At the newish
Musée Huron-Wendat in a tribal enclave in northern Québec City ("Huron" was the French name for the Wendake First Nation), a reconstructed longhouse in a sapling palisade offers a glimpse of the rich social worlds of Iroquois and Algonquian peoples. I've only ever seen pictures of these impressive structures, of which there were many in these parts (in Manahata too!). A young Wendake guide brought it to life for us, translating freely from Québecois.
The museum itself is beautifully put together, telling with precision and poetry - Des paysages réels et imaginaires nous habite/ real and imaginary landscapes inhabit us - the difficult history of the Wendake people, who were driven here by intertribal conflicts from a homeland near Detroit as European-borne disease and French traders and missionaries arrived in these parts. (Another community of Wendak are now in Oklahoma.) The Wendake were "sold" this land by French Jesuits in 1760 in a contract only rediscovered in the 1990s.
In a special exhibition space we got to see the eeries images of "
Mémoires Ennoyées," created by Ludovic Boney for the Québec Biennial earlier this year. Based on data from a sonic bathymetric echo sounder, its video and stills show the forest still standing in two reservoirs built in 1969 in the remains of the
Manicouagan meteorite crater, their tops swaying in the current as once they did in the wind.
