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CHAPTER 6 Onontio ///'"^Vnontio, your name shall be great throughout the earth."1 It V^ywas in these terms that, in his farewell address, the Iroquois ambassador who came to Trois-Rivieresin the summer of 1645 saluted the governor ofQuebec. This nickname had been given to Montmagny by the Hurons, whose language was very close to that of the Iroquois. The allies of the French had picked up the habit of giving them names that were both conceptually significant and accessible to their phonetic patterns. This is how Father Lalemant2 described the phenomenon: The reason for these nicknames is that since the Savages cannot ordinarily pronounce either our names or our surnames, not having in their language the use of several consonants which are found in them, they do what they can to comeclose to them, and ifthey cannot succeed, they substitute words used in their country which they can easily pronounce and which have some relation either to our names or to their meaning. Onontio, literallytranslated,signifiedMonsMagnus,3 orMontmagny. And this name would afterwards serve for all the governors of the French regime. The Amerindians, according to the Relations, even attached poetic connotations to this name, "High Mountain." Onontio has "a voice of thunder," one of them commented;4 for another, "he is a great friend of the Sun," and this gave him supernatural powers.5 In a different tone, the Jesuits themselves used every occasion to exalt the most important person in the land; we have already seen several examples of this, and here is another, which pertains to the subject which we will now address: "These words [ofa native ofSillery] were highly consoling to Monsieur the Governor,whom Iwould gladly call the Knight of the Holy Spirit, so much do I see him given to holy and courageous actions, filled with the spirit of God."6 Here, LeJeune was evoking the entire domain of relations with the native peoples. In the governor's conduct he perceived attitudes and positions that were close to his own; he approved of them, but in his own style. 144 THE CHEVALIER DEMONTMAGNY We now wish to address this important subject, and to describe, as well as the sources allow us,7 Montmagny's activities among the nations, both friendly and unfriendly, that were carried out in the territoryof New France.8 By virtue of his mandate, as defined by the commission of 1645,9 he was to "take care of the colony," that is, to assure "its conservation and security;" his priority being therefore to see to the protection of his French subjects, surrounded as they were by numerically superior populations. For this purpose he had to preserve alliances already established and defend colonists and allies against the tribes which, since the incursions of Champlain at the beginning of the century, had become hostile. Another task was assigned him: "to protect trade." He was, in fact, the representative of a commercial company to which the king had given the colony as a seigneurie. According to the statutes approved by Louis XIII and Richelieu in 1627, the fur trade was closely tied to the peopling of the territory and the conversion of the natives. For the Jesuits, this last objective was undoubtedly of first importance, and they never tired of recalling the fact. Nothing illustrates this better than the meeting which took place at Trois-Rivieres on 22 July 1635 (a year before Montmagny's arrival) between the Hurons who had come downriver to trade and theFrench authorities. Champlain "told them, through an interpreter, that if they wished to preserve and strengthen the friendship that they had with the French, they must receive our faith and worship the God that we worshipped." This adherence would benefit them in every way; notably, it would seal the Franco-Huron alliance: "The French will go in goodly numbers to their country; they will marry their daughters once they are Christians; they will teach all their people to makehatchets, knives and other things which are very necessary to them; and for this purpose they [the Hurons] must next year onwards bring many of their young boys, whom we will lodge comfortably, and feed, instruct and cherish as though they were our younger brothers.10 And Le Jeune added a revealing detail: "I suggested these thoughts to Monsieur the Governor, which he approved, and even amplified,with a thousand praises and a thousand expressions of affection towards our Society." There could be no clearer evidence of the...

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