Today is National Indigenous People’s Day in Canada.
As a settler who is trying to understand Native issues and work in solidarity with Native peoples it has been my habit on this day, ever since a friend passed on a challenge a few years ago, to “Share on social media the names of the First Peoples whose territory I live on, the Treaty or Treaties which govern where I live, and the place where my ancestors came from.” Usually I just make a short post on Facebook, but since I’ve got this new blog, I’m going to expand my usual post.
So here goes:
I live in the Onguioaahra region, apparently named after the fast but narrow river which flows north from Lake Erie to Lake Ontario, plunging over the great escarpment at Niagara Falls. Or perhaps the river is named after the land; the origin of the name Onguioaahra is not entirely clear — it seems to be etymologically related to the Iroquoian word for “neck”, which stands to reason as this region is a narrow isthmus of land between two great lakes… and not a peninsula as it is often described in Canadian media.
(It’s curious to note that the artificial imposition of the international border might make the Niagara region feel like a peninsula, but it’s geographically inaccurate to describe it that way… and it’s important to understand that odd mental division actively undermines our understanding of how the native civilizations which preceded us lived in and around the Great Lakes.)
When French Jesuit missionaries first came to the Great Lakes in the early 17th century, this area was the home of the Chonnonton people, who were called the Attawandaron by their neighbours and the Neutral Nation by Europeans; their name for themselves meant “People Who Tend The Deer.” The Chonnonton spoke a dialect of the Iroquoian language, but apparently one with differences from their cousins; one etymology for the name “Attawandaron” I’ve heard roughly translates as “People Who Speak Strangely.” The European name of “Neutral Nation” was applied because when they arrived in the Great Lakes the Chonnonton had apparently enjoyed an extended period of peace with their neighbours and refused to take sides in any other nations’ conflict.
Chonnonton neutrality likely stemmed from their control of much of the flint trade among the Iroquoian and Algonquian peoples of the Great Lakes basin thanks to the large and relatively easily-worked flint beds in and around modern day Hamilton, Dundas and the north shore of Lake Erie; indeed, every winter the moving ice on the lake deposits nodules of flint on the beaches and shorelines of Lake Erie in the old Chonnonton territory. (In fact, I use one such fist-sized flint nodule as a paperweight on my desk; I literally picked it up off the ground on a summer evening’s lakeside stroll.)
The Chonnonton leveraged the flint trade to enforce a more-or-less general peace in the Great Lakes basin via the threat of economic sanction: make too much trouble and you wouldn’t be allowed to trade for flint until you fell into line. And by and large and for untold generations this system worked, more-or-less. The Six Nations of the Haudenosaunee lived under the Great Law of Peace; the Whyandot, the Petun, the Anishininiwag and the various other peoples living around the Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence travelled and traded and fought with each other in a mostly-ritualized way. Everybody grew maize and beans and squash, wove baskets, worked wood and leather, hunted and trapped, and lived what sounds like a pretty decent life: the First Nations lived in a neolithic world and their lives were not poor, nor miserable, nor crude. Population levels have been estimated as comparable to those of medieval Europe… or at least the northern parts of Medieval Europe.
The first French missionaries who entered the Great Lakes found a land with many villages, extensive transportation networks based on water travel, and a flourishing trade network that extended across the continent and had done so for thousands of years. The indigenous people of North America were not savages or primitives or barbarians: they were people, with customs, arts, economics, politics and warfare and a material culture as fascinating and subtle as any in Europe or Asia. The place I live today in was not raw wilderness, no terra incognita; it was a well-travelled and settled land with abundant hunting, gathering and trade. It was the seat and centre of an entire chain of civilizations that Canadians simply aren’t taught about in school, and it goes back a long, long time, perhaps as far back as when the glaciers retreated ten thousand years ago.
The Europeans came here and brought iron tools, iron weapons and iron firearms… and their diseases. I’ve never been able to find a reliable estimate, but it seems to be generally accepted that a huge majority of the indigenous population of the Great Lakes was dead by end of the 17th century; what Native peoples call the Great Sickness seems to have been as bad or worse than the Black Death of 14th century Europe… and half of Europe died in the Black Death. Some estimates place the death toll of this plague — or rather, multiple plagues occurring simultaneously in waves — as high as ninety percent.
I cannot even imagine it. The utter and near-complete destruction of an ancient society in the space of a human lifetime. When Jacques Cartier explored the St. Lawrence in the 1540s, he found a thriving trade culture with substantial fortified communities. When Samuel de Champlain travelled through the same area only two generations later, he found ruins… and desperate Whyandot who enlisted his help to fight alongside them against the Haudenosaunee, who the French referred to as the Iroquois Confederacy.
Following the devastation of indigenous peoples by the Great Sickness, the Chonnonton were destroyed by the Haudenosaunee during the Beaver Wars of the mid-17th century. Faced with extinction from a reduced population and dependent on European iron and weapons, the Haudenosaunee conquered and assimilated many of the neighbouring Native nations, amalgamating them into Haudenosaunee culture. What is now Southern Ontario was emptied of people, who were either driven west or who were enslaved and taken to the Six Nations homelands around the Finger Lakes. The former lands of the Chonnonton were Haudenosaunee territory, reserved for the exclusive use of Haudenosaunee hunters and trappers to provide the critical animal pelts they needed to trade to Europeans. To trespass in this huge new game preserve was to court death at the hands of Haudenosaunee.
The Beaver Wars are not a happy history, but I find myself unable to condemn the Haudenosaunee for their actions. They made the best choice they could in the face of total extinction. Many modern westerners enjoy apocalyptic fiction and fantasize about the life-and-death decisions that would come from it, not realizing that under their feet are the literal bones of people who faced the end of the world. The Haudenosaunee did what they had to do, and managed to make themselves strong enough to hold back the increasing tide of European encroachment for several generations, allying on near-equal terms with the English against the French and their Whyandot (Huron) allies during the French and Indian Wars of the 18th century.
The Niagara region became a strategically vital connection to the interior of the continent as trade networks were utterly dependent on water transport. The French established a fort to dominate the Niagara river and control trade to the Haudenosaunee, the British seized the fort in 1759. Where the French had come only for trade and to secure the portage route to the upper Great Lakes, the British brought large numbers of settlers into the region. When the United States rebelled from British control during the American Revolutionary War, the Haudenosaunee remained allied to the British… to their sorrow. Following the Revolutionary War, Natives and the new nation of the United States engaged in constant conflict along the American frontier, until the 1779 Sullivan Campaign devastated the homelands of the Haudenosaunee people in what is now upstate New York; this war was deliberately intended to wipe out the Native population and drive out any United Empire Loyalists who remained in the territory. The refugees were forced west across the Niagara River, which had been established as the international border.
Until this time, the specific location I live in was governed by the various Treaties of Fort Niagara, especially the Second and Third Treaties. European squatters from England, Scotland and Ireland had expanded the original corridoor of settlement along the Niagara River portage route (Niagara Falls’ main street is still called Portage Road) for many miles inland, especially on the Lake Ontario shoreline. Now what was once the vast Haudenosaunee hunting reserve was the refuge for those driven out of the new United States. Under the Haldimand Proclamation of 1784 the territory of the Six Nations of the Grand River was established “as a safe and comfortable retreat” for survivors. This proclamation pretty much ceded the entire Niagara peninsula to British settlers by default as it specifically assigned the Natives territory “six miles deep from each side of the river beginning at Lake Erie and extending in that proportion to the head of the said river, which them and their posterity are to enjoy for ever.”
A quick glance at a map shows that this promise was simply not honoured. Having suffered catastrophic defeats at the hands of the Americans, the Haudenosaunee were housed on a pitifully small fraction of their old hunting territory, which the British colonial administration and later the Canadian government (and constant pressure from squatting European settlers) would whittle down again and again as part of a deliberate and well-documented policy of wiping out the indigenous population of Canada. Canada was founded on genocide. This is a point which has been established beyond a doubt and even officially acknowledged by the Canadian government. Canada continues to this day a series of policies and procedures that mean the genocide of indigenous peoples is not merely an artifact of history, but a current and ongoing crime in this year of 2019.
Our government has acknowledged that. It is a fact. We have to acknowledge that, my fellow settlers, or else we remain complicit in that genocide.
I live in the Onguioaahra area. When French missionaries first came to the Great Lakes this area was the home of the Chonnonton, The People Who Tend The Deer, who were called the Attawandaron by their neighbors and the Neutral Nation by Europeans. The Chonnonton were conquered and assimilated by the Haudenosaunee during the Beaver Wars of the mid-17th century and this area became a Haudenosaunee hunting ground before European squatters began encroaching from the established settlements around the Niagara river.
The specific location I live in was governed by the various Treaties of Fort Niagara, especially the Second and Third Treaties, and is bordered to the west by the territory of the Six Nations of the Grand River, which was established by the Haldimand Proclamation in 1784 which ceded the entire Niagara peninsula to British colonists by default.
My maternal ancestors were United Empire Loyalists who fled to Upper Canada from New Jersey in the 1780s after the American Revolution and who settled on former Chonnonton and Iroquois territory inland from Long Point. My father and grandparents fled to Canada after the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. When they arrived in Canada in early 1957 and settled near Port Rowan, the infamous Sixties Scoop had not yet begun. The last residential school would not close until 1996… the same year I graduated from my own primarily white high school in Woodstock Ontario.
The recent acknowledgement that Canada is guilty of — and continuing to commit — genocide against indigenous people is vitally important to the future of Canada as a nation. But it means little if settler Canadians continue to turn a blind eye to the past. We need to educate ourselves on the past.
I offer this post as a challenge to all settler-descended people in Canada, whether you were born elsewhere (as my father was) or whether your family has lived here for generations (as my mother’s has): Discover where you are and who used to live here. Learn the names of these people. Learn what happened to them. Learn what they’re going through right now. Then go on social media and share the original name of the place where you live, the names of the First Peoples whose territory you live on, the Treaty or Treaties which govern where you live, and the place where your ancestors came from.
