The Eighteenth-Century Wyandot: A Clan-Based Study

Chapter One: Introduction

Chapter One Introduction This book is about linking together two photographs in time for the Wendat people, one of a remarkably well-recorded year in the mid-eighteenth century, the other of a very significant event that brought peoples with a shared history together in the late twentieth century. a photograph in time: 1747 It was early in the year of 1747. The people were the Wyandot.1 They lived in the Detroit/Windsor area on Bois Blanc Island in the Detroit River. The island is about 4 kilometres long (2.5 miles), and 0.8 kilometres wide (0.5 miles). A Jesuit missionary living with them, Father Pierre Potier, had compiled a census of their two communities, actually two, only slightly different . I cannot stress too much the uniqueness of this source. In it we see how many houses the people were living in. We see who is living in each house. Most of the names are given, if not at least the relationship between the unnamed person and those previously named. Sometimes ages of the individuals are presented as well. Strangely, Potier identified the two villages as Petit Village and Grand Village. I say “strangely” as Petit Village was the larger of the two with a population of roughly 309, while the smaller Grand Village had around 232 (see Appendix A for how these numbers were calculated). The Wyandot were in significant ways living a traditional life despite having over one hundred years of contact with Europeans and living a few hundred 1 2 chap ter one kilometres away from a homeland of at least a few hundred years. Most people still lived in traditional bark, rectangular, round-roofed longhouses2 with more than one nuclear family living inside, not in squared-off one-family European-styled dwellings. In the Petit Village, houses ranged in resident number from five to forty-nine. In the Grand Village, houses ranged in resident number from five to seventy-four. The average number of dwellers in a house was nineteen. The smaller houses tended to be lived in by people who were not born into the culture, adopted outsiders (e.g., Catawba and Iroquois). In the following chart you can see a brief listing of the houses in each village, along with their estimated population. One of the most useful and fascinating features of Potier’s census is that he listed members of the elders’ council, male and female. I have indicated for each house how many elders lived there. Authority in the communities seems to have been fairly broadly distributed. Those houses without an elder typically had living in them peoples of different ethnicities, including “Iroquois” (PV3), Catawba (PV9), and Wendake Huron (GV1 and GV7). One was the house of a traditional healer (GV3). Petit Village House Population Number of Elders in House PV1 45 2 PV2 31 5 PV3 7 0 PV4 9 2 PV5 0 0 PV6 11 2 PV7 10 2 PV8 7 1 PV9 6 0 PV10 42 7 PV11 49 4 PV12 9 1 PV13 39 4 PV14 17 2 PV15 10 2 PV16 14 2 PV17 0 0 PV18 24 6 introduction 3 Grand Village House Population Number of Elders in House GV1 5 0 GV2 8 4 GV3 8 0 GV4 30+ 3 GV5 6 0 GV6 28 6 GV7 6–7 0 GV8 16 1 GV9 10 2 GV10 0 0 GV11 13 0 GV12 29 3 GV13 74 11 GV14 0 0 GV15 13 1 Clan was strong at this time. Despite the presence of patrilineal and patrilocal Europeans and Algonquians, they stayed matrilineal (determining kinship and clan membership along the female line) and matrilocal (families living primarily in the longhouse of the wife/mother). People did not marry people of their own clan; they practised clan exogamy, even though that cut the number of potential mates down, not an easy thing to deal with when you are a small people among larger nations. The clanowned names that people bore were still passed on as they had been traditionally , that is with individuals going through more than one such name in a full lifespan. And a significant number of people appear to have been adopted by the Wyandot, including the missionaries and Aboriginal people from other tribes. Clan was a way of placing those people into the social networks of the Wyandot. Identifying the clan membership of individuals is work that...