Self-Portraiture and Commodification in the Work of Huron/Wendat Artist Zacharie Vincent, aka “Le Dernier Huron”

Zacharie Vincent, or Tehariolin (1815–1886), was a Huron/Wendat artist from the Wendake reserve community near Quebec City. He took up painting in 1838 after posing for a portrait by celebrated French-Canadian artist Antoine Plamondon, entitled “Le dernier Huron” (“The Last Huron”). Tehariolin’s extant works include landscapes and local-color sketches, but are most notable for his many self-portraits, in which he depicted himself wearing chiefly accessories such as medals and headdresses. Since the 1980s his art has been the subject of growing attention by scholars, mostly in Quebec and writing in French, but Tehariolin is still little known in the United States. This essay examines, first, how the epithet “Last Huron,” typical of the “vanishing Indian” ideology of the time, was appropriated into the cultural struggle of Francophone canadiens against imperial British hegemony during a time of violent rebellion and repression in Canada; and second, how Tehariolin’s artwork became commodified in the manner of products manufactured for a mass market, much like the moccasins, snowshoes, and other items manufactured in Wendake. During the later nineteenth century, photography made possible the mass reproduction of images of Tehariolin, such as in postcards produced by Quebec photographer L. P. Vallée in the 1870s. Zacharie Vincent was not the last Huron, but his livelihood as an artist suffered even as his image proliferated. The cliché of “the Last of his Tribe” was undercut by the consumer culture that had often exploited the ideology for its own colonialist purposes.