Reading Log
We Are as Well as We Are, Week 3
The point that Mr. Ronda is trying to make in WAAWAWA (We Are as Well as We Are) is that sometimes you have to challenge the status quo. Like some historians did in the 60’s and 70’s, before that it was hard to get a view on history that wasn’t from the perspective of “the great white man”. It was during this time that historians started to look at history from the perspective of the women, the children, the natives, and the immigrants. Up until recently most people you asked would say that the Jesuit Missionaries living and working in early Canada were there for the benefit of the natives, to help them acclimatize to the ways of the civilized world. But if you look at it from the perspective of a Huron Shaman or an Iroquois Chief you may see a whole new side to the argument that you have never even thought about before.
One of the examples of differing perspectives that Mr. Ronda shows is the discussions on the concepts of Heaven, Hell, and sin. In the Letters sent by the Jesuit Missionaries to their superiors back in France. They might have contained frustration of the continued resistance of Christian ideals by the native population or derision at their continued use of traditional healing ceremonies. On the other side of the coin are the native perspectives. The natives thought that the ideas of heaven or hell were strange and useless and the same went for sin. The Huron didn’t care for hell because they knew hell awaited them if they were caught by their Iroquois enemy and the same went for the Iroquois. While the Huron did have their own version of the afterlife, it was to different from the Christian counterpart (Huron afterlife is much like normal life, while Christian afterlife has no tobacco, wheat fields, or marriage), and when asked why they would rather go to their own after life they said that they wished to be with their forefathers. They held the same amount of derision for the idea of sin because they had no concept of sin, they didn’t even know how to sin.
In summary you must always to remember to look at history and arguments from both sides because while one side may have one tale to tell, the other may have an entirely different one.
TRU | tru.ca By: Ronda, James P.. In: The William and Mary Quarterly, 1/1/1977, Vol. 34, Issue 1, p. 66-82; The Institute of Early American History Language: English, Database: JSTOR Journals