Panel: Autobiographical Accounts of Native-White Colonial Encounters
Copanelists: Bärbel Höttges and Elźbieta Klimek Dominiak
Between the years 1840 and 1880, Father Pierre-Jean De Smet, S.J., traveled throughout the Pacific Northwest and Midwestern Plains, where he administered to the faith of thousands of Native Americans. A skilled negotiator, trusted by both the Native American tribes and the US Government, he served as an ambassador between the parties several times during the primary years of tension (1855–1875). While many of De Smet’s reports still exist in English at St. Louis University, he wrote the majority of his private journals and reports to his superiors in French, his native language, which remains largely untranslated.
Not surprisingly, there is a discord between De Smet’s official reports in English and his private thoughts in French. On one hand, Father De Smet has often been portrayed in Pacific Northwestern regional history as an active participant in peace activities between the Native Americans and the US Government; on the other hand, his personal writings show more of a worn, ambivalent, and Eurocentric man. Instead of lamenting the political atmosphere around him, from the Whitman Massacre to the reservation policies by the Bureau of Indian Affairs, De Smet chooses to detail the natural environment around him. Moreover, his mentions of the Native Americans with whom he comes into contact during his journeys are only in relation to their marriages or baptisms.
This contradiction between history and personal thought creates an interesting problem for the translator of De Smet: how can his ambivalence and ethnocentrism be reconciled with his services as peacemaker and negotiator? In my paper, I explore this dichotomy and how Pierre-Jean De Smet relates to the Native Americans through his descriptions of picturesque nature as a key to deciphering the man as a literary and historical character.
Arianne Margolin received a BA in French and a BA in Physics from the University of Montana in 2006. From 2006–2007, she was a research assistant and French-English translator at the University of Montana’s Regional Learning Project, where she translated over 2,000 original documents written by Native Americans and Jesuit priests living in the Pacific Northwest from 1840–1880. She and her research mentor, Dr. Sally Thompson, are working toward the publication of an original translation of the newly discovered 1840–1860 journal of noted Indian Affairs negotiator Pierre-Jean De Smet, S.J. During the 2007–2008 academic year, she studied French Literature and Image-Text Relations at the Université de Toulouse 2-Le Mirail in France. While in France, she also served as co-director of the University of Montana’s first Eighteenth Century Studies Conference, which took place in April 2008. In Summer 2008, Arianne will receive her MA in 18thcentury French Literature from the University of Montana. Starting in Fall 2008, she will begin work toward a PhD in French Literature at the University of Colorado-Boulder. Currently, her projects include a full English translation and expansion of her MA thesis entitled The Epistolary Laboratory in the Scientific Works of the Marquise du Châtelet, and a paper on the popularization of science and image-text relations within French Renaissance Scientific Poetry of the sixteenth century.