Brébeuf—the tall, pale stranger from the land across the sea—was invited to witness the sacred Wyandot Feast of the Dead. In the ceremony, held at the Wyandot capital of Ossossané, the Wyandot dead were disinterred, reverently cleaned, and placed together in a communal ossuary pit, along with valuable and meaningful material offerings. The Christian priest was greatly impressed by the pagans’ treatment of their dead, and it is perhaps not coincidence that this was the year of Brébeuf’s first great missionary successes. … Whatever good was present at the Ossossané ossuary—where those who had not yet encountered the fullness of Truth honored their dead as best they knew how—is increased a thousandfold in the cemeteries of the residential schools, where baptized Christians were given Christian burials.