The North American Martyrs, also known as the Canadian Martyrs or the Martyrs of New France, were eight Jesuit missionaries from Sainte-Marie among the Hurons, who were brutally tortured and martyred in the mid-17th century in Canada, in what are now southern Ontario and upstate New York, during the warfare between the Iroquois and the Huron.
The Martyrs are St. Jean de Brébeuf (1649), St. Noël Chabanel (1649), St. Antoine Daniel (1648), St. Charles Garnier (1649), St. René Goupil (1642), St. Isaac Jogues (1646), St. Jean de Lalande (1646), and St. Gabriel Lalemant (1649).
By the late 1640s the Jesuits appeared to have been making more progress in their mission to the Huron, and they claimed to have made many converts at this time. Nevertheless, within Huron communities, the priests were not universally trusted. Many Hurons considered them to be malevolent shamans who brought death and disease wherever they travelled. Their arrival had coincided with epidemics after 1634 of smallpox and other infectious diseases, to which aboriginal peoples had no immunity. (Epidemiological studies have shown the diseases were likely carried by the increased number of children immigrating after 1634 with families from cities in nations where smallpox was endemic, such as France, England and the Netherlands). The Iroquois considered the Jesuits legitimate targets, as the missionaries were nominally allies of the Huron. They had often helped organize resistance to Iroquois invasions.
Read more about North American Martyrs: Honors
Famous quotes containing the words north american, north, american and/or martyrs:
“The Anglo-Saxon hive have extirpated Paganism from the greater part of the North American continent; but with it they have likewise extirpated the greater portion of the Red race. Civilization is gradually sweeping from the earth the lingering vestiges of Paganism, and at the same time the shrinking forms of its unhappy worshippers.”
—Herman Melville (1819–1891)
“We should declare war on North Vietnam.... We could pave the whole country and put parking strips on it, and still be home by Christmas.”
—Ronald Reagan (b. 1911)
“Anglo-Saxon civilization has taught the individual to protect his own rights; American civilization will teach him to respect the rights of others.”
—William Jennings Bryan (1860–1925)
“Many a woman shudders ... at the terrible eclipse of those intellectual powers which in early life seemed prophetic of usefulness and happiness, hence the army of martyrs among our married and unmarried women who, not having cultivated a taste for science, art or literature, form a corps of nervous patients who make fortunes for agreeable physicians ...”
—Sarah M. Grimke (1792–1873)