Scholar sole speaker of Huron language[Canada]

Teacher has published dictionary for once thriving Ontario tribe whose `Huron Carol' is Yule tradition

The world's last Huron-language speaker is a white man teaching at Humber College.

Anthropologist John Steckley has made the Huron tongue and Huron history his focus for more than 30 years, "and every year I think of how little I knew the year before," he says.

Sometimes he feels alone in his interests, he says. At other times, he feels in demand – especially around Christmas and particularly this one.

Earlier this month Steckley published an authoritative Huron-English dictionary, the first such volume in more than 250 years. Laval University also just received a $1 million federal grant to develop Huron-language teaching materials, drawing on Steckley's expertise.

And this is the season of "The Huron Carol," sometimes called "Canada's Christmas hymn."

Most church congregations and concert choirs know only the 1926 anglicized version, but every year singers contact Steckley to learn the 1643 original.

"The Huron version is much better," the professor says. "It's more filled with meaning and much more authentic. The Hurons didn't even have a Gitchi Manitou – that's an Ojibwa term."

The Huron were a mostly agricultural people living between two water bodies now called Lake Simcoe and Georgian Bay. Their first contact with white people came with the arrival of French fur traders in the early 1600s.

Death quickly followed. By 1640, disease had decimated Huron numbers and by 1650 the Beaver Wars had all but wiped them out.

Remnants of the tribe settled north of Quebec City at Lorette, and in Kansas and Oklahoma. The language long ago died, except in writing, but all three communities are working to revive it, Steckley says.

"I guess I'm the closest you could say passes for a Huron speaker," he says in a modest tone. "I have eight dictionaries of Huron at home, all 17th- and 18th-century, only one of which was ever published."

Written by French Jesuit missionaries, the volumes are "beautiful dictionaries, better than any in English at the time – by far," he says. "They are just amazing documents and they taught me."

Such records show that the long ago Huron were a musical people, Steckley says. They possessed an extensive vocabulary related to music and a rich repertoire of songs for all occasions.

One was "The Huron Carol." Oral tradition attributes it to Jean de Brébeuf, the first Jesuit priest fluent in Huron who was later famous – and canonized – for his stoic calm while being tortured at the stake and scalped.

Between 1629 and his death in 1649, Brébeuf devoted himself to the Huronia mission centred at what is now Midland. He is believed to have written the carol while in Quebec City in 1643, although the earliest surviving transcription was made at Lorette in the 1700s.

The melody derives from a French song, "Une Jeune Pucelle (A Young Maid)," Steckley writes in an unpublished paper. The original title was "Jesus ahatonnia," meaning, "Jesus is Born" or more literally "he has just been made."

"The okie spirit who enslaved us has fled," the song begins in one of Steckley's translations. "Don't listen to him for he corrupts the spirits of our thoughts. Jesus is born."

If that sounds like heavy-handed proselytizing, the carol does convey how the Jesuits spoke and what their message was, Steckley says.

The hymn also contains culturally authentic metaphors, such as three elders greeting the newborn babe by anointing His scalp with sunflower oil – "a traditional sign of respect," the professor says.

In 1926, Jesse Edgar Middleton, a poet and historian from the Guelph area, wrote a charming – if inauthentic – English "interpretation" of the carol, setting the Nativity story in the Huron bush.

The newborn lies not in a manger in swaddling clothes, but "within a lodge of broken bark" tucked in "a ragged robe of rabbit skin."

Instead of wise men bearing gold, frankincense and myrrh, "Chiefs from far before Him knelt/with gifts of fox and beaver pelt."

The carol remains one of the most regularly performed Canadian songs, Steckley says.

Franco-Ontarian singer Michel Payment recently performed it in English, French and Huron during the First Light festival at Midland.

Bruce Cockburn also sang a Huron rendition on his 1993 album Christmas. "Special thanks are due to John Steckley," the liner notes read, "for his help as translator and pronunciation coach."

It does not mean "meeting place" as popularly believed, says anthropologist John Steckley.

"Non-aboriginal knowledge of aboriginal languages is like a 5-year-old's knowledge of reproduction," he says. "They don't know, so they make up stuff."

"Toronto" is a Mohawk term, Steckley says. Originally, spelled "tkaronto" on early maps, the name was originally given to what is now called The Narrows, where Lake Simcoe empties into Lake Couchiching at Orillia.

It was where the Huron people and others for more than 4,000 years planted poles in the moving water to trap fish.

In 1680, the name "Lac de Taronto" was given to what is now Lake Simcoe. In 1686, the canoe route from there to Lake Ontario was labelled "passage de Taronto."

And in the 1720s, a French fort east of the mouth of the Humber River – in what is now Toronto – was identified as "Fort Toronto."

Lieut.-Gov. John Graves Simcoe in 1793 renamed the area York, but in 1834 the older name was restored.

Here’s yet another example of how the truth slips in about the demise of most Native Americans. They weren’t killed in a coordinated genocidal system employed by racist white Europeans; most Indians died simply by exposure to viruses and bacteria that that the explorers brought with them from another hemisphere. IOW, it just happened.

Now, I suppose most guilty white liberal Americans believe that once Europeans found out that the Western Hemisphere was populated, they should have just gotten back onto their ships and sailed back to crowded Europe, thus preserving the so-called pristine Americas for the natives who were already here.

Sigh. Silly guilty white liberals. Not only didn’t the French, Spanish, English, and Dutch NOT do that, neither would you, if you were in the same situation as they were some 500 years ago.

Thus, get off my back. I’m NOT sorry whites came to America and I’m NOT sorry for something that whites had no control over (the spread of disease via mere exposure to one another).

Furthermore, I’m NOT sorry that there is only one speaker of the Huron language. I’m sure that there are 100’s of languages that have disappeared over the centuries, if not millenia. Are we to spend a million bucks trying to preserve each one? And for what purpose? Guilt?

One Language. One Nation. Under (the Christian) God. Indivisible.

I am the
Right Republican

It was a well done satire.

14 September, 2007

Pastors's Supposed "Speaking in Tounges" Actually Quenya

Calvert, Maryland - Scandal broke this past weekend at First Pentecostal Holiness Church in Calvert. The incident centered around the churches pastor, Rev. Art Lofton, and his supposed tremendous gift of "speaking in tongues." Lofton, who has been the pastor of the church for over five years, often amazed and charmed his congregation with what many called "a truly spectacular gift."

"Brother Lofton had the most amazing gift of tongues I had ever heard, so I thought" said member Emma Harris. "So often I have heard people speaking in tongues and, while I don't want to be critical, it just sounds like they're saying the same thing over and over again off the top of their heads. But when brother Lofton spoke it really sounded so real! It sounded like he was speaking real sentences with a smooth flow to them. And the words sounded smooth, beautiful and truly angelic. We all thought he truly had the gift."

But what many considered a "beautiful gift" was discovered this past weekend to not be as "miraculous" as many people thought. As it turns out now, for the past five years Lofton has been charming his congregation with the language Quenya. Quenya is an artificial or "constructed" language invented by famed British author J.R.R. Tolkien. The language is one of the tongues spoken by the fictitious people of Middle Earth in his series, The Lord of the Rings.

In Lofton's case, his "secret" was discovered during a morning worship service in which a number of new college students visited the church. The discovery was made by Brent Perkins, a freshman at Calvert Community College.

"I'm a pretty die-hard Tolkien fan" said Perkins. "A couple of years ago I started to learn the Elvish tongue. So, the service was going well and all that. Then during the pastor's sermon he started getting really emotional and started speaking in tongues. Everyone around me just got so overwhelmed. I thought it was some kind of joke though. I leaned over to my friend Tricia who was with me and I said 'Hey, he's speaking in Elvish.' She didn't believe me at first, but then my friend Chris realized the same thing."

After the service the kids talked with Lofton.

"I went up to the pastor and asked him 'Did you know you were speaking in Quenya?' " said Perkins. "Like all of the blood just drained from his face, but some of the other people around us heard us and asked us what Quenya was. So we told about The Lord of the Rings and stuff and they seemed to get really upset. By the time we turned around the pastor was gone."

"As word begin to spread around about what was going on everyone was getting pretty upset" stated Harris. "We felt deceived, cheated and swindled. Here we were thinking that our pastor had this magnificent gift of tongues and all he had done was learn this fake language."

TBNN received notice that the congregation has since caught up with Lofton and that he has confessed to his "sin." At the writing of this article the church has not decided what they are going to do in regards to his status as pastor.

"We just don't know what we're going to do yet" said Reynold Farris, one of the church's deacons. "How could we ever trust him? Since no one ever knows what anyone else is saying when people speak in tongues, how could we know for certain he wasn't speaking Klingon or something up there. Speaking in tongues is the most genuine and real only when it is spontaneous and makes no sense to anyone else."

TBNN will continue to monitor this situation.

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