Source: Link

PETITOT, ÉMILE (named at birth Émile-Fortuné; also known as Émile-Fortuné-Stanislas-Joseph), Roman Catholic priest, Oblate of Mary Immaculate, explorer, and scholar; b. 3 Dec. 1838 in Grancey-le-Château, France, son of Jean-Baptiste Petitot, a clockmaker, and Thérèse-Julie-Fortunée Gagneur; d. 13 May 1916 in Mareuil-lès-Meaux, France.

Émile Petitot’s family had moved from Marseilles to Grancey-le-Château in 1837, and in 1840 they returned. There Emile attended the minor seminary and the Collège du Sacré-Cœur. At 17 he began keeping diaries that recorded his avid interest in languages, natural sciences, and history.

In Marseilles the Petitots lived at various addresses near the old port, and probably attended the church of Saint-Joseph that was consecrated by Bishop Charles-Joseph-Eugène de Mazenod. In 1816 Mazenod had founded the missionaries of Provence, a group that 10 years later was raised to the rank of a congregation with the name Oblates of Mary Immaculate. Montreal’s bishop Ignace Bourget* asked for assistance when he visited Mazenod in 1841, and the first Oblates arrived in British North America that year. Two decades later there were 30 in the northwest working among the Indigenous populations, and 53 in the Province of Canada.

Joining the Oblates in the northwest

Perhaps influenced by the popularity of Mazenod and by the challenge of missions, Petitot, who had taken the minor orders of the priesthood by 1859, joined the Oblates in September 1860. After two years of training at Notre-Dame-de-l’Osier, he was ordained in Marseilles on 15 March 1862. Twelve days later he left for Canada and the northwest, a trip recounted in detail in his book En route pour la mer glaciale (Paris, 1888). Brief training in Montreal was quickly followed by the journey west with the Hudson’s Bay Company fur brigade. The young priest reached his posting at the Providence mission (Fort Providence) on Great Slave Lake in August 1862. His missionary life there is described in Autour du Grand lac des Esclaves (1891).

A brilliant but troubled mind

Petitot’s early encounters with Indigenous people convinced him that liquor and guns threatened their survival, and that a knowledge of their languages was the missionary’s key to their religious conversion. He started preparing dictionaries of the various Dene dialects – those of the Dogrib (Tlicho), Hare (K’ahsho Got’ine), Chipewyan (Denesuline), and Loucheux (Gwichʼin) peoples – and later that of the Siglit, or Mackenzie Inuit. His immediate superior, Bishop Vital-Justin Grandin*, commented in April 1863 that Petitot was very immature, and more interested in exploration than in mission. Nonetheless, in March he had put Petitot in charge of the mission at Fort Resolution; in August 1864 he moved the young man to Fort Good Hope on the Mackenzie River so that he could work under the supervision of Father Jean Séguin. There, Petitot criticized his colleagues. He also sexually abused a boy servant from Providence, conduct that may have begun shortly after his arrival at that post. This behaviour led to his temporary excommunication in 1866 by his new superior, Bishop Henri Faraud*. The expulsion had no impact on his conduct. Beginning in 1868 Petitot began to have short bouts of insanity in the winter; he hallucinated, ran half-naked in –40° weather, and twice attempted to kill Father Séguin. In the winter of 1870–71 he was again overtaken with fits of madness that featured delusions, seizures, and an attempt at genital self-mutilation.

From Fort Good Hope, Petitot made eight trips in the Great Bear Lake region between 1865 and 1879, including two unsuccessful missionary sojourns among the Mackenzie Inuit near the Arctic Ocean. He later described these trips in Les grands Esquimaux (1887), Quinze ans sous le cercle polaire . . . (1889), and in Explorations de la région du Grand lac des Ours (1892), which he called the conclusion to Quinze ans.

During these and other voyages, despite extreme dangers and physical difficulties, Petitot drew maps of his routes, made sketches of the landscape and Indigenous life, and recorded the languages and traditions of the people he encountered. In the mission fields he was chagrined by competition from Anglican missionaries, especially William Carpenter Bompas*. Rebuffs and threats from the Dene and Inuit did not discourage him. The Dene, he believed, were remnants of the lost tribes of Israel; the Inuit were “the most abandoned men on earth” and “a degraded people.” He noted the susceptibility of Indigenous people to European epidemics, but felt that their dying was his opportunity to direct them to heaven.

Between 1864 and 1878 Petitot played a major part in designing the chapel of Our Lady of Good Hope and decorating its interior with paintings and woodwork, especially the altar. The craftsmanship is of such artistic merit that the work was restored professionally and the church designated a national historic site in 1977.

Interlude in France

In 1874, after 12 years in the north, Petitot was given permission to visit France to oversee the printing of his magnum opus, the Dictionnaire de la langue dènè-dindjié . . . (Paris and San Francisco, 1876), which compared three dialects and included a grammar of the Dene language. He was already known in academic circles since he had published two substantial pamphlets in the 1860s and his long letters to his superior general had been serialized in the Oblate journal, Missions de la Congrégation des missionnaires oblats de Marie Immaculée. His visit turned into a virtual Roman triumph thanks to the attention and honours given him by the press and scholarly associations during 1875. In the French capital he was made a member of the Société d’Anthropologie de Paris and the Société Philologique. He addressed the Société de Géographie de Paris, donated his handmade map of the western Canadian Arctic, and received a silver medal. The French ministry of education awarded him the academic palm-leaf decoration and the title officier d’académie. In July, at the inaugural International Congress of Americanists held in Nancy, Petitot earned more notice, and membership in that city’s Académie Stanislas, by advancing analogies of language, customs, and beliefs to postulate an Asian rather than autochthonous origin of the Inuit. From then until March 1876, Petitot was occupied with the publication of his Dictionnaire. During his time in France his derangement was not evident to the Oblate authorities there, although he was sometimes wilful and querulous.

During most of Petitot’s missionary career he suffered from an abdominal hernia and recurrent severe intestinal disorders. After his return to Fort Good Hope in 1876 he became increasingly critical of and quarrelsome with other missionaries, and in particular Bishop Faraud. Because of Petitot’s poor health he was transferred south in 1879, to less demanding work around Cold Lake (Alta/Sask.). At Fort Pitt (Sask.) late in 1881, he “married” an older Métis woman, Margarite (Margarita) Valette, who was also known as Nikamousis (Nicamous).

Recognition and decline

Petitot’s behaviour had now become so unpredictable that early in 1882 the Oblates took him east forcibly and put him in the Asile de Longue-Pointe, an asylum near Montreal. For many months he suffered hallucinations and paranoia. His family in Marseilles repeatedly importuned the father superior of the Oblates to have him returned to France. In May 1883 he was released and sent back to Marseilles, where he tried vainly for a year to earn a living as a proofreader. Later that year the Royal Geographical Society of London awarded him its prize named for the Arctic explorer Sir George Back*.

Petitot spent the period 1884–86 in Paris at the same occupation of proofreader. Anxious to be reunited with Nikamousis, and encouraged by Bishop Bompas, in 1884 he unsuccessfully approached various Church of England authorities in Canada and Britain offering his services as an Anglican missionary in the northwest. On 19 April 1886 he was released from the Oblates and on 5 October was appointed parish priest of Mareuil-lès-Meaux. He became interested in the prehistory of this area and wrote articles about its archaeology. In 1883 he had been a founding member of the Société de Géographie de Marseille, and at Mareuil-lès-Meaux he joined the Société Littéraire et Historique de la Brie and took part in the diocesan Conférence d’Archéologie.

In that small village Petitot spent his last years writing his five autobiographical volumes and publishing numerous articles about the Canadian northwest, its geography and resources, and its peoples and their cultures. In 1909 he participated in a national pilgrimage to Rome by several thousand French people to attend the politically important beatification of Joan of Arc. As an antiquarian, Petitot revelled in the opportunity to tour the ancient monuments and churches, and he later published a lengthy description of this visit. As early as 1898 his niece Isabelle had become his housekeeper and companion despite her poor health. Petitot himself suffered from arterial degeneration in his legs, which virtually immobilized him for some time before he died on 13 May 1916.

Legacy

Petitot’s library, later writings, and artefacts from western Canada disappeared, but the next priest of Mareuil-lès-Meaux discovered in the church a manuscript, “Souvenirs de jeunesse,” that recounts his youthful excursions. Petitot’s linguistic and ethnographic studies have been of value to Canadian northern research, but also important for Canadian history were the records of his travels, including his maps, which provided basic geographic information until the introduction of aerial photography. Various rivers and islands in the Northwest Territories carry one or the other of his names, as did a park adjacent to Yellowknife’s city hall – until the municipal council voted to rename it Somba K’e in the early 1990s. In 1975 the Canadian government unveiled a plaque to Émile Petitot in Mareuil-lès-Meaux.

John S. Moir