Flesh Reborn Read online

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  War was an integral and cyclical part of life, among Iroquoians and Algonquians alike, as it was for early modern Europeans. Modern ethnography, and its underlying evolutionary typologies, has tended to have a distorting effect by presenting some social and cultural features and patterns as quintessentially Iroquois or, somewhat more broadly, Iroquoian. Yet Iroquoians and Algonquians of the Northeastern Woodlands had more in common than is often assumed, and a measure of generalization is possible.27 War’s deepest roots could be found in a people’s will to survive and prosper, to achieve balance in their environment, to maintain group unity and autonomy, to protect and improve material circumstances in changing conditions. Though the need to secure access to limited resources and maintain freedom of movement along trade routes tended to translate into hostile intergroup relations, the parties involved did not tend to think about violent conflict in this way. Instead, it was the real or imagined transgressions of outsiders – ranging from the killing, wounding, or capture of a relative, to suspicions of sorcery, thievery or trespassing, and to a variety of breaches of protocol and public insults – that provided the proximate causes of war. Where a high degree of mutual understanding, positive reciprocity, and regular intermarriage characterized intergroup relations, minor affronts might be tolerated and more serious grievances could be resolved peacefully through symbolic and material compensations. Where there existed a long history of strained relations, of mutual contempt, suspicion, or fear, communities easily tipped into a cycle of violence.28

  The noncoercive structures of Iroquoian and Algonquian societies, coupled with the dynamic relation that existed between personal autonomy and collective responsibility, made for particularly volatile intergroup relations. Individual warriors could raid without the sanction of their chiefs and elders, who had no power beyond persuasion to prevent from taking violent action those who nursed vengeful feelings or who thirsted for the prestige that feats of arms imparted. As such, there existed two interrelated and often blurred levels of intergroup aggression: one characterized by the sporadic, back and forth raids of small war parties; the other, by the involvement of entire communities, often of a broader network of allies, and by the fielding of veritable armies. Large-scale mobilization of the latter type was preceded by long periods of public discussion and argument, during which speakers tried to achieve consensus by shaping perceptions and invoking common values in a way that focused negative opinion on the enemy, assigned blame on them for recent transgressions, and recalled more distant ones, making war a moral duty for community members.29

  Kinship structures, beyond serving as the basic organizing principle of daily life and a context for biological and social reproduction, provided the basis for the cooperative effort required to carry out war. Although speakers at war councils, like warriors, were invariably male, Algonquian and Iroquoian women played an important role in the waging of war and the cultivation of peace. Women could instigate a raid by urging their men on, challenging their honour, and requesting that they prove their masculinity by protecting their dependents or by humiliating the enemy. Beyond that, divergent means of reckoning kinship and subsistence patterns translated into differences as to how war was conducted. Among Iroquoians, the concentration of population in village communities as well as the cross-cutting ties of matrilineality and matrilocality facilitated extensive cooperation among men, making possible the mobilization of larger forces and long-distance warfare more feasible.30 Iroquoian women, moreover, as clan leaders and agricultural labourers, played a more decisive role in the making of war and peace than their Algonquian counterparts. Though Iroquois or Wendat warriors could set out with hostile intent on their own initiative, it was the prerogative of clan matrons to request action in response to the death of a clan member. Conversely, when they judged a given warlike project to be foolhardy or otherwise detrimental to the community, women could hinder the activity of warriors by restricting their access to the supplies of corn meal required to carry out any campaign.31

  Despite the rhetoric of killing which permeated speeches and stories, wars in the Indigenous northeast were fundamentally wars of capture. A warrior’s greatest prize was to return with a living enemy. Whatever scalps could be brought back were valued as war trophies, tangible proof of military accomplishment and spiritually charged objects of power. They were, however, of only secondary value, as a stand-in for human beings.32 Captives, on the other hand, could serve an array of purposes. They could be used to mediate intergroup relations: one might be sent back as an envoy to convey a message designed to appease the enemy or to humiliate him; be released as a sign of goodwill and an invitation to peace; be offered as a diplomatic gift to draw a third party into the war; or be retained as a hostage. Equally significantly, captives provided a means of dealing with the emotional distress of death among the captors’ people. Torture, often leading up to execution, was very often the culmination of the war party’s effort. It was an occasion that allowed noncombatants – the elderly, children, adolescent men, and most significantly women – to partake in the defeat and humiliation of their foes. An entire society was given the opportunity to demonstrate its superiority over its adversaries and signal its ferocity to potential enemies. Individuals who had lost a loved one to the enemy were meanwhile afforded the opportunity of purging their grief. The tormenting of captives, observed Lafitau, was “a thing which each one does with more or less fury according as he is more or less aroused by the losses caused him by the war.”33

  Captives who represented less of a threat, women and children in the main, would most often be allowed to live and be given the opportunity to join their captors’ community. Here again, the range of possibilities reflected the distinctive social organizations and subsistence patterns of Algonquians and Iroquoians. For Innu, Algonquins, and northern Wabanaki peoples, whose basic social unit was the highly mobile, atomistic family band, and whose reliance on hunting required a great deal of flexibility and meant that they periodically lived on the edge of starvation, captives represented something of a liability. Accordingly, these societies tended to be selective about who they kept alive and sought to assimilate. More often than not, captive adults appear to have been treated as slaves, as liminal individuals devoid of kinship relations, who had no basis for claiming reciprocal obligations and whom no one would avenge. If the captive’s labour proved unsatisfactory, he or she could be killed by his or her master without fear of repercussion. But captives might otherwise be well treated. Those who demonstrated a willingness to reject their former lives and identities and to develop affective ties to their captors would be incorporated into the group as kin through either marriage or adoption as the child or sibling of a household head.34

  For Iroquoians more than for Algonquians, then, warfare was a distinctly incorporative endeavour. Agricultural abundance made it less of a luxury to maintain captives alive, and semisedentary village life provided a more conducive context for their management and assimilation. Matrilineal clans structured the experience of captivity. As noted earlier, it was a clan matron’s prerogative to request action when a member of her clan had been killed by outsiders. It was to the grieving matrilineages that captives were distributed, and up to them to determine their fate through internal consultation. A captive who seemed an improper candidate for adoption would be tortured to death, or alternatively maintained in a precarious state of slavery. A captive who showed more promise would meanwhile be adopted as a new member of the lineage and given the opportunity to assimilate into his or her new family’s society, replacing symbolically and literally a dead relative.35 From a functionalist perspective, the extent to which intergroup conflict provided northern Iroquoian societies with a means of dealing with death on both a psychological and demographic level has prompted ethnohistorians after Daniel Richter to label this broad pattern of behaviour and belief a “mourning war complex.”36

  Figure 3.1 Two victorious Iroquois (Seneca) warriors returning with
a captive and two scalps, drawn by the Jesuit missionary Pierre-Joseph-Marie Chaumonot. (Detail from ANOM, Fonds des Colonies, C11A 2: 263, “Mémoire au sujet des neuf familles qui composent la nation,” ca. 1666)

  Among Iroquoians, both ritual execution and adoption served an emotional need to alleviate grief and demonstrated a will to incorporate outsiders into the community. Both Iroquois and Wendats, even as they tormented a captive to the point of death, would address the victim using kinship terms such as “uncle” or “nephew.” The cannibalism with which such executions culminated offered an opportunity to absorb the enemy’s spiritual power, in an extension of cultural values associated with the incorporation of others (the Iroquois’s Algonquian neighbours to the east and north, it should be noted, did not practise cannibalism and feared their enemy all the more for it). The rhetoric that surrounded the attack and destruction of enemy nations was itself replete with metaphors of incorporation through mutilation and consumption. Among the usual figures of speech for making war or peace among the Iroquois was the setting up or breaking of the war kettle, the vessel in which captives were cooked, literally and metaphorically. To destroy an enemy settlement translated as gannatagarien in Mohawk: “to eat a village.” Another expression, we-hait-wat-sha, used by the Onondagas in relation to their seventeenth-century captives, as recalled by one nineteenth-century informant of the ethnologist Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, meant “a body cut into parts and scattered around. In this manner, they figuratively scattered their prisoners, and sunk and destroyed their nationality, and built up their own.”37

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  It is convenient, but often misleading, to think of the midcentury wars merely as wars between “the Iroquois” and “the Hurons,” not only because they involved other peoples, but because war was a fundamentally local matter, and patterns of conflict and incorporation were shaped by specific solidarities. As the Jesuit Paul Le Jeune observed, the Iroquois certainly did have a tendency to “lend a hand to one another in their wars.”38 Yet as this chapter and the next demonstrate, throughout this period, effectively concerted military or diplomatic action involving more than a few constituent nations was the exception rather than the norm.

  Divergences were readily apparent in the Iroquois offensive. The thrust of the 1640s against the Wendats was spearheaded by the Senecas, Cayugas, and Onondagas. It was not until the fall of 1646 that the Mohawks and Oneidas, who had until then had focused their own energies on the Algonquians of the Saint Lawrence valley and east of the Hudson River, joined in the offensive against Huronia. Then, by late 1647, tensions surfaced between the Onondagas, who with Caygua and Oneida support were willing to make peace with their enemy, and the Mohawks, who with Seneca support were set against it. During the winter that followed, a group of Mohawks scuttled the possibility of accommodation by ambushing a Wendat embassy on its way to Onondaga country. Through 1648 and 1649, the Onondagas, Cayugas, and Oneidas persisted in seeking peace, whereas the Mohawks and Senecas carried out a massive and critical assault on Huronia. It was only towards the end of 1649, with the total defeat of the Wendat Confederacy in sight, that the Onondagas returned to the fray.39 Competition between the League’s western and eastern nations over the privilege of incorporating the survivors would persist for at least a decade.

  In the same way, the paths of the constituent nations of the Wendat Confederacy – the Attignawantan, Attigneenongnahac, Arendarhonon, Tahontaenrat, and Ataronchronon – diverged and converged under pressure from the Iroquois. In 1647, while the Attignawantan were willing to put up armed resistance and for that purpose sought the alliance of the Susquehannocks of what is now southern New York, Pennsylvania, and Maryland, it was the Arendarhonon under the leadership of their principal headman Jean-Baptiste Atironta who entered into peace negotiations with the Onondagas.40 It may be that the Attignawantan, as the oldest and largest segment of the Wendat Confederacy, of which until recently they had represented a good half numerically, and whose political affairs they still tended to dominate, were more confident in their ability to match arms with the enemy. Conversely, the Arendarhonon had a smaller population and occupied the exposed eastern frontier of Huronia, towards Lake Simcoe, making them less able to sustain a drawn-out conflict and more inclined to parley.41

  The wave of Mohawk and Seneca attacks in 1647 left no doubt that the Arendarhonon were especially vulnerable. Before the year was over they were compelled to abandon their villages and seek refuge in other Wendat communities, primarily those of the Attigneenongnahac, the second oldest and second most important nation of the confederacy. The following year, however, the latter were in turn beset by Mohawk and Seneca warriors. In 1649, the Attigneenongnahac villages that had held out were overrun, as were those of the Ataronchronon. Droves sought refuge at the Jesuit mission of Sainte Marie, but were forced to seek it elsewhere when it too was assaulted.42

  The palisaded compound of Sainte Marie, on the Wye River (today Midland, Ontario), had been the base of Jesuit operations in Huronia since 1639, and the missionaries and their lay personnel numbered a little over sixty men. They could offer little material and defensive assistance during the invasion, and what they did offer was intimately tied to the spiritual aid that they dispensed. While the number of baptisms administered should by no means be interpreted as a measure of the thoroughness with which beliefs and practices were accepted by the Wendats, it does leave a clear impression of the pace at which the latter increasingly turned to the French for assistance during this period of crisis. By the spring of 1646, it is estimated that about five hundred Wendats considered themselves to be Christians; from the spring of 1646 to the end of winter 1647, another five hundred were baptized; another eight hundred in 1647–48; over seventeen hundred more in 1648–49, and again as many as that through the summer and fall of 1649.43 The reluctance, calculation, and impulsivity that factored into the decision of turning to the missionaries after having rebuffed their advances for so many years varied from one individual to the next. It was an act of self-preservation, filled with desperation and hope.

  At the same time, men, women, and children crossed over to the Iroquois by the thousands, individually and in groups of various sizes. This too was an act of self-preservation. To accept the enemy’s invitations was the surest way to survive, an ultimate resort to avoid certain death on the battlefield or at the stake. No doubt many of the people who crossed over thought of it as a temporary solution, insofar as they may have hoped to make an escape as soon as favourable circumstances presented themselves, or expected that within a few years their Iroquois hosts would allow them to leave on their own terms. All were not equally reluctant, however, for there was among the “enemy” an ever-growing number of friends and relatives.

  Already before the campaigns of the 1640s, as a result of earlier conflicts and peacetime encounters, individuals of Wendat origin could be found residing among the Iroquois and, to a lesser extent, vice versa.44 We can speculate that the spiritual kinship of clan structures played a role in the social integration of these voluntary migrants. Wendat men and women belonging to the Turtle, Wolf, Bear, Beaver, Deer, and Hawk Clans would presumably have recognized a special affinity to the Iroquois who belonged to the clans of the same name, and vice versa.45 For Wendats staunchly opposed to the growing influence of Jesuit missionaries and to their countrymen’s appropriation of the newcomer’s religion, relocation to Iroquoia offered a means of holding on to a traditional way of life and the stability that they associated with it. Many of the Wendats in Iroquoia whom colonial chroniclers were quick to label “slaves,” “captives,” or “renegades” might more accurately be thought of as refugees. Among their Iroquois hosts they proclaimed that it was the Christian faith and prayer which “had attracted all sorts of misfortunes on their nation, which had infected it with contagious diseases, which had made their hunting and fishing less productive than when they lived following their ancient customs.”46

  The ever-growing presence of Wendats in Iroquoia, ran
ging from enthusiastic refugees to unwilling captives, had a snowball effect. As two chiefs explained to their missionaries in the spring of 1650, many of their people had among the Iroquois “a great number of relatives who wish for them, and counsel them to make their escape as soon as possible from a desolated country if they do not wish to perish beneath its ruins.” Similarly, a few years later, a Mohawk orator argued to a group of Wendats that they would find in his villages “their kinsfolk who had been formerly carried away captive, and who bore their absence only with regret and inconsolable sadness. He said they were waiting for them with love, and would receive them with joy.”47

  Most dramatically, the Tahontaenrats and a large number of Arendarhonon, after failing to find safety among the Neutrals, a neighbouring Iroquoian people, would give themselves over freely to the Senecas and collectively resettle among them in 1651. Describing the results of this migration, the Jesuit superior Paul Ragueneau noted that these Wendats “now live as peacefully” with the Senecas “as if they had never been at war.” Instead of joining preexisting communities these migrants formed a satellite village apart from those of the Senecas where they lived, according to Paul Le Jeune, “satisfied to be united with them in good feeling and friendship.”48 One of the advantages of collective, voluntary resettlement, thus, was the possibility of retaining a distinctive cultural identity, and no doubt a measure of political autonomy. Perhaps these Wendat migrants hoped or expected, in time, to be formally recognized and integrated within the Iroquois League on equal footing with its other five constituent nations – to associate with them, rather than be assimilated by them.