[BRIEF NOTE] The Wendat/Hurons and their carol

[rfmcdonald]

Just in time for Christmas, yesterday's edition of The Toronto Star featured an article by John Goddard (The Toronto Star ("Scholar sole speaker of Huron language") that did a sterling job of introducing readers to Wyandot/Huron researcher John Steckley, the origins of the famous Christmas song "The Huron Carol" and the Wendat people and their language that the song remains associated with.

The world's last Huron-language speaker is a white man teaching at Humber College.

Anthropologist John Steckley has made the Huron tongue and Huron history his focus for more than 30 years, "and every year I think of how little I knew the year before," he says.

Sometimes he feels alone in his interests, he says. At other times, he feels in demand --especially around Christmas and particularly this one.

Earlier this month Steckley published an authoritative Huron-English dictionary, the first such volume in more than 250 years. Laval University also just received a $1 million federal grant to develop Huron-language teaching materials, drawing on Steckley's expertise.

And this is the season of "The Huron Carol," sometimes called "Canada's Christmas hymn."

Most church congregations and concert choirs know only the 1926 anglicized version, but every year singers contact Steckley to learn the 1643 original.

"The Huron version is much better," the professor says. "It's more filled with meaning and much more authentic. The Hurons didn't even have a Gitchi Manitou--that's an Ojibwa term."

The Huron were a mostly agricultural people living between two water bodies now called Lake Simcoe and Georgian Bay. Their first contact with white people came with the arrival of French fur traders in the early 1600s.

Death quickly followed. By 1640, disease had decimated Huron numbers and by 1650 the Beaver Wars had all but wiped them out.

Remnants of the tribe settled north of Quebec City at Lorette, and in Kansas and Oklahoma. The language long ago died, except in writing, but all three communities are working to revive it, Steckley says.

"I guess I'm the closest you could say passes for a Huron speaker," he says in a modest tone. "I have eight dictionaries of Huron at home, all 17th- and 18th-century, only one of which was ever published."

Written by French Jesuit missionaries, the volumes are "beautiful dictionaries, better than any in English at the time--by far," he says. "They are just amazing documents and they taught me."

Such records show that the long ago Huron were a musical people, Steckley says. They possessed an extensive vocabulary related to music and a rich repertoire of songs for all occasions.

The Jesuits, eager to win converts, composed others.

One was "The Huron Carol." Oral tradition attributes it to Jean de Brébeuf, the first Jesuit priest fluent in Huron who was later famous--and canonized--for his stoic calm while being tortured at the stake and scalped.

Between 1629 and his death in 1649, Brébeuf devoted himself to the Huronia mission centred at what is now Midland. He is believed to have written the carol while in Quebec City in 1643, although the earliest surviving transcription was made at Lorette in the 1700s.

The melody derives from a French song, "Une Jeune Pucelle (A Young Maid)," Steckley writes in an unpublished paper. The original title was "Jesus ahatonnia," meaning, "Jesus is Born" or more literally "he has just been made."

"The okie spirit who enslaved us has fled," the song begins in one of Steckley's translations. "Don't listen to him for he corrupts the spirits of our thoughts. Jesus is born."

If that sounds like heavy-handed proselytizing, the carol does convey how the Jesuits spoke and what their message was, Steckley says.

The hymn also contains culturally authentic metaphors, such as three elders greeting the newborn babe by anointing His scalp with sunflower oil--"a traditional sign of respect," the professor says.

• People interested in further readings on the Wendat outside of Wikipedia and the first page of Google resutls might be interested in the Catholic Encyclopedia's article on the Wyandot, which provides an interesting background interpretation of the Wyandot/Hurons, the Jesuit missions among that people, and the eventual migrations from a depopulated homeland that is now a collection of historical parks and monuments. The Catholic Encyclopedia also includes a brief description of the Wendat village of Lorette, located on the île d'Orléans just downstream of Québec City.


• The text of the J.E. Middleton translation of 1926 that Steckly refers to is available here. This translation is poetic, but it is also rather problematic: The Ojibwa language from which the term "Gwitchi Manitou" is taken belongs to the Algonkian language family, while Wyandot belongs to the completely separate Iroquoian tradition. Here is what looks to be a more accurate translation into English .


• Finally, The Toronto Star article features a video of a performance of "The Huron Carol" by folk singer Michel Payment.