Good article.

Joseph Boyden's 'The Orenda' details, in often graphic violence, what life was like for the Huron during the years following first contact with the French and for the Iroquois with the British.

Many historians concluded it was accurate. The better armed Iroquois wiped out the Neutral Tribes and continued to massacre the infection-weakened and poorer armed Huron...their genetic cousins.

But because Boyden dared to contradict the current infantilizing and romanticized almost Rousseau-like version of pre-contact Indigenous cultures, his claims of Metis ancestry were questioned and found lacking.

And so the message that Indigenous culture was as sophisticated and as brutal as was the 'white' culture, was lost because the messenger clearly was too.

Pity.