Situated within the area stretching from Georgian Bay in the north to Lake Simcoe in the east, the Wendat Confederacy flourished for two hundred years. By the mid-seventeenth century, however, Wendat society was under attack. Disease and warfare plagued the people, culminating in a series of Iroquois assaults that led to their ultimate dispersal.

Yet the Wendat did not disappear, as many historians have maintained. In Dispersed but Not Destroyed, Kathryn Magee Labelle examines the creation of a Wendat diaspora in the wake of the Iroquois attacks. In the latter half of the century, Wendat leaders continued to appear at councils, trade negotiations, and diplomatic ventures, relying on established customs of accountability and consensus. Women also continued to assert their authority during this time, guiding their communities toward paths of cultural continuity and accommodation. Turning the story of Wendat conquest on its head, this book demonstrates the resiliency of the Wendat people and writes a new chapter in North American history.

Kathryn Magee Labelle is associate professor of history at the University of Saskatchewan. She lives in Saskatchewan.

Kathryn Magee Labelle's profile page

• Short-listed, Aboriginal History Prize, Canadian Historical Association
• Winner, John A. Ewers Award, Western History Association
• Short-listed, Sir John A. Macdonald Prize, Canadian Historical Association
• Winner, CSN-REC Book Prize, Canadian Studies Network – Réseau d’études canadiennes

… the devastating Haudenosaunee attacks in 1649 have long shaped the ways scholars have narrated and understood the past of the Wendat people … So dramatic was this dispersal that many historians and anthropologists have portrayed it as the end of Wendat history and any meaningful Wendat peoplehood. Kathryn Magee Labelle forcefully challenges, and convincingly demolishes, this “discourse of destruction” (p. 196) in her aptly-named Dispersed but Not Destroyed … A topnotch ethnohistory, Labelle’s book … draws a complex yet coherent picture of the vibrant Wendat diaspora. At the same time it prompts broader questions about power, society, and narrative in the study of seventeenth-century North America.

Histoire sociale / Social History

A nuanced and highly readable account of the Wendat people’s turbulent history, which challenges the notion of the Wendat’s disappearance as a cohesive community in the wake of the Iroquois attacks of the mid-seventeenth century.

Roger M. Carpenter, Department of History, University of Louisiana Monroe