A figure of speech
Anthropologist-linguist helps to keep Indigenous languages alive.
If John Steckley were doing German history, he “would learn German, and no one would be surprised. To do Indigenous history, you learn an Indigenous language.”
Steckley had that idea decades ago. So when he began considering a career as a historical anthropologist, he went looking for an Ojibwa language coach. “Fred Wheatley in Toronto was my first Ojibwa teacher,” Steckley said. “His grandmother made him speak the language. It was a glimpse into the soul of Native languages.”
Steckley had linguistic training — and a gift for languages — and his command of Ojibwa became pretty strong. But in 1974 his interests shifted: from the Ojibwa to the Huron or Wendat, the powerful confederacy that dominated much of what is now southern Ontario in the 1600s. So he took up Wendat, a language as different from Ojibwa as German is from, say, Arabic.
Learning Wendat carries a special challenge. As part of the great disruptions of European colonization in the mid-1600s, wars and epidemics roiled the Wendat nation. In 1649 the Wendat were overrun and dispersed by their rivals, the Six Nations (Haudenosaunee) confederacy.
Wendat communities resettled near Quebec City and in the American Midwest, but spoken Wendat barely survived.
Steckley found different kinds of coaches: missionaries and their Wendat teachers of the 1600s. Four hundred years ago, Jean de Brébeuf and other missionaries compiled Wendat dictionaries and grammar books and wrote copiously in Wendat using the European alphabet. Steckley believes the Wendat language “may have had more written in and about it than any [other Indigenous language] currently spoken.” By teaching himself Wendat from those sources, Steckley became the first person in four hundred years who was able to analyze a precious historical source, the missionaries’ copious writings in Wendat. He compiled his own English-Huron dictionary and republished the missionaries’ French-Huron dictionary and other writings.
“Brébeuf is my weird alter ego,” he laughs — meaning Brébeuf is the other non-Indigenous Wendat linguist. In 2008, the Wendat nation of Wendaké, Quebec, named Steckley “Hechon,” a Wendat approximation of “Jean,” previously given to Brébeuf.
Through his knowledge, Steckley is able to quickly demonstrate that “Toronto” does not mean anything like “meeting place,” as was long supposed, but rather means “where there are trees in water.” More deeply, his work has made it possible for historians to reassess much that French and English speakers had garbled or misunderstood when writing about Wendat perspectives on the missionaries, the fur trade, and Wendat society.
Steckley, as long-haired and grey-bearded as Gandalf the wizard, never pursued a formal university career. He wrote standard textbooks in anthropology and sociology and recently retired from thirty years teaching anthropology at Humber College near Toronto, but he mostly did his linguistic studies on the side. That work continues.
Twice a year, Steckley flies to Oklahoma to help the Wyandotte Nation to build Wendat language programs and to recover songs and folk tales. He even helps find traditional names for the community’s children.
John Steckley reminds us that Wendat and Cree and Haida are languages as sophisticated and worthy of study as ancient Greek or Sanskrit.
In our era of truth and reconciliation, Indigenous languages seem doomed. But Steckley, having learned Ojibwa and Wendat, does not despair.
“Whose job is it to know the language? Maybe not everyone will learn and keep the language. But everybody in the community can have some. Some could have conversational abilities, if they have that gift. And there have to be some who climb the wall of total fluency.”