Indians 101: Huron concepts of death

The Huron were a confederacy of four major tribes: Bear, Rock, Barking Dogs, and White Thorns (also known as Canoes). At the time of the European invasion of North America, they lived in the Lake Simcoe region of Ontario. While the Huron were an Iroquoian-speaking people, they were not a part of the Iroquois Confederacy or League of Six Nations.

As with many Indian nations in Canada and the United States, the name “Huron” was not their own name, but one given to them by the Europeans. They were given the name Huron meaning “rough” or “boorish” by the French. They called themselves Wendat (or Guyandot, or Wyandot) meaning People of the Peninsula.

Like other Iroquois-speaking Indian nations, Huron subsistence patterns were based on slash-and-burn agriculture which was supplemented by some hunting and fishing and by the gathering of certain wild plants for both food and fiber. While the general Indian stereotype emphasizes hunting, in actuality hunted meat was relatively unimportant as a source of calories on a daily basis. In her entry on the Huron in the Encyclopedia of North American Indians, Olive Dickason writes:

“Like all Iroquoian peoples, the Hurons were farmers who supplemented their crops with hunting.”

Corn, beans, and squash provided about three-fourths of their caloric intake.

Among the Huron there was no fear of death for the afterlife was not too different from the life of the living. After death, the body was placed on a mat in a flexed position and the death was announced to the village. The body would then lay in state for three days while those who had known the person would give speeches extolling the virtues of the dead person. After three days there would be a feast in which the soul of the deceased would take part. Gifts were given to the deceased, to the bereaved, and to the person directing the funeral. The body would then be placed on a scaffold 8-10 feet above ground. Here, away from the village, the body was allowed to decay and the bones buried later.

With regard to Huron warriors who had died during battle, Karen Anderson, in her book Chain Her by One Foot: The Subjugation of Native Women in Seventeenth-Century New France, reports:

“They were not accorded honours, but were treated with caution and interred in separate graves away from those who had died peacefully, lest their anger disturb the others. The Huron believed that the souls of these dead warriors were destined to constantly wander, seeking revenge.”

If a person died in war or by drowning, the body was buried below the ground and a shrine was built over the grave.

Huron burials were temporary. Every 8-10 years, the Huron would hold the great Feast of the Dead at which time the bodies would be disinterred and then buried in a common grave. According to anthropologist Conrad Heidenreich, in his chapter on the Huron in the Handbook of North American Indians:

“This was not only a religious ceremony but also an occasion to symbolize tribal union through common burial and to renew friendships with the living and the dead.”

Religion professor Henry Bowden, in his book American Indians and Christian Missions: Studies in Cultural Conflict, puts it this way:

“The Feast of the Dead reminded Hurons perhaps more graphically than any other ceremony that they were a people defined by the group and from it drew their abiding sense of being.”

Each person, according to Huron beliefs, has two souls. After death one soul stays near the corpse until after the Feast of the Dead and then it is released so that it can be reborn. Some of these souls are resurrected in name-giving ceremonies. The other soul goes to the village of the dead after the Feast.