American Indian Culture and Research Journal

The historian's attempt to recognize and convey accurately the reality of American Indians' experience in northeastern North America has long foundered on the ethnocentric character of written documentary sources. Because these sources mainly reflect the attitudes of Euroamericans, the historian has had to contend with a seeming lack of authentic Indian sources. Historians have emphasized that missionaries, in particular, notoriously biased their records with self-serving, and distorting, justifications. Although seventeenth century English missionaries have borne the brunt of this recent criticism, French Jesuits have also been closely scrutinized, if only because the priests' published Relations glowingly report their success among the Indian peoples of New France. The interpretation of Jesuit interaction with the Algonkian peoples within the French colonial sphere has struggled not only with documentary bias - historical prejudice has also been a problem. In the nineteenth century, Francis Parkman defined what became the dominant view of French and Indian relations. For Parkman, the priests of the Society of Jesus perpetuated the backward, suspiciously religious mentality of all colonial Frenchmen. In effect, Parkman judged the French, and particularly the Jesuits, as unprogressive; therefore they were natural allies of the malleable Algonkians whom they manipulated for sordid economic, political and military purposes. Both French and Indians were, in Parkman's thinking, inevitably vanquished before the economic and political momentum of the Anglo-American democratic experience.