Subsistence activities followed an annual cycle that divided the work of women and men, and reconciled agriculture with hunting, fishing, and gathering. As soon as the snow melted in early spring, men, having already killed many of the trees by girdling them, laboured to turn forests into fields, removing vegetation with fire and blades. Towards the end of May, women took over, preparing the ash-enriched soil with digging sticks and hoes in order to seed it. Women continued to tend the crops throughout the summer before gathering them in late August or early September. In addition to planting, maintaining, and harvesting the fields, women made forays beyond the village to gather berries, roots, and other edibles, and to collect firewood. Tending the fires of the longhouse and cooking the meals was also their responsibility. Men typically left the village during the warm season to hunt and fish, and to undertake military, commercial, and diplomatic expeditions. Hunting and fishing occurred year-round, but the most productive seasons for both were fall and early winter (October to December) and late winter to early spring (February to March). While the great majority of women and children remained in the village from spring to the early fall, it was not unusual for them to accompany men to hunting and fishing camps in the late fall and early spring, with the effect that villages were at times nearly emptied. During periods away from the longhouse, Iroquoian hunting and fishing bands lived in temporary bark shelters similar to the wigwams of their northern Algonquian neighbours. But the longhouses offered a welcomed comfort in the cold of winter – and whereas wintertime was for the Innu and Algonquins an essential hunting season, the Wendats and Iroquois were less reliant on it, and could subsist on the agricultural reserves accumulated during the warm season. With spring, the basic cycle of agriculture and excursions began anew.12
These generalizations considered, seventeenth-century European references to the rhythm of the Iroquoian subsistence cycle are not always consistent. As one Jesuit missionary working among the Senecas during the late 1660s observed, with some exasperation and perhaps exaggeration, “the greater part of the people who belong to the villages […] are at war, or out hunting, during nine months of the year.”13 Such observations suggest that the timing and intensity at which particular activities were carried out varied somewhat from community to community and, in response to the failure of a crop or the scale of a war, from year to year. As the century wore on, the European fur trade may also have had an impact on traditional subsistence patterns, inducing the winter hunt – the time of year when beaver is easiest to catch, and when its pelt is thickest – to take on greater importance for Iroquoians than previously.
While the “forest” – the space of hunting, warfare, and diplomacy – was considered in Iroquoian thought to be a male symbolic domain, the “clearing” – the space of residence and agriculture – was considered to be a female one. The central economic role of Iroquoian women as agricultural producers vested them with a singular social standing. “Nothing is more real […] than the women’s superiority,” observed Joseph-François Lafitau, the Jesuit missionary and protoethnographer, in his description of the Iroquois. All of this could have been said of Wendat women too.“It is they who really maintain the tribe, the nobility of the blood, the genealogical tree, the order of generations and conservation of the families. In them resides all the real authority: the lands, fields and all their harvest belong to them; they are the souls of the councils, the arbiters of peace and war; they hold the axes and the public treasure; it’s to them that the slaves are entrusted; they arranged the marriages; the children are under their authority; and the order of succession is founded on their blood.” Men cleared fields and built longhouses, but these spaces belonged to women.14
An individual’s role within the community was shaped by gender, age, and kinship relations. In Iroquoian society an individual was at once a member of a nuclear family, a lineage, and a clan, and belonged to a village, a nation, and a confederacy. The lineage was the basic unit of society. Made up of one or more senior women and her progeny, it was, more precisely, a matrilineage: descent was matrilineal, meaning that an individual was considered to belong to the same kin group as her or his mother; residential patterns were matrilocal, meaning that brothers and sons usually left their mothers’ houses for those of their wives, even though they continued to belong to the lineage and clan of their birth. Households, and villages by extension, consisted in essence of related women living out their lives beside each other, together with a fringe of spouses from other lineages and their common children. Those women who stood out most by a combination of seniority and competence headed the lineage – within each house the senior woman was the authority – and, as clan matrons, presided over yet another key unit of Iroquoian socio-political organization. Clans drew groups of lineages together, forming an extended matrilineal family. Every nation was made up of three to nine clans, each of which had in each community its separate leaders and council of elders. While clan cohesion was strongest within the village community and the nation, the sense of kinship that it fostered stretched beyond them. The Bear, Deer, and Turtle Clans, most notably, could be found in all of the Iroquois and Wendat nations.15
Men conducted the political and diplomatic affairs of the village, nation, and confederacy. Iroquoian women’s authority is comparatively discrete in the historical record, notwithstanding the observations of Lafitau and other attentive colonial chroniclers. Missionaries and colonial officials, as men, were rarely privy to the councils and exchanges in which women shaped the destinies of their communities. Moreover, coming from a world where political power was the prerogative of men, they were not well conditioned to appreciate the ways in which female and male leadership complemented and supported each other.
Much of what has been noted in the previous chapter regarding the character of leaders in Algonquian societies can also be taken to apply to their Iroquoian counterparts. Wendat and Iroquois chiefs commanded the respect of their people from a combination of achievement, heredity, and election. They exercised their authority only insofar as they acted upon consensus within their community, or succeeded in facilitating it. Villages often had more than one civil headman or peace chief, often referred to in English writings by the Algonquian loan-word sachem. These individuals were ritually installed for life and their nomination rested on genealogical considerations. They were selected within specific lineages, which for this reason were especially honoured, and upon their death a successor was typically chosen by leading matrons in consultation with other women from among his sister’s sons. The chief’s house – or, more properly, that of his matrilineage – tended to be larger than the others in the village, so as to serve as a meeting place for councils, for ceremonies, and entertainment. Another category of chief, whose standing was not hereditary, derived its status from skill at council oratory and achievement on the warpath – yet these men too depended on the support of leading women, who presided over both their recognition and censure. It would appear that throughout the seventeenth century, population losses due to epidemic diseases had the effect of eroding traditional power structures by allowing young war chiefs to take on some of the roles of civil chiefs, and to exercise an unprecedented importance in their peoples’ political and external affairs.16
In grappling with the political structure of the Wendats upon his arrival in their homeland in 1638, Jesuit superior Jérôme Lalemant spoke of “four nations, or rather four different collections or assemblages of grouped family stocks – all of whom, having a community of language, of enemies, and of other interests, are hardly distinguishable except by their different progenitors, grandfathers, and great-grandfathers, whose names and memories they cherish tenderly. They increase or diminish their numbers, however, by the adoption of other families, who join themselves now to some, now to others, and who also sometimes withdraw to form a band and a nation by themselves.”17 Apart from the readily apparent inaccuracy – the progenitors that mattered were grandmothers and great-grandmothers, not the
ir husbands – the statement captures the organic character of the nation and confederacy among Wendats and Iroquois alike. The Iroquoian nation – peoples who shared a common culture, language, and extended kinship bonds – occupied a cluster of neighbouring villages. There was a good deal of porosity between communities of the same nation, encouraged by the cross-cutting ties of family. Matrilocal residence patterns meant that men might find a wife and a new home in a village different from that of their birth, but that they maintained obligations to members of their matrilineage, that is, to their mothers, sisters, and sisters’ children. Clan membership meant that individuals had extended kin in other villages, both within their own nation and beyond.
By the time of contact with Europeans in the early seventeenth century, the Iroquoian nations who occupied what is today Ontario and New York were also united at a higher level of political organization, that of the league or confederacy. As noted earlier, the Wendat Confederacy was composed of four nations, or perhaps five: the Attignawantan (People of the Bear), Attigneenongnahac (People of the Cord), Arendarhonon (People of the Rock), Tahontaenrat (People of the Deer), and Ataronchronon (People of the Marshes, who may have been a division of the Attignawantan rather than a distinct constitutive nation). The first two were accorded senior status as founding members and largest nations of the confederacy; the Attignawatan alone occupied half the seats on the confederacy council. This council of the Wendats is less well understood than that of the Iroquois, but it appears to have brought together most of the civil headmen of each nation.18
The fact that the term “Wendats,” as Hoüandate, 8endat, or Ouendat, appears more rarely in the early Relations than do the names of individual nations is indicative of the way in which localized identities mattered most.19 The same was true of the Five Nations who had been united into a confederacy through the mythical action of the Great Peacemaker Deganawida and the prophet Hiawatha: Mohawk (Kanien’kehá:ka, “People of the Flint”), Oneida (Onyota’a:ka, “People of the Standing Stone”), Onondaga (Onöñda’gega’ “People of the Hills”), Cayuga (Gayogohó:no’ “People of the Great Swamp”), and Seneca (Onöndowága, “People of the Hills,” like the Onondaga). A sixth, the Tuscarora, would join them in the early eighteenth century. Together, these Iroquois nations were called the Rotinonsionni or Haudenosaunee, in reference to the symbolic longhouse that gathered the nations. The confederacy council of the Iroquois usually met at Onondaga, the principal village of the central nation, and was made up of hereditary chiefs from each of the constituent nations.20
Iroquois and Wendat confederacy-wide councils each gathered periodically for feasts and discussions, bringing together leading men of different nations and giving them an opportunity to reaffirm old friendships and to discuss subjects of mutual interest. These confederacies provided their constituent nations with mechanisms to prevent disputes from erupting between them and for settling grievances without resorting to bloodshed. But they remained loosely knit formations. It was at the level of the lineage and the village, and secondarily at the level of the nation, that leadership manifested itself and that political and military support could be mustered and coordinated. By the mid-seventeenth century the Iroquois and the Wendats were each united in a way that allowed them to maintain internal peace and turn violence outward, but neither confederacy possessed the means of elaborating and carrying out a unified foreign policy.21
The fact that local communities – not the Wendats or the Iroquois as ethnic wholes – were the basic unit of political action is a key to understanding the patterns of conflict and migration outlined in this and subsequent chapters. Iroquoian mobility is a second key. Although village dwellers, the Wendats and the Iroquois were sedentary only in a relative sense. As noted above, the rhythm of the seasons drew community members away from their villages, whether to hunt, fish, and gather their subsistence, or to trade, wage war, and make peace with neighbours. Moreover, families and individuals occasionally relocated from one community to another, and communities themselves shifted their location on a regular basis. It was the norm for individuals to live at a succession of two or three sites during the course of their lifetime, perhaps even more. Alluding to the social and cultural centrality of this pattern, one seventeenth-century Mohawk dictionary transcribed the word tekanatakwa, as “lift the camp, transport the village, move, emigrate.”22
Owing to a variety of factors, such relocations usually occurred every ten to twenty years, though some villages stayed in place for as long as half a century. Chief among these factors was the exhaustion of local resources. Swidden agriculture enriched the soil in the short and medium term, but in the long run it had a detrimental effect. The need to travel increasingly further from the village to find firewood and trees and bark suitable for house and palisade maintenance was another issue. In a way that emphasized continuity, the name of a village was sometimes transferred from the old site to the new one, just as the names of individuals were reused within the lineage. Village relocation was typically a gradual process. Time was allowed to make advance preparations at the new site: to clear new fields and build new structures, before the old ones were entirely abandoned; and perhaps to move the poles of houses and palisades, as well as bark sheeting, from one site to the other. Communities often retained a strong sense of affiliation with their former residence location. It was not uncommon for a village site and associated fields to be reoccupied several generations after they had been abandoned, once soil fertility and suitable firewood had been sufficiently replenished to support a community.23
Socio-political circumstances, not just soil exhaustion and resource depletion, led to the relocation and reconfiguration of communities. Insofar as Iroquoian communities depended on consensus, and as disagreements were more frequent in large villages, it was not uncommon for a segment of the community, usually one or several lineages, to splinter and join another village or form a new one. Crop shortages and epidemics may have contributed to encouraging large communities to divide into smaller ones; the wartime influx of refugees or captives, after swelling a community’s population, often resulted in its division in the longer term. Unsurprisingly, the migrations, fusions, and fission of communities prompted by war were the most dramatic. Champlain observed that in normal circumstances a village relocated only one to three leagues away, but that “when forced by their enemies to decamp [they] move to a greater distance,” citing a nation that had moved some forty to fifty leagues, or over two hundred kilometers.24
Village relocations and reconfigurations were often prompted by the dream of an influential community member, but such dreams can be assumed to have occurred or to have been acted upon in response to the sort of pressures described above. In reality, resettlement occurred only after serious deliberation within a community. In normal circumstances a new village site was prepared long before the old was abandoned, although the perils of wartime brought about departures that were more rushed. At such times, male chiefs, responsible as they were for military affairs and better equipped to gauge an enemy threat, may have had a particular influence on the decision-making process. A Jesuit observed how, as the Iroquois warriors and diplomats were closing in on Huronia, a council was held after which “the Captains went through the streets, urging the women to begin pounding their Indian corn, and collecting their provisions – to be ready to start in three days,” and that the “the women set to work to do what they were commanded.”25 As a rule, however, the will of women was paramount. As stressed earlier, the household, the village, and the fields around them were spaces over which women’s authority prevailed, and it follows that the decision to abandon one site in favour of another would have been of utmost concern to them. As keepers of the lineage, women had the principal stake in the relocation or reconfiguration of the household. And while men may have been best equipped to identify a new village site on the basis of its defensible qualities and of the ease with which longhouses and a palisade might be built there, these were secondary
factors. Women were best prepared to judge a site’s agricultural potential – its very ability to sustain a village.
Women’s crucial leadership in the formation and relocation of communities is captured in the creation stories of the Wendats and Iroquois, according to which the first woman – variously called Awenhai, Ataensic, Otsitsa, Iagnetci, or Sky Woman – fell from the heavens onto the back of a giant turtle, in effect bringing her descendants from the Sky World to Earth. More concretely, this leadership was illustrated in a story that, in the early eighteenth century, some Mohawks told the Jesuit Pierre-Joseph Lafitau about the origin of their nation. Their ancestors, they explained, “wandered a long time under the leadership of a woman named Gaihonariosk. This woman led them all through the north of America. […] she stopped at last at Agnié [Mohawk] where the climate seemed to her more temperate and the lands more suitable for cultivation. She then divided the lands for cultivation and thus founded a colony which has maintained itself ever since.”26
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