Who were the Hochelagans?
As with Hochelaga’s location, controversy surrounds the classification of Cartier’s Indigenous hosts.
Archeologists say the language and customs of Hochelagans — whom they classify as Iroquoians — were similar but not identical to Iroquois nations such as the Mohawk.
That’s a Eurocentric interpretation of historical and archeological sources, used by those who consider Mohawks to be “immigrants” in Quebec, the Mohawk Council said in a recent full-page ad about the issue in the Montreal Gazette.
Referring to Indigenous populations as “migrant peoples or disappeared peoples” is a tactic used by governments to “justify and perpetuate the dispossession and imposition of non-Indigenous governments on our land,” according to the ad, a response to a series of opinion pieces in La Presse that downplayed the historic presence of Mohawks in Montreal.
Labelling Iroquoians as distinct ignores the ancestral links established by Iroquois oral history, Chief Christine Zachary Deom of the Mohawk Council of Kahnawake told the Montreal Gazette.
She said some archeologists’ assumptions are based on Cartier’s writings, but “he was not a great collector of information. He didn’t do enough, he didn’t observe enough, he didn’t write down enough."
Montreal and the surrounding area “is where we used to roam, this is where we left our prehistory behind” long before Cartier, who was “a newcomer,” Zachary Deom said.
“The island of Montreal was filled with First Nations People. It was full of rivers and lakes, full of fruit and nut trees, full of corn, beans and squash.”
When digging resumes in the search for Hochelaga in summer 2018, Mohawk archeological technicians from Zachary Deom’s community south of Montreal will be part of the crew.
She said the community is eager to take part because the search could expand knowledge about Indigenous history in the region.
Mohawk participation is “a concrete step toward reconciliation as well as a potentially fruitful collaboration,” said Christian Gates St-Pierre, the Université de Montréal archeologist coordinating the search.