On TwitteX, Mark Bourrie expresses disappointment in his recent history Crosses in the Sky being less successful than he had hoped and partly blames himself.
I've never had much talent for seeing what might or might not make a best-settling Canadian history book. (1867: How the Fathers Made a Deal -- a confederation book in the wake of Meech and Charlottetown -- was one occasion I did maybe get in time with the zeitgeist.)
Stories of heroic white men in rugged settings still hold surprising appeal for CanHist book buyers, so I would not have been surprised to see Crosses in the Sky, a retelling of the Brebeuf and the Huron story.
But I wonder if the moment is not right for white authors using white sources to present indigenous history. Bourrie's sympathies are entirely with the Huron, not with the Jesuits and the French colonizers behind them, for sure. But he tells the same story that has been circulating among Europeans for four hundred years, based almost on the Jesuit Relations' knowledge of the Huron.
The wars that destroyed the Huron nation in the mid 1600s were the largest and bloodiest ever fought in what is now Canada, I would guess. In less than a century, across much of the territory that is now southern Ontario, one empire was destroyed by another and then the second one was displaced by a third, with great loss of life, dispersion, and dispossession thoroughout. I'm not talking of the French empire, still less of the English. It was Huron-Wendat, then Haudenosaunee, then Anishnabeg, military, economic, and diplomatic power that drove these events.
That is still an almost entirely untold story, one in which Brebeuf and the other Jesuits would be very much marginal. It needs to be told from Indigenous sources -- Wendat, Haudenosaunee, and Anishnabeg. And I assume only an indigenous scholar will be able to access and interpret those sources.
I wish Mark Bourrie were happier with the sales of Crosses in the Sky, because I like to see books about Canadian history succeed. But I think CanHist readers might be thinking that when it comes to Indigenous history, the time is right for indigenous historians.
