The Meeting of Two Cultures

Week 1: The Huron Carol

The Christmas song “Jesus Ahatonhia” (‘The Huron Carol’) was composed in a time and society very different from our own. The Wendat/Huron of today are in their own ways also removed from the context in which this ancient hymn was originally written in the late 1640s. Yet it continues to serve them as a living touchstone of both culture and faith.

A recent article about “Jesus Ahatonhia” notes that the Wendat confederacy of tribes “numbered around 25,000 people before Europeans made contact with them in the early 17th century.”* In the ensuing decades, many of them died of diseases introduced by the Europeans or in wars with their Iroquois rivals. The article tells of their fate: “In 1650, about 300 Wendat fled to a mission in New France, carrying the Christmas carol they had learned with them on the 50-day journey east.”* They settled in a village that came to be called Wendake, just north of Quebec City. Their community continues to this day, with a population of about 2,000.

For hundreds of years the small Catholic church in Wendake has sung out with the sounds of “Jesus Ahatonhia” sung in its original text during Advent and Christmas. For today’s Wendat people, this carol has been a way both to celebrate the birth of Christ and to connect to their lost language which gradually died out through intermarriage with French speakers. It has also provided the Wendat people with an opportunity to act out its First Nations imagery in nativity plays – depictions that are from a bygone but cherished era of their own cultural heritage. 

“Jesus Ahatonhia” serves as a reminder of “the creative ways Indigenous people responded to Christianity, and the spiritual generativity that resulted from the meeting of the two cultures.”* When we sing this hymn today, it helps renew our awe at the birth of the Christ child. We ourselves are reminded of the creative ways of God, in whom heaven and earth, the human and the divine, are joined in one tiny babe for the good of the whole world.

By Moses Beaver, First Nations artist  in “An Aboriginal Carol”, by David Bouchard.  Used with permission from the author.

* “The complex history of the Huron Carol” by Will Pearson, Broadview, Dec. 4, 2018. https://broadview.org/the-complex-history-of-the-huron-carol/. Accessed 10/22/2025.

WRITTEN BY

Rob Spach