Empire by Collaboration. Robert Michael Morrissey
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