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Nindoodemag: The Significance of Algonquian Kinship Networks in the Eastern Great Lakes Region, 1600–1701
Heidi Bohaker
| IN the summer of 1701, the twelve hundred French residents of Montreal played host to some thirteen hundred Native American visitors from communities throughout the Saint Lawrence lowlands and Great Lakes region. They had gathered to ratify a peace agreement, carefully constructed during a decade of difficult and complex negotiations, which was intended to end conflicts among the Haudenosaunee (the Iroquois Confederacy) and the French and their native allies. As Gilles Havard has illustrated in The Great Peace of Montreal, the ratification ceremony on August 4 concluded a two-week-long trade fair at a spectacular grand council. There the amalgam of European and Native American diplomatic protocols created a hybridized feast for the senses: the scent of tobacco burning in peace pipes mingled with powder and perfume as the members of the assembly, wearing their finest in dress and adornment, listened to the French and Native Americans give elaborate performances drawn from their respective oratorical traditions. Exchanges of gifts, from wampum and beaver pelts to bread and wine, punctuated the speeches.1 The relationships forged and strengthened as a result of this treaty would shape the region's political history for many years to come (Figure I). |
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This ceremony left behind a documentary record that also drew from distinct cultural traditions. As Havard observed, the text of the treaty followed Native American oratorical conventions with their extensive use of metaphor instead of the numbered clauses of European diplomatic practice. And though French plenipotentiaries and witnesses recorded their assent with signatures, Native American leaders drew pictographic images representing at times, according to the accompanying clerk's note, the mark of a chief, or of a village, or of an entire nation (
Figures II –
IV
). These pictographs of the Great Peace of Montreal bring to the foreground the challenge of understanding Native American collective identities. This treaty was not negotiated between two opposing camps, the French and Native Americans, or really even among three parties: the French, the Haudenosaunee, and France's Native American allies. Aboriginal political organization was far more complex, a fact the French recognized in the preamble to the treaty. The document names twenty-five distinct Native American political entities as parties: the "hurons, outaouacs du Sable [Sable Ottawas], Kiskakons, outaouacs Sinago [Sinago Ottawas], nation de la fourche [Nation of the Fork], sauteurs [people at the rapids of Sault Sainte Marie], pouteouatamis [Potawatomi], sakis [Sauk], puants [Winnebago], folles avoines [Menominee], renards [Fox], maskoutins [Mascouten], Miamis, Ilinois, amikois [Amikwa], nepissingues [Nipissing], algonquins, Temiskamingues [Lake Temiskaming people], Cristinaux [Cree], gens des terres [inland people], Kikapoux, gens du Sault [people of Sault Saint Louis], de la Montagne [people of the mountain], Abenakis, et vous nations iroquoises [Iroquois Confederacy]."
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Yet the names of these political entities do not consistently correspond with the Native American pictographic signatures on the treaty document itself; there are thirty-eight or thirty-nine distinct pictographs (depending on how one counts).
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Figure I
Significant Anishinaabe sites in the central and eastern Great Lakes region. Adapted from a map created by Joey Morin, freelance artist. Drawn by Rebecca L. Wrenn.
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