BONDUEL (Fl.-J.)

Tableau comparatif entre la condition morale des tribus Indiennes de l'etat du Wisconsin.

A RARE WORK ON MENOMINEE ARTEFACTS

First edition. 2 plates. 8vo. Publisher’s printed yellow wrappers, spine perished, some minor spotting. 27, [1]pp. Tournai, J. Casterman et Fils, 1855.

£5,000.00

A rare pamphlet describing “moral tradition” and Native artefacts from the state of Wisconsin, written by a Belgian Catholic Missionary. Illustrated with two plates, the text describes wooden statuettes, small bows and arrows, eagle feather and snakeskin ornaments, emetic shells, good and bad medicine, magic, totems, etc., created mostly by the people of the Menominee Nation.

Father Florimond Joseph Bonduel (1799-1861) was born in West Flanders, and emigrated to the United States as a missionary in 1831. In 1834 he became the first priest to be ordained at St Ann’s Cathedral in the newly-established diocese of Detroit.

He was transferred from Detroit to a mission outpost on Mackinac Island, where he lived and worked amongst the Menominee people and the French-Canadian trading community. He immersed himself in Menominee culture, and was sympathetic to their rights. When the Madison legislature proposed their removal to the Crow Wing River, Bonduel appealed against this motion.

Bonduel wasn’t the only missionary on Mackinac Island or Green Bay; most notably he crossed paths with Protestant ethnographer and Indian agent Henry R. Schoolcraft (1793-1864). The two were natural enemies, and Bonduel missed no opportunity to criticise Schoolcraft in both policy and conduct. It’s interesting, therefore, to see his own ethnographic output from this period. Bonduel collected artefacts, some of which were deposited in the archives of the diocese.

Bonduel draws ethnographic comparisons between the Indigenous American artefacts he is describing, and similar objects from Egypt and China. He equates pictographs with hieroglyphs, and uses this as evidence for his spurious theory of racial migration, one that was commonly held at the time. Though the items depicted on one of the plates are numbered, the text does not reference these directly, but rather describes them in a more general way.

Rare: OCLC locates copies at BnF and Libraries and Archives Canada only. The last copy recorded for sale was with Cedric Robinson in 1958.

Howes, B597 “aa”; Sabin, 6297 (but dated 1856).

Rosholt, Malcolm & Gehl, John Britten. Florimond J. Bonduel, missionary to Wisconsin Territory. (Wisconsin, 1982).

Stock No.
248176