Petitot

by Susan Charlotte Haley

Fresh out of college and reeling from the failure of a marriage that had barely even begun, Marcus takes a teaching job in a tiny northern-Canadian native community. While struggling to grasp his own predicament, Marcus finds himself entangled in much larger community tragedies–the suicide of an aging priest and the death of two young students from exposure.

But it is his discovery of the writings of Émile Petitot–a controversial nineteenth-century missionary Oblate priest, linguist and ‘explorer’–which finally threatens to unhinge Marcus, launching him on an obsessive quest for answers. In this novel, Susan Haley explores the troubled life and dubious claims of Father Petitot, whose fifteen years beneath the Arctic Circle were punctuated by scandal, delusional behaviour and episodes of outright madness and paranoia–problems which caused him to be shuffled from mission to mission, temporary excommunication and even forcibly hospitalized by the bishop.

Haley’s binocular approach ruptures the normal historical perspective as she attempts to depict Petitot in all his complexity, both through the eyes of his Inuit and Cree contemporaries and through those of Marcus, who sifts through the written records of one man’s life in search for the truth about us all.

365 pages, Paperback

First published September 30, 2013

About the author

Susan Haley's first two novels, A Nest of Singing Birds and Getting Married in Buffalo Jump, were made into movies for CBC-TV. Most recently she has published The Complaints Department (2000), Maggie's Family (2002) and The Murder of Medicine Bear (2003). Haley lived in Fort Norman, Northwest Territories, for 15 years where she ran a charter airline with her partner. Haley now lives in Black River, Nova Scotia.

Reviews

[David Wimsett · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have long known the horror visited on the American aboriginal peoples by European colonization, horrors that continue to this day. I read the news and know these things as facts. Susan Haley’s historical novel, Petitot, powerfully immersed me in the human cost.

Emile Petitot (1838-1918) is a historical figure, a nineteenth century French, Catholic Oblate priest and missionary who wrote books of exploration and dictionaries on the languages of the native peoples of Canada’s far north. The story moves back and forth between the present time and the 1800s.

In 1999, a new teacher named Marcus Glowatsky takes a job in a northern, native settlement where he can earn higher wages to pay off his student loans. There is poverty as Marcus has never seen. Alcoholism is rampant in both adults and children. Housing is poor and overcrowded. The students are interested in anything but school. Marcus is genially concerned for his pupils and tries to reach out, but he is treated like any of the other white teachers and administrators. His window is broken by a rock that damages his stove. When two suicides take place, Marcus expresses his deep grief and is slowly accepted by a community with no hope.

We are also taken back to the first Catholic missionaries in the region and the effect they have on the native people. They brought new values, a new religion and disease that decimated the aboriginal population who have no immunity to European illnesses. One of these is Fr. Petitot. He is kinder than the other priest and tries to comfort and help the inhabitants. But, he is a pedophile and soon takes young boys as lovers.

Though the story does not directly touch the subjects of residential schools where the government and the church attempted to eradicate all native language and culture, Ms. Haley lays out the origins of these abuses that have been called “cultural genocide” by Justice Murry Sinclair during the truth and reconciliation inquiry.

The book is exceptionally well written. It reads easily and clearly. The characters are fully drawn and reflect each individual in the story, using specifics to portray true human emotions. Some are noble and others base as they struggle to achieve their goals. The use of details gives a complete picture in the readers mind of places, objects and characters without slowing the story. Petitot contains moments of sensitivity and affection as well as sadness and trial.

Susan Haley ‘s Petitot is a major work. She lived in the far north for 15 years and knows well the conditions the people endure. Those who read it will come to understand the destruction wrought by colonization on the native populations across North America.

[Blair]

I'm so glad I read this fascinating and vital book. Petitot is part historical fiction novel about the brutal first encounters between the indigenous people of Canada and French Jesuits bent on their conversion. It's also partly set in the present, as a young teacher and grad student struggles to research the occluded past, and the history of rampant sexual abuse that occurred by the Jesuits. The interactions between the Jesuits and the first nations characters are always fraught, complex, sometimes charged with love and desperation, sometimes clouded with fear and distrust. No one is saintly and no one is purely innocent in this world, and the harsh realities of life in the far north are portrayed viscerally here.