Micah True

Micah True, The Jesuit “Relations”: A Biography. McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2025.

Among the foundational sources of early Canadian history, few have been consulted as widely, or understood as narrowly, as the Jesuit Relations. Micah True’s The Jesuit “Relations”: A Biography is a transformative study that fundamentally reconceives what this body of work is, who made it, and what it means. In doing so, it sets a new standard for how scholars across disciplines should approach the documentary record of New France.

Where previous scholarship has treated the Relations primarily as a repository of events, religious thought, or missionary-Indigenous encounters, True moves beyond these established practices through what can only be described as precise and deliberate detective work. He reconstructs the lives and intellectual worlds of the Relations’ lesser-known authors, traces the correspondence between missionaries and their superiors, and reveals how publishers shaped the texts and how readers received them across time. The result is nothing less than a life story of a manuscript: a biography of a source.

The book’s interdisciplinary reach is impressive. Drawing on the history of the book and reading, literary studies, religious history, and the histories of Indigenous peoples, True challenges readers to reckon with what writing itself meant in early modern New France. He asks us to consider the Relations not merely as transparent windows onto the past, but as constructed, contested, and contingent texts produced by specific people, shaped by institutional pressures, and transformed by the act of reading. This methodological creativity, moving outward from the sources themselves, opens new avenues of inquiry that will resonate across the humanities. The book is equally bold in the voices it foregrounds. Indigenous peoples, religious women, and labourers, long marginalized in the historiography of this period, are brought into fuller view, restoring texture and complexity to a world too often rendered as the story of a handful of prominent men or swashbuckling explorers. In this way, The Jesuit “Relations”: A Biography changes the shape of our knowledge of New France and will inspire scholars, instructors, and students alike to ask harder, richer questions about whose words survived, who shaped them, and why.

For its originality, its interdisciplinary ambition, and its capacity to renew a field, the committee is pleased to award this prize to Micah True.

SHORTLIST (in alphabetical order):

• Tina Adcock, A Cold Colonialism: Modern Exploration and the Canadian North. University of British Columbia Press, 2025.
• Karen Dubinsky, Strangely, Friends: A History of Cuban-Canadian Encounters. Between the Lines, 2025.
• John Sandlos & Arn Keeling, The Price of Gold: Mining, Pollution, and Resistance in Yellowknife. McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2025.
• Cheryl Troupe, Putting Down Roots: Métis Agency, Land Use, and Women’s Food Labour in a Qu’Appelle Valley Road Allowance Community. University of Manitoba Press, 2025.
• Micah True, The Jesuit “Relations”: A Biography. McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2025.