Neutrals (people)

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The confederation of North American ethnic groups of the Iroquois language family , referred to as neutrals by the French ( neutrals ) and the English ( neutrals ) , by the other Iroquois as Attiwandaronon or Attiwandaronk , lived in southern Ontario until the middle of the 17th century . Your self-designation has been lost; the Iroquois name just means that they used a different language. With Attiwandaronk , the neutrals occupied the tribes of the Iroquois League .

The Southwold Earthworks , remnant of a 0.8 hectare village in Elgin County, Ontario, which existed from around 1450 to 1550 . It consisted of about 18 long houses that would have been enough for about 800 residents. However, local traditions know of purely ritual use, so that the village was possibly mostly uninhabited. The earthworks are now a National Historic Site of Canada .

Naming

The name Attiwandaronon comes from the Wendat, the language of the Wyandot ( Hurons ), their Iroquois neighbors, and means something like "those who speak a little differently". The Iroquois also mostly called the neutrals Hatiwantarunh , which has roughly the same meaning. The French, first Samuel de Champlain , called them la Nation Neutre because they tried to remain neutral between the warring factions of the Wyandot and the Iroquois.

The neutrals called themselves together with the neighboring Wyandot and Khionotaterrhohon (French: Gens du Petun - 'tobacco people', shortened to Petun , English Tobacco Nation ) as Wendat , and the entire area that these three tribes inhabited as Wendake .

The name Wyandot or Wendat means something like 'the islanders' and is probably derived from the impression that the tribes mentioned lived on islands, as they were almost always surrounded by water in the middle of a landscape rich in rivers and lakes.

The occasional assumption of a self-designation as Chonnonton proved to be premature. It goes back to a map from the first half of the 17th century, from which Samuel de Champlain read the description as "those who keep deer" ("e qui chonnonton").

Tribal area

During the late 16th and early 17th centuries, the area of ​​the Attiwandaronon extended within the boundaries of southern Ontario. In the east of their area, a large part of the population was concentrated south of the Niagara near what is now Buffalo . The western limit of their territory was the valley of the Grand River , with population concentrations on the Niagara Peninsula and near the present-day parishes of Hamilton and Milton .

According to the sources , the original number of Attiwandaronons was around 40,000. Due to diseases brought in by Europeans, famines and increasing wars, it was reduced to around 12,000 in the course of the first half of the 17th century.

There were about 40 villages in the neutral area, but Decreaux only recorded St. Michael on his map , probably on the shores of Lake St. Clair , not far from Sandwich and Windsor, then Ongiara near Niagara Falls , St. Francis in Lamberton County to the east from Sarnia ; Our Lady of the Angels , west of the Grand River, between Cayuga in Haldimand County and Parism in Brant. Furthermore, St. Joseph in Essex or Kent; St. Alexis , in Elgin, east of St. Thomas, then the Ontontaron area of Halston County. Across the Niagara, probably between Buffalo and Genesee , it lists the Ondieronon and their villages, by which the neutrals understood the Ouenrôhronon , who fled to Huronia in 1638 .

St. Jean de Brébeuf and Chaumonot visited eighteen Attiwandaronon settlements between 1640 and 1641 and gave each a Christian name. The only ones mentioned in their writings are:

  • Kandoucho (or All Saints , the closest settlement to the Wyandot)
  • Onguioaahra (on Niagara)
  • Teotongniaton (or St. Wilhelm , in the middle of the country) and
  • Khioetoa (or St. Michael)

Douglas F. Reville explains in his The History of the County of Brant (1920) that the hunting grounds of the Attiwandaronon extended from Genesee Falls and Sarnia, and south of a line from Toronto to Goderich . Your area is described by Reville as heavily forested and full of "wild fruit trees of great variety" with trees, berry bushes and wild grapevines.

history

Neutrality and later alliance

One plausible reason for their neutrality during the Wyandot-Iroquois war was the occurrence of flint deposits in their area near the eastern end of Lake Erie . Since the neutrals possessed this important resource, which was needed for the production of spear and arrowheads, they could have maintained their neutrality towards the neighboring tribes. However, when they received rifles from European powers, ownership of the flint mines lost its military status. Soon the Attiwandaronon had to give up their neutrality and join an alliance.

They allied themselves with the related Wyandot, Khionotaterrhohon ( Petun ) and Erie and thus against the Iroquois League in the south. Around 1535 the Wyandot numbered around 30,000, the Khionotaterrhohon around 10,000, the Erie around 10,000 and the Wenrohronon or Wenro around 2,000 people. In addition, the Susquehannock who lived in the south were also among their trading partners and allies through the intermediary of the Wyandot. So these tribes together, with the Wyandot taking the lead, were able to put the Iroquois League under pressure from the west, north and south.

In 1616, Samuel de Champlain reported that the "Nation Neutre" could muster 4,000 warriors and that they inhabited a land of 80 to 100 "leagues". They supported the Ottawa (Cheueux releuez) against the Mascouten . They grew good tobacco, which they exchanged for skins, furs, and the quills of porcupines and articles of clothing made from them. They gained the space for this by not cutting down the trees, but by cutting their branches, piling them up around the trees and setting them on fire. The burnt tree was easier to remove.

Missionaries

The Daillons report

Father Joseph de la Roche Daillon (also D'Alyon), whose family came from the Anjou , reached Québec on June 19, 1625 and tried to proselytize the neutrals in 1626 after hearing strange things about them from Étienne Brûlé . As he wrote in his report of July 18, 1627, he set out on June 14, 1626 and reached the village of Toanché on Huron canoes. On October 18, he left for the neutrals. He was welcomed and even adopted in the first village of Kandoucho. The leader of the neutrals, Tsohahissen , stood over about 28 villages and 7 or 8 fishing spots or camps used for soil cultivation. The chief seems to have enjoyed great authority, which the missionary attributed to war successes against 17 tribes. They only fought with clubs and arrows and bows.

When the Hurons learned that Father Daillon wanted to take the neutrals to a trading post at Cape Victory in Lac St. Pierre of the Saint Lawrence River, a place around 80 km from Montréal , they spread rumors to discredit him. They called him a magician who had poisoned many Hurons. It is unclear whether this should be interpreted as an indication of introduced smallpox or other diseases that the Indians were not aware of .

Daillon reports that the customs of the neutrals were little different from those of the Hurons. Their houses are built like arbors and covered with tree bark. They were 25 to 30 fathoms long and 6 to 8 wide, so they measured about 50 by 13 m. A three to four meter wide corridor ran through the middle of the house from one end to the other. About four feet above the ground there was an elevated camp for the night in summer to protect against insects. In winter they lay on mats around twelve fires.

Like the Hurons, they would break up their village every five, ten, fifteen or twenty years when the ground was exhausted and move to a more suitable place, usually one to three kilometers away.

New mission attempts from 1640, converts

In the autumn of 1640 the Jesuits decided to undertake another mission attempt among neutrals and the Algonquin . Brébeuf and Pierre-Joseph-Marie Chaumonot should go to the neutrals. However, they had discredited the Hurons as sorcerers, so that they met with rejection and hostility everywhere when they were in the territory of the neutrals from November 2, 1640 to March 19, 1641. On the way back, Brébeuf broke his left collarbone while crossing a frozen lake.

Little is known about how the converts themselves acted. An exception is Totiri or Étienne, who in 1642 left part of his hut to two missionaries so that they could live where corn and wood were otherwise stored. There they built a chapel dedicated to St. Joseph . This was at a time when most neutrals blamed the Jesuit missionaries for the fact that wars and severe epidemics threatened their lives. Totiri guarded the chapel and taught the men among the converts, his wife Madeleine the women. When the missionaries left his village, the two continued their missionary work. Another convert, Barnabé Otsinnonannhont, a Huron from the neutral village of Saint-Michel, was also a major influence and attracted a hundred interested people. In 1643 Totiri was attacked by the Iroquois and lost all his property, the next year he took part in the war against them.

In 1646 Totiri was active as a dogique , a kind of assistant or representative of the absent missionaries. His most important opponent was Teanaostaiaë, who defended the traditional belief. When a crowd of children attacked a cross that had just been erected in a cemetery, he got the parents to prohibit them from doing so. Only Totiri's wife, his daughter Catherine, his brother Paul, his mother Christine and Tarihia, who was baptized in 1639, are known by name, that is, by their baptismal names. She wanted this when she felt imminent death in the winter of 1643–44.

Conflicts in the south, the Hurons' monopoly on trade

After the arrival of the French, the long-time allies of the Wyandot, the allied tribes gained a dominant position in the fur trade . The Hurons stoked distrust of the French so as not to endanger their trade monopoly. They also persistently refused to give the French any information about the land to the west of them, such as Chief Iroquet, who with 20 men had acquired 500 beaver pelts in the neutrals' area . The fur trade of the neutrals was only carried out via the Hurons. To get furs, neutrals swarmed far into Michigan in the southwest and there came into conflict with the Algonquin. In 1635, the Hurons informed their French allies that the neutrals were taking in an unknown group of Iroquois, whom they named Aouenrehronon . They may have come from the west bank of Lake Erie . They had been attacked by Asistagueronon , which means "fire people". It could therefore have been Potawatomi . But this is not certain, as the Hurons used this name to name all of the Algonk groups in the region, i.e. Fox , Sauk , Mascouten and Potawatomi. However, this should have been the last victory, because all Iroquois groups now came through the fur trade to metal weapons and later to rifles, with which they were superior to the tribes in the south and west. In 1641, according to reports from the Hurons, 2,000 neutral warriors attacked a fortified village in central Michigan, which was likely inhabited by Mascouten. After ten days, the village was captured and 800 prisoners were taken. Following the Huron report of preventing the French from advancing further west, the neutrals blinded all the men among the prisoners and left them helpless.

The Beaver Wars

A stronger opponent, similarly armed, grew up for the neutrals in the Iroquois Confederation . These had joined the English as opponents of the Hurons, allied with France, and were supplied with firearms in considerable quantities. This gave the numerically weaker Iroquois a high military clout. The Mohawk in particular became the most important trading partners of the Europeans on the Hudson River through these battles and from then on they fought against the southern allies of the Attiwandaronon, the Susquehannock . They were weakened by the attacks of the Mohawk and Oneida , who also belonged to the Iroquois League.

Like the other tribes in the Great Lakes and Ohio Valley , the Iroquois had overran their territories and were forced to trade or war to obtain their furs. But since they were surrounded only by hostile tribes, they either had to drive them out or subjugate them, or expect to be destroyed themselves. Faced with dwindling resources, this led to conflict with the Wyandot and their allies.

The Iroquois concentrated their attacks first from 1640 on the Wyandot, in 1645 they isolated them from the Algonquin, Innu and French. In 1647 they organized attacks into the Wyandot lands and destroyed the villages of the Arendahronon, one of their tribes. During these wars, the Susquehannock in particular were allies of the Wyandot, but they suddenly refused any help and were overrun by the Iroquois in the winter of 1648 to 1649. The Tionontati fared no better, especially when the Iroquois forcibly accepted a thousand captured warriors into their tribe. When the western Iroquois, i.e. Seneca , Cayuga and Onondaga , attacked the Attiwandaronon in 1650, the Susquehannock once again joined the war against the Iroquois.

It was around this time that the Wyandot fled to the Erie, their allies, before the Iroquois destroyed their confederation. The Iroquois then demanded that the Erie deliver the Wyandot to them, but the Erie refused. As a result, there was two years of extreme tension between the two peoples. Several hundred Attiwandaronon also sought refuge with the Erie and were taken in by them.

However, when the Mohawk and the Oneida attacked the Susquehannock in 1651, they could not help the Attiwandaronon. In addition, despite the clashes with the Iroquois, the Erie refused to support them because of the acceptance of the Wyandot refugees. So it did not take long and the Attiwandaronon were defeated and almost destroyed by 1655. Around 1660 only about 800 Attiwandaronon lived in two villages.

The looming war of the Erie (along with the refugee Wyandot and Attiwandaronon) against the western Iroquois broke out after all 30 Erie ambassadors were killed by the Iroquois during a peace conference. The Erie resisted the Iroquois in uninterrupted war from 1653 to 1656.

Downfall

With the end of the Erie War in 1660, the Attiwandaronon were practically annihilated and their last villages destroyed. The last mention of the Attiwandaronon by the French was in 1671. Their sachem in their final years was Tsouharissen ("child of the sun"), who undertook several raids against the Mascouten who lived in what is now Michigan and Ohio . Tsouharissen died around 1646.

After the final defeat of the Erie in 1679, the last of their independent groups disappeared. In 1680 they finally ceased to exist as an independent people. They had either joined the Wyandot out of fear of the Iroquois or had become enslaved auxiliaries in the constant wars of the Iroquois.

Wyandot ethnogenesis

The Wyandot, which was strongly decimated by epidemics and the wars against the Iroquois, formed an amalgamation of scattered remnants of the Attiwandaronon, Erie, Susquehannock, Khionontateronon, Wenrohronon and some smaller Algonquin and Iroquois tribes around 1700. The Attiwandaronon themselves had ceased to exist as an independent people, just like the Erie.

Subgroups belonging to the neutrals

  • Ahiragenrega
  • Ahondihronon
  • Andachkhroa
  • Aondironon
  • Atiaonrek
  • Atiraguenrek
  • Attiuoaisgon
  • Kakouagoga
  • Kandouche
  • Kehesetoa
  • Khioetoa
  • Niaggorega (Niagagarega, Onguiaahra)
  • Ouaroronon
  • Ongniaahraronon
  • Qunonisaton
  • Rhageratka
  • Skenchioe
  • Teotoguiaton (Teotongniaton)

literature

Web links

Remarks

  1. ↑ Frances L. Stewart, William D. Finlayson: Subsistence at the Irving-Johnston village and the question of deer tending by the neutrals , in: Canadian Journal of Archeology 24.1 (2000) 17-40.
  2. ^ Huron Indians , in: Catholic Encyclopedia
  3. ↑ Joseph de la Roche Daillon . In: Dictionary of Canadian Biography . 24 volumes, 1966–2018. University of Toronto Press, Toronto ( English , French ).
  4. ↑ James White (Ed.): Handbook of Indians of Canada, Published as an Appendix to the Tenth Report of the Geographic Board of Canada , Ottawa 1913, pp. 344-346.
  5. ↑ Chaumonot . In: Dictionary of Canadian Biography . 24 volumes, 1966–2018. University of Toronto Press, Toronto ( English , French ).
  6. ↑ Totiri . In: Dictionary of Canadian Biography . 24 volumes, 1966–2018. University of Toronto Press, Toronto ( English , French ).
  7. ^ Iroquet . In: Dictionary of Canadian Biography . 24 volumes, 1966–2018. University of Toronto Press, Toronto ( English , French ).
  8. ↑ They lived closest to the Hurons.
  9. ↑ # James F. Pendergast: The Kakouagoga or Kahkwas: An Iroquoian Nation Destroyed in the Niagara Region , in: Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 138/1 (March 1994) 96-144.