Who will speak for the Chonnonton People?
Not many people aside from historians know that the Chonnonton may have been the mightiest Iroquois nation of them all
Recently much talk has ensued on the desirability of permanently housing and displaying, all things ‘Hamiltonia’ as my Ward 3 Councillor Matthew Green adroitly said. Considering that Hamilton now has an Aboriginal Advisory committee, an urban Indigenous strategy and that Council recites a land recognition statement before each of their meetings, the first thing that visitors should see when they walk through the front doors of a Hamilton Museum should be detailed and accurate information on who was here first.
Hamilton and its environs are duly recognized as the traditional territory of the Anishinaabe and Haudenosaunee, who allied with each other under ‘The Dish with One Spoon’ wampum treaty, inviting newly arriving white settlers to be part of this concordant. However, the Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabe were not the first inhabitants of Hamilton.
For centuries it was speculated that long before first ‘contact,’ a group of people we can still safely call the Iroquois, either descended down the St. Lawrence River Valley or ascended up the Mississippi River Valley, to take up residence in what is now southern Ontario and New York state. Betraying their Eurocentric, even racist biases, early ethnographers could not accept that the civilizations they encountered in the North America interior could have originated here. Archeologists, however, now believe that a protoIroquois Middleport culture existed in the Hamilton area from at least 1000 AD on.
This Middleport culture, based on excavation done between Caledonia and Brantford was part of a larger pre-Iroquois ‘Late Woodlands’ culture that evolved into three main political entities, best called confederations, subdivided into matrilineal based clans. Each confederacy took up residence in a specific locale in the vast unbroken wilderness that is now home to millions of people.
The Wendat (‘Dwellers on a Peninsula’) took root in a small 20 by 30 mile rectangle just south of the Canadian shield, in an area that is still popularly known as Huronia. The original nations of the Haudenosaune (‘People of the Longhouse’) occupied five strategic locations on a broad summit of fertile table land equidistant from each other in upper New York state. The Chonnonton (‘People who tend Deer’) spread out the furthest, occupying key points in the Thames River valley near London as well as the east bank of the Onguiara/ Niagara River. The nucleus of the Chonnonton nation was in the Hamilton region square in the middle of this broad swath of territory.
‘Iroquoia,’ which at it greatest numbered maybe 100,000 souls, was the greatest Indigenous population, north of Central America. Although ritual warfare was part of Iroquois society, just as it was for the Scottish Highlanders, a contemporaneous ‘primitive’ European culture, the term ‘Pax Iroquoia’ is often used to describe the overall stability and prosperity of the Iroquois peoples in the 15th and 16th centuries. It has been speculated that had they remained undiscovered by the Europeans, a united Iroquois Confederacy might have taken over the entire North American continent.
The first French explorers, bobbing and weaving in and out of the harbours and inlets of Atlantic Canada in their little carvels, heard of this fierce inland dwelling people from nonagricultural hunting and gathering coastal natives, many of whom had less than favourable dealings with the Iroquois, bestowing on them names like Mohawk (man-eaters).
The Haudenosaunee are of course with us today. The Wendat have a faint presence in Quebec and Oklahoma. The latter are also the best documented Indigenous group in Canada so early in the ‘contact’ period because of the Jesuit missionaries, who unsuccessfully tried to convert them. But who knows of the Chonnonton, except antiquarians who bury themselves in musty, largely unread tomes and pore over broken shards of pottery and rusty iron pots stored in drawers in university basement archives? Yet the Chonnonton may have been the mightiest Iroquois nation of them all.
The two terms, the Chonnonton were previously known by, should be forever discarded. ‘Attawandaron’ which means ‘those whose speech is awry or crooked’ was a derogatory term used by the Wendat and Petun to mock their southern neighbours. The Chonnonton were called the Neutrals by the French because of the deliberate strategic policy of nonalignment they chose, to stay out of the conflict between the Wendat and Haudenosaune over control of the beaver pelt trade. However, the increasing use of guns obtained from British and Dutch traders, rendered the Chonnonton’s long held position as suppliers of flint for arrowheads precarious and they became susceptible to attack by the Haudenosaune.
The first European to encounter the Chonnonton, Etiene Brule, estimated there were 30,000 Chonnonton, including 6,000 braves (young fighting men) when he came through the Hamilton region in 1615. The Chonnonton lived in largely unpalisaded villages which were concentrated within a 32 kilometre radius of Hamilton, although it appears that marshy, weed entangled and rattlesnake infested lower city was not inhabited.
Starting in the 1960s noted McMaster University archeologist William Noble validated the French explorers and priests writings as well as decades of amateur archeological ‘lootings,’ by locating and thoroughly excavating many Chonnonton sites. To date, over 100 sites have been scrutinized in and around the Hamilton region. The omittance of the Chonnonton was brought to my attention, when I was preparing the City of Hamilton’s Woodlands Park historical plaque this summer. Chris Redford, Event Planner in City of Hamilton’s Culture and Tourism department, indicated to me that he would like to see standardized land recognition statements heading all historical recognition plaques from now on. It is my hope that the Chonnonton will be the first name listed.