Reviews for Children of Aataentsic: A History of the Huron People to 1660

The average rating for Children of Aataentsic: A History of the Huron People to 1660 based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2017-02-28 00:00:00 Matthew Fern Bruce Trigger, one of the founders of the discipline of ethnohistory, spent twelve very productive years researching the Huron nation of Indians. The end product of his research is CHILDREN OF AATAENTSIC, which most ethnohistorians consider the definitive history of the Hurons from the Pleistocene to 1660 CE. The mammoth tome (published originally in two volumes) synthesizes ethnographic studies, archaeological evidence, insights from European documents, and modern scholarship into a clear thoughtful and account. The Huron confederacy comprised about two dozen small towns located at the southeastern end of Georgian Bay in modern Ontario. In 1600 its population stood at 20,000, reduced by later epidemics to 9,000 people (as of 1640). Culturally they resembled their Iroquois neighbors. Both peoples had a subsistence economy based on fishing and maize horticulture, a gendered division of labor, matrilineal clans, and a non-hierarchical political system. Both had similar creation stories* and invested ample time in studying and interpreting their dreams, which they saw as manifestations of “unfulfilled desires” requiring some sort of fulfillment. They fought periodic wars with their neighbors to obtain captives, whom they adopted or ritually executed. Despite, or perhaps because of their similarities, the Hurons and Iroquois considered one another deadly rivals, their hostility only exacerbated by European contact. Unlike the Five Nations, the Hurons had constructed an extensive commercial network in which they occupied a central and critical role. They grew a large surplus of maize and traded it to the Odawas and Nipissings for whitefish and furs; they swapped corn and other goods for Neutral Indians' and Susquehannocks’ tobacco and wampum; and after 1615 they began traveling to Quebec to exchange beaver and other furs for French metal wares and beads. The Hurons became New France’s primary trading and diplomatic partner. French traders and interpreters began living in Huron towns by the 1620s, and Recollet and Jesuit missionaries joined them in 1627 and 1634. Huron men and women found some French possessions (like religious books and domestic cats) quite fascinating, and they accepted some fur traders into their families. For the most part, they considered Frenchmen stupid and uncouth, and disliked their growing dependence on French goods and military assistance. French religious beliefs and European diseases had a stronger and more adverse impact on the Huron people. The Hurons initially viewed the Jesuits as shamans, and baptism and Christian prayers as curative or kinship rituals that they could incorporate into their own socio-religious system. The Jesuits, however, wanted Huron Christians to throw off all of their old faith and culture. They viewed syncretism (the blending of old and new faiths) as apostasy, and began establishing segregated Christian communities to protect their converts from corruption. By the early 1640s the missionaries were encouraging converts to adhere to European marital customs and stay away from traditional Huron ceremonies and feasts, like the Feast of the Dead. This engendered a widening factional division within the tribe. Epidemics of influenza and smallpox, which arrived in Huronia in the late 1630s and cut the local population in half, weakened the nation still further. In 1648-49 Iroquois warriors, now armed with Dutch firearms, took advantage of their rivals’ weakness. They destroyed several Huron towns, killed over 1,400 men and women, took several thousand more back to Iroquoia as captives or refugees, and dispersed the remainder to Quebec and the upper Great Lakes region. The Jesuits, who followed their surviving converts to Iroquoia and Michilimackinac, had achieved with Iroquois assistance at least one of their goals: radically “restructuring Huron life” (p. 847). The survivors became different Indian nations – Iroquois adoptees, Wyandot villagers (in the Great Lakes), and reserve Hurons in Quebec – though all retained their old language and the Christian faith that helped maintain their national identity. I still suspect many of them would have preferred the French to have stayed on their side of the Atlantic. * Both claimed descent from the first Earthly human, Sky Woman, whom the Hurons called Aataentsic.

Review # 2 was written on 2008-01-29 00:00:00 James Lawson More than two years ago, I had launched myself into reading Glimpses of World History by Jawaharlal Nehru, a book that gave me some solid knowledge in brief about the world history, and upon finishing it mid-last-year, was amazed by his way of writing [You can read its review here, if need be]. But alas, the book ended just as WW2 was about to be set into motion. To compensate for the remaining, I picked up this book by Martin Gilbert, a cheap copy that I had found in one of the second-hand book-sales. With that in mind, History of the Twentieth Century did satisfy me with what I was looking for: the political world history in the twentieth century, of which personally I lacked a lot of knowledge. But however, this book did not go beyond that. It was all about wars, racism, violence, number of people dead, and such ... I also found at least three fundamental errors in the book (will insert an example here once I re-find it). Having said that, I make it a point to mention here, that unless one wants to know in general, superficial political knowledge of the history of the twentieth century, she should rather look for another title. Also, to be kept in mind, is that this book is a condensed edition of Gilbert's three separate books that made up his history of the twentieth century. Another disappointing fact about the book was, the two dedicated chapters for the two World Wars, did not contain anything else, but only the account of the wars. As a result, nothing has been mentioned about what happens at all in other parts of the world where the World Wars were not taking place. The good thing about reading the book was that I came to know a lot about what happened in the century. The cascading effect in political history that came to the eventuality of both the World Wars, the Cold War, the Vietnam War, the end of the Soviet era. The language is easy, the book is a fast-read, although nothing very 'interesting' to contemplate upon (unlike as in Nehru's book). Contains 26 good maps to refer to while reading, and 75 pages of Index.