A Canadian Christmas Carol "Stands Corrected"

I'll begin this Christmas morning by wishing all of you the best of this day, wherever you find yourselves. We will have a bunch of family around our table although this Christmas is something of a relay race as our gang comes and goes. 

In an earlier time I was grateful for the somewhat melancholy Huron Carol. I liked that it was a Canadian carol and had an Indigenous connection. Over time I learned that it was a romanticized version of an old song and while in Sudbury a scholar translated it from the  Huron, a language no longer used, and it didn't read at all like our version.

I'm more than willing to "stand corrected", as you'll read below. In this time when many of us are considering what Truth and Reconciliation looks like I found this story encouraging:

Three women from across Canada say they're hoping their re-imagined version of Canada's oldest Christmas carol, originally crafted as a religious conversion tool, will inspire choir singers and directors to be more curious about the songs they sing.

Under its Wendat name,  I esous ahatonnia' (Jesus, he is newly made, just born), and with new lyrics written by Wendat poet Andrée Levesque Sioui, the re-imagined "Huron Carol" tells the nativity story from a Wendat perspective. 

"I cried like a baby," said Levesque Sioui about the first time she heard her version of the song live at the PODIUM choral conference in Montreal in the spring of 2024. "It's a mix between pride, but not for myself, pride for our people. It was a pride that people will dare sing this — this decolonized version."

The project started over a decade ago when choral composer Sarah Quartel began reflecting on how to apply the ideas of truth and reconciliation to her own work. 

Growing up in Southern Ontario, the Huron Carol was everywhere, even in schools, she said. As an adult, she realized the song was long overdue for a revamp. "It just really struck me. I had worked with the Huron Carol, I had created [this] arrangement of the English Jesse Middleton lyrics. But I had no idea what I'd done," she said. "I didn't know the story behind the piece."

 From left to right: Jeanette Gallant, Andrée Levesque Sioui, elder Diane Andicha Picard, and Sarah Quartel in Wendake. The women lead a conference there in late October to present the piece to the community. (Julia Caron/CBC)

So she reached out to ethnomusicologist Jeanette Gallant, who had criticized the song and its origins in her work. Gallant went on to write the foreword for  I esous ahatonnia', explaining the piece's history. The song was reportedly first written by French Jesuit Jean de Brébeuf in the 1600s as a way to communicate new religious ideas to the Wendat in their own language. Over the centuries, it was translated twice into French and then English, losing some of its original meaning along the way.

The English lyrics make reference to Ojibwe language while using very few Wendat-language words. That version has "no relationship" to the original version of the song, says Gallant. "If you don't know these things, you look at the words and it's very pretty poetry; very, you know, romanticized, but that's kind of the point. It's romanticized. It's not the truth, right? So it white-washes the story of the Wendat people," she said.

I really appreciate that you read, you comment, and you provide the impetus for me to continue reflecting on Christian faith, spirituality, and the ways of our world. Again, Merry Christmas!