The earliest recorded formulation of the idea that some of Onontio’s allies were his children, rather than his brothers, had occurred in September 1645 when a French embassy in Mohawk country was asked to thank Onontio for restoring the good sense of his Algonquin children. Yet it was in the context of the 1650s that the idea became more prevalent, at a moment in time where the rhetorical infantilization of the Wendats suited the purposes of both the Iroquois and French. The mixed parental metaphors wielded during the Onondaga embassy of September 1655, like the apparently contradictory call for the governor to release and hold on to his children, conveyed a case for resettlement in a shared Iroquoian idiom: while, up to this point, Onontio had acted as a mother to the Wendats, he was now becoming their father, that is, someone bound to allow them to go reside elsewhere – namely, at Onondaga. Urging Onontio to hold on to his allies even more firmly and at this juncture let them live within his bosom also meant, more concretely, preventing the Wendats from moving to Mohawk country in the interval.32
During the meeting with the Onondagas, the case for migration was further strengthened by the speech of a “Huron Captain, formerly a captive of the Iroquois [e.g. Onondagas], and now a Captain among them” who had accompanied the embassy.“My brothers,” said this unnamed man, addressing the Wendats in the audience, “I have not changed my soul, despite my change of country; nor has my blood become Iroquois, although I dwell among them. My heart is all Huron, as well as my tongue. I would keep silence, were there any deceit in these negotiations for peace. Our proposals are honest; embrace them without distrust.”33 What the Wendat listeners thought of this is not clear. What is obvious is that the French had weighed their options and had come to see the Onondaga threat to the Wendats as an opportunity for themselves. The Jesuits had grown convinced that the benefits of establishing a mission in Onondaga country outweighed its risks. From this perspective, the careful injection of the Wendat neophytes among the heathen Iroquois promised to solidify the peace and radically advance the spread of Christianity.34
Two months later, Fathers Pierre-Joseph-Marie Chaumonot and Claude Dablon travelled to Onondaga to make a formal reply and to establish the footings of a new mission on Lake Gannentaha (as they called Onondaga Lake), accompanied by as many as eighteen Wendat ambassadors. On the very day of their arrival, Chaumonot publicly assured the local elders that the “Huron question” had been resolved, and that the Wendats would soon “plant their village” nearby. The Wendat ambassadors who accompanied the two missionaries may possibly have taken part in private meetings, from which the missionaries were excluded, with the Onondaga leadership or with the numerous Wendat “prisoners and renegades” who lived there, but during the public councils that occurred over a week-long conference they allowed Chaumonot and Dablon to speak on their behalf. At one point during the declarations of mutual goodwill, an Onondaga spokesman declared that he and Onontio “were now but one,” and “since the Hurons and Algonquins were Onnontio’s [sic] children, they must be his also.” With two presents, cast at the missionary’s feet, the Onondaga proceeded to adopt them. No one objected.35
Yet subsequent events revealed that the “Huron question” was far from resolved. The degree of autonomy – indeed, the very safety – that the Wendats could expect among their Onondaga hosts was called into question. In the months that followed these optimistic encounters, a Wendat captive who had escaped from Onondaga reached the Island of Orleans where he assured his countrymen and the missionaries that his former captors’ “sole design was to attract to their country as many French and Hurons as possible, and then to kill them in a general massacre.” He was so persuasive that the Wendats who had promised the Onondagas that they would relocate to their country decided against carrying through with their plan and attempted to convince the Jesuits to do the same. The missionaries’ zeal for the faith would cause their death, they argued, begging them not to “cast [themselves] into so manifest a danger” by proceeding.36
It seems improbable that the Onondagas intended to massacre the Wendats who willingly joined them. Still, the Onondaga delegation that came to Quebec and the Island of Orleans with a small number of Senecas in the spring of 1656 to escort missionaries and migrants had a difficult time countering these claims. The Mohawks represented an even more manifest danger. Diplomatically outmaneuvered by the Onondagas, in April they sent a force of three hundred warriors to the Saint Lawrence valley with the intention, if necessary, of resorting to violence to compel the Wendats to come and live among them, rather than anywhere else in Iroquoia. At Trois Rivières, the district governor Pierre Boucher attempted with presents to dissuade the warriors from pursuing their journey downriver. The Mohawk captains countered with wampum belts of their own, reiterating the solidity of their peace with the French and promising to return home as long as Onontio was willing to “close the doors of his houses and of his forts against the Onnontageronnon [Onondagas], who wishes to be my enemy.” Following the intervention of Jesuit Father Simon Le Moyne, the Mohawk force dispersed in search of wild game, allowing the French to believe that a crisis had been averted.37
If the Mohawks had any intention of hunting peacefully and returning home, however, it vanished with the news that French and Wendat doors remained open to the Onondagas. A violent incident heated tempers even further. Two Mohawk warriors, having detached themselves from the main force around Trois Rivières to maraud in the vicinity of the Island of Orleans, had ambushed and killed a young Wendat man. One of the warriors had managed to escape, but the other was captured, brought back to the mission settlement, and condemned to burn. The victim happened to be the only son of one of the community’s most prominent couples, a man of good qualities who was “destined for the office of captain,” and his death caused much grief. The missionaries attempted to dissuade his relatives from carrying out the execution, hoping that the prisoner might be used to negotiate with the advancing Mohawk army, but in vain.38
On 17 May, the Onondaga ambassadors set out from Quebec back towards Onondaga with a large contingent of missionaries, lay brothers, and soldiers, who intended to establish a mission settlement on the shores of Onondaga Lake. They were accompanied by a few Wendat migrants or emissaries.39 The Onondagas seemed on the cusp of a diplomatic victory. By welcoming missionaries, not only were they strengthening their relationship with the French, they were fulfilling the condition set out by the Wendats themselves two years earlier, which promised to usher their massive resettlement. Yet the convoy travelled no further than ten to twelve leagues from Quebec when its tail was ambushed by the secretly reassembled Mohawk army. Gaining the upper hand with no difficulty, the Mohawks mistreated the Onondagas and bound the Wendats. After some discussions, the assailants relented and freed their captives for “fear of becoming involved in a war” with the Onondagas, offering the unconvincing explanation that they thought the canoes carried only Wendats – with whom they were still at war.40
Three days later, on 20 May, the Mohawk force converged on the Island of Orleans before news of the skirmish had time to reach the Wendats or the French. Bypassing Quebec under the cover of darkness and landing on the island before dawn, the raiders scattered in ambush near the fields. They caught the villagers by surprise as they went out to work that morning. While some of the Wendats managed to find refuge in the mission’s fort, a large number were seized and forced to embark in the waiting canoes. The Relation for that year reported that seventy-one persons were captured or killed; the account of the Ursuline superior, Marie de l’Incarnation, reported eighty-five captives and six killed outright.41
In an effort to maintain the Franco-Mohawk peace, the raiders were careful not to harm the few colonists encountered in the area during the attack. By noon, the triumphant warriors departed. They paddled past Quebec in broad daylight, forcing their captives to sing, mocking both their Wendat victims and the French who stood by passively as their allies were carried off. The scene elicited the pity of the townspeople, who were
appalled to discover that Governor Lauzon categorically refused to intervene for fear that it would jeopardize the peace which the colonists enjoyed, or that it might endanger the safety of the missionaries who had left for Onondaga country three days earlier. When the Mohawk army reached the vicinity of Trois Rivières, a Jesuit stationed there could do no more than visit their camp to console the unfortunate captives.42
Following Marie de l’Incarnation’s numbers, the fact that only six persons were killed during the raid on the Island of Orleans reminds us that the Mohawks’ intention was not so much the physical destruction of the Wendat community as the incorporation of its members. The captives included “a large number of young women who were the flower of that [Wendat] colony.” But they also included men like Jacques Oachonk, the prefect or head of the mission’s lay confraternity, the Congregation of Our Lady, and according to the missionaries “the most fervent of all our Christians,” as well as Joachim Ondakont, one of the community’s most celebrated and skilled warriors. In Mohawk country, the captors granted their lives to all of the captives except six of the “principal Christians” whom they promptly put to death – in other words, the leaders who had been the fiercest opponents of relocation, among whom was Oachonk.43
In the wake of the attack, the village on the Island of Orleans was abandoned. Some families appear to have gone to live temporarily at Kamiskouaouangachit, but most found refuge in a fortified encampment laid out for them on the orders of Governor d’Ailleboust in the Upper Town of Quebec, between Château Saint Louis and the parish church. There they were joined by a handful of individuals who found a way to escape their captors after the raid, including a severely mutilated Ondakont. This ultimate refuge, nestled at the very heart of the colony, quickly became known as the “Fort des Hurons” or “Fort des Sauvages.”44
***
The withdrawal from the Island of Orleans to Quebec did not entail a complete desertion of the fields there. Although seigneurial title to the land was transferred back to Éléonore de Grandmaison and her new husband, Jacques Gourdeau de Beaulieu, the Jesuits made sure that the Wendats continued to be allowed to cultivate their fields there until 1660, as per the earlier agreement for an eight-year term of occupation, and that they be permitted to encamp within the old fort when they worked. In addition, the missionaries secured title to another plot of land at the Pointe de Lévis on the south shore of the Saint Lawrence, opposite Quebec, where they had forty-four arpents cleared for the use of Wendat families. A few French settlers, taking pity, offered additional plots here and there to Wendat acquaintances, who in turn reallocated them within the community in accordance with individual needs. Fear of additional Iroquois depredations severely curtailed their labour, however, and it was often under armed escort that the Wendats continued to work these scattered fields.45
French forts and palisades could only do so much to protect a people who needed to work their fields, to hunt, fish, and gather plants to survive. Seeing that so many of their loved ones had been taken by force and no doubt fearing, with good reason, that the same would unavoidably happen to them, the Wendats remaining in the area sued for peace with the Mohawks. In the fall of 1656, three Wendat emissaries travelled to Mohawk country to conclude an accord which hinged on the refugee community’s resettlement there in the following spring. Two Mohawk ambassadors spent the winter at the Island of Orleans, as guests in the house of Atsena the Attignawantan.46 That spring, a body of about one hundred Mohawk warriors entered the Saint Lawrence valley to make sure that the Wendats complied with their promise of the previous fall. On 1 April, two Mohawks arrived at Quebec from Montreal with presents for the Wendats. Meanwhile, the Onondagas responded to these unwelcome developments with a show of force of their own, breaking with the steadfastly diplomatic approach that in recent years had distinguished them from the Mohawks. In the first days of May 1657, some fifty to one hundred Onondaga warriors arrived in the vicinity of Quebec, threatening war against the Wendats and harassing French colonists. During a first council, in the presence of representatives of the Wendats, Algonquins, Innu, and French, as well as of a few Mohawk deputies, the Onondagas excused themselves “for having come for the Hurons, their brothers, with arms in their hands.” They had been compelled to do so, they claimed, by the discovery that under Mohawk influence the Wendats had reneged on their earlier promises to join them. All parties present reiterated their willingness to maintain peace and harmony, and the issue of the Wendat migration was negotiated in a series of private councils aimed at achieving a compromise.47
Figure 4.1 Map of Quebec showing the Wendat compound (labelled “Hurons”) in the Upper Town, between Fort Saint Louis, the parish church, and the Ursulines’ visiting quarters. (Detail from Jean Bourdon, “Le Véritable plan de Québec fait en 1663,” BNF, Département des cartes et plans, GE SH 18 PF 127 DIV 7 P 3)
Again, the Onondagas were outmaneuvered by the Mohawks. On 15 May, the former’s delegation headed home from Quebec in the company of three Wendat envoys who intended to further discuss the resettlement. The hundred Mohawk warriors who lay in the vicinity of Trois Rivières and Montreal intercepted them and dissuaded the three Wendats from proceeding to Onondaga country. A delegation of twenty to thirty Mohawks headed by Teharihogen, the man who had initiated the secret discussions in 1653, went on to Quebec. Reaching the town on 28 May, he met with the Wendats in council. “Four years ago,” he declared, “you begged me to take you by the arm, to raise you and bring you to my country. You did sometimes withdraw it when I wished to comply with your request; that is why I struck you on the head with my hatchet. Withdraw it no more, for I tell you in earnest to get up. It is time for you to come.” Teharihogen asked the interim governor, Charles de Lauzon de Charny, the son of Jean de Lauzon, to let the Wendats go and to allow Father Simon Le Moyne to accompany them to Mohawk country. During the nightlong internal consultations that ensued, divisions within the refugee community manifested themselves. While the Attignawantan (or Bear Nation) agreed to join the Mohawks, the Arendarhonon (Rock Nation) reaffirmed their pledge to join the Onondagas, and the Attigneenongnahac (Cord Nation) opted to remain at Quebec.48
In reporting the events of the summer of 1657, the Relation allows us to catch a rare and final glimpse of the relations between the constituent nations that had made up the former Wendat Confederacy. The insight is rare because since the invasion of Huronia, colonial chroniclers had ceased to refer to the constitutive Indigenous national segments, favouring instead the convenient collective label of “Huron”; final, because no mention would ever again be made of these national segments in colonial writings after 1657. This shift in terminology reflects a lack of interest in Indigenous identity politics on the part of the French, but it also mirrored the very real process of cultural and political convergence that occurred in the Saint Lawrence valley during the 1650s and 1660s. While the sources do not hint at how the Wendat refugees defined themselves in this period, it seems clear that under the pressures of invasion and forced migration, the distinct cultures and identities of the refugees who shared a common fate gradually merged. The cultivation of a common Christian identity among the Wendat refugees contributed to this process of convergence, as surely did the increasing tendency of missionaries and officials to think of and approach them as “Hurons” rather than Attignawantan, Arendarhonon, or Attigneenongnahac.
In the summer of 1657, these cultural and political cleavages still mattered. A decade earlier, in 1647, as indicated in the previous chapter, it was the Arendarhonon who attempted peace negotiations with the Onondagas, while the Attignawantan were strongly opposed to them.49 In the fall of 1653, it was the Attignawantan leader Atsena who had responded with gifts to Mohawk invitations. Conversely, in May of 1657, it was to the Arendarhonon that the Onondagas had directed their secret wampum belts.50 Presumably, the refugees’ leanings were influenced by these longstanding relationships and by the presence of a critical mass of Attignawantan captives and migrants living amon
g the Mohawks, and conversely of Arendarhonon living among the Onondagas.
An element of explanation for the Attigneenongnahac desire to remain with the French can also be teased from the activities of their most prominent leader, Étienne Annaotaha. In the previous decade, he had emerged as one of the staunchest and most flamboyant opponents of the Iroquois. Already recognized in 1649 as “the most esteemed in the country for his courage and his exploits over the enemy,” he was captured the following year but managed a prompt escape. At Gahoendoe Island, after the departure of the first Wendat contingent for the Saint Lawrence valley, he brought about the death of thirty Onondaga ambassadors by cunning – or from the Onondaga perspective, treachery. In July 1652, in the vicinity of Trois Rivières, he seized another ambassador, a Mohawk this time, who was executed soon thereafter. Both the Onondagas and Mohawks thus had good reasons to wish ill of Annaotaha – in fact, the French believed that the Iroquois’s desire to avenge these acts had been a cause of their hostility in recent years.51 Without doubt, Annaotaha’s Attigneenongnahac relatives and friends were party to his exploits. His actions can be interpreted as an expression of a suspicion, a hatred even, of the Iroquois that was more pronounced among them than among other segments of the Wendat population. Recent occurrences had done little to ease tensions. On 12 May 1657, less than two weeks before the council at which the three nations that made up the refugee communities agreed to part ways, an Onondaga warrior had killed a nephew of Annaotaha near Quebec. Though the head of the Onondaga delegation had dissociated himself from the killing and done his best to atone for it with customary presents, it takes no stretch of the imagination to understand that hard feelings persisted.52 Annaotaha and his Attigneenongnahac relatives and followers had strong personal reasons to resent both the Onondagas and the Mohawks, and to fear that in spite of assurances to the contrary, their reception among either nation would be tricky at best, or at worse fatal.
Flesh Reborn Page 18