Fathers and Crows by William T. Vollmann

And the Old Men met to discuss the question.  But while many hated the Black-Gowns, they said:   We fear the Iroquois too much to rid ourselves of them.  Only the Black-Gowns can save us now, for are they not Sorcerers?

So those who loved dreams lost once and for all.  Now they must pay the forfeit.  Throughout the vastness of Canada, they must pay, and they would, patiently, as the Souriquois did when they had lost the gambling-game of Waltes, as the Hiroquois did, as the Huron did, even when they gambled away their wives and wigwams, their hair and fingers... This time they'd gambled away everything.  And the Wendat stripped themselves to render presents and presents--more than ever in their history--until those called Charcoal were satisfied.

That's right, I did read this 860-pp. book in the first five days of 2020.  (Or maybe I started it just after Christmas to pad my early reading stats--I'll never tell.)  It seems clear that Vollmann, as he has gone on and on in his "Seven Dreams" series detailing interactions between Europeans and indigenous peoples in North America, has really leaned into the idea that every little detail is worth capturing; this novel is even fatter than Argall, the story of Jamestown and Pocahontas.  (But slimmer still than The Dying Grass, a 1500-pp. account of the Nez Perce War published in 2015--the final two unreleased novels must run into the 2000-pp. mark!)  You might wonder why 800 more pages are necessary to tell a story that's more or less contemporaneous with Jamestown, even though its focus is on the colonizing of the French rather than the English.  (How different could they be?)

But while there's a lot of overlap (the perfidious English Captain Argall even appears here, to sack the French Acadian outpost of Port-Royal), Fathers and Crows turns the focus away from the resource-lust of capitalism to the process of Christianization.  The story Vollmann wants to tell here, in his circuitous, laborious way, is the 17th century conversion of the Huron by Jesuit missionaries.

But he has to get there through the capitalism part: The first 500 pages or so focus on the central figure of Champlain, who lead the process of French exploration and expansion into Canada. Vollmann's version of Champlain is a humorless, practical-minded man, who is driven not really by patriotism or greed (like the English sailors of Argall), but by an insatiable need to map the extent of Canada.  For decades, Champlain dreams of mapping every river and lake in this new world, thinking that when he gets to the other side of it he will at last have found China--more or less completing the map of the world.  Of course, we know what Champlain could not: just how big Canada really is.

The Jesuits that come after Champlain have a different kind of map in mind.  One of the central images of the novel is the "Stream of Time," which comes to be identified both with the mighty St. Lawrence River and the spiritual exercises of St. Ignatius Loyola, which the Jesuits use to turn their mind from worldly things and focus only on God.  For the Jesuits in the new world, the spiritual exercises can be conceived of as a series of rapids in a narrowing river, just like the St. Lawrence, at the end of which lies God, after a perilous journey of danger and self-mortification.  As the "Stream of Time," the image evokes a future Canada that has been both Frenchified and Christianized.

But those who can "see ahead"--a group of related native women including the first Native American saint, Kateri Tekakwitha--know that the future is more complicated for both Native Americans and the French, both of whom will find themselves on the margins of an Anglicized Canada.  The Jesuits succeed in converting the Huron, but what they don't suspect is that the Huron, along with the Jesuit mission, will be destroyed by Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) warriors.  Are the Jesuits successful, or not?

One thing I like about Vollmann's novels is this: While he avoids fetishizing or romanticizing the Huron, his sympathies are clearly against the colonizers--here, the Jesuits.  The dedication reads, "This book is dedicated against all dogmatists and their armies... Whoever they are, I cordially wish them a warm stay in Hell."  Vollmann suggests there are dogmatists, too, among the nations of North America, especially the Huron and Haudenosaunee who have developed practices of ritually torturing their enemies.

Yet there's no question that what the Jesuits inflict upon the Huron is a crime of a greater order of magnitude: what the Jesuits desire is not just to Christianize the Huron but to eliminate their indigeneity and turn them into good little Frenchmen and Frenchwomen.  They're aided in this by war, famine, and disease; they grimly insist that God will save the Huron from horrible epidemics of smallpox if they put their faith in Jesus even as we know that it is the Jesuits themselves who have brought the disease with them.  If nothing else, the length of Fathers and Crows gives Vollmann enough space to give a convincing portrayal of how an entire nation might be converted to Christianity from their traditional beliefs over a single generation.

On the other hand, even Vollmann's portrayal of the Jesuits is complex.  "Unlike the Greenlanders in the previous volume," he writes, speaking of The Ice-Shirt, "they strove to do good. -- Were they good, then?"  There's no easy answer to that question here, but Vollmann stops to give an account of a Jesuit missionary, Roberto de Nobili, who brought Christianity to India by adapting to local dress and customs, instead of trying to eliminate them.  "So, if it had to be done at all," Vollmann writes, "it could have been done that way in Canada.  It could have been done."  Like Kateri Tekakwitha, like the native women Born Swimming and Born Underwater, who have the "seeing-ahead," Vollmann has a vision that things at least might have been different.

Although I love these books, I'm not sold on the idea that they need to cover every detail, or be so freaking large.  The strongest of them, to me, is still The Rifles, and it's the shortest.  As in all of them, Vollmann plays with anachronism here, jumping forward to the Montreal and Quebec of 1989, but the pleasures of these time-jumps get lost in the shuffle.  But there are other pleasures in Fathers and Crows: the detailed, attentive portrayal of early modern Huron, Haudenosaunee, and Innu natives; the water monster Gougou, created from a discarded scalp, that haunts Native and Jesuit alike at the bottom of the St. Lawrence.  More than anyone, Vollmann really knows how to describe the monsters of history that haunt us still today.