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Historical person
Jean de Brébeuf was a French Jesuit missionary who worked among the Wendat in seventeenth-century New France. He studied the Wendat language and culture while seeking converts and helping establish missions in Huronia.
Brébeuf was captured and killed by Haudenosaunee warriors in 1649 during a period of devastating warfare and epidemic disease. Canonised as a Catholic martyr, he is also part of a colonial history marked by cultural disruption and European expansion.
In William T. Vollmann’s Fathers and Crows, 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.
Series
Seven Dreams is William T. Vollmann’s projected seven-volume cycle about the collisions between Indigenous peoples and European colonisers in North America. The published novels range from Norse voyages to Greenland and Vinland through the Jesuit missions of New France, the founding of Jamestown, the Nez Perce War and…
All books in this series
