map of British North America in 1840
Paddling toward the origin of the name of Lake Huron, we touch shore in Old French where une hure meant a shock of hair. It also meant the head of an animal, and then was applied to any human head that was animal-like. An augmentative suffix is something one adds to the end of a word to make the root meaning bigger. A common augmentative in Romance languages is -on. For example, in Spanish, hombre means man. Now add -on, to get hombron, which means a big man, a stud, a real bruiser. Thus sixteenth-century French has huron, the augmentative of hure ‘a big clump of hair.’ In older French it could mean also a wild boar, or a bumpkin, a gross lout who never cut his hair. A North American legend says a French soldier saw a group of Indians with their hair shaved on the side and long on top in what we would today call a mohawk, but in what that French soldier or explorer called huron because it was bristly like the hair on a wild boar’s head. But the linguistic truth, which cannot be fudged by Jesuit historical revisionism, is that Huron was a derogatory, racist epithet that meant “the lout.” The Compare the name of Awenda Provincial Park in Ontario. When they fled their Iroquois enemies in the 17 th century, they were called Wyandot, a version of Wendat.
In 1615 when Samuel de Champlain and his crew of fur-seekers, a missionary priest, and adventurers first saw Huronia, they found, though they did not recognize it, an expertly balanced economy among the Wendat that included fortified villages and cleared land for agri-culture with three stable food crops: corn, beans, and squash, being deftly grown at the northern limit of their botanical range in North America.
The Wendat were such successful farmers that they could use surplus food supplies to trade with northern neighbouring peoples who trapped and hunted beaver, deer, moose, and bear. Most of the Wendat lived in towns. They were close together in 4-to-8 family longhouses, and were thus highly vulnerable to the diseases brought by the French, smallpox, measles, and tuberculosis, to which the Wendat had no immunity whatsoever.
Lest one imagine that native peoples contracted disease only from frowsy, louse-ridden, semi-criminal, degenerate voyageurs, one must recall that Champlain soon had Huronia crawling with Jesuit missionaries who piously passed on to the immunologically defenseless aboriginal population every spirochete and every pathogenic bacterium they had carried in their syphilitic bodies from France. One Jesuit-inspired custom of the French traders in the New World was that firearms could only to traded to native peoples who had converted to Christianity. Neat. That way, one could inveigle even peace-loving groups to take up arms, naturally on the French side, and fight whichever of their neighbours the French happened to be slaughtering that season. Then add the pious imprimatur of whatever semi-literate priestlet was attached to the “trading” mission.
The basic missionary impulse is an obsession that intelligent human beings of any century must wonder at. What kind of blind arrogance would drive a European to think that the nature religions of first peoples needed to be replaced by Christianity? Why foist the petulant, vengeful desert god of ancient Palestinian shepherds upon the Wendat? In the Jesuit Relations, whose diaries and records detail the enormities inflicted on native people in the name of the Christian God, in the myriad of self-congratulatory, self-pitying lines penned by Jesuit priests, there is not a single expression of kindly humanity that stood up in a priestly conscience and screamed out, But what are we doing to these people? Are we saving their souls only to destroy their lives? The Relations is a torrential spew of smug piety.
Father Brébeuf, the Patron Saint of Canada, and a few of his pious buddies hold a pep rally on a small cloud in heaven. Possible rally question: "Do you think we Jesuit criminals left enough plagues, diseases, dead bodies, and destroyed a sufficient number of native peoples while spreading God's word to insure our own sainthood?" "Ô, bien sûr, je pense que oui, mes amis." The author can think of no more flagrant historical obscenity than the one which enthroned this murderous Christian thug Brébeuf as the patron saint of my country. This creepy Jesuit's impulse to impose his own spiritual quackeries on innocents contains not one iota of Canadianness. Why not alter his saintly bailiwick to something more realistic? Let's make Brébeuf the patron saint of buggered alterboys.
After one has spent hours perusing this literature of religious self-justification and blindness to common humanity, one begins to think that Brébeuf and his ‘black robes’ got just what they deserved. Hawaii , South America, Africa : there has been no dot on earth’s map unsmudged by the missionary hand. Fifty years after Champlain met the Wendat, half of the entire population had died due to European diseases. And the Wendat lost more of their people through incessant warfare by neighbouring Iroquois tribes. In 1650 the last Wendat, 300 people who had numbered perhaps 15,000 when Champlain first encountered them, fled to a refuge at Lorette near Québec City, where a community survives to this day. But the last speaker of the Wendat language died in 1912. The use of Huron to name an aboriginal people would not be the only example of white insults made into native names. Consider the Flatheads, the Nez Percé, the Slave peoples. Or that notorious French trapper slang that became the official name of a people for many years, the Loucheux, a Dene people speaking one of the Na-dene languages, who live in northwest Canada and Alaska. Louche means cross-eyed, squinty-eyed, shifty, shady, suspicious. Now this couldn’t be French trappers projecting their own traits onto the native peoples with whom they traded and whom they cheated, could it?
© 2007 William Gordon Casselman
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name Huron was applied to a confederation of some Iroquoian tribes that once inhabited the area between Georgian Bay and Lake Simcoe, quite early called Huronia. Huron was a French label, never one used by the confederacy. Their own name for their people was Wendat ‘island dwellers,’ either because of the many lakes and rivers with islands in Huronia, or because in their mythology the earth is one vast island resting on the carapace of the primordial turtle. 
map of British North America in 1840