Roy Allen Wright, ethnohistorian and historical linguist, died with great comfort, dignity and courage on May 18, 2018 at Hôpital Notre-Dame in Montreal, with children and friends at his side. Nia:wen to Dr. Kristina Huneault and Dr. Luc-Aurèle Loiselle and his team in facilitating Roy’s wish to begin his journey to the spirit world after a long illness. Roy drew great comfort from the many friends in his “posse” who accompanied him faithfully during his final weeks.
Roy was born on May 15, 1941 in Springfield, Massachusetts from the marriage of Edward F. Wright and Patricia Fagen. His father had a family tree with Abenaki lineage, and his mother’s had Mohawk, Huron and Micmac lineage, which explains his cherished connection to the Iroquoian people. His forebears from the French Canadian and British side included links to the family of Philemon Wright, founder of the European settlement at what is now Ottawa-Gatineau.
He is survived by his children, Thora, Eva, Elsa, and Andrew, adopted daughter Patty, and eight grandchildren.
Educated at Harvard, with additional training at MIT, Roy was a National Merit Scholar from 1958 to ’63, while working summers mapping the surface of Mars at the University of Texas at Austin. Roy graduated cum laude from his bachelor’s degree, with a thesis on the historical development of the initial /-j/ in Albanian. After a two-year stint as a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Bucharest in Romania, he returned to Harvard to pursue a doctorate in linguistics. In 1968, Roy began a teaching career that encompassed more than a dozen universities and colleges, including McGill, Toronto, Trent, Cornell, Laval, Marlboro, and Concordia.
Roy consulted widely and freely with anyone who loved knowledge. His expertise was vast, ranging from astronomy and the history of science, to anthropology, ethnohistory, etymology, and historical linguistics. Above all, Roy was a hyperpolyglot, who spoke eight languages fluently, could carry on a conversation in twenty-five others, and had studied or taught sixty-three languages in total (including Xalxa Mongol, Maliseet, Icelandic, Yiddish, Swahili, and Russian). Of these, there is no doubt that Iroquoian languages were closest to Roy’s heart. His dissertation research focused on Jesuit lexica and grammars of Huron-Iroquois, and he knew Mohawk, Huron, Oneida, Onondaga, Tuscarora, Abenaki, Mi’kmaq, Maliseet, Cree, Ojibwe and Lakota. He enjoyed nothing more than visiting with his many friends at Kahnawake and Akwesasne, including elder Ernie Benedict and his family. His Kanien'kéha name, Tekastiaks, meant “chatterbox,” and no one who met him would question the choice. Any question posed to Roy would spark animated and erudite musings comparing words and concepts across both time and space.
Roy’s publications include several astronomical works from the 1960s co-authored with the late French astronomer Gérard de Vaucouleurs; “Le Plan Vincent et la toponymie historique des Hurons-Wendats” and “People of the Panther—A Long Erie Tale” (both published as part of the Canadian Museum of Civilization’s Mercury Series); and linguistic notes in Along the Hudson and Mohawk: The 1790 Journey of Count Paolo Andreani. From the 1980s onwards, he was a free spirit consultant and a fellow at the Newberry Library and the Canadian Museum of Civilization in Gatineau. Both an inhabitant and a founder of communal living spaces, he was greatly drawn to radical politics, especially anarchism.
For the past few years, Roy was on the executive of the Beaconsfield Historical Society along with his companion, Suzan Searle. He sang at Mohawk wakes, again with Suzan, and was a player on the trivia team “Relic and friends” at the Old Orchard Bar in Chateauguay.
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