For more than 400 years, Jesuits working in Canada have written about their daily life and mission. Originally, their letters were published as The Jesuit Relations (Relations des jésuites). This blog,  igNation, continues that tradition with a new series entitled: Getting to Know the Relations.

Using excerpts chosen from the first 200 hundred years of these documents, the series presents vignettes which speak to the timeless heart of Jesuit endeavour: the promotion of discernment in order to help people find God in all things.

These excerpts are found in The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents – Travels and Explorations of the Jesuit Missionaries in North America (1610 – 1791), selected and edited by Edna Kenton, and published in 1954 by the Vanguard Press. That edition uses the word “savages” throughout. In these excerpts that word has been replaced by “the people who were here before we arrived” or “the people here.”)     

Today: Of the Residence in the Hamlet of Ossosane

In 1637 François Le Mercier SJ wrote to his superiors in France to explain something of the challenges if getting buildings constructed in the mission. It requires skilled builders, preferably sent over from France. It requires plans that could be adapted – especially when local help is not available because they have gone fishing or trapping.

At last, behold our desires accomplished. I shall now express no longer mere hopes to Your Reverence, for they are working in earnest to erect for us our cabin at Ossosane; and we expect that you will send us, if you please, some workmen to build there a chapel in honor of the Immaculate Conception of our Lady.

On the 17th of May the Father Superior broached the subject of our decision to the Captain, in order to have the work begun as soon as possible. The Captain summoned the Council to assemble, where the proposition was received with much satisfaction. They bound themselves to make us a Cabin of about twelve brasses [approximately 22 metres in length], begging us, if they did not make it larger, to consider that the malady had carried off a part of the young men, and that the rest were nearly all gone trading or fishing; and giving us their word to make it as long and as wide as we should wish, the following year. The council over, each one took his hatchet, and they all went away in a crowd to prepare the site.

On the 21st, Father Pierre Pijart departed with two domestics, to set the laborers to work. He wrote me thus about it, on the 4th of June:

I find myself here in the midst of extraordinary confusion. On the one hand, I have to keep them at work upon our cabin and, on the other, I have the sick to visit: the former do only a part of what they attempt, and I encounter near the latter more Sorcerers than occasions to speak to them of God and of the matter of their salvation. I console myself with the thought that we are not building here a simple cabin, but a house for our Lady, or rather, many beautiful chapels in the principal villages of the country.

On the 7th (of June) I received a second letter from Father Pierre Pijart who wrote me in these terms:

I will send you further information of the state of our new Residence since my last letter. On the fifth of this month I said the first Mass in our house of La Conception de Notre Dame. . . . At the time I am writing this there remain only ten pieces of bark to finish the cabin; they have gone to get them, and this evening it will be completed.

(135-6)