Jean de Brébeuf

Jean de Brébeuf was a French Jesuit priest, missionary, linguist, and writer born at Condé-sur-Vire in Normandy in 1593. He entered the Society of Jesus in Rouen in 1617, was ordained in 1622, and sailed to New France in 1625. He became one of the Jesuits most deeply engaged with the Wendat people, learning their language and recording extensive observations about Wendat society, religion, and customs. After the English occupation of Quebec forced the Jesuits back to France in 1629, he returned to New France in 1633 and resumed work in Wendake the following year.

The Christmas song usually called Jesous Ahatonhia or Iesous Ahatonnia is traditionally attributed to Brébeuf and is generally placed in the early 1640s. The surviving documentary chain is later than the supposed composition: Wendat oral tradition preserved the song, and the words and melody were written down in the eighteenth century by Jesuit Étienne-Thomas Girault de Villeneuve. Modern Wendat-language scholarship treats the song as a significant artifact of seventeenth-century missionary encounter and Wendat Christian tradition.

Brébeuf returned to Wendake in 1644. He was captured and killed during Haudenosaunee attacks in 1649. The Roman Catholic Church canonized him with seven other Canadian martyrs in 1930.