Customer Reviews

The Huron: Farmers of the North (Case Studies in Cultural Anthropology)

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
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This book was first published in 1969 as part of the Case Studies in Cultural Anthropology series. It is essentially an overview of all anthropolgical information known about the Huron Indians, who at the time of contact with Europeans in the early 1600's were settled in a relatively small tract of land between Lake Simcoe and Georgian Bay. There are three main sources of contemporary information on the Huron, the writings of: 1) Samuel Champlain; 2) Gabriel Sagard; 3) The Jesuits (on the Jesuit Relations). All of these writings are incomplete in their observations and tainted by bias. But regardless of this, they provide us with a rare glimpse into the lives of Native Americans who had been little disrupted by direct contact with Europeans. Trigger does an excellent job of summarizing and interpreting the information from these sources, and does so in a highly readable manner. This book is by no means a dry academic work, but is rather a very accesable social and historical study, one that should be read by anyone with an interest in Canadian or Ontarian history.

Huron, Farmer's of the north.

The book itself was assigned to me through my Anthropology class. Far as books from classes go, it's very interesting overall.

This book gives you a detailed layout of not only the Huron people and their basic lifestyle but also some about their rivals as well. The Huron book is filled with various details about Huron life and the sources that are used, (Champlain, Jesuits, and some others) are all very thorough and well done, also... the author of this book itself does well to keep the natural bias of the sources he used out of the book which instead gives a more balanced point of view

Right off the bat the author attempts and I believe does so successfully to push the claim that the Huron were as much of a valid entity as the Iroquois confederacy, if not more so as the author suggests that the Huron is way better organized than the Iroquois.

To that claim I give mixed feelings, yes the Huron are better organized as an entity than the Iroquois, but this is really an apples and oranges claim. For a smaller section of the people following the lead of a particular tribe, the Huron would be like France, and then the tribes within them could almost be like Normandy and Brittany, they are both people on their own but ultimately they are really France and that's it, that is the Huron. This is especially notable as one tribe tends to dominate the other three in some ways
However, the Iroquois is a step above a kind of UN for the local Indian tribes, but a step below the Confederate states of America, if you will. I don't think these two groups truly compare in this nature.

Overall, as a writer, I'd say if I wanted to do a book on the Indian peoples of the northeast US, or South East Canada, this book would be a principle source.
There are only two things that drop this book from a 5 star, two a 4. One, the first 50 pages has several typographical errors and the book while successfully telling you what the people are truly about, really failed to deliver even a small amount of detail as about what the Huron's final fate was.
Frankly, the book should have said what happened to them, perhaps in the epilogue, or in the introduction, the reader is left with many great details about the Huron but ultimately asking the question "What happened to the Huron people" and the books answer "they were defeated" is just not sufficient.

Finally, what helps bump this book up to four stars is the overall richness of the details. All and all, this is a great book that can serve many roles and I stand by the teacher's decision to use it as a text in class because it did very well to fall within and fulfill the objective of the class to learn about the anthropological details of one of the great peoples of Native America.