France and England in North America, Part II: The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century

The narrative reconstructs the efforts of Jesuit missionaries to evangelize Indigenous peoples in seventeenth-century North America, drawing on letters, reports, and mission relations as primary sources. It surveys native societies, social organization, rituals, and varied responses to conversion. It follows missionaries’ daily routines, hardships, devotional practices, and strategies at mission houses and in the forest. It recounts episodes of ceremony, captivity, intertribal violence, and epidemic that shaped relations between missions and native communities. The account also traces the founding of colonial religious institutions and settlements and reflects on cultural encounter, religious zeal, and the political consequences of missionary activity.