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  For one, the agriculture which the neophytes of Kamiskouaouangachit practiced on a modest scale took on an increasingly precarious dimension, as field workers made attractive targets to enemy marauders. Algonquian neophytes soon abandoned their experimentation with this new activity. As late as 1651 the Jesuits reported that “not a few” of the neophytes were cultivating fields, but references largely disappear thereafter.101 Fishing, hunting, and foraging in the vicinity also became increasingly risky in these years. The fact that Etouet, the captain of Tadoussac, “gave the district most abounding in game” in his parts to Tekouerimat during the winter of 1647–48 points not only to the strong ties between the two men and their relatives but also to the people of Kamiskouaouangachit’s need to secure access to more distant, safer hunting grounds.102 A 1650 memorandum from the Jesuits for its part indicates that in the last “year or two that their Iroquois enemies have become more fearsome, and [because] they feared more their incursions,” the neophytes had not dared to set up fishing encampments as was their custom at Pointe à Puiseaux, the easternmost extremity of the cove of Kamiskouaouangachit.103

  The invasion of the Wendat homeland by the Iroquois and the arrival beginning that year of hundreds of refugees in the Saint Lawrence valley also had far reaching consequences for the Algonquians who had coalesced at Kamiskouaouangachit. The presence of these newcomers applied pressure on limited environmental and missionary resources, making it all the more necessary to seek subsistence further afield. The Wendat presence, moreover, brought to the region unprecedented numbers of Iroquois warriors, buoyed by their success and bent on pursuing the people who had escaped. By 1655, the Jesuits observed of Kamiskouaouangachit that the Iroquois were “incessantly prowling about this village,” intent on “the destruction of the Christian Algonquins and Hurons, whose shattered remnant we preserved in the fort of Sillery.”104 The fact that these people were housed in the fort itself at this time, rather than up and down the cove as they had been in the past, is indicative not only of the danger to which they were exposed but also of the fact that their numbers were fewer than in previous years. An accidental fire, which in June of 1657 destroyed the Jesuits’ residence, church, and most of the houses in the compound, was an additional blow to the community. It took three years for the residence to be rebuilt, and three more for the reconstruction of the chapel.105

  As Algonquian neophytes developed a more distended relationship with the mission settlement, missionaries responded by seeking opportunities in the growth of the French population, ceding the lands surrounding Kamiskouaouangachit to settlers, which further fuelled the Algonquian withdrawal. In November 1649, the Augustinian sisters became the first to sell off their property – the stone house and plot that they had abandoned five years earlier. It was purchased by the widow Anne Gasnier, and soon thereafter transferred to her son-in-law, Denis-Joseph Ruette d’Auteuil, who made it into a manor house and began exercising his right to the eel fisheries along the shore. Around this time the new governor, Louis d’Ailleboust de Coulonge, and his employees also began to contest the fishing rights that the neophytes had until then enjoyed at various points along the shores.106 The Jesuits began ceding grants of land to colonists at Sillery, enclosing the Indigenous community’s land base: ten concessions in 1652 and a further block of forty-one concessions in 1663.107

  A similar process occurred at Trois Rivières, which Algonquians had continued to visit to trade, hold diplomatic conferences, and receive religious instruction without ever coalescing into a political entity comparable to Kamiskouaouangachit. They found safety there in times of danger, encamping within the town’s palisade, albeit in smaller numbers and for smaller periods of time than in the 1630s and 1640s. From its mixed origins, the mission of La Conception evolved decisively into a parish for settlers: in 1661, the Jesuits who had been posted there relocated to the seigneury of Cap de la Madeleine, just east of the mouth of the Saint Maurice River; within a few years, the title to the sole town lot that had been reserved for the use of neophytes, namely for Charles Pachirini and his relatives, had been transferred to a Frenchman. Algonquian families that had orbited around Trois Rivières adjusted their movements, occasionally trading in town but otherwise seeking infrequent missionary assistance at Cap de la Madeleine where the Jesuits shared an enclosure with French settlers. It was not long before that site too evolved into a parish for the latter. By the early 1670s, the two Jesuits stationed there had withdrawn, with Governor Frontenac explaining that it was “because too few Natives come there presently.”108

  ***

  As late as 1669, the Jesuits remarked in their Relation that “Sillery [is] where the leading Captain is appointed, and where he is accustomed to dwell.” The occasion for this precious observation was a great gathering of Algonquins, Montagnais, Mi’kmaq, Wabanakis, Maliseet, Attikameks, Nipissings, and Wendats who had assembled at Kamiskouaouaganchit to witness the naming of a new Tekouerimat. The former bearer of the name, Noël Negabamat alias Tekouerimat, had died three years earlier, and his relatives had chosen a war chief named Negaskaouat to take on his title and responsibilities – to “resurrect” him, as was the customary phrase. However, the nature of the mission at Kamiskouaouaganchit had changed since its heyday in the 1640s. Although it retained some importance as an occasional ritual and diplomatic centre, it had long ceased to be a site of Indigenous experimentation with the settled life. That the mission continued to serve as the “accustomed dwelling place” of the old Tekouerimat until his death is perhaps best explained by the fact that the site had, since the very beginning, been valued as a hospice for the elderly and infirm. Throughout the 1650s and 1660s most of the bands who continued to recognize his leadership had turned to Tadoussac, the Saguenay River, Lake Saint Jean, and the upper Saint Maurice River. In his final years the first Tekouerimat was described more broadly as “the Christian of longest standing,” and “chief of the Algonquins of Quebec.” It is revealing of the shift that, in succeeding him as the new Tekouerimat, Negaskaouat was himself described as a war chief “from Tadoussac.” Although the latter would return periodically to the old mission, he does not appear to have attached himself to it in the same way as his predecessor.109

  The distinct community of Innu and Algonquins that for a time had coalesced as people of Kamiskouaouangachit – “Christians of St. Joseph,” “Christians of Sillery” – was relatively short-lived. Mobility, as a preferred strategy of defence and subsistence, and dispersal as a means of dealing with external pressures, thus prevailed among the Saint Lawrence Algonquians. While the experiment of Kamiskouaouangachit might have been deemed a failure both by French observers and historians after them, it is not so clear that Algonquians perceived it in this way. The mission had served its purpose, for a time, in the context of a way of life where migration, gatherings, and scatterings were norms rather than exceptions. Yet the site itself would in subsequent decades be given a new life – resurrected, so to speak, not unlike Tekouerimat. In 1669, the Wendats established their community at Notre Dame de Foy, within the Jesuit seigneury of Sillery, but some 3.5 kilometers inland. Then, in the early 1670s, a new wave of Algonquians – Wabanakis from the south this time – would come to occupy Kamiskouaouangachit.

  3

  The Enemy’s Arms

  Iroquoian Lifeways, Warfare, and Wendat Migration to the Saint Lawrence Valley, 1649–1651

  In the early decades of the seventeenth century, the Wendat homeland – Wendake, or Huronia, between Georgian Bay and Lake Simcoe in present-day Ontario – had boasted a population of about twenty to thirty thousand, divided into up to thirty communities belonging to four or perhaps five confederated nations: the Attignawantan, Attigneenongnahac, Arendarhonon, Tahontaenrat, and Ataronchronon.1 The devastation wreaked by the epidemics of the 1630s and early 1640s reduced that population by about a third. Weakened by disease and death, by the concomitant disruption of subsistence activities and political structures, and further destabilized by divisions gen
erated by the dissemination of Christianity by French missionaries and Indigenous proselytes, the Wendats were poorly equipped to repulse their enemies’ incursions. Gaining in intensity in these years, the campaigns of the rival Iroquois Confederacy culminated in an all-out offensive against the Wendat homeland between 1649 and 1651. One by one, its villages fell to the invaders.2

  The enemy’s aim was not to destroy, but rather to absorb. “The design of the Iroquois, as far as I can see,” observed the Jesuit missionary Isaac Jogues in June of 1643, “is to take, if they can, all the Hurons and, having put to death the most considerable ones and a good part of the others, to make of them but one people and only one land.” A century later, another colonial commentator, the New Yorker Cadwallader Colden, elaborated along the same lines: “It has been a constant maxim with the Five Nations [Iroquois], to save children and young men of the people they conquer, to adopt them into their own Nation, and to educate them as their own children, without distinction; These young people soon forget their own country and nation and by this policy the Five Nations make up the losses which their nation suffers by the people they lose in war.”3 These were perceptive observations, though a closer inspection reveals that, beyond captivity and tormented executions, force and persuasion were part and parcel of the broader socio-cultural pattern of incorporation. Iroquois warriors and ambassadors in turn negotiated with, cajoled, and threatened their opponents, interweaving generous pledges of unity and renewal with reminders that noncompliance would be met with ruthless violence. As another French commentator put it, “they exert their industry to engage the other nation to give themselves up to them; they send them gifts and the most skilled people of their nation to harangue them, and to let them know that if they do not give themselves up they will not be able to avoid destruction […]; yet on the contrary, if they were willing to surrender and disperse in their long-houses, they would become the masters of the other men.”4

  The motif of using speech rather than violence to eliminate and integrate outsiders featured prominently in the traditional accounts of the Iroquois League’s founding: in times immemorial, the Great Peacemaker Deganawida had used words to transform Hiawatha from a cannibal warrior to a messenger of peace; later, the pair had gone on to use reason to straighten the twisted mind and body of the tyrannical shaman Thadodaho, converting him to the ways of peace. The League’s founding epic, the Great Law of Peace, contained provisions according to which any person of any nation who showed a desire to obey its laws would be welcomed to join the Five Nations. Deganawida had furthermore given the Iroquois a mandate to be proactive in bringing foreigners into the fold and establishing universal peace. In the Seneca version of the Great Law recorded by the anthropologist Arthur C. Parker in the early twentieth century, it was stipulated that first the foreign nation was “to be persuaded by reason and urged to come into the Great Peace.” If these advances were rejected, the Five Nations were to “end the peaceful methods of persuasion,” and declare a war which would “continue until won by the Five Nations.”5 The rhetoric used by Iroquois diplomats and warriors through the 1640s and 1650s was thus conciliatory. As Iroquois military supremacy grew increasingly indisputable, a mounting number of Wendats gave serious thought, in the words of two of their captains, to “throwing themselves into the arms of the enemy.”6 But many, intent on maintaining their distinct identity, sought other solutions.

  It is in this context that over six hundred individuals travelled to the Saint Lawrence valley, founding there what colonial observers called a “Huron Colony,” and carved a place for themselves at the heart of the Franco-Indigenous political sphere. Like the Innu and Algonquins on whom the previous two chapters have focused, these Wendats sought safety. Yet settlement in mission communities represented something quite different for the Wendats than it did for these Algonquian neighbours, for village life and agriculture were at the very core of their Iroquoian world. The French settlements in whose shadow the Wendats now sought safety paled in comparison to the village world of Huronia. Quebec had grown in half a century from a bare outpost to a proper town, but its proportions remained modest. The patch of land at the foot of the cliffside, near the river, where Champlain had built the first habitation, was cramped, and the town necessarily grew on the heights above. There, the Fort or Château Saint Louis became, in 1646, the governor’s official residence and seat of government; it was also in the Upper Town that the Jesuits, Augustinians, and Ursulines had built their abodes. French colonists had begun to spread out, slowly turning the adjacent woodland into a countryside. Trois Rivières, established in 1634, and Montreal, in 1642, remained little more than fortified compounds, each home to about fifty inhabitants. In all, the French population of the Saint Lawrence valley at midcentury amounted to less than fifteen hundred.7

  In examining the circumstances that led the Wendats to the Saint Lawrence valley, this chapter makes the case that this relocation represented both a dramatic upheaval and a continuation of well-established patterns of Iroquoian mobility. It also probes the meaning and conduct of war among the Indigenous populations of the Northeastern Woodlands, in an effort to understand the nature of the pressure that Wendats and Saint Lawrence Algonquians alike began to face from the Iroquois in the 1640s, and to appreciate the appeal of cultivating the French alliance and establishing new villages near colonial settlements. War destroyed, but war also created. In the Saint Lawrence valley, fragments from different Wendat villages and, significantly, different constituent nations of the Wendat Confederacy, came together. To the Iroquois, and particularly the Mohawks and Onondagas, they continued to represent a tantalizing target – a great human prize to be incorporated through diplomacy and violence.

  ***

  The creation of a Wendat community in the Saint Lawrence valley – and, as we shall see in chapter 4, later Iroquois communities – represented the transplantation of a well-established way of life. With modes of residence and subsistence patterns similar to those of the Saint Lawrence Iroquoians who had occupied this territory in the sixteenth century, the Wendats and Iroquois, who at the time of contact were established in what is now Ontario and New York, were settled agriculturalists of a sort that the French considered more civilized than their Algonquin and Innu neighbours. In the closely related Iroquoian languages, villages were called “gannata” or “kanata” among the Iroquois, and “andata” or “carhata” in Wendat.8 They corresponded to clusters of longhouses, and ranged in size from hamlets of fifty individuals or less to large towns occupied by as many as two thousand people. The longhouse, the characteristic dwelling of Iroquoian peoples, was built as an elongated rectangle averaging seven by twenty-five meters, but it could also stretch to sixty. It was framed by a structure of sapling poles and rafters that arched at the top to form a vaulted roof some five to nine meters above the ground, and was entirely covered in sheets of bark. An entrance was located at each end of the longhouse, and an aisle about four meters wide ran down its centre. Platforms ran along both sides of that aisle for people to sit and sleep, and along its centre was placed a series of open hearths, each of which was shared by two nuclear families who occupied the adjacent living space. On the basis of three or four hearths per longhouse, two families per hearth, and five to six members per family, the average long-house lodged thirty to fifty persons. Its length depended on the size of the extended family group that occupied it. Additional families could be accommodated by building an extension on one end of the structure. Among the Iroquois, the phrase “extending the rafters” took on the meaning of both the addition of new individuals to a long-house and, in a metaphorical sense, of the incorporation and adoption of new groups into the society as a whole.9

  The perimeter of the clustered longhouses was typically protected by a palisade four to ten meters high, formed with tree trunks planted in single or multiple rows and intertwined with branches and sheets of bark. The French referred to Iroquoian villages as “bourgs” (towns) or “bourgs fermés” (enc
losed towns), while the English, reflecting the impressive sight that these fortified settlements made, took to calling them “castles.” Such palisades served as windbreaks and snow fences, but their primary function was to offer protection from enemy attacks and a deterrent against them. Frequently, villages were also built on easily defensible terrain such as hilltops, and in some cases further secured by ditches and earthworks. One or two gateways, which could without difficulty be closed off in case of danger, controlled access in and out of the village. Platforms running along the palisade’s top allowed the defenders to observe the approach of enemies, dart them with arrows and pelt them with stones, and put out the fires with which they might try to make a breach. Like the long-houses themselves, palisades represented a great investment in labour and were built and regularly maintained to last through many years. But the village, as a built environment, reflected a community’s dynamism and changing composition. Over time it underwent episodes of expansion and contraction as needed to accommodate the arrival and departure of families and groups.10

  Around the village lay the clearing. Iroquoian agriculture was of the slash-and-burn or swidden variety – anthropologists and historians have tended to use the term horticulture, to distinguish it from farming that makes use of the plow, but this term tends to underestimate its scale and productivity. Controlled fire was used in combination with axes to open space for cultivation and simultaneously increase the fertility of the soil through the addition of ash. An expanse of fields was prepared immediately adjacent to the village, but it was also common for other plots to be worked in convenient sites at a short distance in the woods. In the ash-enriched soil, Iroquoian women grew the distinctive triad they knew as the “three sisters”: maize, beans, and squash. Maize grew first, allowing beans to twine themselves up its stalks, while squash thrived about its base, with its broad leaves choking out competing weeds and reducing evaporation, and with its prickly vines dissuading vermin. The bean plants returned to the soil some of the nitrogen leached out by the maize. In addition to growing well together, these three staple crops complemented each other nutritionally to form the core of a balanced diet. Sunflower too was grown for its seeds and oil, and tobacco for its ceremonial and social roles. But maize, because of its high yield and caloric density, was the foundation of Wendat and Iroquois subsistence. Pounded into flour or soaked to make hominy, it was made into soups, mush, and bread. Dried, shelled, and placed in large bark containers in the longhouses’ storage areas and in underground storage pits, it could provide sustenance from one harvest to the next, and serve as insurance against the droughts, frosts, and insects that occasionally spoilt a year’s crop. Maize was, as European observers put it, the “sole staff of life” and the “the chief of their riches.”11