From Huronia to Wendakes: Adversity, Migrations, and Resilience ed. by Thomas Peace and Kathryn Magee Labelle (review)

From Huronia to Wendakes traces the diaspora of the Huron peoples from the shores of the Georgian Bay in the seventeenth century to new Wendakes, places "where the Wendats live," in both Canada and the United States. Each one of the six chapters in From Huronia to Wendakes is an excerpt from the authors' dissertations. Such close collaboration between younger scholars working on similar topics is truly extraordinary. Their close attention to resilience and continuity in Wendat culture provides a consistent thematic focus that is all too rare in edited volumes. Together they offer a critical response to previous historians who have defined the Wendat people as passive victims of either the Haudenosaunee or Jesuit missionaries. They show that the Wendat people were and are creative agents of their own destiny amid ongoing manifestations of settler colonialism in divergent, transnational contexts.

These historiographic contributions are laudable and timely. However, the authors' focus on community engagement makes their research even more compelling. In 2001, the Canadian government established a "Panel on Research Ethics" that mandated rigorous new research protocols for scholars hoping to do research on First Nations' peoples. Scholars conducting research based on respect, reciprocity, and consistent engagement became eligible for national funding as never before. Long before the Canadian government embraced community-engaged scholarship, anthropologists and museum studies scholars such as Julie Cruikshank, Alison Brown, and Laura Peers placed collaborative, reciprocal research at the foreground of their work. They turned away from single-authored, positivist research that placed the interests of scholarly communities before those of Native peoples.

In From Huronia to Wendakes, Thomas Peace and Kathryn Magee Labelle have edited a book that represents the full flowering of this new paradigm in Indigenous studies, methodologies predicated on respect and reciprocity. Remarkably, their book blends the newest research on the Huron-Wendat with the voices of contemporary Wendat leaders whose support and advice has guided their scholarship. Their research serves both academic audiences and Indigenous people hungry for well-researched and culturally sensitive work on the Wendat people.

The six main chapters of the book span from the horrors of wars with the Haudenosaunee and concomitant virgin soil epidemics to their resurgence and renewal in both Canada and the United States. In chapter one, Kathryn Magee Labelle explores the immediate aftermath of the wars between the Huron and the Haudenosaunee. Labelle rejects narratives of victimhood, choosing instead to tell the stories of Huron-Wendat women whose deliberations guided their peoples' diaspora. Labelle manages to demonstrate agency while telling the truly harrowing story of the Huron migration to Gahoendoe Island, where starvation devastated Huron survivors of Haudenosaunee warfare. Andrew Sturtevant then picks up the transition from Huron to Wendat before and during the American Revolution. During this period, Wendat people subdivided, moving between their capital, at Detroit, and satellite communities such as Sandusky, on the southern shore of Lake Erie. Sturtevant rejects previous narratives of "diasporic collapse," showing how Wyandot diplomats became central players in the Ohio Valley (36). Thomas Peace examines the Wendat village of Lorette, later renamed Wendake, near Quebec City, from 1650 to 1697. Peace uses biographical sketches of two Laurentian Wendats, André Otehiondi and Louis Vincent Sawatenan, to complicate Indigenous identities and the notion that Catholic Wendats simply assimilated into French Canadian culture. Labelle, Sturtevant, and Peace use their knowledge of Wendat culture to demonstrate sites of resilience at times and places typically associated with decline and disarray.

The remaining chapters focus on the transnational experiences of Wendat and Wyandot peoples as nations within the United States and Canada. Chapter four, by Michael Leonard Cox, tells the story of Barnet, a Sandusky Wendat who converted to Presbyterianism and led some Wendat people from Catholicism to Protestantism. Brian Gettler than returns to the story of Lorette and their economic transition from hunting and agriculture...