Notes
notes notes to chapter 1 1 There are several alternatives available for naming these people. I have chosen to call them “Wyandot” as they were ancestral to the peoples of Michigan, Kansas, and Oklahoma who so name themselves now. Contemporary writers referred to them as “Huron,” as do several modern writers. I do not so name them as they were linguistically distinct from their Huron cousins, as well as having a somewhat different clan system, which is a major part of this work. The language itself I tend to refer to as Wendat, which has dialects including Wyandot, which I suspect is based in one of the dialects of the Petun, and was most similar to the Wendat dialect spoken among the Southern Bear (see Steckley 2007a, 45), long-term neighbours of the Petun (see chapter 2). 2 Jacques Charles Sabrevois, Sieur de Bleury, commenting in 1718, wrote: “They build their cabins all of bark and make them very substantial, High and rounded like arbors, and very long” (“Wisconsin Historical Collections” 1902, 16:368). 3 For example, Raymond Firth’s classic We, the Tikopia (1957), based on the New Zealand anthropologist’s five months of fieldwork in 1928–29 on the small Pacific island of Tikopia, presents the four-clan social structure of the people in a way that presumes little European or other contact and that assumes there had previously been no change for an extensive time period. While elegant in its functionalist description, we get no sense of how the clan structure came to be. 4 This is based on the noun root -h8end- “island” (Steckley 2007b, 100–101). The basic problem with this as a potential meaning is that there would be no pronominal prefixes in this word. Wendat verbs require pronominal prefixes. For example, with the Wendat name for Christian Island, by the southern 273 274 note s shores of Georgian Bay, we have ,ah8endo,e, meaning “it is an island in water.” The verb root involved is -o- “to be in water” (Steckley 2007b, 291–92). The pronominal prefix is -,a- (ya) meaning here “it.” 5 Charles Garrad, the foremost archaeologist working on Petun sites, often remarks on the fact that the ethnohistorical literature makes it seem that the Petun grew this tobacco, even though there is no evidence for this and there is a long history of tobacco growing in southwestern Ontario, by the Neutral, by the settlers that followed, and by the tobacco industry until fairly recently. 6 I wonder whether the Huron ever adopted Champlain, giving him a name and a clan. They probably would not have tried to pronounce his name, the -mand -l- in Samuel, and the -p- and -l- in Champlain being too alien to them (none of these sounds were in their language). 7 Sagard several times made some cultural commentary in the lines of his dictionary, telling people not to oil themselves with sunflower oil (Steckley 2010, 269) and such. One of my favourite translations from one of the lines in Sagard’s dictionary is (from the French, the Huron is awkward but close) “Do not fart here. Go fart outside” (Steckley 2010, 359). 8 Here we find such features as a -g- after an -n- and before an -i-. This is written as a superscript above the -d- that appears in other Wendat dialects. Then there’s another -g-, this time written above the second of two -n’s- written before an -i-. Another prominent feature is a -k- written over a -t- that appears before an -i-. 9 By 1718 they were growing French peas and wheat (“Wisconsin Historical Collections” 1902, 16:368). notes to chapter 2 1 One could argue that this could be expanded to five peoples, if you consider the St. Lawrence Iroquoians and the Wenro, who joined the Huron before the dispersal. 2 In the early 1700s, the Tuscarora, who lived in the North Carolina area, were being harassed by American settlers, which eventually led to the Tuscarora War of 1711 and 1713. They moved west and were invited to join the Confederacy . They were sponsored in 1722 by the Oneida and given land in Confederacy territory. 3 Masculine will hereafter be represented in translation as (m). Iroquoian peoples ’ names involve the masculine plural as it is used when there are both females and at least one male involved. The use of the feminine plural indicates a group that is purely female. The indefinite is another, more generalized, third-person form...
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