Ideas - Betrayal of Faith: The Story of Pastedechouan

Episode Date: April 3, 2024

Pastedechouan was an Innu boy taken to France by Catholic clergymen in 1620. What happened to him 400 years ago may well be the template that would later become the residential school system. IDEAS retraces the story of Pastedechouan, revealing that history has an extremely long reach.

Hey there, I'm David Common. If you're like me, there are things you love about living in the GTA and things that drive you absolutely crazy. Every day on This Is Toronto, we connect you to what matters most about life in the GTA, the news you gotta know, and the conversations your friends will be talking about. Whether you listen on a run through your neighbourhood, or while sitting in the parking lot that is the 401, check out This Is Toronto, wherever you get your podcasts. This is a CBC Podcast. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayed.

History has a long reach. This story goes back four centuries. The year is 1620. As religious wars continue to rip Europe apart, the Mayflower lands in what's now New England. And that same year, another, lesser-known ship is preparing to leave the so-called New World. On it is a unique passenger. He's 11 years old and is about to cross the Atlantic to France. His name is Pastor Deschouan. He's indigenous and Innu from north of the St. Lawrence River.

Pastor Deschouan is the youngest of four brothers and very smart. In France, Pastor Deschouan will help missionaries compile an Innu dictionary to use when they return to convert the people they refer to as Les Sauvages, Pastor Deschouan's people. Pastor Deschouan is a promising candidate to help Franciscan missionaries call the Recolet in their goal, converting the Innu into French-speaking Christians. They'll isolate Pastor Deschouin from his community and take him to one of their friaries in France. and take him to one of their friaries in France.

There, he'll learn French and Latin and teach the missionaries his language. He may not be fully aware of the Recollet's plans for him. His family has given permission for him to go on the ship that will take him across the Atlantic, and they trust the Recollet will bring him safely back home. Emma Anderson is an historian at the University of Ottawa. She's scoured the documents written by 17th century Catholic missionaries to Canada, the Recolet, the French branch of the Franciscan Order, and the Society of Jesus, the Jesuits. And she's pieced together an astonishingly rare biography. The story of one young Innu boy, Pasadishawan, who becomes entangled with European missionaries and the entire colonial enterprise.

That story is featured in her book, Betrayal of Faith, The Tragic Journey of a Colonial Native Convert. colonial native convert. We begin in northwestern France, in the small town of Angers. This is where Pas de Deschamps was taken. town of Angers. This is where Pas de Deschamps was taken. So I'm standing outside Cathedral Saint-Maurice. It's a beautiful spring day. It's the sixth Sunday after Easter and right around the same time of year that Pierre Antoine Pas de Deschamps would have been baptized. April 25th 1621, so over 400 years ago, this courtan would have been baptized April 25th, 1621, so over 400 years ago.

This court area would have been filled with people. And we're told by Jean Louvet, who wrote eyewitness account of what he experienced. There was found such a great number of people at the aforementioned church that all of the galleries around the organ and the choir stalls were filled up. And then the ecclesiastics and nobles and others came in a long procession through the cloisters and entered into the nave, carrying all of the vessels for the sacred oil and the baptismal bonnet displayed on a pillow.

And all went in a great procession to the big door to the galleries before the square in front of the church. By taking Pastor Deschouan away from his family and his culture in Canada, the Recollet were doing something really quite new. They wanted to show that they were capable of transforming him religiously, culturally, linguistically, and that he almost served as a forerunner or an exemplar of what they would do to an entire culture across the Atlantic.

The crowd seemed to have mostly been interested in Pastor Deschewan not because he was becoming one of them, part of the body of Christ, a Frenchman joining the larger clan, but because he was different. It was an unusual baptism, really a dramatic spectacle that involved this young teenager being stripped totally naked and baptized by aspersion until he was completely soaking wet, we would have seen the water running out over the stone floor of the cathedral, the very same floor that's still here. That's where Pastor Deschamon would have stood, would have walked in this procession. And it's there we can see the

larger inclusion of an entire people through the baptism of one young man almost as if they're thinking of him as a noble or a king or a representative of his entire group because it harkens back ritually to the baptisms of Clovis and Charlemagne, which were also done completely nude, and were also thought to affect all of the people under these King's sway. Not just Clovis, not just Charlemagne, but all of France was baptized through them, in them. And with Pasadeshuon's baptism, you can sort of feel those hopes that all of the Innu people, all of Pastor Deshawan's kin, neighbors, friends,

would also be brought to what they thought of as the only true faith. They would bow the knee in front of Jesus Christ. That's the hope. What was being affected ritually with pastiche one's baptism was the passage from paganism into Christianity, the transformation of someone profoundly different, profoundly strange into a familiar friend and a true child of the church. I asked fellow historian Dominique Deland to explain why a newly baptized child from a so-called savage people would be chosen to help in the creation of New France here in Canada. At the beginning of the 17th century, France is coming out of 40 years of civil and religious war

that were absolutely terrible. Dominique Delon teaches history at the Université de Montréal and focuses on the role of religious orders in colonization. France has to be reconstructed from scratch because everything is in ruin. And one thing that is absolutely terrible for the French people as well as the rest of Europe is that now you have two vérités, two truths,

one which is protestant and the other one which is Roman Catholic. There is only one truth possible. It is irreconcilable to have two truths. It is a time where a pope could say that tolerance is the most obscene thing in the world. If you're a good Christian, you cannot tolerate another way of doing things. And this decision between Protestant and Catholic will put all these French reformers, they had a kind of calling saying that they needed to save all these people that were getting lost to Christ because they were following Satan.

And this realization happened in the beginning of the 17th century in France, where all these peasants, they have no more church to go because it's in ruin. And then there's this menace from the protestant that are there. They are Christian by name, but they are pagans at heart. And in the same time, a new France is being constructed. You have a kind of movement from the elite, the religious elite, that has this project a little bit crazy. It's totally crazy, actually, to transform the Frenchmen into Christian and good subject of the king, as well as the indigenous that they are meeting in New France.

After being baptized into the Catholic Church, Pastor Deschouan will enter more fully into the prayer-filled routines at the Recolet Friary and House of Studies, La Beaumet. At La Beaumet, Pastor Deschouan will study Latin, French, and theology, as if he were joining the Recolet Order himself. He runs errands for them and learns to serve as an altar boy. He helps them in fundraising events with wealthy supporters. And he teaches the missionaries a new vocabulary.

But Pastor Deschouan does not know how long he will remain at La Beaumette. I'm on the way now to La Beaumette this is the beautiful ancient Franciscan convent where Pastor Deschouan lived for the entirety of his time, he was five years in France a little bit on the outskirts of Angers, it's on the banks of the main river, so it's about a 10 minute cab drive from the downtown.

Cinq, numéro cinq. Numéro cinq, bis. Je pense peut-être cette porte vert. Là, on sait. Oui. Bonjour, bonjour, bonjour, bonjour. Merci d'avoir reçu. Entrez, entrez. On plonge dans les poids, après la chapelle et puis les anciennes cellules qui étaient là-bas. Wow! In the walls of the chapel. And the old cells that were there.

Yes. It's just as I remember. Yes, it's true. I'm in a little cell, probably larger than the 17th century cells that Pastor Deshaun would have stayed in. Pastor Deshaun lived at La Beaumet for five years, arriving sometime probably in the late fall of 1620, and residing here until 1625. He would have had a very regulated life here at La Beaumette. His life would have been circumscribed by the periods of worship,

rising in the dead of night to hear matins, and then his life would have been punctuated by the daily round of prayers and ritual obligations, just like those of the Recolet. And, of course, the life would have been also affected by the seasonal liturgical round, moving from the birth of the God-man at Christmas to his death and resurrection in the springtime. his death and resurrection in the springtime. And probably it would have been hard for Pastor Joshua to get used to being in one place for the entire year,

because his people were nomadic, migratory. They would be sedentary through the late spring and through into the early fall. So there would be like a big gathering around Tadoussac, lots of dependents during the summer on fishing as the primary sort of resource for food. But then what would have been missing here at La Beaumette was splitting up into the smaller clan-based familial hunting groups for the winter. It must have seemed strange to be in nature but not able to move around in nature the way he would have been able to, of course, at home.

But still, looking out his cell window, Pastor Deshwan would have seen all of the same things that we can see today, including a very, very vibrant bird life. Herons, cranes, ducks, and swans. Lazy, grey-green, snaking river, just full of a luxuriant bird life. They were looking to transform him, give him the theological education,

give him all the linguistic richness of Latin and French, teach him to serve at the altars, while all the same time preserving his indigenous abilities and language. his indigenous abilities and language. And in fact, it was when Pastor Deshwan started to brag about how he was almost on the verge of losing his language, this really prompted them to say, okay, we need to close up this little chapter while he's still able to speak his original language.

And their theory really was that by taking so much time and energy over one young boy's soul, they could also kind of form him as a missionary to his own people. Because I think they thought it might be more effective coming from one of their own, as well as they were hoping to extract from Pashto Deshwan as much as they could of really the grammar of his language, insights that could perhaps apply not just to the Montagnier Innu language, but other indigenous languages. They knew they were going to have to master these languages

in order to be able to communicate fluently and convincingly with indigenous people while they still hoped that French would become literally the lingua franca of New France. Christ regna, Christ impera. While he was here at La Beaumet, Pastor Deschouan fell seriously ill. Many indigenous children and adults were taken over to the Old World, where their lack of immunity to common European diseases meant that many got sick or even lost their lives. The only thing that Pastor Deschouan may have lost, and this is speculative on my part, was his fertility. We have records from later on in his life that Pastor Deschouan had several

marriages but no children. I think probably Pastor Deschouan had the mumps when he was here. But there's no record of his illness in any of the Recolet documents. When he told his Recolet mentors, Father Georges and Father Joseph, that he was losing his Innu language, arrangements for him to leave France quickly followed. His religious transformation was only the first step towards a greater goal,

the conversion of his entire native society. In the words of a Recollet historian, Chrétien Leclerc, As Pierre-Antoine was more advanced, having made five years' stay in France, which he did not want to leave, Father George and Father Joseph thought proper to persuade him to make a voyage home.

As he was tractable and docile, he yielded to their entreaties from a pure motive of God's glory. But Pierre-Antoine Pastadeschouan was not as docile as they hoped. In 1625, when they told him they planned to bring him back to Canada, he reportedly said, But my fathers, why would you have me go back among those beasts who do not know God? It's a terrible turn of phrase about his own maternal culture. And it sets us up really for the next chapter in the story,

which is Pastor Deshaun's inability to fit back into a new culture. Pastor Deshaun, had he remained at home, would have been sent off individually into the wilderness, really, to find an animal mentor. You would almost sort of throw yourself on the mercies of these beings and hope that one of them, at least, would endow you with its special traits. And Pastor Deschouin missed all of that.

When he went home and was anxious to show off all the different Latin and French prayers that he knew, no one was all that impressed. Pastor Deshuon's real lack of hunting or fishing ability was not just seen as his failure to have mastered the art, because the inner belief, of course, is that it's the animal that decides whether you're worthy enough to receive the gift of their death and their suffering, their meat, their flesh, their bones, their fur. The fact that Pasadeshm was unable to inveigle these animals to die for him was seen as indicating his moral failures.

his moral failures. Pierre-Antoine Pastadeshwan was caught between two competing cultures and two conflicting worldviews. And so he sailed back to his traditional Innu territory, which stretched from the settlements of Tadoussac in Quebec, north of the St. Lawrence, and west of the Saguenay River, in the company of yet more missionaries and traders. For him, it was his old home. But for them, it was a new France, and had been new ever since 1608, and the arrival of explorer and principal colonizer on behalf of the French crown, Samuel de Champlain. Une France neuve.

Précisément, Sire. Une nouvelle France. In reality, Champlain was just doing business here. The colony was not a great royal project. This is author Mark Borey describing the kind of New France that Pas de Deschamps had been returned to. Every culture, every country looks for a founder. There's always a founding myth. And the founding myth of Canada is of this demigod with this tremendous vision of the future. And overthinking Champlain like that gives some warm feelings and maybe sells

some books. Champlain had to go back and beg the government to keep it going, but they never put any money into it. So what Champlain ends up doing is building basically a warehouse at Quebec, starts meddling with Indigenous politics, starts taking Indigenous boys to Europe as sort of props, and I think that includes Passe de Chouin, who are trotted around and dolled up as model, and I'm going to use big air quotes here, Indians, as a fundraising effort. Because the French colony, which is really, like I said,

a warehouse and a couple of farms at this point, and a couple of little forts inland, very small ones, is of really no value to the French crown, and at a great expense. One of the things that people forget about colonialism is it's always expensive to the people in the mother country. It was rarely profitable. Champlain refuses to give up. Maybe they're not as weakened as we thought.

Quite certain they are. Could be bluffing. But if he's not? We came here for Porfitt, not for glory. It was an early form of the corporation, so we're just at the beginnings of the history of the emergence of corporations in Europe. Historian Alan Greer is Professor Emeritus of McGill University in Montreal.

And it certainly was not a corporation like General Motors or General Electric. It was probably best understood as a kind of arm's length agency of the French monarchy. It is probably more about politics than economics, if I can put it that crudely. It had investors who held shares. It looked for profits and distributed them to shareholders. But that was a means to an end. It was essentially created as a legal instrument of establishing French sovereignty in North America. To describe Champlain, the idea that it was a dream of a French nation in North America is such a stretch of reality. The French government was opposed to large-scale migration from France.

The French wars of religion, which just end up as a half a line in a book somewhere, killed 4 million French people out of a population of 20 million and left whole areas of France devastated. And what Champlain was trying to do was he was there to trade first, which was a very lucrative business for the handful of people who were in it. They wanted to keep the crown happy and justify their intrusion here by saving some souls. And then in the reaction to this horrendous war in France that had happened just before Champlain comes, they end up saddled with the Recollets and the Jesuits. New France was vulnerable and volatile. There were conflicts between traders and colonists

and amongst the indigenous nations, even between the two French missionary groups, the Recolets and the Jesuits. Alan Greer The Recolets are in the Franciscan tradition of friars, so the emphasis is on simplicity, humility, and partly for that reason, they are generally not particularly educated to the degree that the Jesuits are. The Jesuits have a strong emphasis on intense and extended intellectual education of all their members. The Recolets not.

Along with their just kind of institutional rivalry, they do have a different point of view. They are intellectually more elitist, and partly for that reason, maybe a bit more adept at finding theological justification for the kinds of cultural compromises they make with Christianity. It's now 1632. One Jesuit in particular, Paul Lejeune, is about to encounter Pastor Deschouan. Lejeune is determined to civilize what he sees as the lost souls of New France first, and then make them Christians. Dominique Delande. And Lejeune says it perfectly.

They are spiritually equal, but they lack everything that is needed to make their redemption. He says, all these savage people remind me of our gueux, which is the peasants in France, who are going to be lost, all of them, because they don't know the Christian teachings. Even with Christian teachings, Pastor Deschon was still lost, at least according to Lejeune. Having been brought back to his country, he was again placed in the hands of his brothers to recover the use of his own language, which he had almost forgotten. But this poor wretch has become a barbarian like the others. On Ideas, you're listening to Betrayal of Faith,

the tragic journey of a colonial Native convert. We're a podcast and a broadcast heard on CBC Radio 1 in Canada, on US Public Radio, across North America on Sirius XM, in Australia on ABC Radio National, and around the world at cbc.ca slash ideas. Find us on the CBC Listen app and wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Nala Ayyad. it to other people has been harder. Lately, I've been trying to talk about it. Short Sighted is an attempt to explain what vision loss feels like by exploring how it sounds. By sharing my story, we get into all the things you don't see about hidden disabilities. Short Sighted,

from CBC's Personally, available now. It's 1632, and Pastor Deschouin has returned to North America. He's now in his 20s and goes by his baptismal name, Pierre-Antoine Pastor Deschouin. And while he's back among his own people, the Innu, he finds himself to be an outsider. The story resumes as he's about to move into Notre-Dame-des-Anges, the small, crowded Jesuit residence near today's Quebec City, where he'll be working as a translator for Father Paul Lejeune. This arrangement will not last. Having been brought back to his country, he was again placed in the hands of his brothers to recover the use of his own language,

which he had almost forgotten. But this poor wretch has become a barbarian like the others. Pastor Deshwan struggled for three years, unsuccessfully, to reintegrate into his Innu community, just as the Recollet missionaries had tried, with his help, to convert the Innu with little success. Then geopolitics intervene, when for three years there are no Catholic missionaries in Canada. When New France was under French control once more, it was the Jesuits, not the Recolets, who were the favored missionaries. This had devastating consequences for Pastor Deschelon.

for Pastor Deschouan. He had thrown in his lot so closely with his recolée mentors. He leaned on his brothers and hoped for better relations with his community. When the Jesuits come back to New France, Pastor Deschouan once again has the option to throw in his lot with the Europeans. And it's with mixed feelings that he moves into Notre-Dame-des-Anges. He's no longer the tractable and docile child as the Recollet once described him.

University of Ottawa historian Emma Anderson has assembled a portrait of Passe de Chouin's promising early life and tragic end from Father Paul Lejeune's 17th century reports to his superiors back in France. This young man had been taken to France in his childhood by the Reverend Recollet fathers. He had been baptized at Angers. He speaks French and the

savage tongue very well. As historians, what we wish we had was an entire diary from Pastor Deschouan himself, describing his experiences, his thoughts, his ideas, his impressions. But we don't have that, even though Pastor Deschouan was literate. I haven't been able to find any such diaries or even letters from him. We do have a lot of writings about his life from the perspective of European missionaries. And I would say that the latter years of Pastor Deschouin's life are really dominated by his very emotional, very passionate relationship with Paul Lejeune. He sees Pastor Deschouan pastorally as a young man who may have fallen from grace, has become a Protestant, or gone back to the ancestral religious ways of his people.

He also sees Pastor Deschouan as someone who can provide an invaluable service. Because he knows, of course, his own Innu language, because he also knows Latin and French, if he can just persuade this young man to come into the Jesuit realm, he can almost be like a walking, talking dictionary. Lejeune tells us every time he wanted to know new information, he'd have to give his tutor a plug of tobacco, which was, I guess, in some ways, Pastor Deschouin's way of trying to maintain some sort of control over his life. Alleluia, Alleluia Alleluia, Alleluia This wretched young man, who was so well instructed in France,

having been ruined among the English, has become an apostate, renegade, excommunicate, atheist, and a servant to a sorcerer who was his brother. These are the qualities which I shall assign to him hereafter when speaking of him. It's at this juncture that Pastor Deschamps runs away from Notre-Dame-des-Anges to Tadosac. We hear, too, that the English, who are still lingering at Tadosac, introduce Pasta Deschouan for the first time in his life to alcohol, which he'd struggle with for the remaining four years of his life.

of his life. What can Father Lejeune do about Pasteur de Chouin now? He first tries to persuade Pasteur de Chouin to come back to Notre-Dame des Anges. When this fails, Lejeune himself has to make a decision. Should he risk going out into the woods to follow Pastor Deschouan and his 40-man hunting band? Lejeune wants to convert them to inculcate them. That's his dream. In his mind, Lejeune is already seeing his triumphal re-entry back into Quebec as the head of this new little church that he'll have formed over the winter. But almost right away, things start to unravel. winter. But almost right away, things start to unravel. It's late at night, and everyone's busy setting up camp on the riverbank after a tough journey upriver. Pastor Deschouan secretly makes his way back to the boat that had brought them there. The apostate, having observed that everyone

was busy, returned to the boat that was lying at anchor, took the keg of wine, and drank from it with such excess that, being drunk as a lord, he fell into the water and was nearly drowned. Finally he got out, after considerable scrambling, screaming and howling like a demon, not knowing upon what to vent his fury. He approached the fire, and was about to take hold of the kettle to overturn it when my host his brother quicker than he seized it and threw the water into his face

boiling as it was the skin of his face and whole chest changed would to God that his soul had changed as well as his body he redoubled his howls when I went up to him and tried to stop him he said to me in French that his soul had changed as well as his body. He redoubled his howls. When I went up to him and tried to stop him,

he said to me in French, It is not you I am after. Let me alone. Then, pulling my gown, Come, he said. Let us embark in a canoe and return to your house. You do not know these people here. All they do is for the belly.

They do not care for you, only for your food. To this I answered in an undertone and to myself, in vino veritas. Despite the fact that so much of their relationship is characterized by conflict, there's also a kind of closeness between the two. And part of this, of course, is because of their shared alienation from the larger group. And we know of one instance where it's the end of the day, everyone else has gone to bed, the two are sitting up around the fire, and they have this really revealing conversation.

One night, when everyone had sunk into a deep sleep, I began to talk to this poor, miserable renegade. I showed him that while he was in our house, he had lacked for nothing of whatever we had. That in forsaking God, he had rushed into the life of a brute, and it would finally end in hell if he did not open his eyes. I see clearly, he replied, that I am not doing right, but my misfortune is that I have not a mind strong enough to remain firm in my determination. When I was with the English, I allowed myself to be influenced by their talk. When I'm with the savages, I do as they do. When I am with you, it seems to me your belief is the true one. Would to God that I had died when I was sick in France, and I would now be saved. When I want to stay with you, my brothers tell me I will

rot, always staying in one place, and that is the reason I leave you to follow them. What had happened is that the group had fallen on very, very bad luck in terms of hunting. People are starting to panic. And so, as a result, they figure, let's see what this enigmatic stranger who claims he's got this other god, let's see what he can do. And so to make this as dramatic and effective as possible, he decides he's going to make this little rustic oratory. And so he has everyone help him gather these branches and make them almost into, we can imagine kind of like a little bandstand almost, in which he can place some of the beautiful colored pictures from his breviary. And he takes Pastor Deshawn aside and has him translate this heartfelt prayer in the Innu language.

Help us, for you can do it. I will certainly do what they, the Jesuits, shall teach me ought to be done for your sake. I promise it without pretense. Help us, the Innu, to believe in you perfectly, for you have died for us. So in a sense, the Innu here are promising that they will believe in the Christian God if the Christian God comes through for them in this time of need. The animals come, and the animals are killed. People start to look at Lejeune a little bit differently. Maybe he does have access to some sort of supernatural power. But then, almost right away, at the feast that they give to give thanks for this wonderful salvation from privation, Lejeune makes a number of ritual missteps. Seeing the big pieces of meat they gave to each one, I asked the apostate if this was an eat-all feast.

He answered yes. I said to him, it is impossible for me to eat all they have given me. I made him understand that God forbids such excess. As I could not come to the end of my portion, I invited one of my neighboring savages to take a part of it, giving him some tobacco as a reward for what he would eat for me. I threw another piece of it secretly to the dogs. The savages began to suspect something from the fight that took place among these animals. They commenced to cry out against me, saying that I was contaminating their feast

and they would capture nothing more and that we would die of hunger. They looked upon me as a very bad man, saying that I would be the cause of their death. Lejeune can't help himself. He's squandered the best opportunity that he had. And so he asked to be taken back to Quebec early. And this results in this terribly dangerous journey up the St. Lawrence, it's starting to melt. There's these great big chunks of ice that crush their canoe. They do eventually make it back alive, but one of the

first things that Paul Legend does was to write Paris. My reverend father, I beg your reverence to discharge me. I have not the talents, nor the qualities, nor the mildness necessary to be superior. I have often been astonished in thinking it over, how God let his thunderbolts fall, so to speak, upon the three brothers with whom I had passed the winter, for having wickedly violated the promise they had made to acknowledge him as their sovereign, to love and to obey him as their lord.

They had had recourse to his goodness in their extreme famine. He had succored them, giving them food in abundance. They had not yet swallowed the morsel when God took them by the throat. Before the year had expired, the eldest was burned alive in his own house. The second, a man who had naturally a good disposition but to please his brother, was willing to displease God, was drowned, having lost his mind. It's hard to overestimate how much the death of his two older brothers changed things for Pastor Deshwan, because they're the link or the sinews that keep him

tied into the Innu body politic, and now they're gone. There remained the apostate Pierre, the youngest of the three brothers. I believe that the stamp of the Christian for a little while arrested divine justice, but as he would not acknowledge it, the same thunderbolt that struck his brothers, reduced Pierre-Pastor de Chouin to ashes. The wretch died this year of hunger, abandoned in the woods like a dog. The savages merely told us that they had found him starved to death in the woods. It was very reasonable that his mouth, which had so often blasphemed God, should lack food. mouth, which had so often blasphemed God, should lack food. Whether he died an apostate or not, I do not know. At least he died without any earthly help. I do not know whether he received any from heaven, though I would be very glad if it were so. I admit he was a wicked man.

I say even more, that if it were in my power to free him from the irons and chains in which perhaps he now is, I would release him, that I might procure for him, in exchange for the wrongs he has done me, the greatest blessing that can be obtained for a reasonable creature, eternal salvation. It's impossible to arrive at this point in Pastor Deschamps' story and not wonder something. At La Beaumet, Catholic priests taught the young Pierre Antoine for five years in the early 1620s. They had taken him far from his family, his village, and his traditional territory to instruct him in languages not his own. Was it all a kind of model, however unintended, for what would eventually become residential schools in Canada? In a way, it's a difficult question to answer and also an easy one because we could say that

it's exactly the same. Dominique Deland. But the missionaries in the 17th century, they didn't realize that the indigenous had a valid religion and spirituality. They are a product of their civilization. Of course, in the French part of Canada, you will have religious people that will follow the lead of the state, saying we are going to kill the Indian in them. But this is another story. The missionary enterprise in the 17th century takes place almost entirely in indigenous languages, and the Residential Schools Project is designed to eradicate Indigenous languages. Alan Greer. The Ricolets and the Jesuits of the first half of the 17th century

do not have a realistic program for re-educating and re-engineering people. or re-educating and re-engineering people. They start out with the belief that if people can be liberated from the delusions in which they live and from the influence of the devil, they will naturally and unproblematically become fully Christian. They pick up Pasadichuan assuming a duty of obligation on the part of someone who is in a position of inferior power, whether it's a child, a servant, or in this case, a captive who can be counted on to act as a loyal agent of the people who have fed and clothed him, they're a bit shocked when he comes back to Canada and doesn't play the expected role in this case to act as, you know, as their agent of conversion among his people. So that's one of the outstanding differences. But anyway, this is light years removed from the efforts of a modern nation state to, in a massive way, transform people's culture and way of life. We now recognize that it was wrong to separate children from rich and vibrant cultures and traditions, that it created a void in many lives and communities. And we apologize for having done this.

I really do see Pastor Deschouan as being a very sad template for what comes later because it's so clear in his experiences how much his time in France rips his psychology apart. The basic idea of trying to use children as a kind of arrowhead of change. Let's take these kids, separate them from everyone and everything they know. Let's change their appearance. Let's change their daily life. Let's shave their heads. Let's forbid them to speak their own languages. It's children who are targeted. And of course, we can't ignore the trauma that these sorts of disruptions to a child's life have on their later behavior. in missionary methodology in the 17th century, where people said,

why are we spending so much time, energy, and money to transform a single Innu child when probably he won't be able to resist all the social pressures to reintegrate? In the 19th century, all of these same ideas come back. Easiest way to change indigenous cultures is by taking the children, changing the children. The adults will learn from the children. All of this comes back again.

People knew it was toxic, but it came back anyway, like a revenant or ghost. So I'm walking along in the cemetery here at La Beaumette. This seemed like a good place to end my visit because it's very poignant. There's absolutely no grave markers at all. And beneath my feet are resting all the bones of untold numbers of Recolet monks. And it makes me think of the unknown grave of Pierre Antoine Pastodeshwan. We don't know where he fell. We don't know what happened to his remains. He was the last of his four brothers to die. But just as he has no monument, so these men back in the 17th century trying to transform this young boy, they also rest without any kind of memorial or headstone.

headstone. It's exciting to see our voices emerge again. Alan Delery is Anishnabek. Alan has spoken to my university courses on missionaries and indigenous people in 17th century Canada. This Inuk young man, he was taken away and brought back. What they had hoped was he would be a bridge between these nation states, you know, him as an Innu, and then the French coming in with the Jesuits and the Recollects. Alan and I met to walk by the river in a local park. Alan and I met to walk by the river in a local park. It's a bit different from res schools, but to me it's the stone tossed in the lake of colonialism, and it was the first blush at it. Back in 1989, in addition to his career with what was then the Department of Indian Affairs, he was one of the founders of a pioneering rock band, Seventh Fire.

His songs mix political critique with dance music. He's currently the chief administrative officer of Coldwell First Nation in southwestern Ontario. We were both in the way, but we were also very much needed because the settlers were going to starve without us. As we move 400 years from that time, I still think in Canada we're trying to find that path. When I see what's happening with murdered, missing missing Indigenous women, the biases that still occur, the lack of inclusion of us in this society. It's still pretty far removed for me. I'm a part of this land. I'm a part of everything that constitutes our place in this earth, along with my other fellow human beings and all the animal creatures and

everything that's living from the smallest to the biggest, those are the reconciliations that need to be made. Our earth is on fire. It does not matter philosophically who's right or wrong. Our earth is on fire. All of us need to reconcile to that fact and take care of us as human beings because everything is related. You were listening to Betrayal of Faith by Ideas contributor Emma Anderson and producer Kevin Burns.

You can go to our website, cbc.ca slash ideas, for photographs that Kevin took in France featuring the cathedral and La Baumette friary in Angers, and some audio clips recorded on location. Special thanks to CBC archivist Shamsa Abdullahi, Princeton Media Centre's Alexander Brownstein, La Bonmette hosts Yolande Stern and Monique and Bernard Bourgeois, Ottawa-based actor Steve Love,

and Alexandre Duval at Radio Operations Ottawa. Ideas is a podcast and a broadcast. If you liked the episode you just heard, check out our vast archive, where you can find more than 300 of our past episodes. Ideas Technical Production, Danielle Duval. Our web producer is Lisa Ayuso. Lisa Godfrey is the acting senior producer. The executive producer of Ideas is Greg Kelly, and I'm Nala Ayed. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.