Ghost Brothers: Adoption of a French Tribe by Bereaved Native America

John Abbott is a professor of history at Laurentian University’s Algoma University College. He is the co-author of The Border at Sault Ste Marie and The History of Fort St. Joseph.

Rony Blum contends that “despite Jesuit projects, the early life of
the settlement trained French North Americans from birth that Native
life would give them the cultural tools they needed to enable their
survival and advancement as well as that of the settlement.” So
intimate were these associations, she argues, that the “cult of the
ancestors,” which retained credibility in 17th-century Normandy and
Brittany, easily meshed with similar Native American beliefs. Native
assumptions were reinvigorated by the need to come to terms with the
extinction of entire communities as a result of pestilence and war. How
was one to manage the “ghosts” of such disasters?

Much of Ghost Brothers is a more sophisticated restatement of the
argument advanced by the environmentalist school of Canadian history,
which went from strength to strength in the first half of the 20th
century.

Dr. Blum describes her own methodology as one that “integrates the
multidisciplinarity of cross-examined space and time, environment,
socioeconomics, anthropology, and psychology with relevant asides from
literature and philosophy. It historically contextualizes and integrates
the macroanalytical approach of sociological structuralism with the
microanalyses of symbolic interactionists, and it alternates between
etic … and emic … perspectives. This was done in an attempt to
examine the multilevel problematique in the round, looking out from the
inside.”

Fortunately, Dr. Blum is as competent in English as she is in
sociological jargon, and the advanced generalist as well as the
specialist should have no trouble following her arguments.