In celebration of National Indigenous Peoples Day in Canada, Georges Sioui has provided an addendum to his Choice 2020 Outstanding Academic Title award winner, Eatenonha: Native Roots of Modern Democracy. Providing a greater understanding of the meaning of Eatenonha, Sioui also graciously offers readers a guide on takeaways for the book.

Eatenonha is the Wendat word for love and respect for the Earth and Mother Nature. For many Native peoples and newcomers to North America, Canada is a motherland, an Eatenonha – a land in which all can and should feel included, valued, and celebrated.

In Eatenonha: Native Roots of Modern Democracy Georges Sioui presents the history of a group of Wendat known as the Seawi Clan and reveals the deepest, most honoured secrets possessed by his people, by all people who are Indigenous, and by those who understand and respect Indigenous ways of thinking and living. Providing a glimpse into the lives, ideology, and work of his family and ancestors, Sioui weaves a tale of the Wendat’s sparsely documented historical trajectory and his family’s experiences on a reserve.

Addendum

Note from the Author

Eatenonha proposes a different way to look at how we construct our societies. Eatenonha relates how an ancient look on history has been preserved among descendants of the original Wendat Confederacy. Eatenonha places us at the onset of a new epoch when it will no longer be possible to use the conventional approaches of thinking and understanding our history as Quebeckers, Canadians, Americans (on a continental scale), in one word, our humanity.

Things to learn at the reading of Eatenonha

1. How to understand and speak to each other as Aboriginals and non-Aboriginals;
2. How men and women must see one another and communicate;
3. How the Aboriginal foundation of Canada’s and America’s history constitutes the study and the discovery of the soul of Canada, of the Americas;
4. How to approach and how to teach the Aboriginal/Indigenous studies on a national and world scale;
5. How to write oral history;
6. How Canada must be the guardian of democracy on a world scale;
7. How history and its study can and must be a medicine for the world;
8. How history can only be a medicine for the world (unite instead of divide) if it is intimately and simultaneously the history of the author and that of all humans;
9. How the animals and other-than human beings are our teachers
10. How to approach and understand the circular philosophy of the Aboriginal peoples.

Georges Sioui is a retired full professor at the University of Ottawa and author of For an Amerindian Autohistory: An Essay on the Foundations of a Social Ethic and Eatenonha: Native Roots of Modern Democracy.

To purchase Eatenonha: Native Roots of Modern Democracy use discount code MQFA at the checkout for 20% off. Valid until March 2022 across all of Turtle Island.