by Ian Roberts
Fire spreads rapidly along the line of dry bark canoes. The early dawn light illuminates the gorge.
“I needed you,” Brulé says to Savignon, feeling a pang of remorse for pulling his companion into this mad scheme.
“I needed it too, Etienne,” says Savignon. “To be a warrior for my people. To have a song sung of this. Although no one may know of it.”
“They’ll know, Savignon.”
They load muskets, leaning them side-by-side, immediately at hand. They must wait until the Iroquois are close enough so they cannot miss and waste a shot, but not so close they will be overrun. There’ll be no time to reload.
The French soldier hangs tied to the tree, burnt and bloody. The screams of the approaching Iroquois wrench him back into consciousness. He moans and writhes in pain and terror.
Brulé picks up a musket and shoots the man in the chest, knowing he will never survive his wounds, or, if he should, what revenge the Iroquois would exact on him. A dozen crows explode out of the trees with the shot, cawing as they cross the clearing. Their screeching, flapping mass separates as a white hawk launches itself from higher up in the trees, drops silently past them, and sweeps across the clearing and starts to climb.
Brulé watches the hawk as he reloads the musket. As he sets the musket down, he notices LeCharon’s crucifix in the grass at his feet. He picks it up and hangs it around his neck. “We’ll need all the help we can get.”
“I suppose it is too late to worry about Heaven or Hell now,” says Savignon.
“We’ll find Paradise yet, my friend.” He sees Brulé’s face smeared dark with dirt and blood, but his eyes shine clear, fearless of whatever is to come, either here, or in the hereafter.
The crows resettle in the trees. However this battle unfolds, they at least will be fed.
Just then, the screams of the attacking Iroquois erupt, a barrage of rage and blood lust. The first Iroquois emerge into view, clambering over the boulders at the far end of the long, rock cleft. Brulé shoulders a musket, knowing he will have to wait a bit longer yet before having a sure shot. He gazes up at the hawk. It glides above them, distant, soaring fast, sweeping high above the trees, and then it’s gone.
Afterword
My eighth-grade history teacher, Mr. Carver, fashioned a narrative around Etienne Brulé that brought him to life, and which I never forgot. Something of his life in the wilderness rung true, called to something in me. Each summer I took canoes trips in northern Ontario that further honed that narrative with experiences in the very same wilderness that inspired Brulé.
When I was seventeen on a canoe trip down the Bloodvein River in northern Manitoba, I awoke one morning feeling a deep spiritual peace and joy, in complete contrast to my usual teenage angst and confusion. The feeling resonated to my core, and I associated it with being in the wilderness, with being at one with it. Albert Camus once wrote, a person’s “work is nothing but the slow trek to rediscover, through the long detour of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence their heart first opened.” I experienced that opening on the Bloodvein and it stayed with me. My desire to rediscover that pristine state of simplicity, I projected onto Brulé and the reason he lived with the Wendat.
Decades later, I sat outdoors drinking coffee in Oakville, a town near Toronto, with my friend Jakob de Boer, not far in fact from the long portage the Wendat, and Brulé himself, would have used to go from Lake Ontario to Lake Simcoe. Jakob, a photographer and filmmaker, described a film script he was working on and something in his story reminded me of how I imagined a story about Brulé. I mentioned it and did not get two sentences into my idea before Jakob said, “You have to write this.” I said, “Wait, just a minute. I haven’t even started”. I got two more sentences into it and again, even more emphatically, he said, “You have to write this.”
Now lots of people have told me I must do all kinds of things over the years. And I don’t. But those words struck deep; they hit some narrative core in me. I began reading and researching everything I could about the Wendat and those early years of the French in the New France, and about writing film scripts. Then I began writing one dreadful script after another as I slowly came to terms with that very specific and demanding art form. A script rests on structure, with two main tools to tell the story — action and dialogue. What can’t be filmed — psychology, inner dialogue, abstract ideas — are all out. Only what can be tangibly seen onscreen remains. The scriptwriter also leaves out most description. Except for the most basic outline, all details of costuming, sets and locations will be fleshed out by the costume, set and production designers. The script also leaves out all camera directions, such as close up, or pan to left to reveal the dead body, or whatever. Those directions are the job of the director. If you see a script with those camera directions, it is the shooting script created by the director and cinematographer. A script is one honed piece of structure without much distraction. All story.
Fashioning that script on Brulé took years of writing and rewriting. Actually most screenwriters would probably say they have had that experience at some point in their career. In my case most of that rewriting was in service of learning what a script was—definitely one of those “long detours of art”! It’s devilishly difficult. I remember two things said to me during those years that give a sense of it.
When I moved to LA, not because of the script, I remember my brother telling me he’d heard if you are ever at a party in LA and the small talk begins to lag just ask them how their script is going. Meaning everyone either wants to or tries to write one. The other, “Writing a script is like shitting a piano.” It ain’t easy.
Eventually with the script pretty much as good as I knew how to make it, I gave it to a couple of script doctors, got notes, made changes. Then I made the rounds to a few producers in Canada, got nowhere, put the script in a drawer and got on with something else.
A couple of years later, my friend Don Clark read the script to his wife Jan. I don’t remember exactly why they had a copy. When he finished, he called and said, “You have to do something with this script.”
I pulled it out of the drawer and gave it to Jim Bonnet, a story consultant here in LA. I spent several days chatting with him and by the end of the week decided to turn the script into a novel, with illustrations. Pretty much what you have in your hands now.
I am aware of the issues of appropriating native culture to advance a story, particularly the story of a white hero. My experience on the Bloodvein River as a teenager offered me an insight into what I thought motivated Brulé to live with the Wendat. His connection is both to the culture and to the land itself. In trying to give form to Brulé and his story I have had to immerse him in a culture I can only guess at. My fictional recreation of that culture has been expressed I hope with the deepest respect for and sensitivity to the issues of appropriating another’s culture to serve my own narrative ends.
Historical Accuracy
Historical fiction needs an historically reasonable setting, but also needs room to bend accuracy for the sake of the story. With that in mind, I think it worth discussing a few points within the story to clarify its historical accuracy.
Etienne Brulé
Brulé did come to New France in 1609 with Champlain, and Champlain did send him to live with the Wendat the next spring. When he came back to Québec the following year, he had fully embraced the Wendat way of life. He was the first European to go deep, really deep, into the North American wilderness and live with and adopt the native culture. Brulé’s natural aptitude for picking up the native languages and dialects, and what I assume, was a love of being out in the wilderness, allowed him to create trust with the Wendat and alliances with other tribes even further afield.
Disappearing into the wilderness and sometimes not reappearing for two or three years at a time, he spent too much time out there to imagine he was developing the fur trade solely for profit. Because of that, he was not entirely reliable to Champlain’s ends
. Within a couple of years Champlain sent other Frenchmen into the wilderness to live with different tribes to the west to learn their languages, foster alliances and develop trade.
Brulé clearly holds the mantle of hero in my story. And in his years living with the Wendat he did travel hundreds of miles even deeper into what would seem the endless wilds of the New World. He travelled as far as what is now Duluth at the western end of Lake Superior. He’s thought to have travelled on to the Mississippi River which is not far to the west and the local tribes would have known it runs far to the south. Although he was probably assessing everywhere he went for furs and trade, he was unusual for the time. As a European explorer he claimed no territory, keep no notes nor made any maps. He embedded himself in the Wendat way of life. But later he crossed paths with Champlain who rejected him as a traitor, ostensibly for having traded with the English. And in the end he was in fact murdered by a Wendat chief. No one knows why.
One possibility presented by Father Sagard, a Jesuit priest who lived with the Wendat and who clearly thought Brulé was damned, was that he’d been killed because of his licentious relations with the Wendat women. That may reflect the Catholic priest’s own fixation more than the motives of the Wendat, who did not have many inhibitions around sexual relations.
The other: Brulé had been captured and tortured by the Iroquois, and escaped. Some Wendat may have been suspicious of that escape and speculated he had escaped in exchange for helping the Iroquois create a trading relationship with the French. If true, Brulé perhaps saw a way to redeem himself with Champlain.
If that was the case, then all the Wendat, who survived as the middlemen among the many tribes trading with the French, would have seen the need to do away with such a devastating threat to their livelihood. However, many Wendat were upset at his murder, so perhaps it was just a personal feud with the chief who killed him.
One account had it that whatever Brulé did crossed some line in the Wendat code. He was given a choice, to leave the Wendat, or stay and be killed. He stayed. That dilemma fascinated me, of someone coming to terms with what he truly is and believing in it to such an extent, that he would rather die for that, than return to something, say the values of the French, he had rejected as now foreign. But, that is a very internal dialogue. And being so internal, would have been difficult to navigate as a script. Perhaps that’s a story for another time.
Savignon did go to France the year Brulé first went to live with the Wendat. He stayed for three years and helped forge trust and the alliance between the Wendat and the French.
Champlain travelled out to the Wendat in 1615, but never went back.
Language
I soon found in writing the novel that saying, “Brulé said in Wendat”, “Champlain said in French” got tiresome pretty quickly. So I eliminated almost all of it. The Wendat language was close enough to Iroquois that they would understand each other. The only place where the language became really important to the story itself was the conversation between Father LeCharon and the Wendat chief Atironta, where Brulé is acting as interpreter. Here the very words being translated are a problem, i.e. to jail someone, to hang someone, Heaven and so on. I hoped to show the distance that needed to be crossed in order to begin to understand each other.
Indians
I made of point of never using the word “Indian” in the novel. Partly because some people find it offensive but also because the word was not used to describe the indigenous peoples of North American until the mid-1800s.
In Canada, Indian was changed in the 1970’s to First Nations. In the US the terms Indian, Native American, American Indian are used but many indigenous people prefer to call themselves by their tribal name, although even that is often anglicized, e.g. Navajo for Diné. The word Iroquois is of uncertain origin but is not an Iroquois word. Wendat, or Wyandot, was their own name for themselves. Huron, the anglicized name for them, is probably from the Old French “huré” meaning “bristly, unkempt”.
The French in the 16th century referred to the native people as savages. Although obviously an extremely offensive term, in French, ‘sauvage’ meant more like unspoiled nature. “Une région sauvage” meant a wilderness. So the expression didn’t really mean, as we would mean today, a barbarian. And Champlain, unusual in the history of Europeans in the New World, did imagine them somehow being integrated into the colonies of New France. But all, of course, predicated on becoming “civilized”, meaning having French values and ethics and being Catholic, that is not being “sauvage”.
Guns
In 1634 the Iroquois would have been buying guns in fact from the Dutch, who had settled in what is now upstate New York. Fort Orange was located where Albany is today. But the big conflict going forward in this part of the New World ultimately was between the French and English, so I decided to keep the number of players within the conflict simple and symmetric for the sake of the story.
The Iroquois and Wendat found the allure of the muskets irresistible. The guns were expensive and not very accurate by today’s standards, but deadly compared to an arrow. The muskets used in the New World in the 17th century were smooth bore, meaning they had no rifling. The musket ball when fired would tend to weave through the air towards its target. In truth someone with a bow and arrow could release two or three arrows in the time it took to load and fire a musket. Before the musket the Iroquois and Wendat used wooden slatted armour in battle to protect themselves from axe blows and arrows. They had no protection from the lethal damage of the musket ball.
For an extremely well researched account of the role guns played among the tribes of North America see Thundersticks: Firearms and the Violent Transformation of Native America by David J. Sliverman (The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2016).
Religion
In my story, Brulé opposed the Jesuits coming in to try and convert the Wendat. In fact the missionaries, first the Récollets, then the Jesuits, were already travelling to the Wendat by 1615. They were keen to live with the Wendat because the Wendat farmed and therefore stayed in one place. The Algonquin tribes around Québec were hunters, nomadic, so living with them was more difficult.
For the French, converting the “heathens” was central to their mission of colonization.
I tried to reconstruct the Wendat relationship with spirit and the land as respectfully as I could. In looking through the filter of several hundred years of our modern European culture, we have demystified our connection to nature. As Descartes said, man is “master and owner of nature.” In that view, spirit resides within us, not in the world. The world is ours to do with as we choose. Most aboriginal cultures see spirit existing inside and out, everywhere and in everything, animate and inanimate. We have lost such a resonance with nature that would have been innate with the Wendat.
The Jesuits saw a people without religion, mired in superstition, that needed saving. It is interesting to read William James’s definition of a religion from his The Varieties of Religious Experience, as the soul “putting itself in a personal relation with the mysterious power of which it feels the presence.” Although their religion almost certainly was clouded by superstitions, just as ours are, this idea, I think, would ring true to the experience of a Wendat. I have tried to capture their sense of that presence as best I could in the story.
The Wendat did not convert to Catholicism at first. Yet by 1640 they begin to convert readily. What caused them to change their mind? The answer is primarily disease. Ironically it is the Jesuits that almost certainly brought the various epidemics to the Wendat.
Imagine living in a village of several hundred, with much travel and intermarriage among the dozens of other local villages. The total population of the Wendat estimated by the Jesuits in 1620 was around 30,000. From 1634, when my story unfolds, to 1640, a smallpox epidemic wiped out half the population. Half! Any sense of a spiritual center the people must have felt, any sense of a social order and a stable unfolding for the future, must have been destroyed.
One can only imagine they lived in an unfathomable fear and confusion, and it must have left them grasping for any possible solution. The Jesuits offered them Christ and eternal life after death. Certainly they must have imagined they now lived in some kind of accurséd hell.
Their proud valor to fight Iroquois would have been broken. Add to that the Christian ideal of turning the other cheek forced the Wendat to question their blood feuds with the Iroquois.
That long mutual rivalry maintained by the Iroquois and the Wendat for generations ended in the late fall of 1649 when the Iroquois attacked the vastly reduced Wendat. Those that survived the attacks retreated to an island on Georgian Bay, where many starved to death that winter. In the spring the few that remained split into two groups. Three hundred relocated to Québec and about a thousand moved to the western Great Lakes and then eventually south to Kansas and Oklahoma.
Ethnologists consider when a people’s language dies, the culture has died. Although efforts are being made to revive the Wendat language now, technically the last person to speak the language died in the early 19th century.
Acknowledgments
When I began research for the story Bruce Trigger’s work on the Wendat, in particular The Children of Aataentsic, and David Hackett Fischer’s Champlain’s Dream were invaluable. Channing Gibson, Tom Darro, Jamie McGill, Britt Roberts and Pilar Alessandra all gave thoughtful and helpful suggestions during the writing of the script.
Spending several days talking with Jim Bonnet convinced me the story was worth pursuing as a novel. Vicki Leblanc helped me immensely in crafting the language from script to novel. Guitta Karubian and Jo Rapier I’d like to thank for their careful edits. As well as Alan Teare for his thoughtful reading of the novel for historical detail.
Tom Darro convinced me black and white illustrations would work. Doug Rosman shot hundreds of reference photos for me dressed as Brulé, Savignon and LeCharon. The photos are hilarious and I’ll have to post them someday. But they were perfect as reference for the illustrations. Doug also pulled my design ideas for the book into form in InDesign. When he left town to do an MFA, Ari Bharthania helped me with the cover and getting the book ready for the printer.