Wyandot (Huron)

The Wyandot, also spelled Wyandotte, are an Iroquoian-speaking people who formed as a distinct nation around the Great Lakes during the mid-1600s from refugees of older nations, above all the Wendat, whom the French called Huron, and their neighbours the Petun. Pushed from Ontario to Michigan, Ohio, Kansas and finally Oklahoma, they are today represented by the federally recognised Wyandotte Nation, and they share a revived confederacy with the Wendat of Quebec.

In the early seventeenth century the Wendat, four allied nations, lived in Wendake, between Georgian Bay and Lake Simcoe in present-day Ontario. To the south-west lived the closely related Etionnontateronnon, "people of the hill", whom the French called Petun. Both lived in palisaded villages of bark longhouses, were organised in matrilineal clans and farmed maize, beans and squash. The name Wyandot comes from Waⁿdát, roughly "dwellers on the peninsula"; the French name Huron is thought to refer to a hairstyle that reminded them of a boar's head.

Armed with Dutch guns, the Haudenosaunee began large attacks on Wendat villages in 1647, and in 1649 the Wendat abandoned their homeland. Some went east to the St Lawrence near Quebec, where their descendants form today's Wendat Nation. Others joined the Petun, who were themselves attacked late in 1649. The survivors moved again and again, from Mackinac Island to Green Bay, the Black River and Lake Superior, before settling at Michilimackinac in 1671. Their leader Kondiaronk, a celebrated orator, helped bring about the Great Peace of Montreal in 1701 but died days before it was signed. That same year his people moved to the new French post at Detroit, and linguists suggest the Petun element shaped the emerging Wyandot language most strongly.

By the mid-eighteenth century some bands had settled around Sandusky Bay, where British traders first wrote their name as Wyandot. They fought for France in the French and Indian War, joined Pontiac's War in 1763 and backed Britain during the American Revolution. In the Northwest Indian War they fought alongside the Shawnee, Miami and others, defeating St Clair's army in 1791 before the confederacy lost at Fallen Timbers in 1794; their leader Tarhe signed the Treaty of Greenville in 1795. During the War of 1812, Roundhead, an ally of Tecumseh, led Wyandot warriors for Britain, while the Ohio bands under Tarhe stayed largely neutral.

The 1817 Treaty of Fort Meigs reduced the Ohio Wyandot to a reservation at Upper Sandusky, and in the 1840s most were removed west. With money from their Ohio lands they bought land from the Lenape at the meeting of the Kansas and Missouri rivers, now Wyandotte County, Kansas. There they set up schools and libraries, and Quindaro, a town founded on Wyandot land in 1856, became a stop on the Underground Railroad. Further removals to Indian Territory followed after the American Civil War.

In 1985 the US government agreed to pay $5.5 million to settle claims that the Wyandot had been underpaid for their Ohio lands in 1842. More than 4,000 Wyandot live in eastern Kansas and north-eastern Oklahoma, and the Wyandotte Nation is based in Wyandotte, Oklahoma. In 1999, bands from Quebec, Kansas, Oklahoma and Michigan met at Midland, Ontario, in their ancestral homeland and re-established the Wendat Confederacy. The last native speaker of Wyandot died in 1972, but the Wyandotte Nation now teaches it as a second language, drawing on a grammar and dictionary rebuilt from early twentieth-century transcriptions.

Our 1500 map draws an approximate territory labelled Huron, which stands for the Wendat homeland from which the Wyandot later emerged, not for the Wyandot nation itself. The Lenape, the Cherokee and the Crow are among the other peoples drawn on that map.