All our relations: The Grandview site and ancestral Huron-Wendat gathering logics

Abstract

Together with the development of ancestral Huron-Wendat village life in what is now southern Ontario, Canada, unusual deposits consisting of animal parts, small stones, and manufactured items such as smoking pipes were occasionally sequestered in sweat lodges, longhouse post holes, and other features. In instances where such deposits have received comment, most turn on notions of ritual behavior that betray commitments to a modernist distinction between sacred and profane acts. Such deposits, it is thought, align with the former category and can be reduced to their veiled symbolic meanings. In this paper, we seek to reframe this understanding by drawing upon Indigenous scholarship, particularly the Huron-Wendat philosophy and theology of Georges Sioui, along with the early documentary record and archaeological evidence. We argue that such deposits are better understood as the material vestiges of gatherings — concerted efforts to reveal latent yet ever-powerful beings or forces by bringing together seemingly disparate things and siting them in important places. Recast as products of an immanent rather than transcendent ontology, Huron-Wendat gatherings work against traditional notions of ritual as applied in archaeological settings. The late fourteenth through mid-fifteenth century ancestral Huron-Wendat village known as Grandview provides the case study for exploring these ideas.