From Huronia to Wendakes: Adversity, Migration, and Resilience, 1650–1900 ed. by Thomas Peace and Kathryn Labelle (review)

FROM HURONIA TO WENDAKES is a landmark volume in Wendat studies. This collection of essays on the history of the Wendat people is intentionally collaborative, featuring the innovative work of six emerging scholars in consultation with historians and leaders who are members of the Nation huronne-wendat, the Wyandotte Nation (Oklahoma), the Wyandot Nation of Kansas, and the Wyandot of Anderdon Nation. While still admittedly imperfect, this model of collaboration and critique constitutes a real step toward better methodological practices by scholars working on the histories of Indigenous peoples.

The essays in this collection employ decolonizing methodologies. As is acknowledged in the editors' introduction, prior non-Native histories have focused primarily on the colonial period, especially on the decades prior to 1649, the year in which the people of the Wendat confederacy were driven from Wendake Ehen, their traditional homeland in southern Ontario. The tendency of non-Native historians to focus on a period that was characterized by deep cultural crisis and culminates in alienation from traditional territory creates and normalizes a settler colonialist narrative of "disappearing" people and "destroyed" culture that deliberately fails to recognize Wendat survival, innovation, and cultural resiliency. In contrast, this collection of essays attends to Wendat history and culture postmigration and is designed to identify and analyze the strength and creativity of the Wendat people as they negotiated these displacements and emerged as a renewed contemporary confederacy of many Wendakes.

In chapter 1 Kathryn Magee Labelle provides necessary background and sets the overall tone of this project by exploring the strategies that the people of the Wendat implemented during the critical period in 1649, when, in order to survive as a people, they decided to move themselves to the island of Gahoendoe. Labelle's is the first of a series of methodological interventions that successfully reframe colonial narratives of these events. In this case, Labelle provides compelling historical evidence of Wendat collective strategic planning with sufficient flexibility to reevaluate and reorganize when drought and famine made long-term survival at Gahoendoe no longer tenable.

In chapter 2 Andrew Sturtevant reframes another colonial narrative: the splintering of the Wendat community that had relocated to Detroit, as some migrated south to Sandusky, in the Ohio Valley. Sturtevant argues that these events are best understood as Wendat territorial expansion, with the "capital" at Detroit spawning a satellite in Sandusky. Sturtevant contends that expansion to Sandusky was a sound geopolitical strategy that preserved cultural integrity and brought immediate economic advantage as well as long-term political autonomy and influence as the Wendat negotiated hostilities and alliances with the Delawares, the Shawnees, the British, and the Americans over the course of the Revolutionary War.

In chapter 3 Thomas Peace traces the divergent lives of two Wendat men who left the new Wendat homeland in Lorette in the St. Lawrence Valley: one joined the Wendat community in Detroit, and the other moved to New England and was educated at Dartmouth. Peace presents an alternative to colonialist narratives of Wendat "Canadianization" and "assimilation" by illustrating how these men maintained continuity with traditional Wendat culture and values as they made choices and created alliances in service to their community of origin.

In chapter 4 Michael Leonard Cox identifies several ways in which Presbyterian Protestantism appears to have been negotiated and selectively incorporated by a few Wendat men and women at Sandusky in the early nineteenth century.

In chapter 5 Brian Gettler provides an analysis of the emergence of a market-oriented manufacturing economy and attendant credit networks at Lorette in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and shows how this new economy came to be dominated by certain entrepreneurial families and contributed to lasting changes in Wendat social structure.

In chapter 6 Annette de Stecher focuses on the role of Wendat material culture in diplomacy, which in the nineteenth century included women's needlework—specifically, moose-hair-embroidered birchbark in the form of the Elgin...