Wendat Nation

Huron-Wendat Nation mulls dropping “Huron” from official name

Ruby Pratka, Local Journalism Initiative reporter

editor@qctonline.com

The Huron-Wendat Nation of Wendake could soon drop the word “Huron” from its name.

The nation will hold a public consultation on April 26 to get an idea of community members’ attitudes toward a potential name change, and move forward with the change if the consultation indicates support for the idea, Grand Chief Pierre Picard told the QCT.

Picard explained that the name change has been discussed informally for some time. Wendake itself was known as Village-des-Hurons until the mid-1980s.

“The conversations that I’ve had with younger people, they use the name Wendat, although there can be an attachment to the name Huron if you’re an older person who has been calling yourself Huron or Huron-Wendat for 60, 70, 80 years. On April 26, we’ll see whether people are in favour of the change,” Picard said.

Wendat author and anthropologist Louis-Karl Picard-Sioui is one high-profile supporter of the name change. He explained that the word “Huron” was derived from the French word hure, meaning “boar’s head” because French colonists thought the way Wendat men wore their hair, in a ridge down the centre with the sides shaved, resembled a boar’s head; in the 19th century, the word huron became an insult, a synonym for “vulgar.” The word “Wendat,” he said, is likely to have come from a Wendat term meaning “people who all speak the same language;” other sources suggest it might mean “island dwellers.” The important thing, he said, was that the name came from the nation itself, not from outsiders.

Picard-Sioui said the current double-barrelled name is “confusing. … Why call us two names, including one that’s a slur? It’s like calling the Quebec nation the ‘frog-Québécois nation.’ We’re in the era of decolonization and it’s not normal to define ourselves in the colonial sense,” he said.

“I’m 49 years old, and since I was little, the term ‘Huron’ has been on its way out,” he added. “For 150 years, people used it so they would be understood [by outsiders], but by the time my generation were teenagers, 30-some years ago, we were already telling people not to call us that.”

Picard said if the consultation indicates support for the name change, it would need to be confirmed by a band council resolution. The nation would then need to apply to the federal government for permission to enact an official name change. “We’re still under the Indian Act, so there’s a whole process … but I can’t see the feds refusing that in 2025,” he said. Institutions that officially use the double name, such as the Musée Huron-Wendat, could then choose whether or not to incorporate the change in their own names.

He observed that colonial names for Indigenous Peoples are increasingly falling out of use in Quebec – two of Quebec’s larger First Nations are now commonly known by their Indigenous names, the Innu and the Anishnabe, rather than the colonial Montagnais and Algonquin. “Zimbabwe used to be Southern Rhodesia,” he pointed out. “We’re not the only nation that has done this. … It’s a correction of history that has let outsiders define us. We want to define ourselves now.”