1. Then and Two Centuries Ago. The First Civilizers of North America. The Indians. Features of Their Communal and Everyday Life. Their Intellectual, Moral, and Religious Condition

The Indians who inhabited North America consisted of numerous small tribes that were scattered throughout the continent. The chief among them were the tribes living in the vicinity of the Great Lakes, in the basins of the St. Lawrence, Hudson, and Mississippi Rivers, namely the tribes of: the Hurons, who lived in the southern borders of Canada, the Iroquois, who occupied the territory of present-day New York State, and the Illinois, who lived along the Mississippi River. All of them were at the lowest degree of development, in a state of primitive savagery and barbarism. Some of them led a nomadic life across immense forests and plains, moving from place to place and carrying all their possessions on their backs. Among others, the beginnings of settlement were already evident. The Hurons and Iroquois lived in villages consisting of a considerable number of huts, of the most primitive construction, though sometimes quite large in size, like barns, only with an opening at the top for the exit of smoke from a fire kindled in the middle of the hut. The men engaged exclusively in hunting, fishing, and war, while the women conducted all domestic labor, which consisted of sowing corn and tobacco, feeding children, sewing leather clothes by means of root threads, and preparing various articles necessary for the meager economy of savage life. With particular skill they made canoes of birch bark, so light that Indians usually carried them on their shoulders from one river to another. Clothes were prepared not without adornment with fringe, for which porcupine quills served them instead. The men, however, in summer time cared little for clothing and are ordinarily described by Jesuits as “so naked as your hand”[1]. Children resorted to clothing only in extreme necessity during winter cold, but the women were always dressed, and always as modestly as “the most devout ladies in France.” War was considered the most honorable occupation. Indian weapons consisted of bows and arrows, spears, clubs, and tomahawks. Since Indians until the seventeenth century were not acquainted with the use of iron, the arrowheads and spear points had tips of sharpened stone, and the tomahawks themselves represented something like stone axes. This primitive weapon they used with astonishing skill. The Indians, however, did not know pitched battles. Their warfare consisted in parties of warriors unexpectedly attacking enemies or hostile villages, burning and killing, taking scalps, and capturing prisoners. All the glory and valor of warriors was based on the number of scalps taken from the heads of slain enemies[2]. Prisoners were subjected to savage torture[3]. They were tormented in every conceivable way, limbs were cut off gradually, they were burned with slow fire, and in conclusion—hacked to pieces, boiled in pots, and eaten. The cries and wails of the sufferers delighted the torturers, while stubborn silence drove them to fury. Sometimes, however, no torture could draw even a sound of pain from the breast of the unfortunate victim. Until their last breath amidst the flames, the sufferers continued to revile their torturers and sing their war songs. This drove the torturers to despair, as it was considered an ill omen for the people. When attacking a village—everything was subjected to fire and destruction, women and children were killed indiscriminately, and sometimes the latter were eaten before the eyes of their mothers. After a successful raid, only heaps of ashes and dead bodies remained of the village. Particularly destructive became the wars in the middle of the seventeenth century, when coastal tribes received firearms from Europeans, giving them an advantage over other tribes who were not acquainted with their use. Some of the latter were literally wiped from the face of the earth by their opponents.

In moral terms, the Indians were complete savages, and unwritten, natural moral law barely made itself known under the rule of animal passions. They knew no law, and this independence, according to the expression of one Jesuit, “enslaved them to the basest passions.”[4] “They are lazy, faithless, fickle and inconstant, liars and natural thieves, so that theft is considered a glory among them; cruel, dishonorable, ready to promise everything to those who are generous to them, and at the same time ungrateful. Generosity and benevolence toward them only intensifies their natural audacity. He fears me, they say, because he takes care of me. Gluttony and love of pleasure are stronger than all vices prevailing among the Indians. They give themselves over to the most shameful way of life, even before reaching an age sufficient to understand the shame of what they do”[5]. Polygamy was the prevailing custom, though not among all tribes. Marriage consisted of a simple gift to the bride or her parents. Divorce was accomplished at the whim of one party. Among the Hurons there existed a form of temporary marriage, or trial marriage, lasting two or three days or a week. Some beauties changed up to twenty husbands before making a final choice[6]. The position of women was most wretched. Before marriage her life was mired in animal passions, and afterward it turned into a life of unceasing heavy labor. “Their women were their mules,” says a contemporary observer[7]. Despite the poverty of Indian life, they had, however, cheerful feasts, consisting of singing, dancing, contests of various kinds, and the serving of meat of killed buffalo, bear, or dog. Smoking tobacco was the highest pleasure. Feasts often had a religious character. Then the guests were each given a certain portion, which each was obliged to eat, no matter how large it was[8]. Otherwise disaster threatened the host. Gluttony was considered a virtue and often eating contests were held for a pack of tobacco. Indians did not store provisions; they ate what hunting provided; therefore sometimes they wallowed in abundance, and sometimes, especially in winter, they died from hunger, living on bark and roots[9]. In the moral character of the Indians, however, there were some bright features, which accentuated human nature. They had their own code of courtesy, the rules of which could not be violated without fear of public censure. An unprotected and unarmed traveler could in most cases count on warm hospitality, and prisoners who distinguished themselves by special bravery in defense were sometimes given the privilege of being free from burning, if not from torture. In need they readily helped each other. When a family found itself without shelter, the inhabitants of the village together would build a hut for it. When a young woman got married, the other women of the village would supply her with wood for an entire year, thus freeing her from one of the heaviest labors of Indian women—gathering wood in the forest for the fire. They had a division into noble and common, rich and poor; but the poorest and most destitute Indian, in case of lack of his own food, could consider himself assured against hunger. He had only to enter the nearest prosperous hut, sit by the fire, and the women without a word would give him food[10]. But these features of humanity were sparks amidst a sea of savage life.

Their religious worldview stood at one level with their moral condition and represented crude fetishism. To the childlike worldview of an Indian, the entire world was a living being; all objects were spirits (okis or manitous), which by their disposition could bring him harm or show mercy. River, mountain, lake, forest, beast, bird, snake—all was filled with spirits, all could listen to the requests of an Indian and fulfill them. Often a hunter, wounding a beast, humbly asked it for forgiveness. A fisherman, before casting his net into the water, would address an eloquent speech both to the net itself, that it might catch fish, and to the fish, that it should not fear entering the net, assuring that their bones would receive the greatest respect. Each Indian had his own personal spirit-guardian, in the form of some animate or inanimate object, which was acquired through a dream, and to which he would address prayers, making sacrifices in the form of tobacco or game. “It would be difficult to say,” writes the Jesuit Mareth, “what the religion of our Indians consists of. It consists entirely of superstitions on which their faith is nourished. Since all their knowledge is limited to familiarity with animals and the necessary needs of life, their idol-worship is also limited to these”[11]. But in them were also observed traces of abstract religious thought. Spirits were not considered inseparable from objects, but on the contrary constituted a separate realm and only manifested themselves in the form of different objects. They are embodied predominantly in the forms of animals, sometimes also take human form, and sometimes live in stones; but they assume all their forms freely, by their own choice, and therefore often change them. The thought of the savage clearly attempted to rise even higher along the path of abstraction; but there it lost itself in indefiniteness and dissolved in mist. The idea of monotheism dimly slumbered in the consciousness of the Indian, and despite all the successes of his thinking ability could not rise higher than a crude form of the chief of all beasts or the so-called Great Hare (Manabozho), to whom the world owes its origin[12]. The understanding of the essence of this Great Hare varied among different tribes; now he appears as an actual hare of enormous size, now as some extraordinary human being. According to one tradition, after the creation of the world, he flew to the sky, from where he influences the fates of people[13]. Here already the theistic idea emerges with considerable clarity, though for the Jesuits it seemed so obscure that they denied the Indians had any concept of God[14]. In any case, the remarkable fact is that among the Indians the missionaries found no word by which they could express the idea of God, and therefore they resorted to a descriptive form: “Great Chief of people,” “He who lives in the sky,” etc. But at the same time, the structure of Indian worldview, according to which each group of beings had its chief or leader, gave the missionaries the opportunity to lead the consciousness of savages to the concept of God as the Great Chief of all things[15], so that they could easily develop the concept of that Great Spirit, under which they understand the idea of God even to this day. In the sphere of other religious questions the thought of the Indian also as it were groped in the darkness. The creation of the world, though attributed to the Great Hare, was not creation in an absolute sense, but rather a transformation of a disordered or even world destroyed by a flood. The Indians did not derive their own existence from a common Creator of the world, but from animals, of different kinds of which various tribes considered themselves the descendants. Thus, some derived themselves from a bear, others from the fish carp or tench, etc.[16], and found in themselves the virtues and qualities that characterized these animal ancestors. They believed in the immortality of the soul, in a future life—with reward and punishment, the former being destined for the best hunter and warrior who had killed the greatest number of animals and hostile people, and the latter awaited the lazy; and between people and spirits there was a direct relationship. Each worshipped his own spirit-patron and made sacrifice to him. An organized class of intermediaries or priests did not yet exist; but the beginnings of this class were already evident in the form of shamans who presented themselves as people most closely connected with spirits, and thanks to this close connection with the higher world possessed special means for delivering people from various evils and diseases. These shamans often turned out to be the worst enemies of the missionaries, especially since the latter in their preaching sought first of all to undermine trust in these self-appointed intermediaries between them and the spirits[17].

Such was the soil on which the Jesuits had to sow the seeds of Christianity. It was stony soil that, to bring it into a condition to receive and nurture the seeds sown upon it, required not only long and stubborn labor but also skilled and tireless workers. “Nothing can be more difficult than the conversion of these Indians. They must first be transformed into human beings, and then made into Christians,” wrote one of the workers upon whom this task fell[18]. “Reason in this people is completely stifled, and they are almost incapable of submitting to the yoke of the Gospel. But the farther they are from the Kingdom of God, the stronger our zeal must be to bring them closer to it and to give them the opportunity to enter it,” says the same zealous missionary[19]. And indeed, the missionaries took up the work with the zeal that only the power of Christian genius could inspire, and accomplished deeds before which pale even the legendary deeds of heroes of ordinary culture[20]. At the same time, these deeds show that the famous order can serve its motto Ad majorem Dei gloriam—even apart from the political intrigue by which it has chiefly acquired historical fame.