Montreal Gazette
Monday, August 30, 1999
It was a homecoming that was 3 1/2 centuries in the making.
Descendants of the Wendat (Huron) Confederacy were reunited over the weekend in their ancestral homeland, on the southern shores of Ontario’s Georgian Bay, after an absence of 350 years. They returned to the land known as Huronia from as far away as Alaska, Virginia, California and the Quebec City suburb of Loretteville. And yesterday, some of their ancestors came home, too – for good.
Under a fittingly solemn, gray sky, the skeletal remains of more than 500 men, women and children were lowered into the ground where they had been buried together in 1636, only to be unearthed by archeologists in the late 1940s.
It was the Wendat custom to inter their dead temporarily, then every 10 to 15 years rebury them permanently in a mass grave during a ceremony known as the Feast of the Dead. French Jesuit Jean de Brebeuf, whose martyrdom coincided with the Wendat dispersal, witnessed and wrote about the 1636 Feast of the Dead burial.
Yesterday afternoon, after half a century of being examined by University of Toronto students and later stored at the Royal Ontario Museum, the bones and skulls returned to their resting place. The ceremony took place at the Ossossane burial ground, near the site of the former Wendat Confederacy capital of the same name.
“I’ll feel at peace seeing my ancestors returned to their rightful resting place,” 44-year-old Michel Gros-Louis, of the tiny Wendake reserve at Loretteville, said beforehand. For Gros-Louis, who works as an Agriculture Canada lab technician in Saint-Hyacinthe, the repatriation of his forebears’ bones was the culmination of a personal mission.
A quarter-century ago, he and his late father visited the land of their ancestors, just a 90-minute drive north of Toronto. “When I heard that they’d dug up my ancestors’ bones, I told my father: `I will get them back.’ ”
Yesterday, that promise was fulfilled, when the Royal Ontario Museum’s largest collection of human remains was transported in a rented truck driven by Mima Kapches, the ROM’s head of anthropology. The museum not only returned the relics, but also handed over possession of the burial ground to Quebec’s Wendake Band Council.
With the smell of burning sage in the air, and an endless chant of “Hi-hi-hi hi-hi-hi” from onlookers, 300 cardboard boxes containing the 17th-century human remains were carried by hand from the truck to the side of a huge sandy pit.
Then, after the bottom of the gaping pit was lined with beaverskins, each box was blessed by 90-year-old Madeleine Gros-Louis of Wendake – with three taps on the lid – and emptied into the deep hole.
Young and old, some in buckskins and wearing feathered headdresses, looked on from around the edge of the pit. A hawk circled overhead. After two hours, a huge circular mound of bones had formed, ready to be covered over with sand by young men with shovels.
The ceremony highlighted a three-day homecoming reunion of the descendants of a people dispersed 350 years ago after losing a war with the Iroquois and being ravaged by disease contracted from Europeans. But in addition to connecting with the past, the long-separated Wendat connected with each other. Not only was there a reburial, there was a rebirth.
Saturday night, chief Jan English of the Kansas Wyandot, Steve Gronda of the Anderdon community from the Detroit-Windsor area, second chief Jim Bland of Oklahoma and Willie Picard, grand chief of the Wendake First Nation, proclaimed the renewal of their confederacy, unveiled its new flag and pledged to strengthen the bonds between them. Earlier in the day, the chiefs arrived in their ancestral homeland, symbolically at least, in a procession of canoes.
But the Wendat’s paddling skills have apparently declined drastically since they fled Huronia by birchbark canoe 350 years ago. Saturday’s flotilla of 19 fibreglass canoes required the help of some non-Wendat paddlers. Not only that, one canoe tipped and deposited its occupants into the river – twice.
The canoes’ arrival took place on the banks of the Wye River, below the hill-top Martyrs’ Shrine and a short walk from the reconstructed 17th-century Sainte-Marie mission.
Both Sainte-Marie and the shrine stand as reminders of the fateful year 1649, when Jesuits Brebeuf and Gabriel Lalemant died at the hands of the attacking Iroquois – and Wendat society disintegrated.
The few hundred Wendat who cast their lot with the French eventually made their way to Quebec and are the ancestors of the 3,000 Wendat of the Wendake-Loretteville area. The others – those who weren’t absorbed by neighbouring nations, including the enemy Iroquois – embarked on a restless odyssey through the upper Great Lakes, then south, ultimately settling in the Detroit-Windsor area, Kansas and Oklahoma.
The centuries of separation from their fellow Wendat (“Wyandot” in Kansas and Michigan, “Wyandotte” in Oklahoma) was evident at the weekend homecoming in the mix of traditional costumes, and the
intermingling of languages and accents.
“Ah wish Ah could speak French,” second chief Jim Bland told a crowd in his Oklahoma drawl, alluding to the fact that about half of the 600 or so Wendat at the reunion were francophones from Wendake But the lack of a common language – Huron is no longer spoken – seemed to be no barrier. This was family.
The chiefs smoked the peace pipe and were welcomed home by the Ojibwa, who have lived in Huronia for three centuries. Former enemies took part, too. Atistenha’wi of Kahnawake said prayers in Mohawk and Oneida. Beverlee Pettit made the longest journey to attend, from north of the Arctic Circle in Alaska. Pettit, who works with the Inuit near Nome, learned of the get-together through the Internet. “I couldn’t not come,” said soft-spoken Pettit, who played guitar and sang at an outdoor concert Saturday night. “I had to come and see where I’m from.”
Born and raised in Oklahoma, Pettit said she’s been working with aboriginal tribes all her life. “But I wasn’t one of them,” she said. “This is the first time I’ve ever attended a gathering of my people.”“This homecoming is the highlight of my life,” said Francis Gros Louis, 68, who works for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, co-ordinating disaster relief on reserves. He also speaks to schoolchildren about aboriginal heritage.
“This was my dream, to bring our people and 350 years of history together,” organizer Michel Gros-Louis said. “I wanted to see my people coming to this beautiful land.This is one big family gathering. “We’ve shown that we’re still alive, not just in a history book.”