Canada’s native Huron tribes in the middle of the seventeenth century have made a way of life that enables them to survive the savage winters and scorching summers and to live in harmony with their surroundings because they have “the orenda”. This is the essence, the life-force, which exists in everything that has life itself, from human beings to the animals they hunt and kill, to the plants they sow and harvest, and even to the trees they cut down for firewood.Into this wilderness, beautiful but cruel, arrive French Jesuit missionaries, bent on claiming the Huron for God, and it is with one of these priests, Père Christophe, that The Orenda is mainly concerned. There are three narrators: the Jesuit, known derisively as the Crow from his black robes; Bird, a Huro