forest, Laforgue embraces his Indian rescuers.“I was lost,” he
tells them, tears streaming down his face.“How was that?”
the Indians ask.“Did you forget to look at the trees, Black
Robe?” When the Iroquois capture the band, they order the
captives to sing. The Algonquin chief emits a piercing shriek;
his captors nod. But when Laforgue intones a liturgical
chant, the Iroquois howl with laughter. The theme of mutual
strangeness culminates in the Jesuit’s confrontation with
Mastigoit, an Indian shaman (and a dwarf ). Mastigoit
denounces Black Robe as a demon and calls for his death. A
warrior prepares to oblige, but the Algonquin chief inter-
venes, honor-bound to keep his promise to Champlain.
When Laforgue finally arrives at the mission, he finds all
but one of the missionaries have been butchered; the last,
just before dying, explains that the Huron had been deci-
mated by disease and blamed the Jesuits. As Laforgue buries
him, a shattered remnant of the Huron watch in silence, their
blank faces symbolizing the mutual incomprehension of
Indians and Jesuits. Laforgue raises his head to the heavens,
sunshine framing the church’s cross.“Spare them,” he
intones.“Spare them, Oh Lord.” The movie ends with a notice
that, by 1650, the Iroquois had crushed the Hurons and the
Jesuits had abandoned the mission.
IsBlack Robe a plausible account of the relationship
between Indians and Jesuit missionaries? No definitive
answer is possible because our knowledge is almost entirely
based on the missionaries’ letters to their superiors.
Sometimes the movie departs from these accounts. For exam-
ple, no Indian of New France would have agreed to a 1,500-
mile expedition in the middle of winter. As one missionary
explained, his Indians seldom strayed from their camp during
the winter “on account of the great masses of ice which are
continually floating about, and which would crush not only a
small boat but even a great ship.”
The movie also erred in depicting the execution of the
Algonquin chief ’s young son by the Iroquois. Indians replaced
deceased family members with young captives from rival tribes.
The execution of a healthy boy, especially when European dis-
eases were decimating the Indians, would have made no sense.
On the other hand, the movie scrupulously depicts the
physical world described by the missionaries. Viewers may
complain that the interior scenes are obscured by smoke, but
this reflects the historical reality. Laforgue was based in part
on Paul Le Jeune, a Jesuit missionary who wrote in 1634 that
the bitter cold required the Indians to build large fires indoors.
The smoke from the fires was a form of “martyrdom” thatmade me weep continually... it caused us to place our
mouths against the earth in order to breathe. For,
although the Savages were accustomed to this torment,
yet occasionally [the smoke] became so dense that they,
as well as I, were compelled to prostrate themselves, and
as it were to eat the earth, so as not to drink the smoke.Father Laforgue, played by Lothaire Bluteau, walks along the shores
of Lake Huron, a grim and solitary figure.
46
I
n 1493 Pope Alexander VI praised Christopher Columbus,
“our beloved son,” for having discovered “certain very
remote islands and even mainlands” whose inhabitants
“seem sufficiently disposed to embrace the Catholic faith.” In
order to save their souls, Alexander continued, such “bar-
baric” peoples must be “humbled.” In 1629 the church dis-
patched to New France its most effective missionaries, the
Jesuits, a militant evangelical order founded by Ignatius
Loyola in 1540. The Indians, fascinated by the Jesuits’ austere
cassocks, called them Black Robes.
Black Robe,directed by Bruce Beresford, tells the story of
Father Laforgue: a young French Jesuit who arrives in
Québec in 1634. Laforgue’s superiors charge him with reviv-
ing a faltering mission to the Huron Indians in the upper
Great Lakes. Samuel Champlain, Governor of New France,
persuades a band of Algonquin Indians to escort Laforgue
on this 1,500-mile journey.
The movie is partly an adventure story that chronicles
the group’s voyage to the interior of the continent: paddling
through ice-choked rivers, hauling canoes along snowy
portages, and enduring capture and torture by Iroquois. But
the movie also explores the deep cultural chasm between
Indians and Europeans. When the Algonquin chief tells a
story, Laforgue writes it down and takes the chief to another
European, not present for the conversation, shows him the
paper, and asks him to read it aloud. As he does, the chief ’s
face falls in horror: What manner of sorcery resides in those
squiggly lines? The Europeans, by contrast, were plagued
with illiteracy of the arboreal kind. After losing his way in a
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Black Robe