Jesuit Missionaries Tortured by Iroquois, 1649
The North American Martyrs were Jesuit missionaries from Sainte-Marie among the Hurons. The Huron in this area were farmers, fishermen and traders who lived in villages surrounded by defensive wooden palisades for protection. By the late 1640s the Jesuits believed they were making progress in their mission to the Huron, and claimed to have made many converts. But, the priests were not universally trusted. Many Huron considered them to be malevolent shamans who brought death and disease wherever they travelled after European contact, the Huron had suffered high fatalities in epidemics after 1634 of smallpox and other Eurasian infectious diseases, to which aboriginal peoples had no immunity. Jean de Brcebeuf (March 25, 1593 - March 16, 1649) and Gabriel Lalemant (October 3, 1610 - March 17, 1649) were French Jesuit missionaries. In 1649, they were captured when an Iroquois raid took over a Huron village. Together with Huron captives, the missionaries were ritually tortured and killed, being martyred on March 16, 1649. They were beatified in 1925 and canonized as saints in the Roman Catholic Church in 1930
