Wyandot people
The Wyandot people are an Indigenous people of the Northeastern Woodlands of the present-day United States and Canada. Their Wyandot language belonged to the Iroquoian language family.
In Canada, the Wendat Nation has two First Nations reserves at Wendake, Quebec.
In the United States, the Wyandotte Nation is a federally recognized tribe headquartered in Wyandotte, Oklahoma. There are also organizations that self-identify as Wyandot.
The Wendat emerged as a confederacy of five nations in the St. Lawrence River Valley, especially in Southern Ontario, including the north shore of Lake Ontario. Their original homeland extended to the Georgian Bay of Lake Huron and Lake Simcoe in Ontario, Canada and occupied territory around the western part of the lake.
The Wyandotte Nation descends from remnants of the Tionontati people, who did not belong to the Wendat Confederacy. However, the Wyandotte have connections to the Wendat-Huron through their lineage from the Attignawantan, the founding nation of the Confederacy.
After their defeat in 1649 during prolonged warfare with the Five Nations of the Haudenosaunee, the surviving members of the confederacy dispersed; some took residence at Quebec with the Jesuits and others merged with neighboring nations, such as the Tionontati or Tobacco to become the Wyandot. Afterward, they occupied territory extending into what is now the United States, especially Michigan, and northern Ohio. In the 1830s, they were forced west to Indian Territory due to U.S. federal removal policies. They are related to other Iroquoian peoples in the region, such as their powerful competitors, the Five Nations of the Iroquois who occupied territory mostly on the south side of Lake Ontario but also had hunting grounds along the St. Lawrence River. They are also related to the neighboring Erie, Neutral Nation, Wenro, Susquehannock, and Tionontate — all speaking varieties of Iroquoian languages, but traditional enemies of the Five Nations of the Iroquois. At various points in history these other nations have also engaged in trade and warfare with one another.
Etymology
In the early 17th century, this Iroquoian people called themselves the Wendat, an autonym which means "Dwellers of the Peninsula" or "Islanders". The Wendat historic territory was bordered on three sides by the waters of Georgian Bay and Lake Simcoe. Similarly, in other Iroquois languages, such as Cayuga, refer to this nation as Ohwehnagehó:nǫˀ "Island dwellers". Early French explorers referred to these Indigenous Peoples as the Huron, either from the French huron, or from wikt:hure#French. According to tradition, French sailors thought that the bristly hairstyle of Wendat warriors resembled that of a boar. French fur traders and explorers referred to them as the "bon Iroquois".An alternate etymology from Russell Errett in 1885 is that the name is from the Iroquoian term Irri-ronon, a name also applied to the Erie nation. The French pronounced the name as Hirri-ronon, and it gradually became known as Hirr-on, and finally spelled in its present form, Huron. William Martin Beauchamp concurred in 1907 that Huron was at least related to the Iroquoian root ronon.
Other etymological possibilities are derived from the Algonquin words ka-ron or tu-ron. In the late 17th century, elements of the Huron Confederacy and the Petun joined and became known as the Wyandot, a variation of Wendat.
History
Origin, and organization: before 1650
Early theories placed the Wendat's origin in the St. Lawrence Valley. Some historians or anthropologists proposed the people were located near the present-day site of Montreal and former sites of the historic St. Lawrence Iroquoian peoples. Wendat is an Iroquoian language. Early 21st-century research in linguistics and archaeology confirm a historical connection between the Wendat and the St. Lawrence Iroquois. But all of the Iroquoian-speaking peoples shared some aspects of their culture, including the Erie people, any or all of the later Haudenosaunee, and the Susquehannock.By the 15th century, the precontact Wendat occupied the large area from the north shores of most of the present-day Lake Ontario, northward up to the southeastern shores of Georgian Bay. From this homeland, they encountered the French explorer Samuel de Champlain in 1615. They historically spoke the Wyandot language, a Northern Iroquoian language. They were believed to number more than 30,000 at the time of European contact in the 1610s to 1620s.
In 1975 and 1978, archaeologists excavated a large 15th-century Huron village, now called the Draper site, in Pickering, Ontario near Lake Ontario. In 2003 a larger village was discovered away in Whitchurch-Stouffville; it is known as the Mantle Site and was occupied from the late 16th to early 17th century. It has been renamed the Jean-Baptiste Lainé Site, named in honor of a decorated Wendat-Huron soldier of World War II whose name in French was Jean-Baptiste Lainé. All four Lainé brothers, from the Huron-Wendat Reserve in Wendake, Quebec, fought through and survived the WWII.
Each of the sites had been surrounded by a defensive wooden palisade, as was typical of regional cultures. Four Wendat ancestral village sites have been excavated in Whitchurch-Stouffville. The large Mantle site had more than 70 multifamily longhouses. Based on radiocarbon dating, it has been determined to have been occupied from 1587 to 1623. Its population was estimated at 1500–2000 persons.
Canadian archaeologist James F. Pendergast states:
The Wendat were not a single nation, but a confederacy of several nations who had mutually intelligible languages.
These self-governing nations included:
- Arendaenronnon
- Atahontaenrat
- Ataronchronon
- Attinniaoenten
- Hatingeennonniahak.
The largest Wendat settlement and capital of the confederacy, at least during the time of Jean de Brébeuf and the Jesuits was located at Ossossane. When Gabriel Sagard was among them however, Quienonascaran was the principal village of the Attignawantan, when Samuel de Champlain and Father Joseph Le Caron were among the Hurons in 1615, a village called Carhagouha may have been the capital. Modern-day Elmvale, Ontario developed near that site. The Wendat called their traditional territory Wendake.
Closely related to the people of the Huron Confederacay were the Tionontate, an Iroquoian-speaking group whom the French called the Petun, for their cultivation of that crop. They lived further south and were divided into two moitiés or groups: the Deer and the Wolves. Considering that they formed the nucleus of the nation later known as the Wyandot, they too may have called themselves Wendat.
There were ongoing hostilities between the Iroquoian Wendat and the Haudenosaunee, another Iroquoian confederacy, but the Wendat had good relations with the Algonquin.
Tuberculosis became endemic among the Huron, aggravated by their close and smoky living conditions in the longhouses. Despite this, the Huron on the whole were healthy. The Jesuits wrote that the Huron effectively employed natural remedies and were "more healthy than we".
European contact and Wendat dispersal
The earliest written accounts of the Huron were made by the French, who began exploring North America in the 16th century. News of the Europeans reached the Huron, particularly when Samuel de Champlain explored the Saint Lawrence River in the early 17th century. Some Huron decided to go and meet the Europeans. Atironta, the principal headman of the Arendarhonon nation, went to Quebec and allied with the French in 1609.The Jesuit Relations of 1639 describes the Huron:
The total population of the Huron at the time of European contact has been estimated at 20,000 to 40,000 people. From 1634 to 1640, the Huron were devastated by Eurasian infectious diseases, such as measles and smallpox, which were endemic among the Europeans. The Indigenous peoples of North America had no acquired immunity to these diseases and suffered very high mortality rates. Epidemiological studies have shown that beginning in 1634, more European children emigrated with their families to the New World from cities in France, Britain, and the Netherlands, which had endemic smallpox. Historians believe the disease spread from the children to the Huron and other nations, often through contact with traders.
So many Huron died that they abandoned many of their villages and agricultural areas. About half to two-thirds of the population died in the epidemics, decreasing the population to about 12,000. Such losses had a high social cost, devastating families and clans, and disrupting their society's structure and traditions.
Before the French arrived, the Huron had already been in conflict with the Haudenosaunee Confederacy to the south. Once the European powers became involved in trading, the conflict among natives intensified significantly as they struggled to control the lucrative fur trade and satisfy European demand. The French allied with the Huron because they were the most advanced trading nation at the time. The Haudenosaunee tended to ally with the Dutch and later English, who settled at Albany and in the Mohawk Valley of their New York territory.
The introduction of European weapons and the fur trade increased competition and the severity of inter-tribal warfare. While the Haudenosaunee could easily obtain guns in exchange for furs from Dutch traders in New York, the Wendat were required to profess Christianity to obtain a gun from French traders in Canada. Therefore, they were unprepared, on March 16, 1649, when a Haudenosaunee war party of about 1,000 entered Wendake and burned the Huron mission villages of St. Ignace and St. Louis in present-day Simcoe County, Ontario, killing about 300 people. The Iroquois also killed many of the Jesuit missionaries, who have since been honored as North American Martyrs. The surviving Jesuits burned the mission after abandoning it to prevent its capture. The extensive Iroquois attack shocked and frightened the surviving Huron. The Huron were geographically cut off from trade with the Dutch and British by the Iroquois Confederacy, who had access to free trade with all the Europeans in the area especially the Dutch. This forced them to continue to use lithic tools and weapons like clubs, bows and arrows, stone scrapers, and cutters. This is compared to the near-universal use of European iron tools by Iroquois groups in the area. Huron trade routes were consistently pillaged by raiders, and the lack of firearms discouraged the Hurons' trade with the French, at least without French protection. As a result of their lack of exposure, the Huron did not have as much experience using firearms compared to their neighbors, putting them at a significant disadvantage when firearms were available to them, and when available, their possession of firearms made them a larger target for Iroquois aggression.
After 1634 their numbers were drastically reduced by epidemics of new infectious diseases carried by Europeans, among whom these were endemic. The weakened Wendat were dispersed by the war in 1649 waged by the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, then based largely south of the Great Lakes in New York and Pennsylvania. Archaeological evidence of this displacement has been uncovered at the Rock Island II Site in Wisconsin.
By May 1, 1649, the Huron had burned 15 of their villages to prevent their stores from being taken and fled as refugees to surrounding areas. About 10,000 fled to Gahoendoe. Most who fled to the island starved over the winter, as it was an unproductive settlement and could not provide for them. After spending the bitter winter of 1649–50 on the island, surviving Huron relocated near Quebec City, where they settled at Wendake. Absorbing other refugees, they became the Huron Confederacy. Some Huron, along with the surviving Petun, whose villages the Iroquois attacked in the fall of 1649, fled to the upper Lake Michigan region, settling first at Green Bay, then at Michilimackinac.
In the late 17th century, the Huron Confederacy merged with the Iroquoian-speaking Tionontati nation. They may originally have been a splinter colony of the Huron, to their west to form the historical Wendat.
The Huron Range spanned the region from downriver of the source of the St. Lawrence River, along with three-quarters of the northern shore of Lake Ontario, to the territory of the related Neutral people, extending north from both ends to wrap around Georgian Bay. This became their territorial center after their 1649 defeat and dispossession.