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The Feast of the Dead

Huron-Wendat Museum

Dreams in Traditional Huron Culture

The Story of Creation

Women in Wendat Society in the XVIIth century

The Reconstructed Wendake Village

The Huroni: The Almost Disappearance of a People

The Huron celebrated every 10-12 years a great communal feast, to which several villages in the neighborhood participated. The bodies of individuals who died in the interval between one feast and the other were exhumed and reburied in a common bone pit. The feast lasted for ten days and most of this time was spent preparing the bodies for their collective burial. Each family celebrated a feast in honor of its own dead, during which many gifts were put on display, offered to the dead, and later distributed by the relatives of the deceased to friends and relatives. On the last day of the feast, at sunrise, the bones and corpses, wrapped in beaver furs, were deposited in the pit, with grave goods, while the assistants accompanied the action with group lamenting and songs. In 1636, the Jesuit missionary Jean de Brébeuf attended to a great feast for the dead celebrated in the Huron village of Ossossané. This place has been identified and excavated by the archaeologists of the Royal Ontario Museum in 1947 and 1948. The excavations have revealed the presence of more than 700 individuals, buried in the communal pit, with many grave objects, mainly beads, some pipes, but also rings given by the Jesuits, as a witness that the Huron, though converted to Christianity, continued to practice the feast (Seeman 2011). The last Feast for the Dead was celebrated probably in 1695, at Mackinac. The ravages produced by the epidemics introduced by the Europeans and by the Iroquois wars, which were accentuated by the colonial powers, led rapidly to the disappearance of many aspects of Huron culture.
A Feast of the Dead (Ohgiwe) is still practiced by the Iroquois, one or two times every year, as a celebration addressed to the dead of the whole community. The ceremony is organized by a special society of women, presided by two head women belonging to the two matrilinear moieties into which the community is subdivided. The performance is held usually in  spring, in April, before the beginning of the planting season, and in the fall, in October, after the harvest has been gathered, and last all through the night in the longhouse. The ceremony includes thanksgiving addresses to the dead, tobacco offerings, songs and dances, distribution of food, cloth and candy.  It is a common belief that the dead are actually among the living during the ritual, so that food offerings are left for them, which they would bring with them when they left the longhouse to return to the home of the dead at the end of the ceremony (Hirschfelder-Molin 1992).