Mennonite Descent

Near the end of Menno Moto: A Journey across the Americas in Search of My Mennonite Identity, Cameron Dueck finds himself sitting on a backless bench in an austere church in rural Argentina, the air torpid and heavy. A preacher plods through his sermon in High German, while the song leaders nap behind him. Having spent a cosmopolitan life outside of the religion, Dueck admits that some services still make him nostalgic for the faith of his childhood. (Now a journalist living in Hong Kong , he grew up on a remote turkey farm north of Winnipeg.) But here, on the edge of Patagonia, he feels “like an outsider”— though an outsider who knows “the secret of our shared history.”

It’s this history, with its genetic and cultural layers, that Dueck is searching for. Over the eight months he spends on the road, the freedom of his motorcycle and his ability to speak Plautdietsch, the Low German dialect, allow him to move fluidly through various colonies. As he travels...