The Renewed, the Destroyed, and the Remade: The Three Thought Worlds of the Iroquois and the Huron, 1609-1650.

Carson, James Taylor

The Renewed, the Destroyed, and the Remade: The Three Thought Worlds of the Iroquois and the Huron, 1609-1650, by Roger M. Carpenter. East Lansing, Michigan, Michigan State University Press, 2004. xxii, 179 pp. $27.95 US (paper).

The Renewed, the Destroyed, and the Remade explores how ritual remade the new world that confronted the Wendat and the Haudenosaunee after the arrival of Europeans on the shores of Turtle Island. Much has already been written about the creation of the fur trade, the Haudenosaunee's destruction of Wendake, and the rise of the Great League of Peace and Power as an important player in colonial New France and New England. Carpenter's contribution is to explain the contours of this familiar history in reference to ritual practice whereby the Wendat lost themselves in a world renewed and remade by the Haudenosaunee's pursuit of captives and furs.

The problem is that the story has been told so often that it is hard to discern the depth of Carpenter's contribution. To be sure, his focus on ritual draws our attention away, though not entirely, from the economics of the fur trade, and, instead, focuses our gaze on the seasonal rhythms and rites of life among the two peoples. In many ways, however, Carpenter seems trapped by the ethnographic foundation on which the study is based. When he discusses innovations in hunting and warfare, he seems uncomfortable with how to assess change over time. Carpenter concludes, for example, that "the behavior of many Huron at [a] 1636 feast demonstrated that the commercial value of beaver pelts now began to take precedence over the practice of properly caring for the dead" (p. 89). The juxtaposition of an ascending economic rationality and a descending commitment to ritual, however, strikes me as overly simplistic. One wonders how the Wendat understood and explained such a change of priorities.

Carpenter locates one possible answer in oral history. Before the fur trade, Beaver wanted to be treated with respect, but, after the trade began, Beaver grew angry as hunters treated him and his kin as commodities rather than as beings. Postcontact stories about Beaver, Carpenter suggests, positioned him as a malevolent presence who deserved to be hunted. What the author suggests was a new ethic that rationalized commercial hunting, however, strikes me as more of an illustration of how far the people had strayed from their values. In this way, to my mind, the later stories indicted, rather than justified, hunters' behaviour.

While I enjoy differences of interpretation, the tone of certain parts of the book troubled me. One of the most striking characterizations that Carpenter uses is the designation "prescientific" for the people he studies (p. 30). Anthropologists and others have demolished the utility of terms like "preliterate" and the same ought to apply here. "Prescientific" connotes an ethnocentric distinction between the alleged primitiveness of the Wendat and Haudenosaunee and the sophistication or, perhaps, even the truth, of modern Western knowledge. Such is the case when Carpenter likens the practice of the vision quest to "a hallucination" (p. 32). Similarly, he concludes that a group of warriors who had attacked a Jesuit outpost "amused themselves by slowly torturing [the priests] to death" (p. 124). To call the ritual killing of captives an amusement or to compare the vision quest to a narcotic delusion made me wonder how an author who claims to take ritual seriously could at the same time dismiss such practices so easily.

A last point about tone involves the book's intended audience. Here and there Carpenter writes things like "as twenty-first-century Americans, we think primarily ..."--Canadians encounter such things as a matter of course, so perhaps such a phrase is little cause for concern--but I wondered about how Wendat and Haudenosaunee people today might respond to being excluded as readers from a book about them. Along this line, the author overlooks Georges E. Sioui's Huron-Wendat: The Heritage of the Circle (Vancouver, 1999). In addition to offering an interpretation of Wendat history through ritual practice, Sioui also offers a careful critique of the term Huron. Carpenter's book would have also benefited from a consideration of Taiaike Alfred's study of modern Haudenosaunee ritual, Peace, Power, and Righteousness: An Indigenous Manifesto (Oxford, 1999). A fuller engagement with modern aboriginal authors would have sharpened the book's contribution.

In short, the book works as an undergraduate introductory text, but it does not move the historiography forward in any clear way.

James Taylor Carson

Queen's University