Koutarcano

SERIES

Koutarcano:
An Excercise in the Historic Present

by John Sabapathy

4 September 2025

In 2023, the Anthropocene Working Group put forward Crawford Lake, Ontario, as a Global Boundary Stratotype Section and Point for the Anthropocene, making it an internationally agreed-upon reference point for the transition between geological eras. Crawford Lake is situated in the crook of the Great Lakes, in an area once known as Wendake. In the early seventeenth century, this area was settled by European Jesuits, who headquartered themselves in a place they Christened Sainte-Marie Among the Hurons – but which was known to the indigenous Wendat as Koutarcano. The piece is punctuated with fragments of the Wendat language, as well as French, for which John Sabapathy has deliberately not offered glosses or translations: to read it, forced to move between Indigenous and European vernaculars, is to experience a necessary alienation.

By Crawford Lake, Ontario, let us sit down and look through the water’s film; for the Redside Dace, Silver Shiner, and American Eel, in the month when the herons arrive. In longhouses here Wendat, Neutral, and Haudenosaunee fish, centuries ago now. In the same place, scientists kneel at the water’s edge, prospecting; for the age of copper and lead, the age of spheroidal carbonaceous particles, the age of plutonium – the age of the human fizzing with the present. In reports, graphs and tables the second language of science falls out like poetry with the plutonium it measures, undulating with bomb pulses, laminating the past with varve patterns. How far back does the present go? You can skim the past’s surface, or dive 15 metres 10,000 years through the murk. What answers do the fish and daphnia give? Truth-telling fish may be found, we are told, deep in lakes and seas. Can the fish speak? – perhaps of the depths’ radiating event horizons; have they seen what we can, seen what we shall not? Maybe one does not need to go so deep for profound answers. Perhaps the past accelerates through the water as it ascends towards the present.

Perhaps.

What was your question again?

When did our ancestors first shift the earth’s fabric?

Koutarcano, where the clay, wet earth is penetrated.

A place in the ground, a moment in time. They say the age of the human may be marked here.

No, no they don’t. They cannot agree. Perhaps they will instead contend its status while everything shakes in its crucible beneath the flame.

teontakonchiok

they will look at themselves, at their reflections in the water

You may not fish here now.

By Crawford Lake, Ontario, let us look at the sunlight leaking through high leaves, in the month when one plants trees. Beneath the soil, carbonised Rubus, Sambueus, Juglans, Zea, names alien in Iroquois. What happened here? Nothing, everything, something.

Such a case can be made for many places.

Archaeologists dig, extracting cores, sifting phases of charcoal layers, constructing histories from the fourteenth century. They document: the stumps of palisades, hearths, burial sites; kaleidoscopes of pottery fragments and their patterns – collared rims, dentate stamping, turtle suture stamping. Taxonomies of animal bones unscroll – deer, black squirrel, snapping turtle, brown bullhead.

In the lowlands of the St Lawrence river tribes live, ally, fish, war, trade; Wendats, Neutrals, Petuns, Seneca, Cayuga, Oneida. Alliances and settlements shift, spread, contract. For centuries prayer bends the weather, towards maize, beans, and squashes, before contact; smallpox, dysentery and influenza sail west, incubated in ‘Charcoal Men’, hatitsihenstaatsi, with bible black robes and those armed with great tubes like the hollow masterwort plant, etsohonra8ent8annen. Wendat and Haudenosaunee mix violence here with the outsiders. The Jesuit charcoal men preach, convert, make marriages of convenience, with Wendat, with traders, translate. On their dictionaries much understanding of Wendat still rests. There is no residue of how many Wendat are baptized in Crawford’s waters that we can tabulate. Two hours’ drive from here, in 1649, a Jesuit dies, the first saint of this village, canada. There is uncertainty whether he is Jean Brébeuf, Jesuit, or Hechon, his borrowed Wendat name, ‘a tree which though small is one of the most useful, especially for remedies and medicines’. Captured by Haudenosaunee, his lips are cut off to stop him evangelizing, replaced by burning wood; it takes a long time. A Catholic martyr, or mistranslated medicine man displaced by currents beyond his control. After, other Jesuits are called Hechon too, as one fluent in Wendat.

Ti-onnhontanion8an … tourmenter q., le faire souffrir …retirer, faire sortir la vie des diverses parties du corps en les tourmentant

Within the arc of the great lakes, ‘New France’ boils itself into shape. They come looking for an El Dorado of the north, rumours of Lake Superior’s copper liquefying to plate the land.

At Crawford Lake the archaeologists sieve copper through gamma ray spectrometers, assaying their American or European origins, resolving concentrations of indium, antimony and arsenic.

Here is a lost turtle rattle from the village of Van Eden, an image of a manned canoe burnt into it. A child shakes the rattle.

Here is charcoal – from beech, maple, elm, and ash. Here are rocks placed over the burial mound of a young woman. Specialists disagree whether this was to pin her soul to stop it wandering.

etserak8ajen

they will see the sun again

By Crawford Lake, Ontario, let us look in the mud, in the time of strawberries. The winds blow down from the city of Hamilton, carrying particles of the past in the present, scented and scentless, the metals of Stelco and Dofasco. Somewhere nearby the half-lives of nuclear detonations pulse.

tseronk8are8haska … ouvre le trou de la cheminee.

The chimney’s smoke hole is open.

ondecha8eti tsantondecho’kaθa, ahenhaon iesus

repandez vous dit jesus par toute la terre

Scientists measure varve patterns in choked mud, archaeologists tabulate linear stamping on broken pottery. Acquired languages, acquired expertise.

The lake is quiet in the afternoon light.

t’etiotondechonta8an

voila un etrange evenement … la terre dest renversée

Behold, a strange event … the earth was overturned.

---

Author’s Note

This essay was written between the Anthropocene Working Group’s proposal to locate the Anthropocene at Crawford Lake, Ontario in July 2023 and that proposal’s rejection by the Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy in March 2024. Crawford is an area of historic First Nations’ settlement, and subsequent European invasion and colonisation. Today it is a public park managed by Conservation Halton.

I have drawn particularly on: Bruce G. Trigger, Natives and Newcomers: Canada’s “Heroic Age” Reconsidered (Manchester, 1986); William D. Finlayson et al, Iroquoian Peoples of the Land of Rocks and Water A.D. 1000-1650: A Study in Settlement Archaeology, 4 vols (London ONT, 1998); James Taylor Carson, ‘Brébeuf Was Never Martyred: Reimagining the Life and Death of Canada’s First Saint’, Canadian Historical Review 97 (2016), 222-43 and Francine M. G., R. McCarthy, Timothy Patterson, Martin J. Head, et al, ‘The varved succession of Crawford Lake, Milton, Ontario, Canada as a candidate Global boundary Stratotype Section and Point for the Anthropocene series’, The Anthropocene Review, 10 (2023): 146-76. I have no knowledge of Wendat/Huron, and my usage here is with apologies to those who do, for unintentional errors, and with acknowledgement of John L. Steckey’s Words of the Huron (Waterloo ONT, 2007).

---

JOHN SABAPATHY is Professor of History at UCL History Department, co-convenor of UCL Anthropocene, and an editor at The English Historical Review. He is writing one book about thirteenth-century Europe and another about the half-lives of the medieval fantasy land of Cockagne.

***

Edited by ABIGAIL BLEACH, CYDNEY PHILLIP and MARTHE LISSON
Proofread by NICHOLAS LACKENBY

Lead image (detail) by Karsten Winegeart