Narratives of Discovery and the Cultural Geography of the New World

The historical archive for the 17^th century Great Lakes consists almost entirely of narratives produced by European explorers.  These texts represent a distinct literary genre that can best be described as narratives of discovery. These texts performed discovery, and advanced claims of possession, by identifying, naming, and describing the people and places of the New World.  The discourse of discovery, in effect, appropriated indigenous people and space by placing them under the gaze of Atlantic World empires. We are introduced to peoples, like the Anishinaabeg, theWyandot, and the Haudenosaunee, in the language of empire as the Ottawas, the Huron and the Iroquois.  And, what we learn about them in these narratives is similarly encoded with the meaning and perspective of immigrants struggling to make sense of a new land, while they simultaneously claimed this space as their own. In these stories, the imagined communities of Native peoples exist only in relation to empire.  The Huron and the Ottawa become allies, children of the French father according to the logic of empire.  The Iroquois, of course, are represented in these texts as the other face of Native North America – les Sauvages, the Savage Other standing in the way of civilization's advance. 

It is possible, however, to dig beneath these new names and to look beyond the language of discovery to recover an understanding of the indigenous New World.  This paper attempts to make this recovery through an examination of discovery narratives that focus on the Wyandot Feast of the Dead ceremony, and its adaptation by the Anishinaabe peoples in the western Great Lakes, which reveal the evolution of a multi-ethnic Native social formation that remained independent of European empire throughout the 17^th century and into the 18^th.