“Along the shores of Georgian Bay, where forest meets shining water, the spirit of the Wendat still whispers through Ontario, reminding us that a people may be scattered by history, yet never separated from the land that remembers their footsteps.” – MJ Martin
Introduction
With all of the political rhetoric going on about renaming Lake Ontario, the point that really caught my attention was the origin of the name for Lake Ontario. It came from over 400 years ago long before Canada and the United States even existed.
The name Lake Ontario is Indigenous in origin.
The word Ontario comes from an Iroquoian-language name associated with the lake. The Government of Ontario traces it to kanadario, meaning “sparkling water.” Other historical interpretations translate related Iroquoian forms as “beautiful lake” or “great lake.”
French explorers adopted the Indigenous name during the 1600s, and it gradually appeared on European maps. Eventually, the lake gave its name to the Province of Ontario when the province was created in 1867.
So, unlike Lake Erie, Lake Huron and Lake Michigan, the name Ontario is essentially a description of the water itself:
Ontario = the sparkling or beautiful waters.
Given the Wendat presence around southern Ontario before European settlement, the name belongs to the broader Iroquoian linguistic world in which the Wendat also lived, although it should not simply be described as exclusively a Wendat word.
The Wendat are a part of the Iroquois First Nation.
My childhood memories vividly recall the stories of the Wendat people taught to me by the nuns and priests at my strict Catholic grade school.
Now, with the unavoidable political rhetoric on every media outlet, I decided I needed to learn all over again about the amazing Wendat First Nation.
Who are the Wendat People?
To understand the early history of Ontario, it is impossible to ignore the Wendat Nation. Long before Midland, Penetanguishene, Barrie or Toronto existed, the Wendat occupied an organized agricultural homeland centred between Lake Simcoe and Georgian Bay. The French later called this country Huronia. To the Wendat, it was Wendake.
The Wendat were not a wandering population living in temporary camps. They were an Iroquoian-speaking, matrilineal people who built substantial villages, cultivated extensive fields, maintained trading networks across the Great Lakes and governed themselves through clans, councils and a confederacy of several nations. Their civilization around present-day Midland was one of the largest and most sophisticated Indigenous societies encountered by the French in seventeenth-century Canada.
A Wendat Country Around Midland
By the beginning of the seventeenth century, the Wendat homeland was concentrated principally north and west of Lake Simcoe and south and east of Georgian Bay. The Penetanguishene Peninsula and the countryside surrounding today’s Midland were therefore not peripheral parts of Wendat territory. They were at its heart. Trails connected villages throughout the region, while rivers and Georgian Bay provided transportation routes linking the Wendat with neighbouring peoples and distant trading partners.
The countryside would have looked very different from today’s forested cottage country. Around Wendat villages were substantial clearings and agricultural fields. Corn, beans and squash were major crops, supplemented by fishing, hunting and gathering. Agriculture produced enough food to support relatively large populations living together in permanent or semi-permanent communities.
Wendat homes were longhouses, large wood-framed structures covered primarily with bark. Several related families could live within one longhouse, with fires running along its central corridor. A village might contain many longhouses and could be protected by wooden palisades.
The architecture reflected the society itself. Wendat communities were matrilineal, meaning family and clan relationships followed the mother’s line. Women played particularly important roles in agriculture, households and the continuity of clans.
Traders of the Great Lakes
Geography made the Wendat exceptionally important traders.
Imagine Georgian Bay as part of a seventeenth-century transportation highway rather than a recreational lake. Canoe routes extended west into the Great Lakes and east toward the Ottawa and St. Lawrence river systems. The Wendat occupied a strategic position between Indigenous nations of the interior and French traders along the St. Lawrence.
When the French entered this world, they did not create the trading network. They plugged themselves into one that already existed.
The Wendat became important commercial intermediaries, moving furs and other goods through an enormous Indigenous economic network. The Government of Canada describes them as playing a vital middleman role in transferring furs from Great Lakes nations toward Quebec.
Champlain Arrives
Samuel de Champlain entered Wendat country in 1615. From the French perspective, his journey was an exploration into a new land. From the Wendat perspective, however, Champlain had arrived in somebody else’s country, complete with communities, governments, alliances and trade routes.
French missionaries followed.
The relationship between the Wendat and French therefore became simultaneously commercial, military, diplomatic and religious. These different interests would profoundly affect both societies.
Sainte-Marie Among the Hurons
One of the most visible remnants of this history stands just outside modern Midland.
In 1639, French Jesuits and workers constructed Sainte-Marie among the Hurons on the Wye River. It became the headquarters of the Jesuit mission to the Wendat.
It was effectively a small European enclave inside Wendake, containing residences, workshops, a church, defensive structures and facilities for Indigenous visitors. By 1648, 66 Frenchmen were living there. Parks Canada identifies Sainte-Marie as the earliest major French community in what is now Ontario.
It would exist for only ten years.
Disease Changes Wendake
European contact brought more than trade goods and missionaries. It also brought infectious diseases to which Indigenous populations had little previous exposure.
Epidemics swept through Wendat communities during the 1630s and 1640s, causing enormous mortality. Disease did more than kill individuals. Imagine suddenly removing a substantial portion of the farmers, leaders, parents, diplomats, hunters and knowledge-holders from a society within only a few years.
The Wendat population and their ability to defend their communities were greatly weakened. Religious disputes surrounding the missionaries and conversion to Christianity created additional tensions.
The Destruction of Wendake
At the same time, warfare intensified between the Wendat and the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, whose member nations were themselves deeply involved in changing trade, territorial and military relationships created by European colonization.
The decisive crisis arrived in 1648 and 1649.
In 1648, the Wendat village associated with the Jesuit mission of Saint-Joseph was attacked. Hundreds were killed or captured. In March 1649, a large Haudenosaunee force attacked Saint-Ignace and Saint-Louis, near present-day Midland and Victoria Harbour. Jesuit missionaries Jean de Brébeuf and Gabriel Lalemant were captured and killed during these attacks.
But the greater tragedy was the destruction and dispersal of entire Wendat communities.
People abandoned villages, burned settlements and fled. Some Wendat joined neighbouring Indigenous nations. Some were incorporated into Haudenosaunee communities. Others moved westward.
Sainte-Marie itself could no longer be defended. On June 14, 1649, the Jesuits burned the mission rather than allow it to fall into enemy hands.
The Flight to Christian Island
A group of surviving Wendat and French missionaries crossed Georgian Bay to Christian Island, then called St. Joseph Island.
The refuge became a catastrophe.
Thousands of displaced people had suddenly been concentrated on an island unable to produce sufficient food. During the winter of 1649–1650, hunger, disease and continuing military pressure caused terrible suffering and hundreds of deaths.
In June 1650, several hundred Wendat accompanied the Jesuits east toward Quebec. Their descendants eventually established themselves at Wendake, near Quebec City, which remains the principal Wendat community in Canada today. Other survivors migrated westward and became ancestors of Wendat and Wyandot communities elsewhere in North America.
The Wendat Did Not Disappear
It would be a serious historical error to say the Wendat civilization simply vanished in 1649.
Their political geography changed. The people survived.
Today’s Wendat Nation has more than 5,200 citizens, although only about 1,500 live at Wendake. The Nation describes itself as carrying a history rooted across the St. Lawrence Valley and Great Lakes region.
There is no present-day Wendat reserve centred around Midland, but the Nation maintains profound ancestral connections with Ontario.
That makes the landscape around Midland extraordinary. A person driving Highway 12, boating on Georgian Bay or visiting Penetanguishene is travelling through what was once the centre of an Indigenous country.
Sainte-Marie among the Hurons tells an important French story, but the larger story surrounding it is Wendat. The French mission existed for ten years. Wendat history on this land stretches back many centuries, and the Wendat Nation continues today.
The quiet shoreline of Georgian Bay therefore conceals one of the most consequential chapters in Canadian history: the rise of a powerful agricultural and trading civilization, its encounter with Europe, the devastating convergence of epidemic disease and warfare, its dispersal from the Midland region, and ultimately its remarkable survival as a people.
About the Author:
Michael Martin is the Vice President of Technology with Metercor Inc., a Smart Meter, IoT, and Smart City systems integrator based in Canada. He has more than 40 years of experience in systems design for applications that use broadband networks, optical fibre, wireless, and digital communications technologies. He is a business and technology consultant. He was a senior executive consultant for 15 years with IBM, where he worked in the GBS Global Center of Competency for Energy and Utilities and the GTS Global Center of Excellence for Energy and Utilities. He is a founding partner and President of MICAN Communications and before that was President of Comlink Systems Limited and Ensat Broadcast Services, Inc., both divisions of Cygnal Technologies Corporation (CYN: TSX).
Martin served on the Board of Directors for TeraGo Inc (TGO: TSX) and on the Board of Directors for Avante Logixx Inc. (XX: TSX.V). He has served as a Member, SCC ISO-IEC JTC 1/SC-41 – Internet of Things and related technologies, ISO – International Organization for Standardization, and as a member of the NIST SP 500-325 Fog Computing Conceptual Model, National Institute of Standards and Technology. He served on the Board of Governors of the University of Ontario Institute of Technology (UOIT) [now Ontario Tech University] and on the Board of Advisers of five different Colleges in Ontario – Centennial College, Humber College, George Brown College, Durham College, Ryerson Polytechnic University [now Toronto Metropolitan University]. For 16 years he served on the Board of the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE), Toronto Section.
He holds three master’s degrees – in business (MBA), communication (MA), and education (MEd). As well, he has three undergraduate diplomas and seven major certifications in business, computer programming, internetworking, project management, media, photography, and communication technology. He has completed over 80 next generation MOOC (Massive Open Online Courses) [aka Micro Learning] continuous education programs in a wide variety of topics, including: Economics, Python Programming, Internet of Things, Cloud, Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive systems, Blockchain, Agile, Power BI, Big Data, Design Thinking, Security, Indigenous Canada awareness, and more.
Martin is a volunteer, a photographer, a learner, a technologist, a philosophizer, and a romantic optimist.