***
Movement characterized the formational phase of these settlements not only in the way in which they periodically relocated, before ceasing to do so, but also in the way in which individuals and families continued to circulate between the villages of the Saint Lawrence valley and traditional territories. It was not uncommon for an individual’s senses of identity and belonging to shift over his or her lifetime. To name but a few examples, this pattern is epitomized by individuals such as Haronhiateka and Tsihenne alias Massias, who during the negotiations of the Great Peace of 1701 acted as prominent representatives of Kahnawake and Kanehsatake, respectively, in spite of the fact that they had joined these communities a mere few years earlier. It is also exemplified by someone like La Plaque, the nephew of Togouirout the Great Mohawk. Through the 1690s he showed himself to be one of the staunchest allies of the French, but by 1705 Intendant Raudot reported that he had returned to Mohawk country, citing as an explanation his vices, the principal of which were apparently his “passionate love of women” and his habit of seducing other men’s wives. Then, in 1709, La Plaque’s name again crops up in the correspondence of French officials, where he is described as leading a party of scouts against the English in a way that implies that he had once more relocated to Kahnawake.20
Though it may be counterintuitive to think so, this porosity does not appear to have undermined the cohesion of the mission villages. Each of them came into being as a heterogeneous, multiethnic, and multinational community, but by the late seventeenth century long-lasting collective identities were in place. These identities were at once old and new. That which emerged at Lorette, even as it was solidly rooted in a prior Wendat sense of self, was at the same time fundamentally innovative in the way it melded together fragments of the Attignawantan, Attigneenongnahac, Arendarhonon, and to a lesser extent Tahontaenrat and Ataronchronon. What had been a broad ethnolinguistic category supplanted a range of distinct identities and dialects. Among the people of Ariskantegouk too, recognizably different groups began to merge together under the heading of “Abénaquis” or Wabanakis. While that village continued to attract Western Wabanakis, the new settlement of Wôlinak on the Bécancour River began to draw Eastern Wabanakis, but in the centuries that followed, even that broad ethnocultural division would fade.21
In places like Kahnawake and Kanehsatake, Old and New Iroquois merged. The weight of immigration from Mohawk country was such that, while the French took to referring to the inhabitants of both of these communities generically as “Iroquois,” it was the Mohawk language and culture that came to predominate. And yet divergent roots persisted. In both of these communities, the Wendat language continued to be used well into the eighteenth century as the idiom of religious instruction. In 1735, one missionary posted at Kahnawake commented that “all our Natives understand Huron, and prefer it to Iroquois although the pronunciation is not so pleasing to the ear. Hence it is that they do not care to recite their prayers in their own tongue.”22 This usage was, to a large extent, the result of missionary practice – the fact that the Jesuits had developed a collective linguistic expertise among the Wendats before moving on to the Iroquois – but it may also have been a remote consequence of the fact that, in the middle decades of the seventeenth century, the New Iroquois of Wendat origin had loomed the largest among the proponents of Christianity.23
Ethnic heterogeneity remained most apparent at Kanehsatake. With the exception of Lorette of course, the Wendat component endured the longest there – the community having been founded as a result of the alienation of Wendats at Kentake. From time to time in the eighteenth century, Iroquois warriors from Kanehsatake joined up with the Tionnontaté-Wendats of Detroit, keeping alive old relationships.24 At Kanehsatake, Algonquian families, primarily Algonquins and Nippissings from the Ottawa River watershed, also lived alongside the Iroquois. Periodically, since the early 1670s, the Sulpicians had attempted to minister to this population at various points on the Island of Montreal, and in 1704, around the time of the closing of the mission at La Montagne, the Sulpician René-Charles de Breslay and Governor Vaudreuil acted together to establish a new mission settlement for this nomadic population at Île aux Tourtes, or Aouanagassing, an island in the Lake of Two Mountains. As noted above, when the Sulpicians relocated their mission from Rivière des Prairies to the north shore of that lake, they redirected there the Algonquians who orbited around Aouanagassing, closing the latter mission in 1727.25
In terms of community, the mission settlement of Kanehsatake at the Lake of Two Mountains after that amalgamation thus had the particularity of being at once unitary and plural. A Sulpician missionary could thus describe it as consisting of “two villages,” one of Iroquois and one of Algonquins and Nipissings, “which are separated one from the other only by the church which is common to both,” while a visiting officer understood it as being “inhabited by three different nations: Nipissings, Algonquins, and Iroquois; they form three distinct houses [cabanes], although united in the same village.” The Iroquois element dominated politically, owing to three equally powerful reasons: their more substantial numbers; the fact that their way of life rooted them more firmly in the village than their Algonquian neighbours, for whom the site served as something more akin to a gathering place; and their links to the Five Nations which ensured their strategic importance.26 This intercultural division held until the middle of the nineteenth century, at which point the Algonquian population of the village left it for Kitigan Zibi (River Desert), a tributary of the Gatineau River, and other points in the Ottawa River watershed, which had long been part of their winter hunting grounds.27
These Algonquians who orbited around Skawenati, Aouanagassing, and later Kanehsatake at the Lake of Two Mountains, bring us back to the earliest days of the mission settlements. Most certainly, this population included descendants of individuals who in the middle of the seventeenth century had orbited around the short-lived mission settlements of Kamiskouaouangachit and Metaberoutin. For these families the mission settlements had not provided sites of permanence so much as a brief interlude. In light of the pressures of the Iroquois and the arrival of Wendats in the Saint Lawrence valley, resources rapidly grew scarce. These Algonquians found their sites of refuge and renewal elsewhere, opting to maintain old patterns of land occupation: a seasonal nomadism that brought them closer to the French settlements in the summer, but that led them to the hinterland of the Saint Lawrence’s north in the fall and winter. While the Innu recentered their existence on the Saguenay and Lake Saint Jean watershed, a small number of Algonquins continued to return to various points along the Saint Lawrence through the eighteenth century. Dismissively described as “vagabonds” by officials, just as their forebearers had been during the first decades of the seventeenth, they nonetheless kept on supplying fur traders, taking part in military expeditions, and occasionally seeking out missionary instruction and ministry.28
***
Each of these mission communities could make legitimate claims to preeminence in the Saint Lawrence valley, recalling roots that stretched back deep in time and key moments of their histories. In 1756, a speaker on behalf of the Algonquins and Nipissings of Kanehsatake proclaimed his people’s precedence on the territory during a meeting with delegates of the Iroquois Confederacy: “We are the first who had inhabited this land; we saw a white man (it was a Frenchman), we ran to him, he embraced us and we adopted him as Father. You, other Five Nations, came later.”29 As outlined above, some Wabanakis at Ariskantegouk could similarly trace their roots, through their relationship to Noël Negabamat alias Tekouerimat, back to a distant period. So too might the Wendats of Lorette take pride as the oldest mission community, given Kamiskouaouangachit’s demise.30
Lorette indeed enjoyed within the Franco-Indigenous alliance a position that was well beyond its slight demographic proportions. Beyond the intergenerational memories of its distant roots in the world of the sixteenth-century Saint Lawrence Iroquoians, the community was invariably d
escribed by observers as the most pious and orderly of them all. “Their modesty is remarkable,” one delighted missionary reported of its residents, “to the point where the French who pass through the village are astonished by it and blush when they compare themselves and their lifestyle with the Natives.” This reputation earned them the moniker of “Saints Sauvages” or Holy Natives.31 The mission’s physical proximity to Quebec, the seat of the colonial administration, also made it possible for the people of Lorette to cultivate a privileged access to successive governors and intendants. This entailed, in some respects, a disadvantage, as suggested by the puzzling absence of the speeches or signatures of the community’s representatives from the proceedings of the Great Peace of 1701. While some scholars have interpreted this absence to mean that Kondiaronk, the famous Tionnontaté Wendat leader from Michilimackinac, represented their community in addition to his own, the more plausible answer is that their proximity to the French governor was such that they relinquished their representation to him. Notwithstanding, Charlevoix described the Wendats in his writings as “the soul of every council.” They were not shy in asserting their moral authority. In 1740, one of Roreke’s most prominent eighteenth-century leaders, Vincent Onehatetaionk, was bold enough to travel to Kanehsatake and seize a dozen of the community’s wampum belts, asserting his own people’s “rights” over that community, evoking the part that they had played in its foundation sixty years earlier. Five years later, the same Onehatetaionk displayed a sense of self visibly unblemished by the hardships that in earlier times had led his people to the Saint Lawrence valley. He “boasted verey much of their libertyes and previledges above any other Nation,” wrote a captive taken in New England, “and told me they was in subjection to no king nor prince in the Universe.”32
Such confidence was widely shared among the inhabitants of the mission villages. The people of Kahnawake too could consider themselves to be above all others, forming by far the most populous of these communities, and having demonstrated during the final two decades of the seventeenth century that they had the military and diplomatic weight to match. They maintained this power through the end of the French Regime, and saw it institutionalized thereafter when their community became, under the influence of the British, the center of a new formation loosely uniting the mission settlements of the Saint Lawrence valley – the Seven Nations or Seven Fires Confederation. This context of political achievement, combined with intergenerational memories of Iroquoian ancestors who had inhabited this space in distant times, came to define the community’s evolving sense of self. One of the village’s chiefs, meeting with the superintendent of Indian Affairs in 1791, recalled how ninety years earlier the French king had assembled all the nations of the continent (sic) – “Kanawageronon [i.e. Kahnawakes], Huron, Algonkin, Nipissing” – and, pointing to their common brotherhood and religion, asked them to remain at peace forever as he placed their “great fire” at Kahnawake.33
The way in which war had brought very diverse peoples to live alongside each other in the Saint Lawrence valley, and the mutual obligations of the military alliance, were from time to time recalled. During a council held at Kanehsatake on the shore of the Lake of Two Mountains in August 1741, the officer Jean-Baptiste-Nicolas-Roch de Ramezay spoke on behalf of the governor, Charles de la Boische de Beauharnois, alluding to the fact that at the time of its initial establishment at La Montagne, the community had “placed yourself under my wings [those of Onontio], and added that all those who would bite me would bite you too.”34 This was not a perfectly accurate summation of the interplay between war and the formation of the mission settlements. The ideal of mutual defence – and its tragic limits – had certainly been central to the relationship of the French with the Saint Lawrence Algonquians and the Wendats. But the people who arrived from Iroquoia through the late 1660s to the early 1680s came in a time of peace, with no expectation that they should need to take up arms alongside the French – indeed, the idea that to bite one was to bite the other is, in reality, to be found nowhere in the detailed proceedings of the meeting which occurred at the time of Kanehsatake’s founding in 1675.35 Nor did the French initially think of protecting the first waves of Wabanakis who came to the region in the late 1670s, or of being protected by them, though it was war that brought them there. It was only with the renewal of hostilities against the Iroquois and the outbreak of an imperial conflict against Britain and its colonies during the final two decades of the eighteenth century that New France came to depend on the residents of the mission villages for its defence. The bites to which Ramezay was alluding, projecting a recent reality onto a distant past, were British.
If, with the caveat that centuries are arbitrary units of time, a broad distinction might be made between the seventeenth century and the eighteenth as far as the history of the French and Indigenous inhabitants of the Saint Lawrence valley is concerned, it might be that whereas the threat represented by the Iroquois and the opportunities presented by them loom as the dominant theme of the first period, during the second they were replaced by British colonists. The Great Peace of 1701 marked the emergence of this new geopolitical landscape. Indeed, if the Iroquois wars and politics of integration had been central to the foundation of the mission settlements, war against Great Britain and the politics of imperial trade henceforth would be integral to their story. As the War of the League of Augsburg gave way to that of Spanish Succession, initiating a cycle of war and armed peace, Louis XIV opted for a new colonial strategy whereby New France’s primary function would be to serve as a bastion of empire. In this perspective, the mission villages came to be understood by colonial officials above all as strategic bulwarks, rather than sites of religious and cultural change.36 This increased appreciation for the crucial role of these communities in colonial defence did not put an end to French paternalism, however, and indeed contributed to amplifying colonial expectations of subservience – expectations which predictably clashed with the patterns of Indigenous self-determination firmly maintained during the foundational years of the seventeenth century.
Notes
ABBREVIATIONS
AJC
Archive of the Jesuits in Canada, Montreal
ANF
Archives nationales de France, Paris
ANOM
Centre des archives d’outre-mer, Aix-en-Provence
ASQ
Archives du Séminaire de Québec, Musée de la civilisation, Quebec City
ASSM
Archives of the Sulpician Seminary, Montreal
ASSP
Archives of the Sulpician Seminary, Paris
BANQ-M
Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec, Montreal
BANQ-Q
Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec, Quebec City
BNF
Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris
CMHS
Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society
CMNF
Collection de manuscrits contenant lettres, mémoires, et autres documents historiques relatifs à la Nouvelle-France, recueillis aux archives de la province de Québec, ou copiés à l’étranger, Jean Gervais Protais Blanchet, Faucher de Saint-Maurice, and Narcisse Henri Edouard, eds.
CSPC
Calendar of State Papers, Colonial, W. Noel Sainsbury, J.W. Fortescue, Cecil Headlam et al., eds.
DCB
Dictionary of Canadian Biography, George W. Brown, Marcel Trudel, André Vachon, and David Hayne, eds.
DHSM
The Documentary History of the State Of Maine, containing the Baxter Manuscripts, James Phinney Baxter, ed.
DHSNY
The Documentary History of the State of New-York, E.B. O’Callaghan, ed.
HNF
Marcel Trudel, Histoire de la Nouvelle-France
JRAD
The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents, Reuben Gold Thwaites, ed.
LAC
Library and Archives Canada, Ottawa
; LIR
The Livingston Indian Records, Lawrence R. Leder, ed.
MNF
Monumenta Novae Franciae, Lucien Campeau, ed.
NYCD
Documents relative to the colonial history of the state of New-York: procured in Holland, England, and France. John Romeyn Brodhead, Berthold Fernow, and E.B. O’Callaghan, eds.
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