Ghost Brothers: Adoption of a French Tribe by Bereaved Native America: A Transdisciplinary Longitudinal Multilevel Integrated Analysis (review)

As its second subtitle and its nearly two hundred pages of notes and bibliography suggest, this volume is exhaustively researched and rather imposingly written. Blum's basic argument is that the Wendat (Huron) – and to a lesser extent eastern Algonquians – and French immigrants in the seventeenth century were able to identify with each other far more easily than has commonly been thought. The immigrants, predominantly from northwestern France, still identified with Celtic mother deities and Norse tricksters, which allowed them a religious frame of reference more sympathetic than ultramontane Parisian Catholicism for comprehending Iroquoian and Algonquian spiritual practices. The immigrants themselves had been in many ways colonized by the centralized French state and, like the Wendats, chafed against control. The fur trade required the nativization of its French practitioners, and their acceptance of Wendat beliefs became a matter of survival. The French, bereaved by immigration, and the Wendats, bereaved by smallpox and Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) attacks, saw each other as potential fictive kin. Rony Blum attempts to illustrate this through pairings of 'unlike twins' – indigenous and European – who illustrate similarities and differences as well as metaphors of brotherhood. Blum also uses instances from the European Holocaust of the Jews to illustrate the spiritual psychology of survival and catastrophic bereavement.

Blum builds on the work of her mentor, Cornelius Jaenen, to indicate the complexity and the two-way traffic in ideas and beliefs between the European and Iroquoian systems. Her work also fits into the North American ethno-historical paradigm of blending archival, oral, and physical culture sources to interpret cultural exchange from a point of view that accepts Indigenous ways as normative. Blum clearly sees Indigenous people neither as in need of change, as the missionaries did, nor as 'vanishing,' as did various nineteenth- and twentieth-century administrators and historians.

Nevertheless, Ghost Brothers is not entirely successful. The title and introduction imply that the 'unlike twins' will be the central trope of the book, but it seems instead to be a kind of 'Eureka moment' that set the study into motion and then receded from importance. Blum's story is far more intricate than can be figured from the 'ghost brothers,' read either literally or figuratively.

Blum's passion for her subject also may lead her to attribute too much to the Native-French collaboration. For instance, the iconic Quebec hero Ti-Jean she constructs as a buffoon based partially on the ignorant mistakes of the greenhorn French, fused with Indigenous figures such as Nanabozo. Twice she suggests that it is the narrative influence of Ti-Jean that makes Indigenous trickster characters 'less regal' or 'comic rather than archetypal.' Yet the both/and of the creator-fool seems to be central to virtually all Indigenous North American trickster figures. The fool is not an overlay, and his influence is found among people as diverse and as far from Ti-Jean's influence as the Okanagans, the Navajos, the Kiowas, and on and on. There are also occasional confusing lapses in editing and copy-editing, such as when a sentence seems to say that Wendats are Algonquians, or that the women of New France managed to produce babies only five or six months apart.

Ghost Brothers is ambitious and truly excitingly conceived, but it succeeds with its convincing and exhaustive discussion of the possibilities for both 'bricolage' and 'metissage' among the French and Wendats rather than in an actual examination of 'unlike twins.'