If you happen to be at the Toby Jug in Bolton on a Friday afternoon, you may notice a big burley man with a huge white beard sitting in the shadows nursing a pint of Smithwicks. Little would you suspect that this Bolton resident is an honorary member of the Wyandotte tribe of Kansas (known in Ontario by its French name, the Huron tribe). His name is John Steckley and he is one of the world’s leading experts on Huron culture and language. He is responsible for single-handedly reviving the spoken language of the Hurons and translating texts written in Huron by the Jesuits at Huronia in the 17th century.

When John was doing his Master’s thesis in anthropology at Memorial University in Newfoundland, his topic was Huron concepts of the soul. The problem was he was the only one who could read the documents he was writing about. As his thesis supervisor put it, “The only one who knows what you’re talking about is you.” So John decided to translate what he was talking about. This eventually led to his major translation of De Religione: Telling the Seventeenth-Century Jesuit Story in Huron to the Iroquois published by the University of Oklahoma Press (and available at Forster’s Book Garden in Bolton). This text, written in the 1670s near present-day Midland, Ontario, is the work of a Jesuit priest, Phillipe Pierson, who was trying to explain the nature of religion and why the Jesuits came to Huronia. It was a pastoral text to be used by the missionaries with the Hurons.

Although the Huron language is a “dead language”, John was able to learn it from 17th-century Jesuit dictionaries which were better than English dictionaries of the time. He was also able to learn Huron with the help of another aboriginal language, Mohawk, which is still spoken and is related to Huron. “I probably speak Huron like a Mohawk,” John laughs.

What happened to the Huron nation?

John explains that there were an estimated 30,000 at the time of contact with the first Europeans.

By the mid 17th century they began to be driven out by the Iroquois and many succumbed to the new diseases introduced by the Europeans. Some migrated to Lorette near Quebec City while others migrated via Windsor, Detroit, Sandusky, Ohio and Kansas City, Kansas to eventually settle in Oklahoma. “I know the chief of the Wyandotte in Kansas and she refers to the Midland area of Ontario as ‘the homeland.’ She adopted me in 1999, and I was given the name Tehaondechoren which means ‘he who splits the country in two.’ It’s a turtle clan name. When I was 11 years old I came upon a painted turtle laying eggs. It made a huge impression on me. I swore then that I would never eat turtle. I find it interesting that I ended up so many years later with a turtle clan name. The turtle is a spirit messenger, it symbolizes patience. It is thought that the turtle is made from the flesh of all other animals. I’m very proud of this name.

“I always had a fascination for aboriginal people. I spent a lot of my time in the woods by the Don River in Toronto when I was growing up. It was a different way of being and it attracted me. The person who really started me on this road, however, was Fred Wheatley, who I met in my third year as an undergraduate at York University. He taught a course in the Ojibwa language at the Indian Friendship Centre. He didn’t just teach me the language. He taught me the relationship between the language and the people. If you want to know the people, you need to know their language.”

There is more written in Huron than in any other aboriginal language and there is more written about the Huron language than any other – but no one was able to speak the language until John worked it out. He is currently working on a dictionary of it. John travelled to Lorette near Quebec City where he taught the descendents of the original Hurons their own ancient language. “That was pretty strange. Here was this white guy teaching French-speaking natives Huron.

They gave me the name Hechon. This was a real honour as it had been the name given to Jean Brebeuf back in the 17th century – a man the Hurons respected.”

John published his first book himself.

Entitled Untold Tales, it included the biographies of three Hurons from seventeenth-century Huronia.

They were stories he told to visitors at Ste. Marie-Among-the-Hurons when he was an interpreter there during the 1970s.

He then published Beyond Their Years, biographies of five Canadian aboriginal women that went into a second printing.

His best-selling book came with Full Circle: Canada’s First Nations written with fellow Bolton resident, Bryan Cummins whose specialty is the Cree nation. This introduction to Canada’s first peoples has sold over 10,000 copies and is used in College and University courses across Canada.

In 2002 he did another book with Cummins entitled Aboriginal Policing: A Canadian Perspective. He has just published a major sociology textbook with Oxford University Press entitled, Elements of Sociology: A Critical Canadian Introduction. “That one took four years and scraped off a couple of layers of my soul,” John laughs. Next year, he has another book coming out which deals with the distortions and misconceptions that have been spread over the years about the Inuit. It’s called White Lies About the Inuit. “I take a few swipes at Farley Mowat in that one. Don’t get me wrong. I really loved Never Cry Wolf and People of the Deer, but he did promote some inaccurate ideas about the Inuit.

Margaret Atwood also takes a couple of hits in that book,” says John with a smile.
“I’ve always wanted to be a writer,” says John. “I’m glad I’m not a child growing up now because they would have labelled me and drugged me. I am full of energy. I always have to be doing something. I have two Border Collies. I think I have a Border Collie inside me.

If you don’t give a Border Collie something to do, they go crazy. That’s how I am. I always need something to do.

“I would like to know who said the book finds you, because that’s what has happened to me. I could never have predicted these books. They found me.”

Michael Reist is head of the English department at Robert F. Hall Catholic Secondary School in Bolton.