Daughters of Aataentsic: Life Stories from Seven Generations

I left this world with the guilt of failing to my duty, one to protect you, hoping that you will forgive me one day and with the fear that you think I abandoned you.But know that I never abandoned you.I loved you and at the moment I decided to leave you in your child’s dreams when you were asleep so deeply, my intention was to come back and get you.I have been looking for you since this death and I have finally found you.I love you with all my heart.What happened to them belongs to me andWhat belongs to them belongs also to meThis is my historyThis is my storyThe story of a Wendat woman.These few lines are from a poem shared by Manon Sioui in the epilogue of Daughters of Aataentsic. In its encapsulation of loss, abandonment, abiding love, persistence, and recovery are the four themes developed over the book’s preceding seven chapters: family, community, mother work, and legacy. Daughters of Aataentsic: Life Stories from Seven Generations is the culmination of a near decade-long collaboration between the Wendat/Wandat Women’s Advisory Council and University of Saskatchewan historian Kathryn Magee Labelle, who is an adopted member of the Wyandot Nations of Anderdon and Kansas. Using the life stories of seven prominent women from the histories of the four present-day Wendat/Wyandot(te) nations, the book builds well on Labelle’s 2013 book Dispersed but not Dispossessed, weaving together a history of similarity and difference over the centuries from the Wendat dispersal from the shores of Georgian Bay (present-day Ontario) during the 1640s and 1650s through to the present day.The book begins with a focus on Cécile Gannendâris, a woman born in Wendake Ehen (the seventeenth-century Wendat Confederacy) in the 1620s or 1630s who used the structures of Catholic femininity to ensure that her community had the support it needed in the area around Quebec following their migration in the 1650s and 1660s. In taking this approach, Gannendâris’s biography challenges the common binary that divides “Christians” from “traditionalists” to paint a more nuanced understanding of Wendat women’s decision-making that reflects more Gerald Vizenor’s idea of survivance than earlier historiographical assumptions of resistance, accommodation, or assimilation.Similar arguments are made as the book proceeds, over the course of four centuries, telling the life stories of Marie Catherine Jean dit Vien (who grew up near Quebec but lived her adult life at Detroit), Margaret Grey Eyes Solomon (who lived much of her life at Upper Sandusky), Mary McKee (who grew up at Anderdon and—given readers may be familiar with his work—was one of ethnographer Marius Barbeau’s informants), Eliza Burton Conley (the first Indigenous woman to argue a case before the US Supreme Court, seeking to protect the Wyandot cemetery in Kansas City), Jane Zane Gordon (an early twentieth-century writer who used her work to agitate against the Dawes Act, among other early twentieth-century BIA policies), and Dr. Éléonore Sioui (the first Indigenous woman in Canada to earn a PhD).The book concludes with reflections from the Women’s Advisory Council: Manon Sioui (Nation Huronne-Wendat), Sallie Cotter Andrews (Wyandotte Nation), Linda Sioui (Nation Huronne-Wendat), Judith Pidgeon-Kukowski (Wyandot of Anderdon Nation), Judith Manthe (Wyandot Nation of Kansas), Catherine Tàmmaro (Wyandot of Anderdon Nation), Chief Janith English (Wyandot Nation of Kansas), and Beverlee Pettit (Wyandotte Nation). I list these women’s names because of the continuities they represent with the past.Traditionally, Wendat/Wyandot(te) histories have been shaped by ruptures and narratives of tragedy. These are a people who fled their Homeland in the face of violence and starvation in the seventeenth century; two centuries later, Wyandot in the United States again encountered removal, losing at least 18 percent of their population as they traveled westward to Kansas from the places beginning to be known as Michigan and Ohio. As their communities dealt with these challenges, historians have identified the gendered way that colonial systems of power eroded women’s influence and role in their communities. This book, though, tells a very different history. Rather than fragmentation and the erosion of power, Daughters of Aataentsic is a book about continuity from Wendake Ehen—Gannendâris’s birthplace—through to the four present-day Wendat/Wyandot(te) nations that members of the advisory council call home.Though each chapter is divided into four sections exploring family, community, mother work, and legacy, it is the concept of mother work where the book makes its most important contribution. Building on the scholarship of Lisa Udel, the authors define “mother work” as a type of women’s work “that is geared towards bettering their family and community’s circumstances rather than those of a single person. . . . For many Indigenous women, part of this work aims to re-instate a pre-colonial ‘mother-centred’ value system—one that re-establishes the authority of women” (6). It is here—within this concept—where we find alignment between historical subject matter and the authors themselves. Like the women they wrote about, Labelle and the Wendat/Wandat Women’s Advisory Council have taken up the type of mother work they describe in each of the book’s chapters. There is more to this book than just the words that appear on its pages.As such, Daughters of Aataentsic brings the past into conversation with the present. Over its chapters, readers will grapple with questions of Indigeneity and colonialism, diasporic and intergenerational relationships, and the subtle work that Wendat and Wyandot(te) women have carried out in order to maintain community over four centuries of colonial pressures. The book is an important addition to scholarship on women’s histories, community-engaged research practices, as well as histories of diaspora, resilience, and survivance.

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