By Eduardo Vega

*The Jesuit Relations

*These writings are about annual reports the French missionaries sent to France about their efforts to convert the pagan people to the Catholic Christianity.

*They were very detailed descriptions of the way the people lived, and their cultures of all the natives.

*The French missionaries preached to two tribes of the natives. The Algoquian and the Iroqious.

*The were also news about the colonization taking place and outbreaks of war or epidemics.

The Jesuits• They were men that had incredible talents at

describing events with a lot of details and were excellent writers.

• They were part of a religious group known as the Society of Jesus and took vows of poverty and obedience.

• When they first arrived, they started studying the natives language and ways of life. Since they were at one point teachers, they had a lot of experience for when they had to work with the natives.

• They encountered almost every Indian nation in the northeast.

*Disease and Medicine

*Huron Medical Practices.

*They encountered very odd rituals to recover someone back to health.

*Some of those rituals included gambling and feasts.

*They believed that in order to drive out the demons, they had to address repressed desires.

*Smallpox spread among the Hurons.

*After only two years of being hit by an epidemic, the native people were infected by smallpox.

*They blamed the Jesuits since they were the outsiders that could have brought such a thing to them at that time.

*The Jesuit weren't doctors and so when they epidemic stroke, they were not of much help.

*Since they were men of the church, they believed the epidemic was a sign of God, and a way to punish the wicked.

* Instead of helping the suffering of the natives, they tried to save their souls by baptizesing the dying so their souls would go to heaven.

*Disease and Medicine.

Disease and MedicineThe way they “cured” medicine wasn’t as effective as they thought it was.They didn’t just use herbs in order to cure them, they also used rituals and had believes that weren’t very good.• When a man became sick on a mission, a shaman

doctor of the native people tried many of their medical practices in order to save him.

• He even pulled his dog teeth out thinking that those were the sources of the problem.

• Thinking it was the blood that was the problem, they baptized the son then bled him to death.

• Soon later the sister got sick as well, and jus like before they did the same thing.

• Since they all had died, they believed was because they had prayed to the sun to heal him, not God.

*Surroundings

*According to them, at one point even three suns appeared in the sky, and some days later it happened again.

*Strange things appeared on the sky, then some time later very violent earthquakes took place. Aftershocks of the earthquake kept on happening for six months!

*A comet slowly went across the sky.

*Fiery serpents would fly across the sky.

*Martyrs and Mystics *They are beat up with

clubs and sticks until they turn black and blue.

*Their finger nails are torn out with their teeth.

*Their limbs are burnt and their wounds would be scratched.

*Knives were stabbed through their palms.

*They were finally sacrificed for their blood.

The Iroquois dealt a great deal of torture to the Frenchmen.

The father can’t leave without the rest of the men so he hands himself in to the natives.

Saint Isaac Jogues becomes the first of the martyrs of new France, after being captured by a group of Iroqouis.