COLONIAL HYMNS

In the United States, November is Native American History Month. As a not-employed organist, I use Instagram to share my music so I wanted to post a fragment from a hymn written by a Native American composer for an Instagram Reel/post at the end of November. Since it was approaching the liturgical season of Advent, I immediately thought of the “Huron Christmas Carol” (AKA “Twas in the Moon of Wintertime”).

While decades of hymnals in Canada and the United States Have represented this text as being Native American in origin, the actual history complicates that. In the 1640s, the French Catholic missionary Jean de Brebeuf was dispatched to the Wyandot people in the area that would become southern Quebec, a province of modern Canada. As part of his missionary work, he made the native people learn French hymns and basic Christian theology. The hymn “Twas in the Moon of Wintertime” has French Catholic elements tangled up with native references. Centuries later, in 1923, it was translated into English by Jesse Edgar Middleton who took the creative license to add more native words and imagery. Obviously a complicated history, that seems to suggest minimal native contributions to the hymn itself.

In addition, Jean de Brebeuf is a complicated character himself, while he seemed to befriend and was accepted by many Wyandot people, he was also participating in a systematic effort to strip them of their cultural beliefs. Because various denominations of the church were associated with state government in the 18th and 19th centuries, colonial conquest became forever associated with the Christian faith.