Wyandot
The Wyandot people, also known as the Wendat or Wyandotte, are a historic confederacy of four matrilineal tribes: the Attignaouantan, Attigneenongnahac, Arendahronon, and Tohontaernrat. Their ancestral homeland, referred to by the French as Huronia, was located in south central Ontario, near Lake Simcoe. By the early 1600s, the Wyandot population was estimated at around thirty thousand, primarily engaged in horticulture, with women cultivating crucial crops like corn, beans, and squash. They played a significant role in the fur trade as intermediaries between other tribes and French traders. However, their society faced devastating challenges in the mid-17th century when Iroquois tribes dispersed them, coupled with the impact of diseases and missionary efforts that altered their cultural practices.
Today, Wyandot descendants primarily reside in Oklahoma and Quebec. The Oklahoma group, known as the Wyandotte, has focused on preserving their heritage, while the Huron-Wendat Nation in Quebec maintains some traditional practices despite cultural assimilation. Both groups are actively involved in reviving the Wyandot language, which became extinct in 1972. Efforts include language classes aimed at both adults and children, highlighting the community's commitment to cultural preservation and adaptation in the modern era.
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Wyandot
- CATEGORY: Tribe
- CULTURE AREA: Northeast
- LANGUAGE GROUP: Iroquoian
- PRIMARY LOCATION: Oklahoma, Quebec
- POPULATION SIZE: 7,150 in United States (Wyandotte Nation, 2025); 6,980 in Canada (The Canadian Encyclopedia, 2024)
The Wyandot people, also known as the Wendat or Wyandotte and referred to by the French as the Huron, were a confederacy of four highly organized matrilineal and matrilocal Indigenous groups, the Attignaouantan (Bear People), Attigneenongnahac (Cord People), Arendahronon (Rock People), and Tohontaernrat (Deer People). Their historic homeland, which the French referred to as Huronia, was in south central Ontario near Lake Simcoe, east of Lake Huron.
In the early 1600s, they probably numbered about thirty thousand. The Wyandot were horticultural, with women producing the staple crops: corn, beans, squash, and sunflowers. These were supplemented by game hunting, fishing, and berry picking, as well as by trade with other Indigenous Americans for less common food commodities and other products. The Wyandot traveled widely in the 1600s to pursue trade. They had successfully kept the Indigenous Americans to their west and north from trading directly with the French in New France (Quebec) so that they enjoyed a “middleman” role in the burgeoning fur trade of the seventeenth century.
All of this came to a crashing halt in 1649–51 when the Iroquois ventured northwest into Huronia and completely dispersed the four Huron tribes along with neighboring groups as well. The Wyandot had already been plagued with disease and had their culture disrupted by French Jesuit missionaries, who introduced the foreign belief system of Catholicism.
The few Wyandot people who were not captured by the Iroquois and absorbed as adoptees into those communities moved with fellow refugees of the Tobacco Nation, north and west of Lake Huron. One group of these refugees subsequently occupied areas around Michilimackinac (Mackinac, Michigan), Green Bay (Wisconsin), the Ohio Valley, Detroit, Sandusky (Ohio), eastern Kansas, and eventually, Oklahoma.
The group that eventually settled in Oklahoma took the name Wyandot (Wyandotte). The name was derived from “Wendat,” their name for themselves in the seriously endangered Indigenous language, meaning “islanders” or “peninsula dwellers.” The word “Huron” was French and derogatorily referred to these people as “boarlike” or “unkempt.” Into the mid-2020s, the Wyandotte remained headquartered in Oklahoma, where they were committed to preserving their past for the benefit of future generations.
The other group of refugees (those not eventually finding a home in Oklahoma) traveled with Jesuit missionaries to the St. Lawrence Valley in the seventeenth century, establishing a village called Lorette near present-day Quebec City, Canada. Like their Oklahoma relatives, this group, known as the Huron-Wendat Nation, Huron-Wendat First Nation, or Nation Huronne-Wendat (the French name for the group), became somewhat assimilated into the surrounding culture by the twenty-first century but still maintained some traditional cultural practices and beliefs. Into the 2020s, the group's two First Nations reserves were located at Wendake, Quebec, but the group also had a land claim on the location of an earlier settlement closer to Quebec City.
The Wyandot in the US generally speak English, and the Huron-Wendat generally speak English and/or French, reflecting a certain degree of assimilation as well as the extinction of the Wyandot (Wendat) language following the death of its last Indigenous speaker in 1972. Despite the language's extinction, by the 2020s, communities in both the US and Canada had made efforts to revive the language by offering adult's and children's classes.
Bibliography
"About Wendat." CDFM Huron-Wendat, languewendat.com/en/revitalisation/a-propos-2. Accessed 25 Jan. 2025.
"Our History." Wyandotte Nation, wyandotte-nation.org/culture/our-history. Accessed 25 Jan. 2025.
Heidenreich, C.E., and Michelle Filice. "Wendat (Huron)." The Canadian Encyclopedia, 16 May 2024, www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/huron. Accessed 25 Jan. 2025.
"Wyandot History." Kansas City, Kansas Public Library, www.kckpl.org/kansas-collection/wyandot-history. Accessed 25 Jan. 2025.