Wendake

History

Archeologists have excavated 16th-century settlements north of Lake Ontario at the Mantle Site (2005), Aurora Site and Ratcliff Site in Whitchurch-Stouffville, Ontario, all attesting to distinctly Wendat (Huron) occupancy. They have concluded the people coalesced in this area as a distinct group. Later they migrated to the Georgian Bay area, where they encountered Europeans in the 17th century. Until the middle of the 17th century, the Wendake ancestors occupied a vast territory straddling part of what is now the United States (from Detroit to south-eastern Ontario (Penetanguishene and Midland) and Quebec. They hunted and trapped throughout this territory (mainly in the Laurentian Mountains, between the central section of the Saint-Maurice and the Saguenay rivers). Between 1634 and 1650, the Wendat Confederation was dismembered; its families, having been gathered into four or five tribes, were dispersed. It is estimated that the Wendat population totalled approximately 20,000 to 30,000 people in 1634. By 1650, only a few hundred individuals remained. Most had been decimated by infectious disease epidemics, to which they had no natural immunity; survivors were attacked by wars, especially by the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, who pushed from the south (present-day New York) trying to control hunting grounds and the fur trade. Part of the Wendat population had also been integrated into the Haudenosaunee Confederation. The survivors of this tragic period divided into two groups in Canada: the Great-Lake Wyandot and the Huron-Wendat. The latter were the ancestors of the Wendat of Wendake. This marked the beginning of a period of exile for the 300 or so Wendat who remained, an era during which they would occupy as many as six different sites in the province of Quebec.…