Writing about another culture isn’t like putting a butterfly under a microscope.

That’s the underlying lesson of “Masters and Students,” a new book by Haines High School graduate and former Chilkat Valley News reporter Micah True.

True, an assistant professor in the Department of Modern Languages and Cultural Studies at the University of Alberta, looks at how a famous series of publications about Indians in French-American colonies fell short of the mark as early anthropology.

The Catholic priests who penned the “Jesuit Relations” in the mid-1600s were at the same time students of Native culture and determined to convert various groups of Iroquois and Algonquin Indians. Those relationships colored their accounts, True asserts.

“It’s not as simple as gathering a specimen, but that’s something we’ve always taken the Jesuits to have done… Nobody cared too much what their motive may have been,” True said in a recent interview.

The book is a follow-up on True’s doctoral dissertation, “Writing Amerindian Culture: Ethnography in the 17th-Century Jesuit Relations from New France.”

“This book puts the emphasis much more squarely on what happens when we write about cultures we’re not part of – and specifically how the audience exerted influence over what the missionaries wrote and how the Natives exerted influence,” True said. “The Jesuits were not neutral observers in dialogue with groups they wrote about.”

Natives “controlled quite a bit about what Jesuits knew about their cultures,” True said.

True uses as an example a Huron torture ritual, which the missionaries described as a passion play. “The Jesuits weren’t recounting a torture scene. They portrayed it as a conversion scene where (the person being tortured) won’t renounce their Christianity… The Jesuits were not attempting to accurately depict this event. They had other fish to fry.”

Also, the missionaries were motivated to portray their efforts in a positive light, both to secure funding for their efforts and to distance themselves from the Franciscans, another set of missionaries who tried to assimilate Natives to European culture. Jesuits used Native languages and lived in tribal villages.

“There was a competitive aspect to it as well,” True said. “(The Jesuits) were trying to prove they had the right idea.”

The “Relations” at times read like an NPR fundraiser, True said, with excerpts like, “with what the grand ladies of Paris spend on clothing we could educate 10,000 Huron.”

True said his book’s biggest research coup was finding that the France-based editors of the publications changed facts. “We have access. We can tell what they changed. That might be the biggest contribution of the book.”

The “Jesuit Relations” were regarded for years as objective accounts of Native life, but True said that was due, in part, to the nature of early anthropology, which didn’t consider that bias and other factors influenced the Jesuits’ writing.

“Now we understand you can’t be entirely neutral or objective when you do this kind of work. What you see and what you feel affects what you write.”

Modern anthropologists factor in such things, but that standard wasn’t applied to the “Jesuit Relations,” True said. Over the years, historians have picked through the “Relations,” and drawn various interpretations, he said. “Every trendy theory in anthropology was applied to these texts.”

True read 73 volumes of the French text to write the book, which took a year. “It’s not a small amount of material.”

The scholarly book was published by McGill-Queen’s University Press and is available online. True, who holds a doctoral degree in French studies, lives in Edmonton with his wife, Kim, and daughter, Alex.

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