Gravier.⁹¹ Soon the Jesuits could generalize that Christianity was a means for the Illinois women to resist the gender expectations of their own people: “There are some among them who constantly resist, and who prefer to expose themselves to ill treatment rather than do anything contrary to the precepts of Christianity regarding marriage.”⁹²