Wendat

Wendat, Iroquoian-speaking Indigenous North American people who were living along the St. Lawrence River when contacted by French explorer Jacques Cartier in 1534.

Culture

Many aspects of Wendat culture were similar to those of other Indigenous peoples of the American Northeast. Traditionally, the Wendat lived in villages of large bark-covered longhouses, each of which housed a matrilineal extended family; some villages were protected by an encircling palisade. Agriculture was the mainstay of the Wendat economy; men cleared fields and women planted, tended, and harvested crops including corn (maize), beans, squash, and sunflowers. Hunting and fishing supplemented the diet.

The Wendat were divided into matrilineal exogamous clans, each headed by a clan chief; all the clan chiefs of a village formed a council, which, with the village chief, decided civil affairs. Villages were grouped into bands (each of which had a band chief and a band council, consisting of village chiefs, to deal with civil matters affecting the entire band), and all the bands together constituted the Wendat nation. A large council of band chiefs and their local councils dealt with matters concerning the whole tribe. Women were highly influential in Wendat affairs, as each clan’s senior women were responsible for selecting its civil leader. (See also The Difference Between a Tribe and a Band.

Rivalry with the Haudenosaunee Confederacy

The Wendat were bitter enemies of peoples of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, with whom they competed in the fur trade. Before the 17th century the Haudenosaunee drove some Wendat from the St. Lawrence River westward into what is now Ontario, where related groups seem to have already been resident; four of those bands (the Rock, Cord, Bear, and Deer peoples) formed the Wendat Confederacy, which was defeated and dispersed by Haudenosaunee invasions in 1648–50. The survivors were either captured and forced to settle among their conquerors or driven west and north. The latter remnants drifted back and forth between Michigan, Wisconsin, Ontario, Ohio, and Quebec. During the French and Indian War in the mid-18th century, the Wendat allied with the French against the British and the Haudenosaunee Confederacy.

After the French and Indian War

The Wendat gradually reestablished some influence in Ohio and Michigan, but the U.S. government eventually forced tribal members to sell their lands. They subsequently migrated to Kansas and then to Indian Territory (present-day Oklahoma).

Population estimates in the early 2020s indicated some 25,000 individuals of Wendat descent across the United States and Canada.