I have long expressed the desire that more Native people should become centrally involved in the work of anthropology and ethnohistory. It is therefore an honour as well as a great pleasure to be invited to write this foreword for Georges Sioui׳sFor an Amerindian Autohistory.In this book, Sioui attempts for the first time to establish from an Amerindian, and more specifically from a Huron, point of view the guidelines that should govern the study of Native history. He maintains that these guidelines are also essential for the self-image and social ethics of Native people and should govern the...

Sad and confused, I headed home from school, having just received my first lesson in Canadian history. At the age of six I was starting my third year of primary school: a child from an Indian reservation, whose family had a below-average income but a strong Amerindian consciousness and pride.

“Your ancestors,” said the imposing mother superior who taught us history, “were savages with no knowledge of God. They were ignorant and cared nothing about their salvation.” And then, with a sincerity that sometimes had her close to tears: “The king of France took pity on them and sent missionaries...

Over a 4oo-year period beginning in 1492, the aboriginal population of the American continent shrank from 112 million to approximately 5.6 million.¹ The population of Mexico, which numbered 29.1 million in 1519, stood at no more than 1 million in 1605.² As for North America alone, of its 18 million Amerindian inhabitants at the time of European contact, by 1900 only 250,000 to 300,000 descendants remained.

Contrary to widespread belief, the Amerindian wars, whose intensity was very slight before the Europeans arrived, were not the cause but the result of this depopulation — the most massive in known human history. By...

According to the Sioux holy man Hehaka Sapa, everything done an Indian is done in a circular fashion, because the power of universe always acts according to circles and all things tend be round:

In the old days, when we were a strong and happy people, all our power came from the sacred circle of the nation and as long as the circle remained whole, the people flourished. The blossoming tree was the living centre the circle and the circle of the four quarters nourished it. The east gave peace and light, the south gave warmth, from the west came...

The portrait of a culture depicts the ideas that are most important to its people. The hierarchy of priorities is called a scale of values; culture, therefore, is fundamentally a question of values.

To understand the values that have motivated a people in its relations with another people or civilization, it is essential to comprehend the values of the cultural groups concerned. This makes it possible to respect the motives and recognize the dignity of those peoples. As Bruce G. Trigger states:

The differences between large-scale and small-scale societies are sufficiently great that an historian׳s experience and personal judgement are...

In recent decades, a certain number of researchers have been critically examining George T. Hunt's theory that the Iroquois waged war for economic reasons. For Bruce G. Trigger, there is both a cultural and an economic dimension to the matter: he maintains that because the Five Nations did not possess the entrepreneurial tradition of the Wendat, they tried to increase their trading power by acquiring new hunting territories rather than trade routes.

Most recent studies, however, are closer to the older, so-called “cultural” theory advanced in the writings of Francis Parkman, which attributed the wars waged by the Iroquois on...

Using cultural data provided by the autohistorical method, this chapter offers a brief examination of the thought of the Baron de Lahontan.

Louis-Armand de Lorn d׳Arce was born 9 June 1666 in the French province of Béam, heir to the barony of Lahontan. Reversals of fortune, quite frequent among the upper classes in the so-called civilized states, led the young baron to leave his ruined family at the age of seventeen and come to help the colony of New France in its attempt to suppress the Iroquois enemy, the chief obstacle to the achievement of French hegemony in North America....

In 1982 the province of Quebec instituted legal proceedings against four individuals (including this writer) of the Wendat nation (today known as the Huron-Wendat nation) for having engaged in some of their people’s traditional activities on territories where they possessed ancestral rights. The province, denying Native rights over the territories concerned, attempted to define the Wendat as immigrants on Quebec soil (see appendix).

The Wendat saw this as an opportunity to establish the nature of their rights on Quebec territory. Among other points, they had to prove that the Wendat who took refuge in Quebec in 1650 — whose descendants are...

This book was written because conventional history has been unable to produce a discourse that respects Amerindians and their perception of themselves and the world, one that would be appropriate to harmonizing society.

Because the problem is as broad and deep as the ocean the Europeans crossed to come here, we have tried to make our method — Amerindian autohistory — a vessel that is as confident of its good fortune as theirs. Our main goal has been to provide modern historical and ethnohistorical (anthropological) science with access to an appropriate knowledge of fundamental Amerindian values. But is there a specific ideological...

In the Amerindian’s world of plenty, no one is required to believe in the ideology of another. Each person is a vision, a system, a world.

In contrast, when non-Native humans have impoverished their environment to a certain point, quarrels arise to determine who will control the remaining resources, and whom this “victor” will be able to subjugate. In Amerindian eyes, such “nations,” who do not really have the right to this title because they exploit their poorest members, may claim technical and material success, but experience social disaster. Who can blame the Amerindian for wanting to preserve a moral...