Louis XIV and Colbert’s exhortations during these years explain why, in the Saint Lawrence valley, Iroquoian mission communities were paired off with French habitants, the two groups living next to each other and sharing religious spaces and services. The Wendat community that had spent a decade ensconced at the “Fort des Hurons” within the town of Quebec left it in the spring of 1668 for the Jesuit seigneury of Notre Dame des Anges, to the north, before resettling, the following year, in the seigneury of Sillery, to the west. Notre Dame des Anges and neighbouring Beauport were fertile and familiar ground – in 1650, some Wendat families had encamped there, and the Jesuits had considered it as a site for their mission before settling on the Island of Orleans. However, the area was by this time too densely settled by colonists to properly accommodate the mission community.55 The vast hinterland of Sillery offered a better balance. In describing the Wendats’ installation at the place called côte Saint Michel within that seigneury in the spring of 1669, Father Claude Dablon stressed in the annual Relation that the area was “thickly settled by the French, to profit by the latter’s good example, and, in turn, to edify the French by their own piety and devotion,” and that they had built their chapel there “in union with the settlers of the place.”56 At La Prairie the Jesuits would similarly settle rent-paying habitants side by side with neophytes, the initial handful of newcomers from both groups spending their first winter “living under the same roof [in a] simple shed of boards, upright and leaning one against the other in a ridge like an ass’s back.”57 Within a few short years the missionaries would return to favouring a stricter segregation between the two groups, convinced that the French influence on Indigenous peoples tended to be more corrupting than salutary, but for now the ideal of proximity endorsed by the Crown prevailed.
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The Jesuit missionary Father Pierre Raffeix, who was posted at La Prairie, made it clear to Tonsahoten, Ganneaktena, and their half dozen followers during the winter of 1667–68 that their settlement on that site would enjoy missionary assistance. It was some time, however, before this seasonal encampment of a family hunting band grew into a proper village. As noted previously, of the approximately thirty Oneidas reportedly encamped in the vicinity of Montreal in April of 1668, only ten or twelve returned to Kentake in the fall of that year. During the winter that followed, even this dozen scattered in the neighbouring woods for the habitual winter hunt, returning only periodically to La Prairie’s makeshift chapel to attend the Christian feasts. In an effort to fix these families there for good, Raffeix had a plot of land cleared and sowed for them by hired hands as he awaited their return in the early spring of 1669. It was only then that Ganneaktena and Tonsahoten made a commitment to settle by building a true longhouse for the two families who lived there, to replace the smaller makeshift cabins that they had occupied until then. In keeping with well-established patterns of settlement, the decision to remain there was Ganneaktena’s more than that of her husband. In the missionaries’ retelling of the settlement’s origins it was she who “forced her husband to take La Prairie as his abode,” and it was again she who “did not fail to win over” the hunting bands that passed through. Her house was open to all, and the generosity for which she was renowned reinforced her authority and strengthened the growing mission community. “She fed the French and the Natives with the fruit of her husband’s hunt,” explained Chauchetière several years after her death, “she was liberal to excess [and] this liberality made her beloved of everyone.” Elsewhere he described her as “the foundation stone of the mission.”58
In spite of the site’s manifest advantages, this decision to stay at Kentake could not have been an easy one, as the late winter and spring of 1669 were marked by a troubling series of violent incidents. After long years of war, the ways of peace did not come easily to everyone. A few soldiers from the Montreal garrison intent on stealing furs murdered “one of the most prominent” Senecas, who was on his way to town to trade after a winter hunting along the Ottawa River. An Oneida family, composed of three men, two women, and two children, encamped on the banks of the Mascouche River, north of the Island of Montreal, was massacred by a fur trader and his two employees. It came to light during the latter’s trial that they had committed this act with the aim of stealing fifty-three moose hides, twenty-three beaver skins, and sundry belongings, but it is tempting to see, behind this act of criminal violence, antagonisms shaped by decades of conflict: one of the guilty men had been in the service of the missionaries in Huronia between 1641 and 1646, when the Iroquois offensive began; another had himself been captured by the Oneidas in 1652 and seems to have spent over a decade among them.59
The news of the killings soon reached Oneida country and made “all this nation very angry.” The Senecas were similarly incensed by the death of one of their own. “It is beyond a doubt that an affair of this nature is very unfavourable,” wrote Father Jacques Frémin anxiously from Onondaga, “and capable of rekindling the war between the Iroquois and the French.”60 Colonial authorities were consequently quick to identify and punish the guilty who had “exposed, by the means of their avarice and concupiscence, the whole country to a total destruction” and whose great crimes consisted not only in murder and theft, but in having “hindered the Natives from coming in peace to settlements and having here a favourable retreat.” The guilty soldiers were executed in front of Seneca delegates, while the three who had killed the Oneidas, having fled into the interior, were condemned to death in absentia. Governor Daniel de Rémy de Courcelle was careful to send wampum belts to the Senecas and to the Oneidas to express his regrets and disown the guilty parties.61
Tonsahoten, Ganneaktena, and their followers must have been greatly troubled by the murders – the six Oneidas would have been acquaintances of theirs, perhaps even relatives or close friends. Yet, no doubt owing to official efforts to disavow the killings, they were not dissuaded from returning to Kentake after the hunt. If anything, it is possible that these violent incidents contributed to the attraction of that site, where a missionary presence offered a measure of protection against potentially murderous colonists. The embryonic settlement attracted the attention of the Iroquois hunting bands dispersed around the Island of Montreal and along the upper Saint Lawrence towards Lake Ontario. Between 1669 and 1673, visitors came by the hundreds. “Curiosity,” observed Father Chauchetière, “attracted them to La Prairie.” Traditional subsistence patterns played a key role in the settlement’s growth. The people of Kentake who dispersed for the winter hunt unavoidably encountered in the process the hunting bands of relatives and acquaintances. On these occasions, they vaunted the advantages of their new settlement, both material and spiritual, and extended invitations to join them there, at least for a visit if not the long term. “[H]unting,” Chauchetière explained, “was the pretext which they then adopted in order to come to live at La Prairie. The Christians who left La Prairie, in going to hunt beasts, went also to hunt men.”62
While many of the curious who were drawn to Kentake left uninspired by the fledgling community and its close ties to the French, others were inclined to stay on a more permanent basis for the very same reasons that had motivated Tonsahoten and Ganneaktena. The Jesuits’ willingness to hire colonists to do the initial agricultural work of clearing and sowing fields for the newcomers, was an attractive feature – just as it had been for the Algonquians of Kamiskouaouangachit decades earlier. “These visitors, seeing the corn very fine, resolved to remain there and build their cabins,” as Chauchetière put it.63 By the end of 1669, the settlement at Kentake numbered five such longhouses, sheltering perhaps 50 persons. By the fall of 1671, it was said to number 18 or 20 families, an estimated 100 to 120 individuals in perhaps a dozen longhouses.64
By 1671, the encampment at Kentake had grown into a respectable village community. An important council was held that summer during which its inhabitants decided to remain there indefinitely.65 In the Relation of 1670–71, the formal name of the new mission ap
peared in print for the first time: Saint François Xavier des Prés. Hence, a tentative Indigenous and missionary experiment had evolved into a more consequential affair. The choice of name reflected missionary devotion to Saint Francis Xavier, the pioneering Jesuit apostle to the Indies. More significantly, however, this choice stood as a testament to the prominence among the founders of the community of emigrants from Oneida, where Father Bruyas had named his mission Saint François Xavier.66 It was perhaps also indicative of the personal influence of Tonsahoten within that community, for he had himself taken on the baptismal name of François-Xavier.67 The steady arrival of newcomers now made it necessary to formalize and legitimize the political structure of the village. In the summer of 1671, two chiefs, following what the missionaries took to be Iroquoian custom, were chosen by common accord, one to oversee general administration and war, and the other to supervise the exercise of Christianity.68 The first of the two was plausibly Tonsahoten, who at the time of his wife’s death two years later would be described as the community’s “first captain.”69
Figure 5.2 Claude Chauchetière drew this image of Tonsahoten and Ganneaktena’s family arriving at Kentake from Oneida almost two decades after the fact. It is an allegorical, rather than a faithful depiction, evoking the built environment of La Prairie in a more finished and idealized state than it would have been at the time. Some buildings erected by the French workers may have had a gabled roof and timber walls, but the newcomers built for themselves longhouses in the traditional Iroquoian style. (“Les six [sic] premiers sauvages de la Prairie viennent d’Onneiout sur les neiges et les glaces,” ca. 1686, Archives départementales de la Gironde, Série H, Bordeaux)
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The New Iroquois, adoptees and captives of Wendat and various other origins, featured prominently among the newcomers to the Saint Lawrence valley during the late 1660s and through the 1670s. Kentake, in particular, was in its early years characterized by a great ethnic diversity, and by the range of hyphenated identities of its residents. Describing the first settlers, Chauchetière noted that “one was from the nation des Chats [Eries], another from the Hurons, a few francs Iroquois [Old Iroquois], others Gandastogues [Susquehannocks].”70 Soon the mission was said to be home to individuals from as many as twenty-two nations, “many of which have completely different languages,” including “Outouagannah” (a generic name for Algonquians of the western Great Lakes), “Gentagega” (a subdivision of the Eries), Algonquins, Innu, Nipissings, “Loups” or Mahicans, and Sokokis.71 Many of these newcomers were, like the Wendat-Oneida Tonsahoten and Erie-Oneida Ganneaktena, relatively well-integrated adoptees who, for various reasons, chose to cast their fate with the French. Others were escaping a state of virtual slavery. As Chauchetière remarked, “many who were not naturalized Iroquois resolved to steal away and come to La Prairie. Many thus slipped away during all the following years.”72 The attraction of the mission settlements was such, however, that they appealed not only to the New Iroquois. Old-stock Iroquois came too, this to the great joy of the missionaries who saw in the willingness of former captors and captives to come together as the portent of a Christian utopia. “Habitabit lupus cum agno,” the Relation for 1672–73 quoted from the Book of Isaiah: “The wolf shall dwell with the lamb.”73
For New and Old Iroquois alike, kinship ties and family networks acted as a catalyst to migration. Individuals attracted to life at Notre Dame de Foy or Kentake most often brought their spouses, children, and relatives. When an unnamed Mohawk neophyte returned from the mission settlement at Notre Dame de Foy to his country to bring back his entire family, a resident named Marie Tsaouenté took the opportunity to address a wampum belt to her father, who still lived among the Mohawks, to convince him to “join her here to find his salvation.”74 Women were generally observed to be the most enthusiastic promoters of the mission settlements. The Jesuits were quick to chalk this is up to the fact that theirs was “the pious sex,” resorting to Catholic constructions of femininity and oversimplifying the way in which gender was at play. In Wendat and Iroquois societies, female lineages and leadership formed the very basis of kinship solidarities and community cohesion. It was only natural for women such as Catherine Ganneaktena and Marie Tsaouenté to endeavor to reconstitute extended families.75
To strengthen their heterogeneous communities, such women drew on the array of traditional and innovative means at their disposal. The figure of the Virgin Mary, as in years past, continued to offer a pole of attraction as Iroquoian women explored the merits of various religious devotions. The new mission church at Sillery’s côte Saint Michel was upon its establishment in 1669 dedicated to l’Annonciation de Notre Dame, in honour of the archangel Gabriel’s announcement to the Virgin Mary that she would become the mother of Jesus. However, the community’s enthusiasm at the arrival of a wooden statuette of the Virgin from the shrine of Notre Dame de Foy in Dinant, Belgium, was such that the mission was promptly renamed.76 A few years later, the women of the community inquired to know more about the “Saint Esclavage de Marie” (Holy Bondage of Mary). This devotion, newly popularized in France and in fashion at the Ursuline convent at Quebec, exalted the faithful’s total surrender to the Virgin and must have spoken to the painful experiences of Iroquoia. But devotion to the Holy Family, which instead insisted on the theme of kinship, and particularly on the maternal bond between Mary and the Infant Jesus, proved more appealing. In 1671, responding to the interest of the women, the Jesuit missionary Chaumonot instituted there a chapter of the Congrégation de la Sainte Famille. The devotion caught on at Kentake too, where another chapter was soon formalized.77 This lay confraternity, much like that of Our Lady founded at the Island of Orleans in a time of comparable upheaval two decades earlier, was a means by which peoples sought to bridge differences and achieve a more solid union.
In 1670 or 1671, the Wendats who after the dispersal of midcentury had merged with the Tionnontatés and remained in the Great Lakes area instead of seeking refuge in the Saint Lawrence valley sent some of their chief men to Quebec to ask for the protection of the French against the Dakota who had recently declared war on them. Their embassy was well received and given presents as an invitation to become Christians and to join the community at Notre Dame de Foy. The ambassadors seemed pleased, and left the Jesuits expecting that their people, totaling about five hundred, would relocate there in the spring. But there is no evidence that any did come. Rather, they established their village in the place called Michilimackinac, at the straits of Mackinac, between Lakes Huron and Michigan, where the Jesuits established a mission for them in the summer of 1671.78 People kept coming from Iroquoia, however, to both Notre Dame de Foy and Kentake. Through the early 1670s, an ever-increasing number of them travelled from the villages of the Mohawks, and especially from the one called Gandaouagué – as the Jesuits rendered a name, meaning “at the rapids,” later rendered by others as Caughnawaga and Kahnawake. As the easternmost village of the Mohawk valley, Gandaouagué in recent years had been acutely exposed to spiritual and military offensives. Though during the 1640s Father Isaac Jogues’s early effort in this community had fared poorly, it was here that Fathers Frémin, Bruyas, and Pierron had built their first chapel when they returned in earnest to Iroquoia in 1667. They found a particularly receptive audience, especially among the women and men of Wendat origin who by this time represented an estimated two-thirds of the population of this village.79 They also found a community that was in the process of rebuilding itself, having been razed to the ground during the French invasion of the previous year. Although the solid Franco-Iroquois peace made it unlikely that this disaster would soon be repeated, the village remained vulnerable to the raids of the now well-armed Mahicans from east of the Hudson River, with whom the Mohawks were still at war. In August of 1669, it endured a particularly trying siege. Three to seven hundred enemy warriors were repelled in extremis thanks to the leadership of a man named Togouirout (likely meaning “His Tree Stands Upright”), more commonly known t
o the Dutch and English as Kryn or Cryn, and to the French as le Grand Agnier or The Great Mohawk – a figure who would come to play a central role in the unfolding story of the mission settlements of the Saint Lawrence.80
Figure 5.3 Bird’s eye view of Quebec (in the top left corner) and its vicinity showing the Wendat village with its domed longhouses at Notre Dame de Foy (13) as well as the old mission compound at Kamiskouaouangachit or Sillery (I). (Detail from Jean-Baptiste Franquelin’s “L’entrée de la Rivière du St-Laurent, et la ville de Québec dans le Canada,” ca. 1671–73, BNF, Département des cartes et plans, GE SH 18 PF 127 DIY 6 P 1 D)
As the continuing activity of Jesuit missionaries and Indigenous proselytes through the 1670s exacerbated the rift between Christians and traditionalists in Mohawk country, waves of epidemics, combined with the socially disruptive inroads of the New York liquor trade, further contributed to making life there intolerable for New and Old Iroquois alike.81 At some point in 1672 or 1673, a Wendat captain named Jacques Onnhatetaionk and his family left the Mohawk village where they had spent the previous fifteen years for Notre Dame de Foy. Arriving there with the intention of joining the community, he explained that he had grown disturbed by the drunkenness that reigned among the Mohawks and fearful that his children would adopt these disorderly habits.82
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