Friends of God, Joseph Chiwatenhwa and Marie Aonetta: The Story of the Early Huron Christians

Eileen Goltz is Public Documents Librarian at Laurentian University.

This tome has a profusion of titles. On the cover is Friends of God; on
the first printed inside page is Friends of God: The Early Native Huron
Church in Canada; on the next printed page is The Story of the Early
Huron Christians, followed by Friends of God: Joseph Chiwatenhwa and
Marie Aonetta, followed by The Beginning of the Canadian Native Church.
Henry begins his book with a dedication to the canonization of Joseph
Chiwatenhwa, Marie Aonetta, and their family and friends, and ends it
with a plea for details of petitions granted through the intercession of
Joseph Chiwatenhwa, Marie Aonetta, and companions. In between he has
written a fanciful, disjointed, biographical narrative, loosely based on
a number of secondary sources, plus R.G. Thwaites’s Jesuit Relations
and Allied Documents. His writing style is simple, emotional and
hagiographic, and he offers neither endnotes nor formal bibliography.

Despite his purpose—a hastening of the canonization of Chiwatenhwa
and Aonetta, and other early Native Christians—Henry does his subjects
no justice. His descriptions of the trials and tribulations they
suffered have been presented more effectively by others. Moreover, his
book lacks cohesiveness. For example, in the midst of a description of
the Christian missionaries’ response to an epidemic, he has inserted a
one-sentence paragraph that states, “Each longhouse was the home of
about 50 people, all related through their mothers, with one elderly
woman in charge.” There was no prior, or subsequent, mention of
matrilineal longhouses. The illustrations by Ense, an Ojibwa artist, are
a welcome addition. An obvious error in binding, with pages 103-111
appearing twice, however, does nothing to enhance the book.