Words of the Huron.

J.R. (Jim) Miller is Canada Research Chair of History at the University
of Saskatchewan and the author of Reflections on Native-Newcomer
Relations: Selected Essays and Lethal Legacy: Current Native
Controversies in Canada.

Words of the Huron almost makes students in other fields envy linguists. For one thing, linguists will get far more out of the volume than those in other specialties will. But historians and Native Studies researchers can also glean much from the work of John Steckley.

Steckley employs the tools of what he terms linguistic archaeology to the study of the Wendat or Huron, who were driven out of their territory in southwestern Ontario in 1649. He carefully examines their words for a variety of topics such as kin relations, material culture, warfare, and medicine and disease by comparing how the terms were rendered in several 17th-century missionary word lists and the recollections of modern Huron speakers. The result of the linguistic investigation is to cast light on a variety of areas of Huron and Huron-French history. For example, his analysis revises and expands our knowledge of the longhouse—the distinctive large dwellings in which multi-family, kin-related groups dwelt. The inquiry also provides strong supportive evidence for the author’s contention that the Jesuits, the highly educated Catholic missionary order that evangelized the Huron, respected the Huron language, and, by inference, the Huron people.

John Steckley confesses that his “immodest aim” in undertaking this detailed, painstaking research was “to rewrite the book on the seventeenth-century Huron.” While he does not fully achieve that ambitious objective, he does revise some of modern scholars’ understanding of the Huron and fill in gaps in other areas, too. Moreover, he provides a model of how other linguists can profitably do more of the same for other First Nations.