Description
Book SynopsisThrough the prisms of leadership, women, and power, this book traces the Wendat diaspora beyond a discourse of destruction and into a new world of rejuvenation and hope.
Trade Review… the devastating Haudenosaunee attacks in 1649 have long shaped the ways scholars have narrated and understood the past of the Wendat people … So dramatic was this dispersal that many historians and anthropologists have portrayed it as the end of Wendat history and any meaningful Wendat peoplehood. Kathryn Magee Labelle forcefully challenges, and convincingly demolishes, this “discourse of destruction” (p. 196) in her aptly-named Dispersed but Not Destroyed … A topnotch ethnohistory, Labelle’s book … draws a complex yet coherent picture of the vibrant Wendat diaspora. At the same time it prompts broader questions about power, society, and narrative in the study of seventeenth-century North America.
-- Sami Lakomäki, University of Oulu * Histoire sociale / Social History *
A nuanced and highly readable account of the Wendat people’s turbulent history, which challenges the notion of the Wendat’s disappearance as a cohesive community in the wake of the Iroquois attacks of the mid-seventeenth century. -- Roger M. Carpenter, Department of History, University of Louisiana Monroe
Table of ContentsA Brief Chronology: Selected Wendat Events and Migration, 1400-1701
Introduction
Part 1: Resistance
1 Disease and Diplomacy: The Loss of Leadership and Life in Wendake
2 A Culture of War: Wendat War Chiefs and Nadowek Conflicts before 1649
Part 2: Evacuation and Relocation
3 Wendat Country: Gahoendoe Island and the Cost of Remaining Close
4 Anishinaabe Neighbours: The Coalition
5 The West: The Country of the People of the Sea
6 The East: The Lorettans
7 Iroquois Country: Wendat Autonomy at Gandougare, Kahnawake, and Ganowarohare
Part 3: Diaspora
8 Leadership: Community Memory and Cultural Legacy
9 Women: Unity, Spirituality, and Social Mobility
10 Power: Sources of Strength and Survival beyond the Dispersal
Epilogue: Reconnecting the Modern Diaspora, 1999
Appendix
Notes
Bibliography
Index
