Trigger Bruce G. The Huron. Farmers of the North

Second Edition. — Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1990. — 164 p. — (Case Studies in Cultural Anthropology). — ISBN: 0-03-031689-8.The author’s aim is to reconstruct a detailed picture of Huron life in the first half of the seventeenth century. The Huron, victims of various romantic fables, have been cast as avaricious traders, as cowards, and as disorganized, in order to account for their defeat and near extermination by their enemies — the culturally nearly identical Iroquois. Bruce Trigger ignores these myths and “describes the Huron way of life as it appeared when it was first observed by the French.” The target date for the reconstruction is 1615, when the first detailed description of Huron country and culture was provided by Samuel de Champlain, who visited Huron country between August 1615 and May 1616.
Particularly notable in the author’s reconstruction of the Huron way of life is their preoccupation with personal independence and economic equality. Huron culture contained an “elaborate set of positive and negative social sanctions which served to inhibit the development of economic and political inequality”. This characterization raises serious questions about some of the assumptions of an evolutionary model that transforms small interpersonal and group differences into classes and ranks with power wielded by a few individuals.