Fathers and Crows

Seventeenth-century New France. French Jesuit “Black Gowns” enter Huron-Wendat communities determined to convert them, while the people they meet assess the newcomers through their own religious, political and familial traditions. Father Jean de Brébeuf learns local languages and accepts hardship as a path towards martyrdom; the prophetess Born Underwater provides a countervailing Indigenous perspective on the priests and the transformations gathering around them.

Conversion, trade and colonial alliance become inseparable from epidemic disease and warfare with the Haudenosaunee. As Huronia is broken apart in the violence of 1648 and 1649, Vollmann shifts among missionary documents, oral memory, myth and invented testimony. The result is not a simple story of saints and persecutors but a study of competing certainties, showing how people on every side interpret catastrophe through beliefs that can inspire endurance as well as cruelty.