Onnhatetaionk and his followers may have belonged to a group of fifty persons known to have travelled at about this time from an unnamed Mohawk village to Notre Dame de Foy, or otherwise been incited by this group’s departure.83 By this time, even Togouirout the Great Mohawk, a war chief of high stature and by all accounts of Old Iroquois stock, had apparently grown disenchanted with life at Gandaouagué. Having visited Kentake during the winter hunt and been favourably impressed by what he had seen, he rounded up forty of his people in secret and led them there in June of 1673. Here as elsewhere, it is tempting to sense the discrete influence of women beyond the conspicuous leadership of men. It is all but certain that most of these latter migrants belonged to the Turtle Clan, as that clan dominated at Gandaouagué and as Togouirout himself was one of its members.84
The mix of spiritual and strategic motives that incited these men and women to abandon Gandaouagué was captured by Father Bruyas when he explained to the recently arrived governor Louis de Buade de Frontenac that they sought to “take refuge in your arms as in an asylum, where they hope to preserve their faith and be secure from their enemies.”85 A shift in missionary strategy also factored into this latest wave of resettlement. For the past twenty years the Jesuits had tended to view their mission settlements of the Saint Lawrence valley as secondary to whatever missions could be established among the Iroquois. Louis XIV’s new-found assimilative ambitions had not produced an immediate sea change in their missionary policy. But the challenges encountered in Iroquoia, coupled with the discovery that so many neophytes were eager to leave it, now led Father Lamberville to reason that “to make them good Christians in their own country is a difficult thing, and one that will take a long time to accomplish, but if we could gradually detach them from their dwelling-place, and attract them to our Wendat colonies, it would be very easy to make worthy Christians of them in a short time.”86
It is likely that it was in an effort to capitalize on the recent wave of migrants, or perhaps as a response to the fact that newcomers increasingly favoured the village of Kentake over Notre Dame de Foy as their destination, that a “squadron of Hurons” decided to accompany Frontenac during his expedition to Cataraqui (current-day Kingston, Ontario) in late June and July of 1673. It was headed by Louis Thaondechoren, a Wendat of Tionnontaté birth who had found himself among the refugees to the Saint Lawrence valley in the 1650s, and who, after managing an escape from Annaotaha’s disastrous expedition, had emerged as one of the most zealous members of the community in the exercise of Christian piety. When the Wendats settled at Notre Dame de Foy, Chaumonot appointed him to lead them in prayer during his occasional absences. The Jesuit account of Thaondechoren’s errand in 1673 states that his intention was to use the governor’s conference with the Iroquois as an opportunity to “carry the Gospel and publish the name of Jesus-Christ.” An official’s account paints a more complex and compelling picture. During his conference with the Iroquois, Frontenac voiced his allies’ concern, blaming the “cruelty” that the Iroquois exercised against their “Huron brothers” who lived among them by “preventing them from coming to visit their parents” in the Saint Lawrence valley and “calling them slaves and threatening to break their heads.” Thaondechoren took the floor next. Describing the advantages of Christianity, his speech nevertheless centered on the migration of his countrymen. He offered a wampum belt to his Iroquois counterparts in the hope that they would not refuse his people’s request that they “allow the return of their relatives among them.” The celebrated Onondaga chief Garakontié, responding on behalf of the League nations, apparently agreed in principle.87
While Frontenac was overseeing the foundation of the fort which would bear his name at Cataraqui, Thaondechoren proceeded to Onondaga in the company of Garakontié and two other Wendats. He encountered there a particularly receptive audience of Wendats and Neutrals. Even as he is said to have “sowed in the mind of many infidel Iroquois the seeds of the Faith,” he “excited in the hearts of the Christian Hurons a great desire to travel to Quebec to fulfill in peace the duties of Christianity, with more liberty than they have in the country of their captivity.” The Neutrals, who had willingly given themselves over to the Onondagas only to find themselves treated no better than slaves, took the opportunity to convene Thaondechoren to a secret council and asked him to convince Onontio to send soldiers who might cover their escape to the colony. Knowing that the governor would be loath to threaten the Franco-Iroquois peace by going along with such schemes, Thaondechoren could make no commitment. He nonetheless suggested that the Neutrals could withdraw to the newly built Fort Frontenac at Cataraqui, on the pretext of carrying out their regular hunt, where the French would receive them kindly and from whence they would ensure their safe passage to Quebec.88 It was, in essence, the same ruse that two decades earlier an Onondaga diplomat had proposed to the Wendats of the Island of Orleans. But Thaondechoren’s discussions with the Neutrals were never followed through.
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Frontenac, who served two mandates as governor of New France in 1672–82 and 1689–98, was quick to develop an adversarial relationship with the Jesuits. Encouraged in this thinking by Louis XIV and Colbert, he felt that the missionaries had not lived up to their responsibility of francization. The way in which the Jesuits went about ministering to the neophytes without teaching them the colonists’ language or customs annoyed him greatly, as did their periodic requests for the expansion of their seigneurial holdings to accommodate the mission settlements. He also consistently opposed their efforts to extend their missions beyond the Saint Lawrence valley, countering that they should focus their efforts on those that had already begun. In an – ultimately unsuccessful – attempt to demonstrate that assimilation was feasible and that anyone could be better at it than the Jesuits, Frontenac went as far as to take a couple of Iroquois boys into his household. Although he was more sympathetic to the Sulpicians, soon they too attracted his displeasure with their strict morality and their resistance to the imperious way in which he exercised his authority.89
Within a few years of Frontenac’s arrival, the Jesuits began to push back against the policy of integration. During the fall of 1673, less than five years after its installation at Notre Dame de Foy, the Wendat community moved to a new site, further west from Quebec and deeper in the woods. The lack of arable land and of firewood was cited by Father Chaumonot as the reason why the relocation had become necessary. The fact that the mission “was increasing every day” owing to arrivals from Iroquoia made these needs even more pressing.90 It is also likely that the missionaries meant to isolate the Indigenous community from its French neighbours, many of whom were only too eager to offer brandy to the neophytes in exchange for their pelts. The specific site proposed by the Jesuits, on their seigneury of Saint Gabriel, beyond that of Sillery, had the additional advantage of advancing their order’s property interests in two ways. The redistribution to colonists of the acreage already cleared at the former site promised to increase seigneurial revenues, while the removal of the neophyte community from the seigneury of Sillery also neutralized eventual challenges to the order’s title over this grant, which had ambiguously been made two decades before to the “Sauvages,” in trust to the Jesuits.91
Whereas some of the mission settlement relocations during the seventeenth century were driven by Indigenous communities themselves, the degree to which the Wendats partook in this particular initiative is debatable. “After much searching, and still more prayers,” explained one missionary account, the Wendats “have not themselves found a place more suitable than that which we have granted them.” The annual Relation hints that while the move was accepted by the community, and appreciated by many, the feeling was not universal. At least one woman demonstrated sadness at the thought of leaving Notre Dame de Foy on account of her great attachment to her fields there.92
Work at the new site began in January 1673. Under the Jesuits’ direction, French workmen cleared an initial site on a promontory,
and then, finding that access to the first was too impractical, prepared a second site by hastily erecting a dozen houses which in turn proved too small and close to each other and had to be replaced during the summer of the following year by longhouses built by the Wendats themselves. The missionaries imposed an unusual village layout upon the settlement, quite different from those of Iroquoian tradition, by arranging the houses around a square centred on the mission’s chapel. The new community took on the name of Lorette – in reference to Loreto, Italy, a renowned site of Marian pilgrimage centred on a house, the Santa Casa, in which the Holy Family was believed to have lived and which was believed to have been flown over from Palestine by angels. The Virgin of Loreto held a special personal meaning for Chaumonot, who as a wayward youth had found his calling during a pilgrimage there. The Wendat community, given their collective attachment to the avocation of Mary as a mother and to the notion of the Christian family, proved eminently receptive to this figure. A chapel designed by the missionary to serve as centerpiece for the village, made of brick like the Santa Casa and following the same dimensions, was constructed over the summer and fall of 1674. For its inauguration, on 4 November, Chaumonot and the other Jesuits gave a feast for the community, distributing presents in the way of blankets, cloth, and hatchets, and obtaining from its members a pledge that they would not drink liquor in excess, and that whomever would henceforth become intoxicated would be driven away from the village.93
Migrations from Iroquoia brought the total population of Lorette to about 300 in 1675.94 The population of Kentake probably reached about the same level that year, having numbered, with daily arrivals, 280 in 1674.95 While in 1673 Father Lamberville might still describe both communities as “Huron colonies,” the influx of Old Iroquois heralded a new phase in the evolution of the mission settlements and in the formation of local identities. The migration of Togouirout and his followers to Kentake, in particular, would have a multiplying effect – Chauchetière hailed it in hindsight as the “first shock given to infidelity.” If the first to settle at Kentake had been Oneidas by adoption or birth, the newcomers from the Mohawk villages, and from Gandaouagué in particular, now “took the first rank.”96
Figure 5.4 The mission settlement at Lorette (today Ancienne Lorette), occupied between 1673 and 1697, as it appears on Robert de Villeneuve’s map (Detail from “Carte des Environs de Quebec,” 1685–1686, BNF, Département Cartes et plans, GE SH 18 PF 127 DIY 7 P 4)
The political structure adopted in 1671 to respond to the growth of the community, according to which one chief oversaw civil and military affairs and a second oversaw religious matters, was found to be maladapted to the changing face of the community. In 1673 it was deemed necessary to name a chief for each of the three most numerous nations in the village, namely the Mohawks, Wendats, and Onondagas. When a council was assembled for this purpose, the Mohawks and Onondagas quickly named their respective leaders, but the deliberations dragged on among the Wendats.97 Tonsahoten appears to have been disputing the nomination with another, if not several, Wendat men. In the absence of indications of the time of year in which it occurred, it is tempting to link the timing of this reorganization with the illness of Ganneaktena, which began when she was working the fields in the late summer of that year and carried on until her death in early November.98 It is likely that the disagreement over the choice of chief was not rooted merely in the personalities and abilities of the men involved, but rather in the divergent experiences of the last two decades. The passage of time had frayed the old solidarities of Huronia, allowing a variety of new local solidarities and leaders to emerge. Wendats from Oneida, who had figured prominently among the founders of Kentake and who still retained a measure of moral authority, clashed with the more recent Wendat arrivals from both Mohawk and Onondaga countries. It is not impossible that old divisions of the sort outlined in previous chapters, between Attignawantan and Arendarhonon for example, flared-up. The outcome was that Tonsahoten maintained his authority. Thereafter he is alluded to as “captain of the Hurons” of the mission, someone “deferred [to] in all things, as the first and the senior of the captains” by his two Mohawk and Onondaga counterparts.99
Compounding these matters was the fact that the site of Kentake, though occupied for less than a decade, was, like its political structure, proving poorly adapted to the influx of newcomers. The yield of the corn fields had been impressive in the first few years, but had since become insufficient to satisfy the needs of the community. At the same time as traditional agricultural methods were slowly depleting the soil of the first fields, the fact that much of the area’s acreage was too humid to cultivate maize discouraged the preparation of new ones. Missionary stores, which supplemented the growing community’s needs, were stretched to the maximum. “Poverty,” according to Chauchetière, now characterized life at the mission.100 While the people of Kentake appear to have had a greater say in their move than those of Notre Dame de Foy at around the same time, similar factors contributed to both relocations. At Kentake even more so than at Notre Dame de Foy, the proximity of French habitants and the expansion of their numbers caused growing worry, as the Indigenous community became increasingly exposed to the peddling of liquor that many of its founders, in leaving Iroquoia, had specifically sought to evade. For the Jesuits the silver lining of the situation was the same: an opportunity to expand their seigneurial holdings and, by ceding the mission community’s fields to rent-paying habitants, their revenues. Thus by late 1674 if not earlier, the Jesuits were thinking about relocation and considering potential sites. They briefly considered the area to the north of the Island of Montreal, sending Father Antoine Dalmas to tour around Île Jésus to evaluate the area’s potential for “some project” involving “a settlement of Natives” – but they did not pursue the matter.101 Instead, the Jesuits applied to Governor Frontenac and then to the newly arrived intendant, Jacques Duchesneau de la Doussinière et d’Ambault, for an additional land grant beyond the western boundary of the seigneury of La Prairie. While Frontenac, ever resentful of the Jesuits, dismissed this request out of hand, Duchesneau proved much more amenable, allowing, in January of 1676, the people of Kentake to clear and sow fields along two leagues of river frontage. Owing to the governor’s persistent opposition, the grant was not officialized by Louis XIV until 1680, but by then the Jesuits and the people of Kentake had long since transplanted their mission settlement there.102
In this context, a number of Wendat families marginalized by political divisions at Kentake opted to detach themselves from the village and set their sights on the Island of Montreal. It seems safe to assume that these corresponded to the families who had failed to get their preferred candidate recognized as chief in 1673.103 In 1675, a delegation of Wendats from Kentake headed by a certain Achindwanes and accompanied by Father Frémin petitioned the Sulpician seigneurs of Montreal, in the presence of the district governor François-Marie Perrot, for a plot of land there. In his address to Gabriel Souart, the acting superior of the seminary, Achindwanes glossed over the existence of social tensions at Kentake, instead complaining about the smallness and barrenness of their fields. He asked Souart for help in forming a new village, for a priest, and for the religious and civil authorities to provide them with assistance in times of famine and during the hunting season.104
The success of Achindwanes and his followers speaks to the strength of the discontent at Kentake, of their leeway of action within the community, as well as of their ability to pressure unenthusiastic missionaries into allowing the move. Frémin and the other Jesuit missionaries at Kentake had, most likely, tried their best to convince Achindwanes and his followers to remain in the community, assuring them that it would soon be relocated to a more amenable site. Perhaps they proposed as an alternative a move to Lorette, hoping to counter Sulpician competition in the mission and the dangers of drunkenness and dispossession that a relocation closer to the town of Montreal seemed to foreshadow for these breakaway Wendats.105
> The Sulpicians had reasons of their own to be reluctant in the face of this request. Their missionary ventures over the previous decade, both on the north shore of Lake Ontario and on the upper Island of Montreal, had yielded disappointing results. Around 1672, the seminary’s most able missionary, François de Salignac de La Mothe-Fénelon, was recalled from Kenté in an effort to establish an Algonquin mission on a solid footing at a site called Gentilly and on the adjacent Courcelle Islands (today the suburb and island of Dorval). But in 1674, both Fénélon and his would-be successor, his colleague and cousin François-Saturnin Lascaris d’Urfé, were embroiled in a quarrel with Frontenac over the governor’s imperious involvement in the fur trade and were subsequently recalled to France. Initial efforts at Gentilly were not followed through. Over the next few years, Kenté was allowed to dwindle, having lost the governor’s confidence and becoming increasingly expensive, before being abandoned in 1680.106 Souart’s answer to Achindwanes was thus measured. He suggested that his people needed to consider the move very carefully, and that it might not be in their best interest to abandon the care of the Jesuits who, as they spoke their language (the Sulpicians as of yet did not), were best equipped to minister to them.
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