I took no pleasure yesterday in killing the last two women. They were already so wounded we knew they wouldn’t survive the trip home. Even though I asked Fox to do it, my asking is the same as if I myself had done it. Fox cut their throats with his knife so that they’d die quickly, ignoring the taunts of Sturgeon and Hawk and Deer to make it slow. When the three called Fox a woman for making the first leave so fast, he positioned the second woman, who was quite pretty, so the blood from her throat sprayed their faces. That shut them up, and despite feeling badly for these dead, I laughed. For all I knew, it was this group who was responsible for the slow and awful deaths of you, my wife, and you, my two daughters. There’s been no peace since. I no longer care for peace.
I don't know one Canadian who went through our public education system who left high school thinking, "Wow, isn't our history just fascinating and important?" Courriers de Bois and the Hudson's Bay Co made the fur trade possible so that British gentlemen could don beaver felt hats -- that's pretty much what we know. It probably has something to do with our TV networks not putting together animated jingles for us to sing along with as children: ABC's School House Rock's look and subject matter wasway more appealing than our CBC Heritage Minutes; I think all of us who were children in the 70s got up and did the chicken dance as we sang along to "Elbow Room" (hey, the slaughter of the Natives who got in the way of Manifest Destiny was just a side effect of Americans needing that extra space around themselves -- "got ta got ta get me some elbow roo-oom"); and I think we all got up to change the channel when Cartier had the conversation with the Iroquois chief, and through a linguistic misunderstanding…yawn…named our country Kanata…zzz.
I also don't know any Canadians who look at the issues that the Natives face today (poverty on Reserves, child suicides, overrepresentation in prisons, etc.) and think that the status quo is fine -- but without an understanding of how we got to this point, it is mystifying to me to consider how to improve their lot. It's obvious that those of us of "from away" aren't going to "go back" to wherever it is our forbearers came from, and it's easy to slip into generalisations about who we think the Natives were (noble savages!) or what the British wanted (Empire!) or what the French did (send in the Church!) way back when -- to regard history with a lazy eye that assigns labels like "right" and "wrong"; creating "winners" and "losers".
In The Orenda, Joseph Boyden did the near impossible: He captured a time at the dawn of what we now know as Canada, and not only did he make it a thrilling and fascinating read, but he left the realm of lazy generalisations and created sympathetic individuals on all sides of the colliding cultures; taking care to neither aggrandise nor censure. This is where we came from, and although I think a Saturday morning animated pop song based on The Huron Feast of the Dead would be woefully inappropriate, this book should absolutely be mandatory reading for every Canadian student (because, really, everyone should at least read about The Huron Feast of the Dead).
The Orenda opens in the mid-1600s, within a couple hour's drive from where I now live, and in the aftermath of a bloody skirmish (excerpted above), Bird, the Wendat (Huron) war-bringer decides to spare both the life of Snow Falls, the young Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) maiden whom he has decided to adopt to replace his slaughtered family, and Christophe, the Jesuit sent into the wilderness by the settlement of Kebec (New France) to bring religion to the heathens. The book takes turns telling its tale from the first person, present tense perspective of each of these characters, making each part intimate and immediate, and as the years go by, we learn that each of them is a sympathetic and honourable person who, with the best of intentions, plays their part in destroying the pre-contact culture of the Natives. Even though I can look out my window and see roads and houses and lamp posts, even though I know how the story ultimately ends for the Native settlements that may have once stood where my home now stands, the inevitability of their downfall doesn't lessen the tension of reading about their struggles.
Life was always hard for the Huron and Iroquois -- my kids went on field trips to the reconstructed Iroquois village at Crawford Lake when they were younger to learn about life in the longhouses and "the three sisters" (corn, squash and beans) that the village planted. The picture they got was idealised, idyllic, minimising the razor's edge of survival that Boyden describes here: not only were the people dependent upon fish and animals returning every year and upon crops susceptible to drought and blight, but the Huron and Iroquois were in a generations-long, bloody war with each other. Although the two nations had a similar language and lifestyle, each would send war parties to attack the other side's women as they worked in the fields or the men as they hunted in the forest -- attacks that would see groups of war-bearers enthusiastically slaughter, kidnap and take prisoners for terrible torture ceremonies. (Although these raiding parties had taken place long before the Jesuits arrived, having one of these "crows" in Bird's village made his home a particular target in the book.) Boyden describes the "caressing" that each side gave to the other's captured prisoners, and these passages are hard to read, full of explicit descriptions of barbaric practises and the glee with which the entire community would participate. It was especially chilling to read that those tortured would have their wounds lovingly dressed, that they would be given water and food during respites, all to ensure that they didn't die too soon. But just in case these scenes might give the impression that these Native groups were mere savages, the Jesuits discuss that they're not that different from the torture techniques of the Spanish Inquisition or the witch hunts (but of course no one comes to the conclusion that these tortures are all wrong…)
And that's the most brilliant part of The Orenda: Boyden doesn't peg either group as right or wrong. Bird is a committed war-bearer, capable of participating in bloody and inhumane slaughter, but he's also a loving and sentimental family man. Cristophe is 100% committed to saving the souls of the heathens, and although another Jesuit suggests to him that they could perform simple magic tricks to demonstrate the power of God, Cristophe is too principled to resort to trickery. And this is no Dances With Wolves -- the Jesuits and the laymen who later join them can recognise the parts of the Huron society that are beautiful without wanting to become a part of it (and at no time do the Hurons think that Cristophe is offering a better way of life; it's really a wonder that the Catholics ended up imposing their beliefs, but that happened long after the time period in this book) . I liked that Cristophe could dismiss a Medicine Woman's beliefs as sorcery without seeing the irony of trying to convince the Natives of the existence of the invisible Great Voice in the sky, and I also appreciated that he didn't believe that it was he and his people who brought Small Pox and Influenza to the countryside -- he could remain blameless because he believed himself to be blameless.
The prose in The Orenda isn't flowery but it is beautiful -- in spare language Boyden brings to life the people and the landscape of a forgotten time. The final battle was one of the most tense and nerve-wracking scenes I've ever read and I can't stress enough how important this books feels. It is a great shame that it didn't take home any of the big literary prizes this year -- in particular, this would have been my choice for the Governor General’s Literary Award. This is the story of Canada and one that I wish everyone could learn. I'm going to end with the opening of the book, a passage that had me hooked from the very beginning:
We had magic before the crows came. Before the rise of the great villages they so roughly carved on the shores of our inland sea and named with words plucked from our tongues – Chicago, Toronto, Milwaukee, Ottawa – we had our own great villages on these same shores. And we understood our magic. We understood what the orenda implied.
But who is at fault when that recedes? It’s tempting to place blame, though loss should never be weighed in this manner. Who, then, to blame for what we now witness, our children cutting their bodies to pieces or strangling themselves in the dark recesses of their homes or gulping your stinking drink until their bodies fail? But we get ahead of ourselves. This, on the surface, is the story of our past.
Once those crows flew over the great water from their old world to perch tired and frightened in the branches of ours, they saw that we had the orenda. We believed. Oh, did we believe. This is why the crows, at first, thought of us as little more than animals. We lived in a physical world that frightened them and hunted beasts they’d only had nightmares of, and we consumed the mystery that the crows were bred to fear. We breathed what they feared. But they watched intently, as crows are prone to do.
And when they cawed that our magic was unclean, we laughed, took a little offence, even killed a few of them and pulled their feathers for our hair. We lived on. But that word, unclean, that word, somehow, like an illness, like its own magic, it began to grow. Very few of us saw that coming. So maybe this is the story of those few.
