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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781611861396 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Michigan State University Press |
| Publication date: | 07/01/2014 |
| Edition description: | 1 |
| Pages: | 524 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.80(w) x 9.90(h) x 1.40(d) |
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The Edge of the Woods
By JON PARMENTER
MICHIGAN STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2010 Jon ParmenterAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-87013-985-7
Chapter One
On the Journey 1534–1634
There is nothing so difficult to control as the tribes of America. All these barbarians have the law of wild asses—they are born, live, and die, in a liberty without restraint; they do not know what is meant by bridle and bit. —Paul Le Jeune, S.J., 1637
On October 3,1535, Dieppe navigator Jacques Cartier donned protective armor and departed from his ship anchored in the St. Lawrence River for a formal visit to the Laurentian Iroquois town of Hochelaga. After marching about four and one-half miles, Cartier's party of twenty-five men met "one of the headmen of the village of Hochelaga, accompanied by several persons, who made signs" directing the French to stop at a "spot near a fire they had lighted on the path." The French complied, and the Hochelagan leader then offered a "harangue," which Cartier interpreted as a display of "joy and friendliness" and a means of "welcoming" guests. After an exchange of gifts, Cartier's entourage continued their escorted approach to Hochelaga for another one and one-half miles, passing through the Hochelagans' impressive agricultural fields until they reached the palisaded settlement, home to as many as 1,000 people.
Though we have only a glimpse of the elaborate and formal proceedings that accompanied Cartier's entry into Hochelaga in 1535, the French explorer's description reflected the clear significance precolonial Iroquoian peoples attached to human movement. The official escort and ceremony at the edge of Hochelaga's woods served at once to remind Laurentian Iroquois observers of that community's control over the movement of outsiders into their space and to communicate that power to the armor-clad French explorer and his entourage. By formalizing spatial movement through such highly visible public representations, the Hochelagans protected their own freedom of movement within their homelands.
One hundred years after the first encounters of the Laurentian Iroquois with Cartier, formal protocols governing spatial mobility had enabled five Iroquois nations (the Mohawks, Oneidas, Onondagas, Cayugas, and Senecas) to complete the development of a novel, overarching collective polity known as the Iroquois League. The League's structure manifested the centralizing tendencies of common membership in a confederation of nations while also recognizing the value of existing affiliations of individuals and groups to particular ideas, nations, and geographical spaces. The achievement of unity (not uniformity) among League nations represented its foremost rationale, and the process of League formation that occurred from 1534 to 1634 reveals that the League's constituent nations realized that such unity could best be attained through diversity. In other words, the Five Nations (as the League was known to contemporary Europeans) sought to integrate and accommodate differences and novel phenomena, rather than annihilate or ignore them.
Analysis of the often overlooked sixteenth century in Iroquois history is crucial to understanding the origins, nature, and magnitude of better-documented seventeenth-century Iroquois movements and their attendant impacts on Iroquois society, politics, and culture. Following initial, episodic contacts with Europeans during the early sixteenth century, Iroquois people went "on the journey," undertaking multiple new ventures throughout northeastern North America in order to gain access to European material goods and their attendant flows of information, ideas, and peoples. New postcontact patterns of Iroquois movement enabled the Mohawks, Oneidas, Onondagas, Cayugas, and Senecas to assimilate unprecedented numbers of captives from a variety of indigenous nations. The process of seeking out and integrating newcomers into Iroquois nations inaugurated a pattern of political innovation in which these five nations refined cultural systems for engaging others beyond communal boundaries. In so doing, they embodied the first ritual phase of the Condolence ceremony, "on the journey," which signifies a time of people coming together and consecrating relationships with one another.
Earliest Contacts
Iroquoian peoples residing in the St. Lawrence River valley experienced initial encounters with Europeans during the first four decades of the sixteenth century. The few French explorers and fishermen who intruded into these waters posed no immediate threat to the Laurentian Iroquois communities; indeed, they, not the indigenous people, experienced greater suffering from disease at that time. Yet the nature of the interactions assumed a confrontational character after 1534, when Jacques Cartier's ambitions revealed European colonizers' lack of respect for Iroquoian control over freedom of movement in and on the periphery of their homelands.
Contact between Iroquoians and Europeans may have begun as early as 1508, when French mariner Tomas Aubert sailed eighty leagues up the St. Lawrence River and returned to France with a "Canadian savage." Between 1510 and 1520, two more Dieppe-based sailors, Jean and Raoul Parmentier, appear to have met Laurentian Iroquois engaging in summer hunts of seals, porpoises, and "certain sea birds" in the Strait of Belle Isle between Newfoundland and the Labrador coast. The Parmentiers described the people they encountered there as rendering oil from these animals until the approach of winter, when they departed "with their catch in boats made of the bark of certain trees called birch, and go to warmer countries, but we know not where." The Parmentiers did not identify these people explicitly as Laurentian Iroquois; indeed, they could not have, given their lack of familiarity with these peoples' homelands, but other, more knowledgeable European observers documented the presence of Laurentian Iroquois hunters and fishermen throughout the St. Lawrence River valley and estuary, as well as in the Strait of Belle Isle, less than two decades later. Evidence of seal oil use for ceremonial and military purposes in Laurentian Iroquois culture further supports the likelihood of the Parmentiers' early contact.
The significance of these potential early contacts lies in their location far outside what are traditionally viewed as Laurentian Iroquois homelands, thus indicating the capacity of these people for long-distance movement at the time of their first engagement with Europeans. The first conclusively documented instance of Laurentian Iroquois contact with Europeans occurred on July 21, 1534, when Cartier happened upon a large group of these people fishing for mackerel on the Gaspé Peninsula, approximately 400 miles from their hometown of Stadacona. The story of Cartier's subsequent interactions with the Laurentian Iroquois from 1534 to 1541 yields critical information about patterns of Iroquoian mobility during the early contact era.
In 1534, Cartier counted over 300 Stadaconan men, women, and children who reached the Gaspé Peninsula in a convoy of forty canoes. They manifested prior experience with Europeans by coming "very familiarly" to the sides of Cartier's ships in their boats, where Cartier's men gave them "knives, glass beads, combs, and trinkets of small value, at which they showed many signs of joy, lifting up their hands to heaven and singing and dancing in their canoes." Cartier described the Stadaconans as impoverished, noting derisively how they slept under their canoes and ate their meat and fish almost raw. But other evidence indicates that this expedition was multipurpose in character: the Stadaconans also carried a "large quantity" of corn and dried fruits and nuts. Cartier later learned that this group was out to avenge an attack made by the "Toudamans" (most likely the historically known Micmacs) on members of their community on an island in the St. Lawrence River near the mouth of the Saguenay River in 1533. Tree days after Cartier's initial contact with the Stadaconans, the first clash between European and Iroquoian notions of space took place. Cartier's men erected a thirty-foot cross at the entrance of modern-day Gaspé Harbor, to which they affixed "a shield with three fleurs-de-lys in relief, and above it a wooden board, engraved in large Gothic characters, where was written LONG LIVE THE KING OF FRANCE." The French then commenced public worship of the cross, attempting to explain to Stadaconan observers by pantomime that "by means of this we had our redemption, at which they showed many marks of admiration, at the same time turning and looking at the cross."
The Stadaconans' subsequent behavior suggested skepticism of the intruders' claimed rationale for their behavior. Immediately after the conclusion of this ceremony, Donnacona, the "captain" of Stadacona, approached Cartier's ships in a canoe, accompanied by three of his sons and his brother. Clad in an "old black bear-skin," Donnacona pointed to the cross and gave the French "a long harangue, making the sign of the cross with two of his fingers; and then he pointed to the land all around about, as if he wished to say that all this region belonged to him, and that we ought not to have set up this cross without his permission." In response, Cartier's men lured Donnacona nearer to one of their ships by holding up an ax, "pretending we would barter it for his skin," and then seized the Stadaconans as they came within reach. Cartier then tried to pass off the cross as a mere "landmark and guidepost" that would facilitate his return to the region "with iron." He detained two of Donnacona's sons (Domagaya and Taignoagny) as hostages and sent back Donnacona, his remaining son, and his brother (each bearing a hatchet and two knives) to the shore camp. A few hours later six Stadaconan canoes approached the French vessel, "each with five or six men who had come to say goodbye to the two we had detained and to bring them some fish. They made signs to us that they would not pull down the cross, delivering at the same time several harangues which we did not understand."
Cartier's hostile encounter with the Stadaconans in 1534 inaugurated a pattern of fundamental disputes between Iroquois and European peoples about space and its use. Donnacona's canoe-borne speech, which Cartier interpreted as a claim of Stadaconan possession to the Gaspé Peninsula, is more likely to have been an assertion of the right of freedom of movement for his people in that region. Cartier's lie about the character of the cross as a mere guidepost masked his own intention to appropriate that space for France, an act that Donnacona, a man who "from his childhood had never left off or ceased from travailing into strange Countreys as well by water as by land," may well have perceived as a threat to Stadaconan mobility. Many subsequent conflicts in postcontact Iroquois history would replicate such incidents of mutual suspicion and miscommunication.
Wasting little time in his effort to capitalize on information about the St. Lawrence valley's people and resources relayed by his Stadaconan detainees, Cartier departed St. Malo on May 19, 1534, hoping to discover the Northwest Passage to Asia. Delayed by storms, the French ships did not reach the St. Lawrence estuary for nearly three months. On August 13, 1535, passengers Domagaya and Taignoagny began actively guiding Cartier down the St. Lawrence, after passing Anticosti Island. The captives' assistance may have been more essential than Cartier admitted in the account of his second voyage, which contains no mention of the cross erected in 1534. On September 8, 1535, Domagaya and Taignoagny reached their home village of Stadacona.
Not content to tarry at Stadacona, Cartier made known his desire to push upriver to Hochelaga, another Laurentian Iroquois settlement, but he found no willing guides among his Stadaconan hosts. After a preliminary discussion with Donnacona on September 15, 1535 (which Cartier believed had established "a marvelous stedfast league of friendship"), Donnacona clarified the nature of the arrangements in a formal ceremony two days later at the site of Cartier's anchored vessels. Following a round of singing and dancing, Donnacona moved all his people to one side, then drew "a ring in the sand, [and] caused the Captain [Cartier] and his men to stand in it." He then presented Cartier a gift of three Stadaconan children, which Taignoagny explained were offered to Cartier (as a sign of alliance) on the condition that he not travel to Hochelaga. The spatial gesture represented by the ring drawn in the sand, combined with the offer of children, represented the Stadaconans' conditional offer of allegiance, an offer that depended on Cartier accepting their power to control his freedom of movement and binding himself as an ally of the community with kinbased obligations of reciprocity.
To such limitations Cartier refused to agree. He departed Stadacona for Hochelaga with fifty men on September 19, 1535, rejecting Donnacona's demand that he leave a hostage at Stadacona and ignoring Taignoagny's prediction of supernatural evil awaiting him upriver. Cartier reached his intended destination on October 2, 1535, but after a thirty-minute exchange of food, touching, and "mirth and gladnesse" with the Hochelagans, he and his men spent the night on their boats. After Cartier's formal entry into Hochelaga the next day, described at the beginning of this chapter, he took note of their defensive architecture and extensive agricultural fields. These observations led Cartier to conclude that the Hochelagans "do not move from home and are not nomads" like the Stadaconans. Yet later that day several Hochelagans escorted the French explorer to the summit of "Mount Royal," where they advised Cartier by "signs" of their ability to navigate waters beyond the Lachine Rapids "for three more moons [months]," and described their ongoing conflict with the "Agojouda" (likely Iroquois) people living to their west.
Unable to obtain passage over the Lachine Rapids, Cartier and his party returned downriver and spent an uneasy winter in the vicinity of Stadacona. Early episodes of peaceful trading sessions and exchanges of "familiaritie and love" between the French and Stadaconans were gradually replaced by incidents of "strife and contention." Nutritional deficiencies among the French after December 1535 pushed the intruders to the brink of disaster. Indeed, the desperate French sailors suffering from scurvy received a remedy only after Domagaya himself contracted the disease in March 1536 from the steady diet of French maritime provisions he endured while wintering with (and likely spying on) the French. Once he received a cure at Stadacona, the majority of Cartier's men followed suit. They overcame their symptoms just in time to confront a new Stadaconan initiative.
Taignoagny, who had returned home from a two-month-long winter hunt in late April 1536 with an indeterminate but sizable number of "foreign Indians," informed Cartier that Donnacona wanted to have Cartier take an elderly "Lord of the Country" back to France with him. Cartier, suspecting that the Stadaconans had "gone to raise the country to come against us," elected to circumvent that possibility by once again kidnapping Donnacona, Domagaya, Taignoagny, and seven other Stadaconans during feigned negotiations aboard one of the French ships. Cartier and his detainees departed Stadacona on May 6, 1536, with a cargo of wampum and food supplied by the Stadaconans on the promise of a return in ten to twelve months.
Cartier experienced difficulty in persuading French officials about the value of his enterprise and did not return to North America until 1541. None of the ten kidnapped Stadaconans returned to their homelands; all but one ten-year-old girl had died in France by 1540. But prior to their deaths in captivity, the Stadaconans had persuaded French authorities of their juridical status as nations. The testimony of Cartier's Laurentian Iroquois captives, combined with evidence of their behavior in written reports of Cartier's first two voyages, influenced the royal commission for Cartier's third voyage. King Francis I instructed Cartier to consider North America as occupied by independent peoples who had the capacity to enter into nation-to-nation relations with France via treaties of alliance, peace, friendship, and commerce.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Edge of the Woods by JON PARMENTER Copyright © 2010 by Jon Parmenter . Excerpted by permission of MICHIGAN STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Maps & Figures....................Ix Preface....................XviiAcknowledgments....................xxi
Abbreviations....................xxvii
Introduction....................3
1. ON THE JOURNEY, 1534–1634....................41
2. THE EDGE OF THE WOODS, 1635–1649....................77
3. REOUICKENING, 1650–1666....................127
4. SIX SONGS, 1667–1684....................181
5. OVER THE FOREST, PART 1,1685–1693....................231
6. OVER THE FOREST, PART 2,1694–1701....................275
Epilogue....................281
APPENDIX 1. Iroquois Settlements, 1600–1701....................289
APPENDIX 2. Postepidemic Iroquois Demography, 1634–1701....................293
Notes....................395
Bibliography....................447