Captive Daughter, Enemy Wife

In the early seventeenth century Great Lakes area, White Corn, a member of the Neutral Tribe, endures plague, flight down rapids and across Lake Erie, and violent assault and capture by the ferocious Iroquois. Along with Hole-In-The-Night, her mysteriously beautiful and impassive mother, and her half French brother, Papillon, she is forcibly adopted into the Onondaga tribe of the Iroquois Five Nations. White Corn learns not only how to survive but how to flourish in a time and place where, as her mother says,"death is always there."
Against the background of the struggle known as the "Beaver Wars", we meet the goodhearted and carefree French trader, Jean Aregnac, devout but ill-fated Jesuits, and the fascinating Dutchman known as Corlaer who is equally at home among the natives and the Europeans. Without sanitizing Iroquois culture for modern consumption we encounter not only the famed brutality of the Iroquois but also their beauty and complexity.