Faced with Achindwanes’s insistence, Souart agreed to offer a tract of land and two missionaries. Perrot, as district governor, gave his approval. The site that was chosen was called La Montagne by the French and Kanehsatake by its inhabitants, meaning “at the foot of the hill,” in reference to Mount Royal. A few Wendat families had already moved there before the second week of December of 1675, when four arpents were surveyed and marked off for the mission. One source hints that the founding core consisted of eight warriors with their wives and families. Within a few months a Sulpician missionary, Guillaume Bailly, took up his post.107 The ground was fertile and sloped in a way that provided ideal drainage and exposure to the sun, allowing Kanehsatake, within a decade, to produce surpluses that reportedly fed the people of the other mission across the Saint Lawrence River through a quarter of the year. The proximity of the French town of Ville Marie, moreover, offered attractive commercial possibilities. As Bailly’s successor, François Vachon de Belmont, would boast, this was “a location that much charms and attracts the Natives.”108
The split created much bitterness. “This separation was painful,” explained Chauchetière in his chronicle, “and did not fail to keep their minds at variance for some time.”109 Tonsahoten was himself torn in his loyalties. In the late spring and early summer of 1676, as the people of Kentake prepared to move their village to a new site, at the foot of the rapids about six kilometers upstream, within view of the old, he instead began planning to move to Kanehsatake. In the process, he “spoke very harshly” of his village, offending several people including its two other captains, Togouriout and his Onondaga counterpart, who were shocked to discover his discourse upon their return from the winter hunt. These two, who had until this time deferred to Tonsahoten as the “first and most senior of the captains,” became resentful and for a time ceased to hold him in high regard. Soon, however, the parties made an effort to reestablish harmony. Tonsahoten followed the community as it relocated to the new site at the rapids in July, and there he gave up the land that was allotted to him to cultivate for the construction of the mission chapel. Jesuit Father Cholenec explained that it was “to show his affection for the faith,” but it was also to demonstrate his attachment to the community and regain some of the prestige that he had lost. Togouirout and the Onondaga captain, recognizing the need to avoid division and urged on by Frémin or Cholenec who counselled that “for the glory of God and the welfare of the mission they should become reconciled with him,” made conciliatory gestures of their own. Returning from the small game hunt in the fall or early winter of 1676 they each in turn “gave feasts” to Tonsahoten, “thereby putting him on a footing with them – or, rather, putting him above their own heads, to be thereafter the master of the others.”110 The crisis of leadership passed. As of January 1677, the Jesuits of Kahnawake could breathe a sigh of relief that Tonsahoten had resolved to remain in the mission, and indeed he stayed there until his death in 1688. For having been the founding member of the community, Chauchetière tells us, he was until the end called “the father of the believers.”111
The new site to which the people of Kentake relocated, a short distance upriver from the old, took on the French name of Saint François Xavier du Sault, or more simply le Sault, meaning “the Rapids,” and was called by its inhabitants Kahnawake, “at the foot of the rapids,” both to describe the landscape and in recollection of the village of the same name in the Mohawk valley (Gandaouagué), from which a critical mass of migrants were arriving.112 Its inhabitants thereafter became known as Kahnawakeronon or gens du Sault: People of the Rapids. In 1677, the mission on the slope of the mountain was meanwhile dedicated to the Virgin Mary, under the name of Notre Dame des Neiges (Our Lady of the Snows). Its residents, the Kanehsatakeronon, came to be known by the French as gens de la Montagne or People of the Mountain, though the Indigenous name could be more accurately translated as People of the Foot of the Hill.113
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Figure 5.5 Mission communities of the Montreal region, including early eighteenth-century foundations and relocations. (Map by Andrée Héroux)
In an attempt to strengthen their ranks, the small core of Wendats who had forsaken Kentake for Kanehsatake sent a delegation to Lorette, around the time of their relocation in 1675–76, for the purpose of inviting some of that community’s inhabitants to join them. In the Relations, the Jesuits, careful not to expose the ways in which their missions were undermined by those of the Sulpicians, tiptoed around the issue. A few years later they allude obliquely to the fact that frost and rain had prevented the crops from ripening for a couple of years in succession at Lorette, and that its residents “had been invited to move elsewhere where they might find foodstuffs in abundance.”114 Some seventy years later, a headman from Lorette would recall that the people of Kanehsatake had complained to his own that they were only young men and that they thus lacked a council. Responding to their appeal, the people of Lorette “gave a chief” to the new village and established a constitution for the community which was embodied in twelve wampum belts.115 It is safe to assume that not only a chief, but several families took this opportunity to migrate from one mission to the other. This resettlement would have been particularly alluring to those Wendats who were unhappy with the outcome of the relocation from Notre Dame de Foy to Lorette a few years earlier. It would also have been especially appealing to those who wished to retain links with Iroquoia, or for that matter with the Wendat community that had merged with the Tionnontatés (also known as Petuns) and found a different refuge in the western Great Lakes after the great dispersal. Perhaps the chief in question was none other than the elderly Louis Thaondechoren. Although Father Chaumonot tells us that the latter was one of the more fervent promoters of the relocation of the village from Notre Dame de Foy to Lorette, it is well documented that in previous years he had explored the possibility of a mission settlement near Montreal. In the summer of 1667, just before the Jesuits decided to commit themselves to the mission at Kentake, he was the one who in the company of a missionary had toured the order’s seigneurial holdings to the north of the island.116 Crucially, at the very moment that Achindwanes and his people were settling at Kanehsatake, in the spring of 1676, Thaondechoren is said to have made a journey from Lorette “to go to see his countrymen, who had come to Montreal to trade, in order to exhort them to become Christians.”117 The countrymen referred to here were perhaps Wendats-Tionnontatés visiting from the Great Lakes, for he was himself of Tionnontaté origin, but this may very also be a muddled allusion to the Wendats of Kentake who had come to the island to settle. Certainly the fact that Thaondechoren does not appear thereafter in the Relations relating to Lorette, or for that matter in any of the writings of the Jesuits, would support the theory that he relocated to the Sulpician mission.
In 1677, according to Chauchetière, the Wendats of Lorette sent an “exhortative wampum belt” to Kahnawake. On a background of dark purple shell beads, white ones outlined a series of squares in a way that recalls the famous “Hiawatha belt” which embodies the union of the Five Nations – except that these elements converge on large cross instead of a pine tree of peace. The missionary chronicler summed up the belt’s meaning by observing that, through it, the Wendats were inviting the people of Kahnawake to take up the Christian faith for good, to build a chapel as soon as possible, and to “combat the various demons who conspired for the ruin of both missions.”118 The context of the foundation of Kanehsatake hints at its fuller meaning as an expression of goodwill and a call to reconciliation, internal and external: reconciliation at Kahnawake, plausibly, between the Wendat captain and his Mohawk and Oneida counterparts; reconciliation between the people of Kahnawake and Kanehsatake; and quite possibly reconciliation between those of Kahnawake and Lorette, for in supporting the secessionists the latter had no doubt incurred the disapproval of the former. Implied in this gift of wampum was the people of Lorette’s understanding that they held primacy within the French alliance and the Christian fa
mily, of which they had been early adopters and adoptees.119
Father Chauchetière writes that the wampum belt was well received. It was hung up in the church at Kahnawake, just above the altar, to stand as a testament to the common faith and goodwill that united the two communities.120 In reality, the community of Lorette continued to feel the disruptive pull of the upriver missions for a few years more at least. In an address to the canons of Chartres Cathedral dictated to Chaumonot in 1680, Lorette’s leaders alluded to the ongoing danger. “[O]ur houses united as a village are incessantly surrounded by nations issued from the depths of the earth to lead us there and treat us as slaves, in horrible hollows where fire is never extinguished.” They thanked the canons of Chartres for having sent them, in return for a votive wampum belt, a silver reliquary filled with the fragments of several saints’ bones. “This nation, exited from the bowels of the earth, will not be able to suffer the presence of these bones which shall serve as a palisade to our village against their attacks.” Beyond the metaphorical language, we are made to understand that a core population was adamant in its desire to remain independent from the new, increasingly Iroquoiscised mission communities. The thought of their alliance with the clerics of the cathedral across the sea, they hoped, would help them resist further invitations.121
Most of the community’s population gains in the years immediately following the peace treaty were undone in the decade that followed by the strong gravitational pull of Kanehsatake and, perhaps to a lesser extent, Kahnawake. The community numbered 150 persons in 1668; by 1675, it had swelled to approximately 300 individuals. By the time of the 1685 census, however, Lorette once again numbered only 146 persons; and when another was taken three years later, the village was said to contain 131 individuals. Disease contributed in a small way to this depopulation, but outmigration was most certainly its main cause.122
Figure 5.6 Wampum belt given by the people of Lorette to those of Kahnawake in 1677. It continued to adorn the church there until its theft in 1974. (Reproduced from Devine, Historic Caughnawaga [1922])
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All of this was probably not the outcome hoped for by the elder who, on welcoming Lieutenant General Tracy in 1665, described his wish to see Wendat bones knit together with muscles and tendons, and Wendat flesh born again. Yet in these years his community had been reinvigorated, gaining if not the power and prosperity that it had once enjoyed, at least solid foundations which would allow it to persist in its distinct identity. Having welcomed New and Old Iroquois alike in the few years that immediately followed the peace accord, Lorette now reemerged as an unambiguously Wendat community. Many of its members, including its leaders, had experienced captivity. For some, it had been brief. Louis Thaondechoren had been captured by the Iroquois in the debacle at Long Sault in 1660, but had managed an escape and return to the community shortly thereafter. So had Ignace Tsaouenhohoui – a name, referring to an eagle or osprey – who belonged to a prominent lineage, quite possibly of the Deer Clan, and was considered “captain of his nation” until his death in 1670. Others had spent decades among the Iroquois, returning from captivity only after the peace. Pierre Atironta, already elderly when he returned from Iroquoia, soon emerged as a pillar of the community; he too was described as “captain of the Hurons” at the time of his passing in 1672. Jacques Onnhatetaionk, who arrived from Mohawk country in 1672–73, was in turn installed as a leading captain by the clan mothers immediately upon his arrival. Pierre Andahiacon, who died in 1676, in a similar fashion was recognized as one of the community’s “worthy captains” soon after his return from Iroquoia.123 Many of these men derived their authority from their female relatives or spouses. Andahiacon’s wife, Jeanne Assenragenhaon, for example, had migrated to the Saint Lawrence valley with him, and was a renowned and long-standing Christian. In Old Wendake she had been the hostess of Fathers Le Mercier, Ragueneau, and Chastelain. While she had lost her first husband during the Iroquois invasion, she had maintained her faith during two decades in Iroquoia, and converted two successive husbands there, of whom Andahiacon was the last. The missionaries described her as “the chief of all our Christian women in intelligence, fervor, and constancy.”124
Significantly, the movement of Wendat individuals and families from Iroquoia after years of captivity altered the ethnic makeup of the community, insofar as the Attigneenongnahac (or Cord) character that appears to have for a time predominated after 1657 became less marked. The identity of leaders and the parts of Iroquoia from whence they returned allow us to glimpse this shift. Pierre Atironta was likely of Ahrendarrhonon (Rock) origin, as his name had been borne by two of that nation’s leaders before the destruction of Huronia. Meanwhile, the number of families said to be returning from Mohawk country suggests an increased presence of Attignawantans (Bear). Additional evidence for this shift comes from the fact that variations of the name formerly used for the Attignawantan appear in eighteenth-century Wendat-Tionnontaté dictionaries as referring to the inhabitants of Lorette: one dictionary gives Attinnia8enten, Hatindia8Ointen, Hatingia8Ointen, Hatindia8Ointen, Hatingia8Ointen, and another Hatendia8enten.125 In defining themselves to others in their diplomatic discourse, the community for its part appears to have preferred the label of “Wendat Loretronon” (or, reflecting their pronunciation, Rorekronon): Hurons of Lorette.126 Meanwhile, the Kahnawakeronon and Kanehsatakeronon – People of the Rapids and People of the Mountain – who from diverse origins had found new homes in the Saint Lawrence valley would, in decades marked by the renewal of war, increasingly come to define themselves as Iroquois.
6
Against Their Own
War between the Christian and League Iroquois, 1684–1690
Whereas Lorette was fated to remain a small but decidedly Wendat community, Kahnawake and Kahnesatake were emerging as increasingly populous and Iroquois ones. By 1685, the two villages had attained a respective population of 682 and 222.1 To place this in perspective, population estimates for the whole of Iroquoia during the second half of the century hover around 8,000 or 9,000. Of that total, the population of the Mohawk villages numbered about 1,500, that of the Onondagas at a little over that number, and the Oneidas about 600 to 800.2 Due to the arrival of waves of Old Iroquois who had come in from these villages, and to the need for a common identity and mutually intelligible language among New Iroquois of diverse origins, the process of assimilation that had begun in Iroquoia was completed on the shores of the Saint Lawrence.
This process was quicker at Kahnawake, which had become the favoured destination for newcomers. The departure of the most discontented Wendat elements from Kentake circa 1675 allowed harmony to return to the community which relocated to the rapids. Allusions to “Huron” chiefs, or to a distinct Wendat presence at the mission for that matter, disappear in the years thereafter. Writing in January of 1677, Jesuit Father Pierre Cholenec explained that the mission was governed by four captains, “2 Hurons and 2 Iroquois,” but that he expected that “we shall shortly have there 4 captains of the principal Iroquois nations,” with changing structures of leadership reflecting the evolving self-definition of the broader population.3 Oneidas, who had numbered among the first founders of the community, were joined by another noticeable wave led by Ogenheratarihiens, a captain of their nation who, having quarrelled with a fellow captain on the occasion of a village relocation, and undergone the distress of his brother’s death around the same time, moved to Kahnawake. Baptized Louis, his relocation to the mission and that of his wife, Marie Garhi, attracted others from Oneida country and from the north shore of Lake Ontario, many of whom accepted religious instruction and some of whom chose to relocate there for the longer term. He became the mission’s “fourth captain,” and was judged to be the most eloquent.4 It was the newcomers from Mohawk country, however, who came to predominate at Kahnawake – a name which itself reflected that ascendancy. When he penned, in 1686, his chronicle of the mission’s early years, the Jesuit Chauchetière observed with exaggeration but tellingly,
that the “warriors of Anié [i.e. Mohawks] have become more numerous at Montreal than they are in their own country,” and indicated that though ten or twelve nations were represented at Kahnawake (not the twenty-two reported in the early years, it will be noted), all of them were Iroquois speaking.5
Kanehsatake’s founding Wendat core was slower to be submerged, though it too in time evolved to adopt an Iroquois identity. Of the fifteen individuals from the village who were cited in judicial proceedings of the seigneurial court of the island of Montreal during the period from 1677 to 1686, a full seven were identified as Wendats. More impressionistically but no less tellingly, Bishop Saint-Vallier and Governor Denonville, writing in 1688 and 1690 respectively, both described the mission as being composed of “Iroquois and Hurons.” But the trend was nonetheless for the mission to evolve, much like Kahnawake, in the minds of colonial administrators into the “Iroquois mission of La Montagne.”6
Both missions were in many ways extensions of Iroquoia. Their residents retained traditional matrilineal kinship structures and subsistence patterns that hinged on the combination of agricultural activity with hunting and fishing expeditions that drew most of the population away from its village for much of the year. They used Iroquois dialects to communicate – Mohawk increasingly. Men and women shuttled to and from the Saint Lawrence and Iroquoia to visit family and friends, to find partners, to trade, and to take part in ritual obligations. Yet, despite such high mobility and overlapping identities, Christianity and the French alliance were nevertheless emerging as fundamental components of individual and collective identity for the people of the two mission settlements, crucial means of understanding and negotiating internal and external belonging. It is tantalizing to hypothesize that while they continued to view themselves and be viewed by other Iroquois as Onkwehón:we (“Real Humans,” i.e. ethnic Iroquois), many residents of the missions ceased to consider themselves Haudenosaunee (or Rotinonhsionni, “People of the Longhouse,” i.e. members of the League). While the distinction between these two terms would become conflated in the nineteenth century, and come to take on a different meaning in more recent times, there is good reason to think that the difference did matter during the decades under examination. From the available evidence, those whom the French called “Iroquois chrétiens” or Christian Iroquois appear to have conceived of themselves as “Garihwioston” (in period sources Karikwists, Karigouistes, Caraguists, Garih8ioston). The term translates as “Believers,” “Those who Pray,” or “Christians,” but is rooted in the notion of Karihwiio, or Kariwiio, which has a noteworthy pedigree in Iroquois culture. Combining the words for “good” and for “thing, business, affair, word, message, news,” this idea of the “Good Word” appears in retellings of the Great Law offered by Deganawida, the Peacemaker, as one of the cardinal principles of the Iroquois League. With the arrival of the French missionaries, the word came to be used as a natural translation of “Gospel.” In more recent times, from the beginning of the nineteenth century onward, the same term would come to be used to refer to yet another set of spiritual teachings, those of the Seneca prophet Handsome Lake, which to this day forms the core of the Longhouse Religion.7
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