Crosses in the Sky. Mark Bourne. 2024. 446 Pages. (Ebook on Libby.)

This history covers the fraught multidimensional relationships between the British, French, and Dutch colonists, the many and constantly changing Indigenous nations of what is now mostly Ontario and New York State, and the fraught battle to convert the Natives to Catholic Christianity between 1620 and 1650, with peak success, and then utter failure.

The central character in much of the story is the lauded Father St. Jean de Brebeuf, a dedicated but highly controversial priest, now a saint, but also a delusional hallucinating individual who might be considered a schizophrenic. His weird visual hallucinations were only outdone by the even weirder beliefs and visions of the native Hurons of southern Georgian Bay and Saint Mary’s.

The various Native nations seemed to compete with each other to invent ever more ingenious methods off torturing their opponents, mainly with axes and fire, but also by scalding with boling water that mocked the baptisms that priests insisted were essential to avoid eternal hellfire, and were widely applied to dying children. The plagues of smallpox and influenza that was blamed on the priests decimated the native populations. The widespread pracice of cannibalism of tortured enemy bodies was never condemned even by the Christians.

There are hints that some writing was assisted with AI with such nonsensical sentences as «  If he leaned backwards, he his chest was scorched, » and. « ….the Neutrals appeared to be taller and better proportioned that the Hurons. »

Some of the description of torture defies logic with exaggeration. How could anyone still be alive after having been scalped, both hands and feet cut off, and still crawling and shouting at his tormentors?

In our high school history classes, the very simplistic teaching was that the Hurons, the Chippewas, Senecas, and the Oneidas were friendly pleasant people while the Iroquois and Mohawk were hostile, primitive cruel warriors. There was no discussion of the shifting alliances and ever changing names of umbrella organizations that continue to confuse me, nor any detailed revelations of the territories they occupied.

I found the maps confusing and unhelpful in spite of being reasonably familiar with most of the

territory. And the hundreds of foreign long names of natives were equally confusing.

Only dedicated scholars of the history of Ontario will find this book even remotely useful.

2.5/5

Thanks, Tom.