Daughters of Aataentsic: Life Stories from Seven Generations

These few lines are from a poem shared by Manon Sioui in the epilogue of Daughters of Aataentsic. In its encapsulation of loss, abandonment, abiding love, persistence, and recovery are the four themes developed over the book’s preceding seven chapters: family, community, mother work, and legacy. Daughters of Aataentsic: Life Stories from Seven Generations is the culmination of a near decade-long collaboration between the Weⁿdat/Waⁿdat Women’s Advisory Council and University of Saskatchewan historian Kathryn Magee Labelle, who is an adopted member of the Wyandot Nations of Anderdon and Kansas. Using the life stories of seven prominent women from the histories of the four present-day Wendat/Wyandot(te) nations, the book builds well on Labelle’s 2013 book Dispersed but not Dispossessed, weaving together a history of similarity and difference over the centuries from the Wendat dispersal from the shores of Georgian Bay (present-day Ontario) during the 1640s...