Invested most heavily in this distinct Christian identity and privileged bond to the French were the leading figures of the mission communities. It was in no small part due to their ability to promote the new religion and attract droves of migrants that leaders such as Togouirout the Great Mohawk and the Oneida Ogenheratarihiens – and the influential women behind them – achieved prominence at Kahnawake. Such figures exercised what we might recognize as a form of patronage over the local church. Ganneaktena and Tonsahoten made the foundational donations of wampum to the chapel at Kentake, including by offering the wampum belt that the latter used to wear when he went to war; as noted earlier they also supplied the land for the construction of the new chapel at the time of the move to Kahnawake. When that second building was destroyed in a storm in the fall of 1683, Togouirout offered his family’s newly built longhouse to replace it; the following year, as he was preparing to go to war, he presented as “a monument to his piety” an impressive eight-branched bronze candelabrum very similar to the one which then adorned the Dutch Reformed church in Albany, where he purchased his gift for the exorbitant amount of twenty-four beaver pelts.30 As Chauchetière noted, it was in no small part due to the fact that the captains of Kahnawake “gave such a skillful spin to the affair” that the entire community expressed the desire “to perish rather than lose their faith” upon being invited by La Barre to wage war against the Senecas.31
Figure 6.1 Mark of Togouirout, here referred to by his Dutch name of Kryn or Cryn (in the above right corner). Individuals typically signed deeds and treaties with a clan symbol, here a turtle. (Detail from a deposition in favour of Jacques Cornelius Van Slyck, 12 September 1683, Schaffer Library, Union College, Schenectady)
To “lose” the Christian faith, beyond losing access to potent spiritual forces, entailed a weakening of bonds to an ever-expanding network of French and Indigenous actors, brothers, and sisters through baptism, who shared overlapping beliefs and practices.32 Moreover, to ignore La Barre’s plea for assistance would run counter to the dynamics that lay at the center of the relationship between Onontio – the French king (Great Onontio or Onontio Goa) and his representative in the colony, the governor general (Onontio proper) – and his allied “children.” Paralleling the metaphor of brotherhood, that of fatherhood was first tentatively introduced in the 1640s, extending first to the Algonquins and Wendats, before being institutionalized beginning in the early 1670s. By 1690s if not well before that, orators from the Kahnawake and Kanehsatake spoke publicly of the governor, Onontio, as their “Father” and of their people as numbering among the “Children” who owed him obedience. Beyond the realm of rhetoric, this relationship can more accurately be understood as one not of obedience, but of mutual obligation. In this respect, Iroquoian traditions presented a model: although clan affiliation was matrilineal, kinship retained a bilateral dimension insofar as a sense of pronounced reciprocity governed the relationship of a son to his father’s lineage. Significantly, this reciprocity manifested itself in times of war, when a family lost one of its members: “The children become obligated to their fathers’ lodge, to which they are strangers,” observed Jesuit missionary Joseph-François Lafitau, “and contract the obligation of replacing them [the deceased].”33
A response to Onontio’s call to arms would have been made all the more necessary by his willingness to embrace, in this context of reciprocity and mutual obligation, the role of provider. Indeed, in anticipation of war, La Barre initiated a generous policy of gift giving that in effect grafted itself onto both the missionary practice of supplying material assistance in times of need, and onto the exchange of presents that traditionally accompanied diplomatic rituals. Within weeks of his arrival, even though he had not yet visited Kahnawake, the governor was writing to the king in support of the maintenance of the annual grant of 500 livres to the missionaries there. The following summer, he gave special gifts to the four ambassadors who travelled to Iroquoia, and during the distribution of presents that followed the conference held at Montreal that August he took particular care to give a generous share to the Christian Iroquois. A few months later, in recognition of the community’s good will, La Barre was again petitioning the king for funds to assist in rebuilding the village’s destroyed chapel.34 Thereafter, his successors at the head of the colony would continue to view – albeit with varying degrees of enthusiasm (Denonville) or repugnance (Frontenac) – the distribution of presents as crucial to maintaining the cooperation of the warriors and diplomats of the mission settlements.35
To maintain the cooperation of the inhabitants of the mission settlements during these years, French officials also agreed to juridical compromises that in effect nullified the Sovereign Council’s decree of 1664, which had held that Indigenous offenders would be subjected to the same penalties as the French in criminal cases. The traditional punishment of offenders – “murderers, thieves, traitors and sorcerers,” as enumerated by the Jesuits in an early Relation – among Iroquoians and Algonquians alike had little in common with that prescribed by European law. Murder was atoned for with presents, and only if the accused or his relatives refused to offer any were the relatives of the victims entitled to seek violent retribution.36 This understanding of conflict resolution persisted in the mission settlements, and colonial authorities now proved willing to accommodate it. In January of 1684, the Sulpician Joseph Mariet, who served as Vachon de Belmont’s assistant at Kanehsatake, was accosted by a drunken twenty-three-year-old Wendat named Nicolas Tonaktouan, who lifted a hatchet about the priest’s head saying that he was “a dog that had to die” before other community members arrived to restrain him. Although Tonaktouan was a newcomer there, who had been born and raised at Lorette but had spent the six previous years living among the Tionnontaté-Wendats in the west, the local mission communities rose to his defence, arguing that in light of his drunkenness he could not be held responsible for his action. Two chiefs from Kahnawake intervened in his favour before governor La Barre, as did the Jesuit missionaries (no doubt to the great displeasure of the Sulpicians) who stressed that the punishment of the accused would result in “very dangerous consequences for the country.” The court, sensitive to these pressures, released Tonaktouan from prison, merely banishing him and imposing a fine of a hundred livres – in essence allowing him to atone with presents in keeping with the custom of his people.37 The precedent was followed, with colonial officials showing residents of the mission settlements and their visiting relatives a type of leniency for which no colonist could hope. In 1686, Governor Denonville and Intendant Jean Bochart de Champigny, acknowledging to the Secretary of State for the Navy that they “needed the Natives,” chose not to seek the prosecution of another intoxicated warrior who had killed a Frenchman, on account of his having kin at Kahnawake. The decision proved wise, for that warrior distinguished himself during the following year’s campaign, impressing everyone by slaying a Seneca with a single stroke of his sword.38 In the same way, Denonville and Champigny showed great leniency toward a young man from Kahnawake accused of raping and murdering a French girl in the summer of 1689. As the trial got under way and the accused, Étienne Tehagaraweron, lingered in jail, the chiefs of the village and his relatives there applied stern pressure to the governor and intendant, going as far as to threaten to leave the mission. In ordering the discontinuation of the trial and the release of Tehagaraweron, Denonville and Champigny cited the fact that such action was “absolutely essential to avoid it [this departure], given the unfortunate consequences that could ensue” and stressed that the matter was “of an extreme importance to the service of the King and to the authority of the Colony.”39
***
While spiritual and metaphorical kinship, enacted through shared beliefs and rituals, as well as through mutual obligations, induced the inhabitants of the mission settlements to assist their French “brothers” and “fathers” in their war, an equally crucial factor was the absence of ties to the Senecas. Though Chauchetière and other commenta
tors might marvel at the fact that the Christian Iroquois had agreed to wage war against “their own nation,” this constituted a gross oversimplification of identity and overstatement of solidarity among the Five Nations. As observed in the previous chapter, the men and women who settled in the mission settlements from the late 1660s onward came overwhelmingly from the eastern Iroquois nations: Oneidas formed an initial core at Kentake, but they were soon submerged by waves of Mohawk newcomers. Impressionistic nineteenth-century abstracts from the sacramental registers of Kanehsatake, the originals of which were subsequently destroyed in a fire, indicate that the mission did welcome some Senecas between 1680 and 1683. Still, Mohawks were coming to dominate at Kanehsatake too, alongside a substantial Onondaga minority and the original Wendat core.40
Notwithstanding occasional tensions, ties between the residents of the mission settlements and their villages of origin remained strong. Conversely, the Senecas’ demographic contribution to the mission settlements had been negligible. The few people observed to have moved from those villages to Kanehsatake between 1680 and 1683 appear to form the exception that proves the rule: people moving precisely because they were making the purposeful choice to align themselves with the French and their allies in a context of looming war. Overall, the tenuous nature of solidarity across the League’s constituent nations, and the geographical, biological, and conceptual distance that separated the Christian Iroquois from the Senecas provides the key to understanding their actions through the 1680s. As the Albany fur trader Anthony Lespinard would observe just a few years later after encountering Togouirout, he and the rest of his people “were no ways inclined to engage in the war if the Maquas [Mohawks], Oneydes [Oneidas] and Onnondages [Onondagas] were concerned, because their brethren, sisters, uncles, aunts, etc. were there,” but they were willing to “immediately join” the French against the Senecas.41
The challenge, as recognized by both La Barre and the leading men at Kahnawake and Kanehsatake, was to obstruct the League’s potential political and military unity. In preparation for the campaign against the Senecas, two of their number (including Togouirout), were dispatched with wampum belts to the Mohawks, two others to the Oneidas (including Ogenheratarihiens), and three to the Onondagas. These emissaries were to make it clear that the French wished only to avenge the misdeeds of the Senecas, who by their recent aggression had breached the peace accord made at Montreal the previous year; the French and their allies had no quarrel with the other four nations, and intended to live with them as friends.42 In many ways, this diplomatic gambit was in keeping with the proselytizing habit of the mission communities’ leaders over the past decade and a half. In fact, it was now reported with apprehension at Albany that Togouirout and two other men who arrived at the Mohawk villages had among their aims that of inciting their inhabitants “to move to Canada.”43
To be sure, consensus was not total at Kahnawake. Many warriors, following their personal dispositions or bending to those of their families’ leading women and men, chose to remain home at the risk of disappointing their French father and brothers. These included one of the village’s four chiefs, the Oneida Ogenheratarihiens, who took part in the diplomatic offensive but was unwilling to join the military operations that followed, leading some to believe that he would abandon the village.44 Some nine or ten households – a roughly estimated one hundred individuals – sure enough registered their discontent or alarm by leaving the village the year of the campaign. Vincent Bigot, Jesuit missionary among the Wabanakis recently settled at the village of Saint François de Sales near Quebec, attributed this departure to the ravages of brandy. Those who left Kahnawake, he claimed, “said that they had withdrawn there solely to live in peace, far from the disorders caused by intemperance; but that they found themselves as greatly annoyed by drunkards as they were in their own country.”45 But while liquor may very well have contributed to driving men and women away from the mission, the timing makes it likely that a key factor was the looming war against the Senecas, another major complication for those who wished only to “live in peace.”
Enthusiasm ran highest at Kanehsatake and at Lorette: during the muster at Cataraqui, the warriors of each village respectively numbered 60 and 40, representing a remarkably high rate of mobilization for a community whose total population would be reported the following year as being of 222 and 146 (a rate of 1 warrior fielded for each 3.7 individuals in the community). The small size of these communities likely contributed to the feasibility of reaching such a consensus and a thorough mobilization. At Lorette, where memories of the Senecas’ role in the destruction of Huronia remained vivid, even men who were well past their prime and older boys who had not yet been initiated to the art of war responded to the call to arms: French officers described that contingent as consisting of “mediocre” men, in comparison to the “good men” of Kahnawake and Kanehsatake. Kahnawake’s contingent of 101 warriors (a rate of 1 warrior per 6.8 persons), though representing a third less than the numbers pledged by the community the previous year, was nevertheless the single largest besides that of the French, and alone it represented almost a quarter of the total 410 Indigenous warriors present at Cataraqui on 18 August 1684.46
With these warriors advancing towards Cataraqui as part of La Barre’s army, Christian Iroquois delegations came and went to Onondaga where “a general assembly of all the Iroquois” was being held to discuss the situation. Their urging that the Senecas “give satisfaction” to Onontio was reciprocated by the Onondagas’ resolve to mediate a peace.47 With his forces poorly provisioned, decimated by malaria, and in no state to carry out the offensive, La Barre was compelled to accept humiliating terms at a peace conference at La Famine, on the south shore of Lake Ontario. Accounts of the proceedings on 5 September 1684 allow us to catch a glimpse of what the campaign meant for the people of Kahnawake and Kanehsatake. Indeed, the final point made by the Onondaga speaker, Otreouti, during the discussions – which were otherwise devoted to the affairs of the French, their allies in the Upper Country, and the Senecas – concerned the missions’ inhabitants specifically. He requested that the governor “prevent the Christians of Sault-Saint Louis and la Montagne from coming among us to attract our people to Montreal; make them cease to dismember our land as they do every year.”48 Chauchetière’s summary of these proceedings suggests an even more divisive encounter, during which the Iroquois of the Five Nations spoke harshly to the Christian Iroquois, jeering at them, “renouncing,” and threatening them.49
The willingness of the Onondagas, Cayugas, and Oneidas to lend their diplomatic support to the Senecas at this critical juncture ushered in unprecedented tensions between the inhabitants of the missions and those of Iroquoia.50 The people of Kahnawake took the threats uttered at La Famine seriously enough that they decided to cut short their fall hunt in order to devote themselves to fortifying their village. A bastioned pentagonal wooden palisade was completed with haste during the beginning of the following year and crowned shortly thereafter by the addition of a single iron cannon delivered on the orders of the new governor of Montreal, Louis-Hector de Callière.51 At Kanehsatake, Vachon de Belmont did his best to improve the mission complex, enclosing its chapel and administrative buildings within a rectangular stone masonry wall – of which two corner turrets have survived to this day, along Sherbrooke Street in downtown Montreal – and the adjacent longhouses within a rectangular wooden carpentry palisade erected, in the missionary’s words, “for the security of the Natives in their extreme danger.”52
The Iroquois offensive turned out to be diplomatic, rather than military. In the months that followed La Barre’s campaign, the Oneidas made an appeal to Ogenheratarihiens, whose unwillingness to join in the expedition seemed to signal dissatisfaction with the French alliance and life at Kahnawake. Their chief captain had just passed away, they explained, offering him the opportunity to take on his position if he was willing to return among them. Ogenheratarihiens rejected the offer, countering that they should ins
tead become Christians and join him in the Saint Lawrence valley – but his demeanor was such that throughout the year following the campaign the missionaries continued to fear that he might choose to leave the mission.53 Mohawk overtures proved more consequential. Arriving in 1683, Governor Thomas Dongan of New York took the opportunity presented by the Onondagas, Cayugas, and Senecas’ request for assistance to extend English claims over the Five Nations and to undermine the standing of the French among them. In 1686, he encouraged the Mohawks to advocate the return-migration of their relatives in Canada, promising that the latter would be provided with “as much land as they needed” at Saratoga on the lower Hudson, as well as a Catholic priest who might “instruct them in religion.”54 While a segment of the Mohawk leadership was likely inclined to let their relatives in the mission settlements be, another needed no convincing that their returnmigration should be induced. In the late summer of 1686, a man named Onnonragewas (confusingly known to the Dutch at Albany as Janetje but to the English there as Lawrence), who had spent some time at Kahnawake and been baptized there before resettling in Mohawk country, journeyed back to the mission to convey the invitation to its people. Back in Albany, Onnonragewas gave a misleading report to the effect that all the Christian Iroquois had answered that “they would be very willing to come to live at Sarachtoge [Saratoga],” and that Onontio would not object to this relocation. The number of families that showed interest in returning to Mohawk country was in fact more limited: eight, reports one source, including those of a certain Garistasi (or Le Fer, “The Iron”) and his brother Kakare.55 Along with Onnonragewas, these two men would emerge as the staunchest promoters of a return-migration in the following years.
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