Children of Aataentsic

Book excerpt: The Children of Aataentsic is both a full-scale ethnohistory of the Huron Indian confederacy and a far-reaching study of the causes of its collapse under the impact of the Iroquois attacks of 1649. Drawing upon the archaeological context, the ethnography presented by early explorers and missionaries, and the recorded history of contact with Europeans, Bruce Trigger traces the development of the Huron people from the earliest hunting and gathering economies in southern Ontario, many centuries before the arrival of the Europeans, to their key role in the fur trade in eastern Canada during the first half of the seventeenth century.