Flesh Reborn Read online

  For the Wendat community that found an uncertain refuge near Quebec, an opportunity for regeneration came with the Franco-Iroquois peace settlement of 1667. After this date, large numbers of visitors and migrants streamed from Iroquoia towards the Saint Lawrence valley and its mission settlements. Picking up on the theme of warfare as an integrative process, chapter 5, entitled “Flesh Born Again,” probes the range and limits of integration. Through the return of the Wendats from Iroquoia, a distinct Wendat community would persist near Quebec. Yet through the establishment of Kentake (La Prairie), and later Kahnawake (Sault Saint Louis) and Kanehsatake (La Montagne), many Wendats and other “New Iroquois” would complete a process of assimilation begun in the villages of Iroquoia. And by the early 1680s, the inhabitants of these communities had developed a vibrant religious and political identity distinct from those from which they had detached themselves. Chapter 6, “Against Their Own,” centers on the falling-out of the mission and League Iroquois and again shows how patterns of kinship and migration played a significant role in shaping patterns of war and peace making. Through the 1680s, the inhabitants of the missions sided with the French in their campaigns against the distant and faintly related Senecas. Yet, with the outbreak of European war in 1689, they found themselves unhappily drawn into a war against their close relatives among the Mohawks, Oneidas, and Onondagas. While most Iroquoianists who have considered these two decades have tended to place the emphasis on the fundamental unity of the Iroquois through time and space, this book supports the view that for a time the divisiveness and violence were very real.27

  Before picking up the story of the conflict among Iroquois through the final decade of the seventeenth century, however, chapter 7, “In Their Place,” chronicles how hundreds of displaced Wabanakis from what is today northern New England sought temporary or long-term refuge in the colony, both within and outside of the mission settlements. Processes described in previous chapters – not merely the Indigenous search for refuge, but also alliance building, evangelization, migration, and military mobilization – mutually reinforced each other in the formation and transformation of nominally “Abenaki” mission settlements at Msakkikkan and Néssawa-kamighé (on the Chaudière River), as well as at Arsikantegouk (on the Saint François River).

  Chapter 8, “The Tree of Peace” – an Iroquoian diplomatic metaphor for a solidly grounded coexistence – considers the intensification of warfare between the mission and League Iroquois during the century’s last decade, and their ultimate reconciliation. The contours of the military and diplomatic activity that ensued corresponded closely to long-standing incorporative patterns of war. Out of this situation, the Christian Iroquois, and particularly the people of Kahnawake, emerged as a power to be reckoned with: while scholars have deemed the “Great Peace of Montreal” in 1701 to have been a triumph for either the French or the Five Nations, here it is argued that it was also a triumph for the mission communities.28

  With the Great Peace of Montreal, the book ends at a well-known moment of Franco-Indigenous history. Ideally, the subject should be studied across the entire period of the French Regime, from the 1630s to 1760, even beyond into the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. However, the practical constraints of publication make it necessary to begin by confining our attention to the seventeenth century alone. Eighteenth-century developments, including the further evolution and relocation of these communities as well as the formation of new missions at Aouanagassing (Île aux Tourtres) in the first decade of the eighteenth century, and Wowenak (or Wôlinak, Bécancour), Oswegatchie (La Présentation), and Akwesasne (Saint Régis) at midcentury, as well as the continued impact of the Saint Lawrence valley’s mission settlements on the history of the region, are best left for a future volume.

  ***

  A note on measurements: in the following pages distances are described in kilometers or in leagues, the latter referring to the lieue of the French sources, the length of which was not always consistent but which can be understood to correspond to roughly four or five kilometers (two or three miles). Following the land-surveying practices of the period, plots are meanwhile described in arpents, a measure that could be either lineal (58.5 meters or 192 feet) or areal (1 square arpent corresponding to about 3,400 square meters or 0.84 modern acres). The livre was the basic monetary unit of account.

  1

  Sowing Seeds

  Patterns of Subsistence, Settlement, and Conflict among the Saint Lawrence Algonquians, 1600–1637

  The Saint Lawrence is one of North America’s most vital waterways. A deep gash in the earth’s crust exposed as the glaciers receded some ten thousand years ago, this river forms together with the Great Lakes a hydrographic system that reaches far into the heart of the continent, and whose watershed spans about a million square kilometers. Like waterways of comparable proportions across the globe, it has unavoidably forged the social and cultural fabric of the peoples who have inhabited its vicinity. The Indigenous presence along this Great River dates to the melting of the ice shelf over nine thousand years ago. Time immemorial is another way to put it.1

  The contours of the river and its surroundings are by and large the same today as they were in the seventeenth century. It begins as an extended arm of Lake Ontario flowing northeastward between a multitude of islands, tumbling over a succession of rapids that, since the mid-twentieth century, have been smoothed over by the digging of the Saint Lawrence Seaway. The Saint Lawrence’s principal tributary, the Ottawa River, joins the main stream at a swelling called the Lake of Two Mountains, before dividing through a number of channels that trace the contours of the Montreal archipelago. Past the last of the rapids, the river continues its course downstream, occasionally divided by a number of long and narrow islands, to the mouth of another major tributary, the Richelieu River, which flows from the south. It broadens out, reaching a width of some fifteen kilometers, to form Lake Saint Pierre, narrowing again as it nears the place called Trois Rivières, the distinctive three mouths of the Saint Maurice River. As the Canadian Shield increasingly encroaches upon the river, its banks, gently sloping until this point, turn into steep cliffs. The freshwater flow begins to reverse with the tides. Upon reaching the mouth of yet another key tributary, the Chaudière River, it suddenly narrows at Quebec before opening again to encircle the Island of Orleans, widening from one kilometer to fifteen by the time it reaches the eastern end of the island. Between a rugged north shore and a more open south shore, the estuary keeps steadily widening. The water becomes brackish and the tides grow more pronounced. Near the mouth of the Saguenay River, the second largest tributary after the Ottawa, the riverbed drops dramatically and the freshwater flow mingles with cold arctic saltwater. The river keeps widening until it ends, by geographical convention, at the point where it becomes the Gulf of the Saint Lawrence.

  The climate of the region is essentially a continental one, with generally reliable weather on a day-to-day basis. Paul Le Jeune, first superior of the Jesuit missions in Canada, gave his French readership a glimpse of the river at its most pleasant, describing an occasion when he was “sailing gently down the middle of the great river, in the beauty of a golden day […],” belying the ways in which on windier days the river could become treacherous, or the fact that the rapids strewn along its path west of the Island of Montreal could prove deadly to even the most skilled of canoeists.2 Over its long course, the river covers a wide range of natural environments. The vegetation, far denser then than today, gradually shifts from deciduous, to mixed, and to coniferous boreal forest; broad-leaved species, such as yellow birch and maple, intermingle with cedar, spruce, jack pine, aspen, and white birch before giving way to them. The river was bordered in many places by marshes, wet meadows, and swamps. Its waters were home to a multitude of fresh water species from the Great Lakes to the estuary, and to salt water species from the estuary to the gulf. Massive flocks of migratory birds used the riverbanks as seasonal breeding grounds, and the adjacent forests teemed
with game. Mammals such as mink, muskrats, otters, and beaver could be found along the freshwater segments of the river, while larger sea mammals, such as the beluga and walrus, thrived in the upper estuary. Beginning around the eleventh century CE, some of the region’s Indigenous inhabitants adopted the cultivation of maize from neighbours to the south.3

  Owing to its vast dimensions, convenient orientation, and favourable environment, the Saint Lawrence came to play an essential role in the European colonization of North America. In the sixteenth century, its gulf became the site of yearly visits by fishermen, whalers, and eventually fur traders. By the turn of the seventeenth century, when the French established a permanent presence on the territory that they claimed as New France, it was becoming apparent that the river they took to calling the Grande Rivière de Saint Laurent or Fleuve Saint Laurent provided an exceptional riverine entrance to the heart of the continent. Whereas during their earliest mid-sixteenth-century explorations the French had briefly encountered an agricultural, village-dwelling population in this region whom archaeologists and historians have called the Saint Lawrence Iroquoians, it was by the early seventeenth century home to seminomadic Innu and Algonquin peoples who subsisted primarily on hunting, fishing, and gathering. Meanwhile, the French, whom these Algonquians called Mistigoches, meaning,“men who travel in wooden vessels” or who “work in wood,” arrived with solidly entrenched notions that a settled, agricultural way of life was the very essence of civilization and the best sowing ground for religion.4

  Projecting their best hopes onto more distant nations, particularly the Wendats, whose sedentary patterns of residence and subsistence agriculture suggested a greater potential for conversion and civilization, French officials and clergy, first the Recollets and then the Jesuits, nevertheless persisted in nursing an ambition for the settlement of the nomadic Algonquian bands who lived closer to the heart of their young colony. Algonquian words and actions in the early seventeenth century indicate a genuine willingness to experiment with this possibility. Engagement with the idea and practice of a sedentary, agricultural way of life was for them a means of responding to risk and uncertainty. Like tapping into the new sources of technological and spiritual power offered by the newcomers, or courting their friendship more generally, it offered ways of ensuring the security and wellbeing of relatives and friends. This engagement was not merely a response to French invitations and pressures, but very much the product of Algonquian experimentation, calculations, and initiatives.

  Although the French were conditioned to perceive a dichotomy – which historians dependent on their writings and embedded in the same broad cultural universe have echoed in their scholarship – between their own sedentary lifestyle and their neighbours’ nomadism, lived experience was not so rigidly polarized. On a tentative and occasional basis, Algonquians experimented with crop cultivation. Some entertained the possibility of coming together to form more permanent fortified settlements at places such as Quebec and Trois Rivières that, in addition to being now occupied by Frenchmen, had served as long-standing seasonal gathering sites. This did not represent as radical a shift in subsistence and residence patterns as we might assume, for Saint Lawrence Algonquians could recall a time when some of their ancestors had lived in this way. And even as they experimented anew with this way of life, they never fully abandoned their seasonal hunting and gathering activities. Flexibility characterized Algonquian societies, and patterns of subsistence and residence were negotiated from year to year, according to shifting circumstances, in response to changing needs.

  While history books tend to begin the story of the mission settlements of the Saint Lawrence valley with Jesuit initiatives and the institutionalization of the mission community commonly known as Sillery in 1639, the seeds of this settlement are buried deeper.5 In attempting to untangle the complex relation between patterns of subsistence and settlement, and to make sense of Franco-Algonquian experimentation in this domain, this first chapter hones in on war as a driving force. What would differentiate the late 1630s and 1640s from the previous decades would not only be the intensification of missionary efforts, but also the intensification of the Iroquois offensive against their Algonquian neighbours and long-standing enemies. As Father Le Jeune put it uncharitably, “fear is the forerunner of faith in these barbarous minds.”6 Fear, he might also have written, was also a forerunner of settlement, for the Saint Lawrence Algonquians’ growing interest in Christianity and willingness to experiment with a way of life that was more solidly fixed in space corresponded tragically with their decline as a military power.

  ***

  The Indigenous peoples found in the writings of the French explorer and pioneering colonizer, Samuel de Champlain, and in the Jesuits’ Relations during these years are very often referred to as undifferentiated Sauvages (Natives), and it is only the specific context which allows us to grasp who they were. This ambiguity reflects a broader reality of the Saint Lawrence valley during the first half of the seventeenth century.7 To untangle the complex relation between patterns of subsistence, settlement, and conflict first requires addressing the region’s ethnolinguistic landscape. Taking a page from the archaeologists who decades ago began using the name “Saint Lawrence Iroquoians,” as noted above, to label the peoples who inhabited the region in the sixteenth century, we might thus speak of “Saint Lawrence Algonquians” to conceptualize the unity and fluidity of those peoples who had come to occupy the region by the early seventeenth.

  In attempting to define for the European readers of the Relations the peoples who occupied this area, the Jesuit Barthélemy Vimont wrote that they consisted of “two sorts of persons: one Montagnais, the other Algonquins. The Montagnais are those who reside nearer Kebec, and are thus called on account of our high mountains. The Algonquins are further upriver.”8 Such exonyms – names given by outsiders – derived from the makeshift language of European explorers and traders in their conversations about and with the people they encountered. Both names had entered the French lexicon less than half a century earlier: Montagnais, an apparent translation of the ethnonym applied by the Basques in the late sixteenth century, referring as noted by Vimont to the mountainous north shore of the lower Saint Lawrence; Algonquin appearing first as “Algoumequin” under Champlain’s pen in 1603, most probably from the Etchemin or Maliseet word for “our relatives, our allies” and used in reference to a people allied to the Montagnais he encountered at Tadoussac that year.9

  Unsurprisingly perhaps, the people to whom either of these two broad labels were affixed did not use them in reference to themselves. Nêhiraw Iriniw and its variants are the seventeenth-century endonyms which map most neatly onto the name Montagnais; today, their descendants privilege the term Innu. Today’s Algonquins call themselves Anishinaabe and Omàmiwinini (with the former term used more globally to refer to Algonquian peoples across the Great Lakes and Ottawa River watersheds, and the latter to refer to Algonquins more specifically), but whether or how either of these terms were used by their seventeenth-century ancestors is less certain. The oldest known Algonquin dictionary, an anonymous manuscript dating to about 1661, provides two translations for “Algonquin”: Nehiroïsik and Otichkoagami. It is likely that Nehiroïsik referred to the peoples of the Saint Lawrence and Ottawa River watersheds, and it is by its very form telling of the proximity of their language and identity to that of their neighbours further downriver. The Jesuit missionary Pierre-Michel Laure echoed this reality in his early eighteenth-century dictionary of Montagnais, inviting his readers to “note that the Algonquins of Trois-Rivières appropriate the name that they [the Montagnais] give themselves[,] nehiroiriniu.” The term Otichkoagami and its variants, meaning “those facing the lake” or those “at the last stretch of water,” appear for their part to have referred to Algonquian peoples who lived further west. “Under the name Outiskoüagami,” explained the Jesuit Relation for 1671, “are included various Nations of which the principal one dwells in the country of the Nipissiriniens,�
�� that is, the Nipissings themselves and their neighbours along the Mattawa and French Rivers.10

  While linguists today distinguish “Cree-Montagnais-Naskapi” and “Ojibwe” (or Anishinaabemowin, of which Algonquin proper is deemed a dialect) as two separate languages, it may be more useful to think of the early seventeenth-century reality as a linguistic and socio-cultural continuum. Commenting on the mutual intelligibility that characterized this Saint Lawrence Algonquian world through the prism of his personal aesthetic, Paul Le Jeune observed: “It seems to me that they [the Montagnais or Innu] do not pronounce it well. The Algonquains [sic: Algonquins], who differ from the Montagnaits [sic] only as the Provençals from the Normans, have a pronunciation that is altogether charming and agreeable.”11

  Algonquins and Innu were united, beyond language, by a common form of social organization centered on atomistic, exogamous, bilineal, and highly mobile family hunting bands, which assembled in summer but otherwise dispersed and ranged widely through the rest of the year to hunt, fish, and gather their subsistence. Related families who habitually came together formed political units which the French used the terms gens (people) or nation to describe, and which anthropologists in the last century conceptualized as regional bands. The Montagnais thus included those whom the French on rarer occasions bothered to distinguish, in an entirely unsystematic fashion, as Tadoussaciens, Chicoutimiens, Kakouchaks (or Porcs-Épics, Porcupines), Piékouagamiens, Chomonchouanistes, Nekoubanistes, Petits-Mistassins, Outakamis, Bersiamites, Papinachois, Ouchestigoueks, Oumamioueks, Chisedecs, Petits-Esquimaux, Attik Irinouetchs (or Gens du caribou, “Cariboo People”), Nitchik Irinouetchs (or Gens de la Loutre, “Otter People”), Ouneskapis (Naskapis), and so forth.12 This is also true of the Algonquins upriver, from Trois Rivières up the Saint Lawrence and the Ottawa Rivers. As one missionary explained, “under the name and language of the Algonquins we include many nations. Some are very small and others are very populous: [they include] the Wawiechkariniwek [Weskarini or Petite Nation], the Kichesipiriniwek or Natives of the Island […] the Onontchataronon or the Iroquet nation, the Nipisiriniens, the Mataouchkairiniwek, the Sagachiganiriniwek, the Kinouchebiiriniwek and several others.”13