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Chapter Two: Two Questions
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Chapter Two Two Questions In this chapter, two main questions will be addressed. The first is, simply, “Who are the Wyandot?” The second, the more difficult one, is “What does a clan-based study of the Wyandot entail?” who are the wyandot? To address the first question, you have to look first to the early seventeenth century to see their origin from two, possibly three, different peoples.1 When the French first travelled to what is now southern Ontario, they encountered three groupings of Iroquoian people. The name Iroquoian refers to both their language and culture. It links these three peoples linguistically and culturally with, among others, the St. Lawrence Iroquoians that the French encountered along the St. Lawrence in the 1530s and 1540s, as well as with the then five nations (from west to east Seneca, Cayuga, Onondaga, Oneida, and Mohawk) now six nations2 of the people that came to be known to the French and English as the Iroquois (sometimes with the words “Confederacy ” or “League” attached). The Iroquois are known today primarily by the Iroquoian name Haudenosaunee. This means “they (masculine)3 build or extend a house” a metaphor for the Confederacy bringing together formerly separate and sometimes warring peoples. José António Brandão (2000, 1) estimates that the five nations together numbered about twenty-five thousand in the first half of the seventeenth century. (For his calculations, see his Appendix C, 131–67.) 21 22 chap ter t wo South of Lake Erie were the Erie, or Nation du Chat (i.e., with the meaning “it is a long tail” referring to the cougar). Further east were the Andaste or Susquehanna. Both groups were Iroquoian. Iroquoian cultures at the time were involved with what anthropologists call “horticulture,” in their case the growing of corn, beans, squash, and sunflowers, along with fishing, hunting, and gathering of plant products (fruit, bark, and hemp for rope and such). The three groupings of Iroquoian peoples in the area were known to the French as the Huron, the Petun, and the Neutre or Neutral. As we have seen, the first two groups bore the name Wendat, from which the word “Wyandot” was derived. Estimates of the population of the Huron vary. Early contemporary recorders had what we would now call high estimates. Champlain (1929, 122) reckoned there were thirty thousand, and Sagard (1939, 92) thirty to forty thousand. They may have been including the Petun and even some of the Neutral in their calculations. The estimates of contemporary scholars are lower, with Bruce Trigger (1976, 32) favouring eighteen thousand and Conrad Heidenreich going with twenty-one thousand. The range of medians for the three methods of calculation extends from 16,000 to 22,500 (Heidenreich 1971, 15, 103; for his methods of calculation, see 96–103). Judging from a series of different calculations, Garrad (2011, 537) reckons that the Petun numbered about eight thousand at the beginning of the seventeenth century, and about fifteen hundred at the time of the dispersal in 1650. In Gary Warrick’s (2003, 266, table 1, using data from Warrick 1990) classic series of estimations of population of the Huron and Petun based on the number of hearth sites per village, he reckoned that their combined population was 29,400 in 1615, and after the epidemics and initial Iroquois attacks hit the people, this dropped to 11,520 in 1647. We do not know what specific event might have caused the two Wendat peoples to be socially divided while linguistically and culturally linked, to be in separated clusters side by side geographically, with Petun to the west and Huron to the east. According to Father Jerome Lalemant, in 1640: These nations formerly waged cruel wars against one another; but they are now on very good terms, and have recently renewed their alliance, and made a new confederation against some other peoples, their common enemies. (JR20:43) The Huron called the Petun, Etionnontateronnon, “people where there is a mountain,”4 referring to the northern extension of the Niagara escarpment to Georgian Bay, the Blue Mountain area. Unfortunately, we do not know what the Petun called the Huron.5 That might have told us a useful story. [18.232.88.17] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 12:21 GMT) t wo que stions 23 The Neutral lived to the south and west of the Wendat peoples, including the areas of the Niagara Peninsula, western Lake Ontario, and north of the shores of Lake Erie. The Huron referred...