The Iroquoian peoples whom the seventeenth-century French labeled Hurons (from the Old French hure, meaning "boar's head," referring to the male Hurons' bristly coiffure) lived between Lake Simcoe and the southeastern corner of Georgian Bay in today's Canadian province of Ontario. They called themselves Wendat, "Dwellers of the Peninsula" (or perhaps "Islanders"), referring to the fact that their territory was bounded by water on three sides. According to seventeenth-century estimates, they numbered between twenty and forty thousand and lived in eighteen to twenty-five villages clustered in an area that measured thirty-five miles east to west and twenty miles north to south. Immediately to the south were the very closely related Tionontatis (Petuns or Tobacco People, specialists in growing the sacred plant), whose population was estimated at about seven thousand.
Like all Iroquoian peoples, the Hurons were farmers who supplemented their crops with hunting. Archaeologists favor the theory that they began inhabiting their lands soon after the retreat of the glaciers, slowly evolving from hunter-gatherers into farmer-hunters. Their own traditions have them arriving later, from the southeast. In any event, by A.D. 500 they were growing corn (the plant's northward spread from Mexico had been controlled by its capacity to adapt to shorter northern growing seasons). By 1500 the famous "three sisters" of Amerindian agriculture—corn, beans, and squash, grown together—were well established as the principal food crops. Tobacco had been cultivated long before the introduction of corn and was the responsibility of the men, whereas the food crops were the responsibility of the women.
The Huron villages were clustered close to each other, with their corn fields forming a surrounding belt. These fields were extensive; early in the seventeenth century, it was reported that they covered about seven thousand acres; one early visitor to Huronia, as the region occupied by the Hurons was known, said that "it was easier to get lost in a corn field" than in the surrounding forest. Not only did agriculture provide the Hurons with 80 percent of their diet, but its products were important for trade. Situated as they were at the northern limits for Stone Age agriculture, as well as at a crossroads of the region's trading networks, the Hurons were dominant not only in trade, but also in diplomacy and war. Socially, they were organized into eight matrilineal clans that arose from three phratries; for ceremonial purposes, the phratries were divided into two moieties.
Huron government was three tiered, including village, tribal, and confederacy levels; all operated on the principle of group consensus. By the beginning of the seventeenth century, the Hurons had formed themselves into a confederacy of four peoples, which according to their own oral history had originated at the beginning of the fifteenth century at the initiative of the Attignawantans, "People of the Bear," and the Attigneenongnahacs, "Barking Dogs." The Arendarhonons, "People of the Rock," joined about 1590, and the fourth group, the Tahontaenrats, "People of the Deer," joined about 1610. A possible fifth, the Ataronchronons, "People of the Marshes," does not appear to have attained full membership. If the Huron chronology is correct, their confederacy may have antedated that of the Five Nations (it will be remembered that Hiawatha, one of the founders of the Great League of Peace of the Iroquois, was said to be a Huron). The year in which the Arendarhonons joined, 1590, suggests that they were refugees from the St. Lawrence Valley, which was probably also the case for the Tahontaenrats. Their language differences were on the whole minor, so that all Hurons could understand each other; theirs was the trade language of the North.
The first meeting with the French was at the initiative of the Arendarhonons, easternmost of the confederates. European goods had been filtering into the interior through Amerindian networks since the mid-sixteenth century; Outchetaguin, an Arendarhonon chief, wishing to get direct access to this new trade, joined with Iroquet, chief of the neighboring Algonquins, to meet Samuel de Champlain (c. 1570-1635) at Quebec in 1609. Out of this encounter developed the historic alliance of the French and Hurons. As the fur trade developed, bringing prosperity to both the Hurons and the French, the Five Nations, or Iroquois, to the south entered into a period of expansion. This growth appears to have been an aggressive reaction to a number of factors, such as the increasing intrusion of Europeans, tribal rivalries exacerbated by the fur trade, and above all social dislocations caused by European-introduced epidemics. The Hurons, isolated as they were from alternative sources of European trade, were affected by these changes particularly severely. For example, the French insistence on the introduction of the Jesuits in 1634 exposed them to a concentrated missionary campaign that weakened social solidarity to the point where Christianized Hurons refused to fight alongside their traditionalist fellow tribesmen. Escalating hostilities with the Iroquois finally resulted in the destruction of Huronia in 1649, and the dispersal of its once-powerful confederacy. The Iroquois capped their victory by attacking the neighboring Petuns during the winter of 1649-50. This was a move to prevent the Hurons from reforming their settlements around those of the Petuns, and perhaps reviving their confederacy. In spite of everything, groups of Petuns and Hurons succeeded in joining forces and retreating to the Windsor/Detroit area and northern Ohio. These groups became known as Wyandots (a variation of their traditional name for themselves).
However, most of the Huron refugees fled south to join the Iroquois, since many of them already had relatives among the Five Nations, a result of the Iroquois practice of adopting prisoners of war to replenish their own losses from fighting as well as from the epidemics. Another group of several hundred Hurons went east, to establish themselves in Loretteville on the edge of Quebec City, where their descendants have remained.
In their new homes, the Wyandots soon dominated intertribal politics; when they claimed a large part of present-day Ohio and a part of southwestern Ontario, they were recognized by neighboring tribes. Old colonial associations did not entirely disappear, however, and the Wyandots supported the French during the French and Indian War, and at first backed Pontiac during the 1763 uprising in the Ohio Valley. They sided with the British during the American War of Independence, and again lost out with the Treaty of Greenville, signed in 1795, when they were forced into the first of several land cessions to the United States. Eventually, in 1843, the Wyandots of the Midwest were resettled in Wyandotte County, Kansas. Regaining their tribal status in 1867, they were granted a tract of land in northeastern Oklahoma, where their descendants can be found today.
In southwestern Ontario, the Wyandots ceded their lands to the Crown in 1790. At first they retained two reserves, but soon lost those as well. In 1876, the remaining forty-one Wyandot heads of families applied for the right to vote, which was granted in 1880-81. Some of these families are still in the area.
Denys Delâge, Bitter Feast (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1993); Conrad Heidenreich, Huronia (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1971); Bruce G. Trigger, Children of Aataentsic 2 vols. (Montreal and London: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1976).
Olive Patricia Dickason
University of Alberta
