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Chapter Three Five Wyandot Strategists of the Late Seventeenth Century Sastaretsi, kandiaronk, Sk8tache, the Baron, and Quarante Sols In the previous chapter we looked briefly at who the founding peoples of the Wyandot were, and more extensively at the clan nature of their society. In this chapter we will look at the transitional period in the second half of the seventeenth century. The people were seeking out new lands that they could call home, and new configurations were being formed of two formerly separate peoples who spoke essentially the same language, and called themselves Wendat. I will be presenting this period through an investigation of the actions and strategies of five leading Wyandot figures, to all of whom we can put at least tentative clan identities. A leader persuades his clan members to go along with him, but he listens to what they have to say, so that he speaks for them as well. When French writers of the time spoke of individual Wyandot leaders acting or speaking in a particular way, these writers were also speaking of the individual’s clan, and the clan’s attempts to seek out some kind of stability—security in a seemingly unending series of unstable situations. One reason for thinking this way comes from the fact that we often find these individuals living somewhere apart from the other leaders, part of a “family group” that would most likely be a clan, or at least a significant section of a clan. Four of the five names continued into the period of our main focus and were taken on by people who were significant figures in 1747. The one 51 52 chap ter thr ee exception is a strange one, Kandiaronk. It is strange because of all the five individuals discussed here, he is the best known, and perhaps the most significant in terms of the history of the late seventeenth century. sastaretsi: deer clan Sastaretsi was the name of the person who could be called the Grand Chief of the Wyandot. He was the leader as well of the Deer clan and the Deer phratry. It was rather like he was a mayor, a provincial premier, and a prime minister all in one. As the name did not appear in the Jesuit literature about the Huron from the 1630s through the 1640s, it is reasonable to assume that it came from the Petun. Other evidence points to that as well, as will be seen shortly. If he were Huron, someone with his obvious significance would not have been ignored in The Jesuit Relations of that time. The French were always on the lookout for the “chief.” Unfortunately, the exact meaning of his name is not clear. The verb root is clearly -es- “to be long” (Steckley 2007b, 279), with the repetitive prefix -s- meaning “very.” Both verb root and prefix were often used with Wendat names.1 The name “Sastaretsi” has been translated as “long bark.” This does not appear to be a valid translation, however. The noun root for “bark” is -st- (Steckley 2007b, 247), which leaves the -ar- unaccounted for in the translation. No Wendat noun root that takes the form -star- is readily apparent in the Wendat dictionaries. How old the name was, and how long it had been the Petun leader’s name are both open to question. The often imaginative Baron Lahontan talked about it being in existence some eight hundred years (see second chapter), but much of what he wrote about Aboriginal people was questionable . He liked to tell a good story more than he liked to adhere to tales for which he had actual evidence. A story told by the Wyandot in the nineteenth century was that Sastaretsi was their leader from the time they lived by the St. Lawrence River (see Hale 1894, 6–8). This story may have had its origins in those St. Lawrence Iroquoians that moved west from their homeland by the river from roughly Quebec to Montreal to live with the Wendat between Georgian Bay and Lake Ontario during the sixteenth century (see Steckley 2010a, 5–30, 2012).2 The first written reference to someone bearing the name of Sastaretsi appears in a letter sent by Jesuit Father Rene Menard to his Superior in Quebec on 2 June 1661. He wrote of meeting with a “Huron who had started 11 days before from the Tobacco [Petun] nation” (JR46:143). When [18.189.180.76] Project MUSE (2024-04-20 04:34 GMT...

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