Wyandotte Nation of Oklahoma

Charles Marius Barbeau (1883-1969) studied originally for the priesthood at the College de Ste-Anne-de-la-Pocatiere but eventually took a law degree at the Universite de Laval in Quebec City and then received a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford University, where he completed a degree in anthropology in 1910. In 1911 he became an assistant ethnologist, joining the noted linguist Edward Sapir in the newly established anthropological division of the Geological Survey of Canada. The fledgling anthropol-ogical division has since evolved into the Canadian Museum of Civilization, located in Hull, Quebec, across the Ottawa River from the capital, Ottawa.

Barbeau’s first assignment as ethnologist was to collect Huron songs from an old friend of his, the Abbe Prosper Vincent this he did in April and May of 1911. In June and July of that year he collected additional ethnographic material from Mary McKee, a Wyandotte living in southern Ontario. From September 14 through November 18 he undertook field work in Northeast Oklahoma. The following year, 1912, from April 20 though August 3, he continued his field work and story collection in Oklahoma. Thus the material making up his collection is the result of slightly less than six months of linguistic work.

Barbeau never returned to Oklahoma. His later career centered on the Northwest Coastal Indians of Canada and on French-Canadian folklore. Nonetheless, he brought his Wyandotte material together for publication in English as Huron and Wyandotte Mythology, in 1915 and probably began work on the bilingual edition of the forty stories at about the same time. However, the bilingual edition, eventually published as Huron-Wyandotte Traditional Narratives, did not appear until 1960, eleven years after his formal retirement and only nine years before his death. A French translation Mythologie Huronne et Wyandotte appeared in 1994, a quarter century after Barbeau’s death.