1In his field report of 1636, the French missionary Paul Le Jeune described an Innu (Montagnais) shaking tent ceremony that went differently than expected. According to Le Jeune, an unnamed female kakushapatak (ritual specialist, or shaman) led the ceremony after a male shaman failed to call the powerful beings who were supposed to enter the tent. Her singing worked, but the being she consulted — a powerful manitou, according to Le Jeune — ended up saying more than the priest wanted to hear.1 After predicting the death of a sick man and revealing an imminent Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) raid, the Manitou warned that the cannibal giant Atshen would devour the band if they went through with a plan to relocate to a mission settlement near the new French fort at ‘Trois-Rivières’.2 Nor would they find shelter from the Haudenosaunee there, as the Manitou boasted he would ‘cut the throats of the French themselves’.3

2Le Jeune’s account illustrates the high stakes of the sonic interactions that the Jesuits chronicled in Nitassinan (‘the land’, in Innu-Aimun).4 Shaking tents were ceremonial zones of contact between Innu bands and powerful other-than-human persons5 (animal elders, Mishtapeuat, or mythical beings), with the kakushapatak acting as a go-between whose singing and drumming could draw them into human experience.6 In this shaking tent, the tent itself was also a site of multiple conflicts: pitting Atshen against the band, Innu traditionalists against those favoring settlement, and the shaman against the priests.7 These struggles were political, to be sure, as the band’s members weighed protection from Haudenosaunee raids against French efforts to sedentarize them and control their lands.8 But they registered most immediately as a clash between Innu and French participants’ sensorial experience and understanding of the shaking tent, a clash between two very different modes of ‘world-hearing’.9

3In their 2005 edited volume Bodies in Contact, Tony Ballantyne and Antoinette Burton claim that ‘the body is in many ways the most intimate colony, as well as the most unruly’. Their argument for approaching ‘bodies as contact zones’ is helpful for understanding missionary interactions with First Nations like this one, as it acknowledges the centrality of somatic life to past colonial projects and to the people they targeted. ‘The body’, they write, ‘has, arguably, been crucial to the experience’ of colonial cultural interactions, and holds a distinctive ‘capacity as an archive for the pleasures of human experience and the violences of history’. Approaching past embodied experience relationally, as a zone of colonial ‘engagement’, also holds promise, they argue, as a way of making women and gender more visible in global history, because of ‘the extent to which women’s bodies (and, to a lesser degree, men’s) have been a subject of concern, scrutiny, anxiety, and surveillance in a variety of times and places across the world’.10 As their own case studies demonstrate, body praxes and their poetics have often furnished a basis for refusing coloniality, including colonial racism and misogyny.11

4Focusing on singing, instrument-playing, or listening ‘bodies in contact’ in Nitassinan directs our attention to the larger stakes of the sonic micro-interactions chronicled in the Jesuit Relations (1632–1673) and related archives. Although these sources have been important for Canadian and mission historians, the sonic interactions they detail have infrequently counted as part of the larger processes of colonial integration that reshaped northeastern Indigenous societies and landscapes in the seventeenth century. As importantly, these sources transmit histories of Innu, Algonkin, Abenaki, Wendat, Anishnaabe, and Haudenosaunee peoples ‘in contact’ with each other and with local other-than-human kin (like animal elders), including through song, dance, and listening. These trans-Indigenous and even trans-species layers of sonic interaction are less fully treated in the missionaries’ reports, because of the priests’ own limitations; yet they are crucial to understanding events as they unfolded on the ground, in ways that center Indigenous bodies of knowledge and practice.

5The specific case I consider is the sonic interaction among sub-Arctic Innu and other Algonkin bands and French Jesuit missionaries in the 1630s and 1640s — decades of real upheaval for Aboriginal people in Nitassinan. In the Relations that were issued during these years, singing and listening emerge as matters of concern for all sides in mission interactions, so much so that ‘listening to listening’ (reporting on others’ listening) is a recurring trope of the scenes that the missionaries described for readers.12 Sometimes their ‘listening to listening’ narratives focus on people using music writing technologies, in Aboriginal, European, and hybrid forms. As the annual Relations chronicled the missions across decades, we also get a sense of how listening practices changed over time, as Algonkian groups and French missionaries and settlers interacted more intensively and became more socially interconnected.

6My discussion will center on Innu-Jesuit interactions and the acoustemologies that shaped them. The Jesuits’ documentation of song, sound, and its auralities offers a perspective on the close, improvisatory engagement of Innu and French people in the Nitassinan missions. Focusing on this early moment of missionization is also useful for a global music historiography with decolonial aims, as the mission reports from these years show sovereign Aboriginal communities confronting the aspirations and consequences of French and English colonial projects that were still in their nascence. In hindsight, this was a transitional moment in the relationship between Innu and French communities, when Innu bands were deliberating how to respond to the changes they witnessed, while French missionaries and officials were trying, with mixed success, to exert control over them, their animal relations, and their lands.13

7This is why I approach the Innu hearing-based knowledge described in the Relations as a sovereign acoustemology. Labeling Innu bands’ acoustemologies ‘sovereign’ acknowledges the unconquered, place-specific sensoriums and intelligences that Innu people brought to their interactions with foreign missionaries. In addition, ‘sovereignty’ is a way of naming how Innu actors in the Relations legitimized certain ways of listening and relating sonically while refusing others, as well as refusing colonial ways of knowing that were tied to dispossession.

8This sense of an Innu ‘refusal’ of colonial body logics is indebted to the theorizing of Indigenous/First Nations/Métis scholars David Garneau (Métis), Audra Simpson (Mohawk), Leanne Simpson (Anishinaabeg) and, in music studies, Dylan Robinson (Stó: lō).14 As a settler musicologist specializing in France and the Francophone Atlantic, I am most familiar with missionary acoustemologies and have relied on ethnohistorical and ethnomusicological research for contextualizing the Innu sonic practices and philosophies that the Relations describe. Beyond this empirical research, contemporary Indigenous critical thought has been essential for the more culturally attuned, non-colonial perspective it offers on Indigenous/European sonic interactions: in particular, the acoustemological sovereignty, grounded in Innu norms and protocols, with which Innu actors seem to have countered French missionaries’ ‘hungry’ listening.15 I will say more about the concept of refusal in the conclusion, but for now will turn to what can be recovered of Innu and French Jesuit sonic knowledges from scenes of listening in the early mission reports.

Innu Acoustemologies

9By the 1630s, European projects of missionization, trade, and settlement had begun to transform the traditional Innu lands between Piyêkwâkami (Lac St-Jean) and the great river that the French called the Saint-Laurent, in present-day Québec (see Fig. 1.1).16 With the return of the French to the outpost of ‘Kébec’ in 1633 (after the brief English takeover in 1629), Innu communities began to experience disruptive changes in trade patterns, food resources, relations with the Haudenosaunee, and in the local microbiome, as epidemics of European diseases devastated their communities. The 1630s and 1640s also saw the establishment of mission settlements at Kâ Mihkwâwahkâsic (Sillery, from 1637) and near Trois-Rivières (‘La Conception’, from 1641).17 These réductions, as Le Jeune came to call them, were in many respects modeled on native Christian settlements that the Jesuits had established in Japan and Paraguay.18 Le Jeune, then the superior of the Canadian mission, meant for these settlements to serve the Jesuits’ efforts to convert migratory groups by inducing them to adopt a sedentary lifestyle and abandon their traditional ceremonies and performance. However, Innu people exercised considerable agency in deciding whether and how they would live there, and the winter season saw most able ‘residents’ return to a hunting-based lifestyle in the backcountry.19

10We do not have direct, seventeenth-century Innu accounts of their own ways of listening and knowing, although mission documents do transmit conversations, speeches, and songs by historical Innu people. In lieu of that, one possibility is to consult Innu oral historical accounts of analogous practices in the twentieth century (with the understanding that these reflect modern experiences). As an example, take Mary Madeline Nuna’s reflection on listening to shaking tents of the 1930s, outside the Innu reserve of Sheshatshu:

It’s like the way someone speaks to you. That’s the way it sounded from the shaking tent. It was very good fun. It is a great time and, when stories are being told, it’s like listening to a radio. When spirits speak from inside the tent, they might guide us where to hunt for the animals. […] You could talk to the spirits, the ones who you heard from inside there. Like, for example, the one who is called Mishtapeu — the One Who Owns the Animals. This spirit is heard through the shaking tent. And when the Mishtapeut (more than one spirit) sing, it is really good to listen to them, to the songs of the shaman. The Mishtapeut are really loud singers.20

11Nuna compared the shaking tent with another technology for transmitting sound, a ‘radio’, and pointed out what ‘a great time’ it was, hearing the spirits’ stories. The analogy of listening to a radio clearly stems from a modern Innu experience of transmitted sound, but it also recalls much earlier characterizations of the shaking tent as a means of long-distance communication, information transfer, and entertainment. I also appreciate Nuna’s observation that ‘the Mishtapeut are really loud singers’ for its humor and physical immediacy, which centers her enjoyment in listening.

12Le Jeune’s description of a shaking tent he attended in November, 1633, recalled that the shaman, ‘having entered […] shook this tabernacle gently at first, then, rousing himself little by little, he started to whistle dully and as if from a distance, then to speak as if in a bottle […]’.21 He also recorded various band members’ opinions on how the shaking tent transmitted voices. Some thought that the shaman was far away, while others thought his body was on the ground inside the tent while his soul was up above, where it called the animal elders. During this part of the ceremony, the shaman started

to cry like a screech owl of this region, which seems to me to have a louder voice than those of France, then to howl, sing, varying the tone at every stroke, finishing with these syllables, ho ho, hi hi gui gui nioué, and other similar ones, counterfeiting his voice, so that it seemed to me like hearing these marionettes that some showmen display in France. He spoke sometimes Montagnais, sometimes Algonkian, but always preserving the Algonkian accent, which is lively like Provençal.

13The kin-group led by the hunter Mestigoït, who hosted Le Jeune, was traveling in their hunting grounds south of the St. Lawrence River, and the shaman seems to have called the regional owl master, along with other animal elders. The priest also noted how loud the owl master’s voice was, as Nuna remarked of the Sheshatshu Mishtapeut. Unlike Nuna’s analogy of radio transmission, though, Le Jeune thought the shaman ventriloquized the animal elders’ voices, rejecting his hosts’ explanations and attributing the voices to a willed, human source.

14Witnessing each animal elder’s arrival was important for the ceremony’s success, and a ceremonial listening protocol guided participants’ interactions with them. Each time the voice from within the tent changed, participants ritually urged each other, ‘moa, moa’, which Le Jeune translated as ‘écoute, écoute’ [listen, listen]; then they collectively called on the animal master to enter. Once the first one had arrived, the assembly responded excitedly and asked the master to call his companions:

Now to return to our consultation, the Savages, having heard certain voices counterfeited by the charlatan, gave a cry of joy, saying that one of these Genies had entered: then, addressing themselves to him, cried, Tepouachi, tepouachi, call, call; which is to say, [call] your companions; at this, the jongleur called them, pretending to be a Genie [and] changing his tone and voice: meanwhile our sorcerer, who was present, took his drum, and the others responded, singing with the jongleur who was in the tabernacle.

15Members of Mestigoït’s band knew to listen to the voices in the tent with discernment, to welcome the first animal elder when he arrived, to respond supportively with singing and dancing, and to listen attentively to the news that they brought.

16Beyond the specific protocol recorded in this account, careful reading of other reports suggests more general characteristics of Innu acoustemologies. One of these is the cultivation of mediated listening practices, using materials like sticks, bark, or prepared skins that had long been used for record-keeping across the northeast. Some of these mediated listening practices, like the shaking tent protocol, clearly predated the missionaries’ arrival, while others developed in the middle decades of the seventeenth century as adaptations of existing Innu media to Catholic usage.

17An example of traditional mediated listening is the use of song record sticks, a form of graphic notation that helped ‘guide singers during the performance of long, complex ceremonies’.22 Le Jeune noticed Mestigoït’s band using a song record stick in a 1633 condolence ceremony that the manitousiou (lead shaman) Carigonan held in the lodge where the missionary was staying:

The 24th of November, the Sorcerer [le Sorcier, or manitousiou] assembled the Savages, and entrenched himself with some robes and blankets in part of the Cabin; so that neither he nor his companions could be seen: there was a woman with them who marked on a triangular stick [un baston triangulaire], half a spear’s length, all the songs that they sang.23

18A ‘hungry’ observer, Le Jeune listened closely to the listening of the ceremony’s participants, including that of the unnamed Innu woman who kept the song record.24 Despite his keen appetite for Innu knowledge, he didn’t learn much beyond the name of the ceremony (ouechibouan, according to Carigonan’s youngest brother, Pastedechouan):

I asked a woman to tell me what they were doing in this enclosure, she responded that they were praying, but I believe that she gave me this response because, when I prayed, and they asked me what I was doing, I said to them, Nataïamihiau missi Khichitât, I am praying to him who made everything: and thus when they sang, when they howled, beating their drums and their sticks, they said to me that they were making their prayers, without being able to explain to me to whom they addressed them.25

19The Jesuit’s hosts deflected his questioning about ceremonial practices, and their purpose, that were clearly secret, or at least not for him to know. Tellingly, the woman whom he consulted seems to have translated what was going on into terms the priest could understand — prayer — while declining to satisfy his curiosity, whether from language difficulties (due to Le Jeune’s level of comprehension) or as an act of refusal.

20The song record stick that Le Jeune described resembles a later Osage stick that Victoria Lindsay Levine included in her anthology, Writing American Indian Music. As with the Osage stick, the Innu one had notches along its length, one for each song sung by Carigonan and his associates. As a mnemonic aid, the stick seems to have allowed the woman who used it to keep track of which songs had been sung and where the singers were in the long ceremony. I think it is fair to think of this woman’s use of the song stick (following Levine) as a form of music writing.26

21This does not mean, however, that the Innu woman’s use of the song stick resembled the musical notation that European observers used to transcribe Indigenous singing, or even Le Jeune’s own habitual use of a notebook or erasable tablet in the field. Beverley Diamond contrasts this kind of Indigenous song record with the writing practiced by early modern Europeans, which focused on recording ‘details’ and aimed at ‘fixing’ events in historical time:

The role of print documents created by Euroamericans often fixes things. Consider, by comparison, such records as Osage or Omaha ‘song counting sticks’, Haudenosaunee Condolence canes, Passamaquoddy Wampum Records, Navajo jish, or Anishnabe ‘song scrolls’. They record historical practices in order not to establish a record for posterity but to perpetuate practice by stimulating memory. They do not describe details but include images that, in an abbreviated form, symbolize processes of receiving knowledge (through dreams, for instance), relationships, or ritual forms, the substance of which is kept only in living tradition. […] They serve as mnemonic aids in performance situations, thus not fixing but enabling the renewal and re-performance of historical reference points.27

22Similarly, the stick that Mestigoït’s band used seems to have tracked the sound of voices and drums and helped guide the ritual performers through the cycle of songs across a long performance. In this, it mediated the performers’ listening, and it may also have enabled — in Diamond’s words — ‘the renewal and re-performance of historical reference points’ in the band’s past.

23Listening to participants’ listening in ceremonial settings was a fixture of the Jesuits’ early field reports in Nitassinan and Wendake (Wendat territory), and the priests paid careful attention to the media used in ceremonies while trying to determine their purpose and meaning. This was an interested scrutiny, of course, as the Jesuits were known for their readiness to adapt their evangelizing methods to local languages, artistic cultures, and media. (The adaptive process ran in the other direction, as well, as missionized groups often integrated aspects of the Jesuits’ teachings, music among them, into existing sacred knowledge and performance.) Whatever the impetus in this case, by the mid-1640s Innu and other Algonkin Christians were using traditional writing technologies, including song record sticks, as aids in Catholic devotion and worship.

24In the 1640s, the Jesuits largely relinquished the work of evangelizing Innu bands to baptized part-time residents of the mission villages along the St. Lawrence.28 Jerome Lalemant’s letter in the Relation of 1645 and 1646 reports that baptized Innus at the mission of Tadoussac had begun adapting French Catholic practices for themselves by the spring of 1646, and some of them used record sticks and bark writing as mnemonic aids for confession. Either Tadoussac Innus or the priest also adapted their record stick technology for use by baptized band leaders during their seasonal hunting journeys. Each of the three bands received five ‘books’, as the Jesuits put it, recording key Catholic teachings and practices: ‘The Father, needing to depart from these good neophytes, left them five books or five chapters of a book made in their way; these books were no other than five sticks variously fashioned, in which they are to read what the Father has persistently taught them’.29

25Of special interest for musicologists is the third stick, which apparently worked much like the song stick used in Carigonan’s condolence ceremony of November, 1634:

The third is a red stick, on which is written that which they must do on Sundays and Feasts, how they must all assemble in a big cabin, hold public prayers, sing cantiques spirituels, and above all, listen to him who will keep these books or these sticks, and who will interpret them for the whole assembly.

26The band leaders kept the sticks and presented them periodically, perhaps to recall the relationship established with the Jesuits at Tadoussac:

It is a truly innocent pleasure to see these new preachers hold these books or these sticks in one hand, pull one out with the other [hand], and present it to their audience with these words: ‘Behold the stick or the Massinahigan’, that is to say, ‘the book of superstitions, it is our Father who has written it himself. He tells you that it is only the priests who can say mass and hear confessions, that our drums, our sweats, and our trembling breasts are inventions of the manitou or of the bad demon who wants to deceive us’, and likewise with all those other wooden books, which serve them as well as the most gilded volumes of a Royal Library.30

27It is hard to tell from this account how or why the band leaders used the adapted record sticks, including the third stick for Catholic prayers and songs. Perhaps the Jesuits did indeed appropriate Algonkin record stick technology for their own purposes, as Lalemant’s report suggests. Or perhaps they followed the lead of baptized Tadoussac Innus who had already adapted record sticks for their own use.

28Regardless of who initiated this usage and why, two things are clear. First, the Innu leaders’ use of the record sticks likely meant something quite different to their bands than to the priests, who brought a fundamentally French perspective on religious books and authority. If, as I think is likely, the leaders’ record stick recitation drew Catholic practices into an Innu spiritual and diplomatic orbit, band members would also presumably have listened and participated in familiar ways. This includes habits of mediated listening, with song record sticks, inculcated across generations of ceremonial practice.

29Other scenes of listening and exchange in Le Jeune’s earlier Relations hint at features of Innu acoustemologies that endured into the twentieth century. For example, the 1634 report paraphrases a conversation in which his hosts were surprised that the Jesuit did not pay attention to or give credence to dreams, in which other-than-human persons could appear to them and share knowledge and practices, including songs. As he put it, ‘Our Savages asked me nearly every morning, did you not dream of Beavers, or of Moose when you were sleeping? and when they saw that I ridiculed dreams, they were astonished, and asked me what do you believe in, then, if you do not believe in your dreams?’.31 As Diamond and other ethnomusicologists have noted, listening to dreams was and is a fundamentally important Innu way of living in nutshimit; and it is also a source of songs (nikamuna), accompanied with the snare-strung frame drum called the teueikan.32 Le Jeune’s failure to do so was astonishing to Mestigoït’s kin, and they rejected his explanation as nonsensical, in another instance of refusal. Responding to the Jesuit’s assertion that he believed in the God ‘who made everything’, they reportedly said, ‘you are out of your mind. How can you believe in him if you have not seen him?’ (probably meaning, ‘seen him in your dreams’).33

30As for listening to the French, Le Jeune reports that they compared the priests’ singing to bird song: ‘They say we imitate the chirping of birds in our songs, which they do not disapprove, as nearly all of them take pleasure when they sing or hear others sing; and despite my telling them that I understood nothing about it, they often invited me to chant some air or prayer’.34 This story suggests that Mestigoït’s family members listened with ears accustomed to enjoying and interpreting song created by both human and other-than-human persons, such as birds. It also indicates the value they placed on ‘responsible reciprocity’, here in inviting the priest to join them in singing, by exchanging songs.35 One of Mestigoït’s favorite songs apparently voiced this core social value of reciprocity and mutual accountability, repeating a three-word text (‘Kaie, nir, khigatoutaouim’) that Le Jeune translated as, ‘and you will also do something for me’.36

31The scenes documented in the Relations suggest various modes of listening habitual to Innu hunters, shamans, healers, diplomats, and ceremonial participants, some of which were highly skilled while others were more casual. However, some commonalities do emerge. The Innu people who interacted with missionaries seem to have listened in ways attuned to the immanent world, to dreams, and to communication with human and other-than-human persons. Shared values like reciprocity informed listening norms and protocols, and ingrained, locally grounded listening habits and knowledges proved resilient in the face of priests’ efforts to change them.

32In contrast, the missionaries’ listening has been described as inquisitorial, and it reflected a distinctly Jesuit attitude of enchanted skepticism, weighing sensory evidence with a bias toward natural explanations but an openness to the supernatural.37 As I show in the next section, this mode of listening, which pervades the Relations of the 1630s and 1640s, aimed at determining the fundamental reality of sound and song and assigning it a Christian moral value. Unlike their professional counterparts (Innu ritual leaders and healers), Jesuit missionaries sought to extract rationalist knowledge of what they heard, and they or their superiors worked to use this knowledge in support of conversion and colonization.

Jesuit Acoustemology in Nitassinan

33Returning to the shaking tent ceremony of 1633, discussed above, the difference between Le Jeune’s listening and that of his hosts is striking, and it has much to tell us about the ceremony as a ‘zone of [sonic] engagement’. ‘I was seated like the others’, he wrote, ‘observing this fine mystery, forbidden to speak: but as I had never promised them obedience, I did not hold back from saying a little something to the contrary’.38 His refusal to respect his host’s protocol asking for his silence was, even in a non-ceremonial setting, a violation of the Innu ethic of reciprocal respect and obligation as the basis for good relations. In a ceremonial context, it amounted to an attempt at desecration.

34If Le Jeune’s listening made little sense in the context of Innu protocols, it did faithfully reflect French Jesuit ways of listening to and interpreting sound, especially in ritual settings. The missionary’s aural habits, and the knowledge he drew from listening, were shaped early on by his preparatory training in Catholic theology and philosophy.39 He came to the priesthood as a teenage convert from Calvinism, and it is possible that this Huguenot upbringing also informed his outlook on song and its significance. However, more immediately relevant in the 1630s, when Le Jeune penned his field reports, was his Jesuit colleagues’ involvement in possession cases in France and in the foreign missions.40 Indeed, Le Jeune’s inquisitorial approach to sound and song in his 1630s reports would have been familiar to French readers from the period’s possession literature — most recently, the sensational reports out of Loudun of the Ursuline Jeanne des Anges’ demonic affliction.41 There, exorcists, including the Jesuit Jean-Joseph Surin, engaged in spiritual combat with the Christian devil by listening carefully to demoniacs’ speech and song, evaluating it for signs of diabolical presence, and by chanting the rite of exorcism in return.

35This is not to suggest that Le Jeune heard diabolical influence at every turn, even in shamanic chants and songs. On the contrary, his reports stress his empirical and skeptical orientation. The 1634 Relation was the first of the Jesuits’ North American field reports written with publication in mind, and Le Jeune’s preface takes care to underline the empirical basis for his account, including his ear-witness:

Everything that I will say regarding the Savages I either saw with my own eyes or I drew from the mouths of those of this country, namely from an old man well versed in their doctrine and from many others with whom I passed a little less than six months, following them in the woods so as to learn their language.42

36In addition to emphasizing the empirical, Le Jeune often practiced a skeptical listening, as when he accused Innu shaking tent specialists of ‘counterfeiting’ the voices that participants heard emanating from the tent.

37Still, if his listening was skeptical, it was not disenchanted. He often speculated whether the vocal and physical wonders he witnessed in shaking tent and other trance practices were in ‘fact’ inspired by the Christian devil. This enchanted skepticism was in keeping with Jesuit responses to vocal trance performance (as in possession) in European contexts, but it took on new significance in the context of colonial missionization, where religious reform and land dispossession went hand-in-hand.

38The Jesuits’ efforts to convert Innu people depended in part on inciting them to cultivate an orthodox Catholic aurality in themselves. This aim was biblically authorized, as Le Jeune himself pointed out. ‘Fides ex auditu’, he wrote in 1633 to his superior in Paris, ‘Faith enters by hearing’.43 As he would have anticipated, educated French readers of the popular printed Relations would have automatically filled in the second half of the verse that Le Jeune quoted: ‘ergo fides ex auditu auditus autem per verbum Christi’ (‘therefore faith enters by hearing, but hearing by the word of God’).44 Transforming hearing (‘auditus’) through scripture was a fundamental aim, because the Jesuits knew from their experience in other missions that the human sensorium could be a matrix of right understanding, as well as a portal for what they derided as superstition.

39One of the key changes the priests sought was to weaken communities’ attachment to their own healers and ritual leaders, and they encouraged skeptical listening in traditional rites. In the mission towns, this effort seems to have partly succeeded: Le Jeune reported, in the 1638 Relation, ‘the sorcerers and jugglers have lost so much of their credit that they no longer blow upon any sick person, nor beat their drums, except perhaps at night, or in isolated places, but no longer in our presence’.45 Other factors contributed to the public abandonment of traditional rituals in mission towns, especially the higher death rate due to epidemics and intensified warfare; but the priests’ relentless campaign against Innu peoples’ own sovereign sensorium took its toll.

40For his part, Le Jeune often expressed pleasure in witnessing the fruits of this labor, particularly in hearing Innu, Algonkin, or Wendat neophytes singing Catholic music. The seminaries that the Jesuits established in the late 1630s taught children to sing basic Catholic prayers in their own languages, following the practice established in earlier missions in Japan and Paraguay.46 With the Innu children who visited the Jesuit residence in Quebec in 1633, Le Jeune used a catechism and translations of Latin prayers that he made in collaboration with his Innu language teacher, Pierre-Antoine Pastedechouan:

After the departure of my teacher, I gathered up and arranged in order a part of what he had taught me […]. I began to compose something in the way of a Catechism, or on the principles of the faith. Taking my paper in hand, I began to call a few children by ringing a little bell. I have them say the Pater, the Ave, and the Credo in their language […]. We finish with a Pater noster that I have composed almost in rhyme, in their language, which I have them sing; and, in conclusion, I have each one of them given a bowlful of peas, which they enjoy very much. When there are many of them, I give only to those who have answered well. It is a pleasure to hear them sing in the woods what they have learned.47

41Aural pleasure is not perhaps what we think of in mission settings, but its expression (in Catholic performance settings) is as common across the Relations as expressions of the priests’ displeasure at hearing traditional singing and drumming.

42One of the more striking accounts is in the 1637 Relation, where Le Jeune appreciated the sound of young Wendat (Huron) and Innu catechists singing in services alongside the French in Quebec, sometimes in multiple languages at once:

It is a sweet confusion to hear them sing publicly in our Chapel the symbol of the Apostles [the Credo] in their language. Now, in order to encourage them more, our French sing a strophe of it in our language, then the seminarians another in Huron, and then all together sing a third, each in his language with a lovely agreement. This pleased them so much that they make this holy and sacred song resound everywhere; they are also made to respond publicly to the questions of the catechism, in order to ground them well and establish their faith. I have heard the French, the Montagnais, and the Hurons sing all together the articles of our belief, and although they use three languages, they agree so nicely that it is a great pleasure to hear them.48

43If the missionary was correct, the pleasure at these alternatim performances of the Credo was widely shared, so much so that the Wendat catechists sang it for pleasure outside of services. Inculcating enjoyment of Catholic singing was the positive counterpart to the missionaries’ discouragement of traditional singing and its pleasures. But it is the missionary’s own pleasure in listening that emerges again and again in passages like this, tinged at times with a sense of wonder.

44This is a discursive trope of the Relations, to be sure, yet Le Jeune was also unusually attuned to music and sound in his reports. There is every reason to suppose that when he or his editors described his aural pleasure in Indigenous Catholic song, this was grounded in genuine evangelical enjoyment based in field experience. However, it was also shared with French readers in the published Relations for devotional purposes, as an ‘affective script’ for imagined sensory experience like those published by French Jesuits in meditative literature of the period (including the Affectus Amantis by a Jesuit missionary to Wendake, Pierre Chastellain).49 As a French reader in France or Quebec, imagining oneself listening in Le Jeune’s place was in keeping with the pedagogy of the senses that the Jesuits pursued on multiple fronts.

45However, learning to listen like a Catholic in Nitassinan or Wendake may have involved a more drastic transformation, depending on the extent to which individuals adapted Catholic aural habits to their accustomed ones. From the perspective of a locally grounded Innu acoustemology, French Jesuit practices of listening to and writing down songs and their meanings, in notebooks and tablets, were profoundly alien: alphabetic, analytical, skeptical… hungry.

Singing and Hearing as Zones of Colonial Engagement

46I cannot stop thinking about the Innu and Wendat children Le Jeune described singing and hearing themselves sing Catholic songs. Maybe it is because I read his reports from the missions’ early years knowing something of the subsequent horrors of Canada’s residential schools for First Nations and Métis children (1831–1996), many of which were run by the Church.50 Ultimately, it is not possible to verify mission reports of Indigenous affective experience, especially at such a remove, but knowing what we do of the centuries since, it is worth approaching such reports with caution. It is entirely plausible, for instance, that the children who visited the Jesuits’ house in 1633 enjoyed learning to sing the Pater, as the priest wrote; yet they were also probably driven by hunger (that ‘bowlful of peas’).

47‘The body is in many ways the most intimate colony, as well as the most unruly’.51 What does emerge clearly from the Jesuit reports is a sense of multiple projects converging on these young people’s singing and listening, as well as that of their elders. The priests targeted catechists’ singing and listening for reform, limiting their performance of their own songs and enforcing discipline with corporal punishment that Innu people found abhorrent. Those relatives who sent children to the priests did so for multiple reasons: to dispose of orphans, for diplomacy, for feeding and sheltering, and to have them taught the priests’ language and religion. Their sensory formation, including hearing, was just one component of their training. But the Relations’ persistent attention to Indigenous listening, singing, drumming, and dancing underlines the salience of the body as a zone of colonial engagement, as well as the body’s ambiguity as a site of colonial control. The priests’ attempts to train the children’s singing and listening bodies was colonial in effect; yet the children and their relatives also engaged them in this training for reasons that were outside the priests’ control or even, possibly, their understanding.

48What is illuminating in Ballantyne and Burton’s call to take ‘the body as method’, in the context of this volume, is its valuation of bodied sonic experience (and the understanding this yields) as a site where colonial or other globalizing processes hit home, and at a deep level.52 While postcolonial historians and theorists have long noted the importance of bodily processes for colonial ones, world historians have not conventionally worked with the visceral, sensory, subjective, or meaning-making aspects of large-scale phenomena like missionization and colonialization. Nor have Indigenous and women’s histories been centered in most world histories, with some exceptions. Global historians like Ballantyne, Burton, Ken Coates, and Merry Wiesner-Hanks have been pressing for this for some time, in part by taking stock of archives and repositories of memory, like bodies and their knowledges, that their discipline had not considered important.

49Among other things, they note, the body’s ideological usefulness for colonial powers has tended ‘to exclude from view the very real stories […] that it has to tell’.53 Music scholars are used to dealing with what people do with their bodies in music-making and listening, though historical musicologists have relied mostly on textual and other material sources in studying the distant past. For musicologists working on the early modern period, one of the challenges is that the usual sources for early Canadian music history (mission reports and correspondence, catechisms, prayer and hymnbooks in Indigenous languages) are heavily invested in depicting Indigenous people’s bodies singing or listening in prescribed ways, although they do transmit information about actual, non-ideal sonic embodiment that can be read and re-purposed critically. Paying closer, critical attention to traces of embodied life in these sources is one way of listening past what their authors wanted us to hear, for other embedded histories. This includes histories involving Indigenous women and girls as agents, such as the shaking tent specialist who warned her audience against relocation, or the song keeper who protected sacred knowledge in the 1634 condolence ceremony.

50Reading against the grain in this way is important, and by now it is a standby tactic of postcolonial music history, although centering body practices and knowledges is not. Even more important is starting from the premise of Indigenous sovereignty and agency when using colonial sources, especially those dealing with unconquered peoples and unceded lands. Innu bands interacted with missionaries in ways that were effectively sovereign, although they did not conceive of it in those terms. In just one example of cultural sovereignty, Innu Christians like Pastedechouan were integral to translating Latin and French songs and prayers for communal use, and from parallel cases in later missions we can presume that their own sense of the sacred and aesthetic preferences shaped this corpus.54 Sovereignty, self-determination, and ‘generative refusal’ are also principles of the analytical frames we bring to histories of music in Native/European interactions, because these remain guiding principles of many First Nations’ struggles with ongoing Canadian and U.S. colonization today.

51What can we learn, then, by taking bodied practices and knowledges of the early modern past as starting points for global music history? What stories do they distinctively have to tell? For myself, I can say that starting with Innu and French bodies and body knowledges in this essay has brought out the intimate worldliness of sonic interactions in the French missions, even after having worked with this archive for nearly two decades. Centering bodily experience of hearing and sounding has also led me to a stronger sense of the actors’ groundedness in particular environments and situations, and the dependence of their meaning-making on those factors.

52Read carefully and with an ear for what they do not say, early mission archives like these do sometimes hold evidence of past interactions in which Indigenous acoustemologies successfully confronted colonial projects aimed at subalternizing their sonic ways of being, making, and knowing. I offer this study, then, as a portrait of Innu refusal and survival in the long-ago, early colonial past, in the hope that it may in some way further decolonial resurgence work in the present.