The maneuvering of the Mohawks and Onondagas had left the French in an uncomfortable position. Officials and missionaries were torn between, on the one hand, the desire to maintain a fragile Franco-Iroquois peace and to make missionary inroads among the Five Nations, and, on the other, the fear that recent displays of Iroquois hostility augured poorly for the safety of the Wendats. A corollary to the Jesuits’ willingness to sanction the relocation of the refugees among the Onondagas, where they might spiritually reinforce the embryonic mission of Sainte Marie de Gannentaha, was their great distrust of the Mohawks. Reiterating the position of diplomatic detachment adopted by his father since 1654, interim governor Lauzon de Charny chose to wash his hands of the affair, declaring that, “Onontio loves the Hurons. They are no longer children in swaddling-clothes, but are old enough to be out of tutelage. They can go where they wish, without being hindered in any way by Onontio. He opens his arms to let them go.” Lauzon de Charny could hope that a compromise, by which the Arendarhonon would relocate among the Onondagas and the Attignawantan among Mohawks, would satisfy everyone and ease the tensions that were endangering the fragile peace. Nevertheless, he attempted to delay the migration, denying the Mohawks the boats that they had requested to transport the Wendats and beseeching the Wendats to wait until they had a chance to meet the next governor before departing.53
Annaotaha and the Attigneenongnahac were not alone in harbouring some reservations about resettlement away from the Saint Lawrence valley. Notwithstanding Iroquois assurances of goodwill and the existence of privileged relationships between the Attignawantan and the Mohawks, and between the Arendarhonon and the Onondagas, after a decade of resistance there was much risk involved in yielding to pressures from either nation. When the Attignawantan headman Atsena announced his people’s decision to the Mohawk ambassador Teharihogen, it was with a heavy heart: “I am at your service. I cast myself, with my eyes shut, into your canoe, without knowing what I am doing. But, whatever may betide, I am resolved to die. Even if you should break my head as soon as we are out of range of the cannon here, it matters not; I am quite resolved.”54 Attignawantan reluctance to proceed with this resettlement was made plain on the expected day of departure, 2 June, at which time only fourteen women and children embarked for Mohawk country.55 It took the intervention of a second Mohawk delegation in early August of that year, once again backed by a strong military force of about one hundred warriors, to put a stop to these delaying tactics. On 21 August, “some” Wendats left Quebec in the company of Mohawks, followed five days later by another group of unspecified size, accompanied by Father Le Moyne.56 Whether these represented the last of the Attignawantan at Quebec, or merely another handful of families, it is impossible to say.
The Arendarhonon who had resolved to join the Onondaga, by this point numbering a little over fifty, of which four-fifths were women and children, had meanwhile left Quebec on 16 June. Beyond Montreal they travelled westward with Jesuit Father Ragueneau and a few other Frenchmen, escorted by about thirty Onondagas and fifteen Senecas. Though it was the likelihood of encountering a large force of Mohawks intent on laying claim to these Arendarhonon that caused the most apprehension, harm soon came from an unexpected direction. Within days of having left Montreal, on the way up the Saint Lawrence, one of the Wendat migrants was killed for murky reasons by an Onondaga captain of the escort; the incident snowballed into a melee during which all the Wendat men were killed and the women and children were seized – a massacre of the sort that had been feared. Heavily outnumbered and devoid of authority, the French members of the party were unable to intervene. When Ragueneau attempted to calm tempers and to secure concessions in favour of the survivors, the Onondaga captain defiantly retorted that by releasing the Wendats the French had empowered him to treat them as he pleased.57
In early September, another group of Onondagas approached the Wendats at Quebec. According to one count, as a result of recent outmigration to Iroquoia, those who remained at Quebec now numbered approximately 130, a fraction of the 500 or 600 tallied on the Island of Orleans four years earlier. It seems safe to assume that they were primarily Attigneenongnahac.58 Having spent the summer along the Saint Lawrence and apparently unaware as of yet of the massacre perpetrated by their compatriots, these Onondagas, in a continued effort to persuade them to relocate to their country, presented new belts and strings of wampum to the community’s leaders, “giving them a thousand assurances that they would be very welcome.” The Wendats showed some inclination to comply, but convinced their interlocutors to postpone the journey until the following spring. News of the massacre, reaching town in the early days of October, unsurprisingly spelled the end of the plan.59
***
Onondaga elders promptly conveyed their assurances that they had nothing to do with the massacre of the Arendarhonon migrants in the summer of 1657, and that they did not approve of the behaviour of the rash young men who had committed it. It was of little reassurance. Onondaga, Oneida, and Mohawk bands were now reported to be prowling between Trois Rivières and Quebec, intent on doing mischief to Wendats, Algonquins, and Frenchmen alike. In concert with the principal colonists, the new interim governor, Louis d’Ailleboust, resolved that the hostilities and pillaging of the Iroquois would be tolerated no more. The half-decade during which French governors had taken great care to avoid jeopardizing the peace that their people enjoyed had proven illusory for their Indigenous allies. During a council with the Wendats and Algonquins on 24 October 1657, Governor d’Ailleboust declared that they were free to conduct offensive and defensive operations as they pleased. The French would not be the first to strike or break the peace, but they would henceforth defend their allies if they were ever attacked in the vicinity of the colonial settlements. This was a noteworthy shift in French colonial policy.60
With the intensification of raids in the Saint Lawrence valley, the forceful diplomatic overtures of the Mohawks and Onondagas that had characterized the period from 1653 to 1657 came to a halt. The issue of Wendat resettlement disappeared from the Franco-Iroquois negotiations that continued to occur sporadically thereafter, and it becomes impossible to discern in the sources any further evidence of Mohawk-Onondaga competition over the fate of the small refugee community at Quebec. This is not to say that the Iroquois did not continue to entertain for a time a hope of drawing this community to them by force, as suggested by the rumour which reached the ears of Marie de l’Incarnation in 1659, to the effect that a large Iroquois army was amassing to “carry away our new Christians, and as I believe, as many Frenchmen as they can.”61
The Algonquins did not wait for d’Ailleboust’s invitation in the fall of 1657 to respond to Iroquois aggression, sending a war party of their own to the Richelieu River in the days preceding their meeting with the governor. The Wendats were a little slower to take the field. Perhaps it was for fear of what might happen to their numerous relatives living among the enemy. Perhaps they were also discouraged from taking arms by the Jesuits, who were understandably worried about what open war might mean for their mission of Sainte Marie de Gannentaha on the shore of Onondaga Lake. That preoccupation dissipated before long, however, with the news that the fledgling mission had been abandoned amidst rumours that it would soon be attacked by the Mohawks. Its evacuated personnel reached the safety of the colony in the first days of April 1658, and a first Wendat war party, twenty-three warriors in three canoes, left Quebec on 15 June.62
During his welcoming reception in early August of 1659, the latest governor, Pierre de Voyer d’Argenson, gave a clear indication of the new French willingness to encourage war by distributing arms to the representatives of the allied nations. With guns, gunpowder, lead, swords, hatchets, and iron arrowheads, he metaphorically wiped away the tears shed for the death of their peoples and restored their voice so that they might exhort their young men to battle.63 Indeed, in that summer, in June and August, Wendats took part in defensive operations alongside Algonquins and Frenchmen.64 Then, in Apri
l of 1660, the great war chief Étienne Annaotaha mobilized the largest Wendat war party in a decade, numbering forty warriors who left Quebec with him and were joined on the way by four Algonquins from the vicinity of Trois Rivières. Near Montreal they were reinforced by an additional seventeen Frenchmen, led by a certain Adam Dollard des Ormeaux. While French-Canadian historiography and collective memory has long focused on the latter, inflating his importance in this historical event, it is all but certain that the older and more experienced war chief Annaotaha acted as the party’s leader.65
One of the forty warriors, Ignace Tsaouenhohoui, would explain after the fact that they had been motivated by “the desire to repress the furor of the Iroquois, to prevent him from carrying away the rest of our women and children, for fear that by carrying them away they make them lose the Faith, and after paradise.”66 The religious sentiment was no doubt genuine, but the core consideration was probably the threat of seeing a small community further dislocated in this world rather than the next. And in reality, it is most plausible that Annaotaha and his warriors aimed to surprise isolated hunting bands and war parties along the Ottawa River. By striking blows in this way, they could raise the morale of their people and capture men and women who might serve a diplomatic purpose as hostages.
The expedition would prove disastrous for the Wendats of Quebec. At the foot of the Long Sault rapids on the Ottawa River (today Chute à Blondeau, Ontario), the party was beset by a force of some two to three hundred warriors from the League’s western nations, primarily Onondagas but including some Senecas and perhaps Cayugas. The greatly outnumbered Wendats and Frenchmen took refuge in a makeshift fort only to find the besiegers reinforced within a few days by an additional five hundred Mohawks, Onondagas, and Oneidas. On Annaotaha’s prompting, a “Huronised” Oneida from his party – that is, an adopted Wendat of Oneida origin – went out with two of the leading Wendats to obtain “some good terms.” Given the Iroquois’s incorporative efforts and successes over the preceding decade and a half, the enemy force itself included a number of “Iroquoiscised” Wendats. During the tense truce that followed the parley, a number of the latter summoned their compatriots in the defenders’ camp to abandon the uneven fight. As a result, most of the Wendat defenders, twenty-four or thirty men, chose to defect. This was a typical response to such situations in a cultural context where the violence of battle and the more delicate pressures of diplomacy were never far from each other. Fighting to the death might be praised and admired in the early modern European way of war, but such self-sacrifice did not have the same gloss in the small-scale societies of North America. The value of warriors’ lives surpassed that of strategic gains.67
Annaotaha was among the few who remained with the French and Algonquins. His impressive and controversial war record made it unlikely that, even in the case of voluntary surrender, he would be spared from torture and death.68 After a siege of seven to ten days, the Onondagas and Mohawks stormed the makeshift fort, killing Annaotaha in the process. The five French captives were tortured to death, as were some of the captured Wendats and Algonquins. The men who had voluntarily defected were at first treated like captives, but most were eventually spared. Of the forty Wendat warriors, the Relation reports that only seven were burnt, a number that may very well refer to both those killed in battle and the few who were put to death afterwards.69 After the destruction of Huronia a decade before, and the assault on the Island of Orleans four years earlier, the loss of some forty men was a terrible blow to the Wendat community at Quebec. One commentator described them as “the flower of all those of importance that remained here with us.” Another spoke even more dramatically of “the forty remaining Hurons.”70
The community thus remained vulnerable. Its bark-covered longhouses nestled at the heart of the colonial capital were well protected, but venturing out to carry on necessary subsistence activities continued to involve considerable risks. During fall of 1662, the Iroquois captured another five Wendats who were harvesting fields that they had retained on the Island of Orleans and in the seigneury of Lauzon, along the south shore of the river.71 In May of the following year, officials at Montreal imprudently lodged four Mohawk would-be deputies with a small band of Wendats who had established a hunting camp nearby. Surprising their hosts after an evening of good cheer, the guests killed three of them and captured another three. A few weeks later, the enraged relatives of the victims retaliated by indiscriminately killing an Onondaga visitor to the town.72 The murders of May 1663 became the last-documented Iroquois attack against a group consisting solely of Wendats in the Saint Lawrence valley. By the fall of that year, both the French and their allies began enjoying a lull in the enemy offensive – this was less a result of successful defensive operations on their part than of the fact that the Five Nations were distracted by other wars.73
***
One Jesuit observed, with a mixture of compassion and pride that, for the shattered community which mourned the loss of Annaotaha and his men in 1660, “prayer took the place of lamentation.”74 Such a remark might be qualified by pointing out that a decade later, one of the community’s highly esteemed members, Joachim Annieouton, admitted that, though he had accepted baptism and shown himself assiduous in attending mass and prayers, his conversion had been feigned. “Ah, my Father, I have been deceiving you hitherto,” he confessed.“You urged me very often to become converted; and I, to gratify you and rid myself, as I then used to say, of such importunity, granted you in appearance what you wished of me.”75 Still, the complexities of personal belief notwithstanding, it is clear that the political community defined itself as Christian and that its members, as a whole, sought and found a good measure of solace in Christian beliefs and practices.
That this was the case should not surprise, for the subset of the Wendat population that had chosen to seek its safety in the Saint Lawrence valley, and to hold firm through a decade of diplomatic and military pressure, corresponded to those who had most enthusiastically embraced the new faith. During the difficult years that followed the destruction of Huronia, missionary teachings offered ready meaning to traumatic experiences and a dynamic basis for the construction of new social bonds and support networks – as they had for the Algonquians of Kamiskouaouangachit. Most significantly perhaps, these teachings offered ways of channeling grief at a time when traditional beliefs and practices were proving difficult to adapt to the new context. Indeed, the Wendats of Quebec’s ever-diminishing number of warriors made it difficult to carry out traditional mourning mechanisms that hinged on the capture or killing of enemies. By contrast, the stoic resignation in the face of adversity that was advocated by the missionaries offered ways of grieving that were more practicable at this juncture, as did the belief that death represented a transition to a better life and an opportunity to be reunited with loved ones.
The Jesuit’s remark might also be qualified by noting that prayer, in reality, did not entirely replace lamentation, which continued to feature prominently in the rhetoric of Wendat leaders in these years. It is difficult to fathom the extent to which the experience of the Wendat refugees clustered near Quebec was shaped by personal and collective loss and bewilderment in the decade and a half that followed their departure from their ancestral homeland. In offering condolences to the Ursulines for the loss of their convent by fire in 1650, Louis Taiaeronk described his nation as “devoured and gnawed to the very bones, by war and famine” and his people as “carcasses […] able to stand only because you support them.” In the welcome addresses that they gave upon the arrival of Bishop François de Laval in 1659 and of Lieutenant General Alexandre de Prouville de Tracy in 1665, Wendat spokesmen similarly emphasized social collapse and dependency. No imagery could more strikingly express what had happened to their people than that of the tortured, cannibalized, and decomposing victim of the Iroquois, the human body being here equated with the political and social body. Addressing Laval, an unnamed speaker described his people as “fragments of a once flourish
ing nation,” “remnant of living carrion,” “the skeleton of a great people, from which the Iroquois has gnawed off all the flesh, and which he is striving to suck out to the very marrow.” The elder who welcomed Tracy likewise declared that he spoke on behalf of “the wreck of a great country, and the pitiful remnant of a whole world,” now “mere carcasses, only the bones of which have been left by the Iroquois, who have devoured the flesh after broiling it on their scaffolds” and passing it “through the boiling cauldrons.”76
The sense of loss was very real, and the appraisal of diminished political and military capacity was lucid. Yet beyond expressing Wendat despair, such plaintive performances were intended to instill compassion in the French audience and to stir the Crown out of its lethargy. The orator who welcomed Bishop Laval in 1659 clarified the stakes: “If you would have a Christian people,” he declared, “the infidel must be destroyed.” “If you can obtain from France armed forces to humble the Iroquois,” it would be possible by destroying even just two or three of their villages to open a path to vast lands and many nations who yearned only for “the light of the Faith.” This line of argument made the most of the audience’s sensibilities and priorities. But it also staked the Wendats of Quebec’s claim to the centre of the Christian alliance, at a time when the Algonquians were distancing themselves from the mission settlement at Kamiskouaouangachit. “On our life depends that of countless peoples; but our life depends on the death of the Iroquois,” concluded the speaker, drawing a parallel between the life of the soul and the body. “Give life to your poor children.”77
Flesh Reborn Page 19