S11E6 Letters from the Frontier – The Jesuit Relations and Old World Understandings of New France
About this episode
This episode explores the Jesuit Relations and their complex authorship, featuring historian Micah True.
The Jesuit Relations , a series of annual reports produced between 1632 and 1673 detailing the experiences of Society of Jesus missionaries in what is now Eastern Canada, have long been an influential source on the history of New France and encounters between European settlers and Indigenous Peoples. The question of what exactly the Relations are, and who had a hand in composing the versions that circulated, has been given far less attention. Recent research has shown that they were in fact shaped by a diverse array of contributors, including Indigenous people, lay settlers, nuns, editors in Paris, and readers in France. To shine a new light on the Jesuit Relations we have invited on historian Micah True. Micah reveals a richer and more complex picture of a primary source that has played a major role in public understanding of the colonial history of North America. Micah True is Professor of French and Folklore at the University of Alberta, where he also serves as Associate Dean of the Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies. He is the author of Masters and Students: Jesuit Mission Ethnography in Seventeenth-Century New France , published by McGill-Queen's…
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