Naming indigenous peoples in North American has been an expression of colonial power. From the time of early contact, this power has almost completely monopolized the representation of the people in all media: conversations on the street, official records, place names on maps, history and other school books, television and movies.

These outsider-imposed names (exonyms) are not the names that the various peoples knew themselves by in their own language (autonyms).��The names chosen colonially and reproduced over and over frequently come from another language.��They can come from the colonial power itself or from another indigenous group with whom the colonizer was in contact first —��often, at the time that the group whose word was chosen was not in a good relationship with the people being named. The name would end up as an entrenched insult.

In the early 17th��century, the French helped set the pattern by ignoring the autonym Wendat (elsewhere Wyandot or Wyandotte), replacing it with the now well-known Huron. An early story of its origin comes from the Jesuit Father Jérôme Lalemant, in 1639:

“Arriving at the French settlement, some Sailor or Soldier seeing for the first time this species of barbarians, some of whom wore their hair in ridges — a ridge of hair one or two fingers wide appearing upon the middle of their heads, and on either side the same amount being shaved off, then another ridge of hair; others having one side of the head shaved clean, and the other side adorned with hair hanging to their shoulders-this fashion of wearing the hair making their heads look like those of boar [hures], led him to call these barbarians ‘Hurons.’ And this is the name that has clung to them ever since.”

This hairstyle is often referred to today as a mohawk. As historical geographer has duly noted, “an alternative explanation of the name comes from Old French, meaning a ‘ruffian,’ ‘unkempt person,’ ‘knave,’ or ‘lout.’” This name has been applied not just to the people, but to a Great Lake in Ontario County, city streets, schools and more.

What’s In a Name?

In those times, the Wendat fought a people known throughout contact history as the Mohawk. The name comes from a term used in the early 17th century by the Narragansett living in southern New England to the east of the people so named.��This people spoke an unrelated language, one that belonged to the Algonquian family. A major grammatical distinction made in Algonquian languages is between subjects and objects that are animate versus inanimate.

The Narragansett word was written as mohowawog (the -wog is an animate plural) meaning “they eat animate things.”��This is usually interpreted as calling the Mohawk cannibals.��But the name could refer to apples, trees or even bark, as both are deemed animate in their grammatical system. The Mohawk called the Narragansett people and their Algonquian neighbors Adirondack, meaning “they eat trees.” Fortunately, the name went to the mountains, not the people.

The name Mohawk has been given to a major river in New York, along with the surrounding valley and county.��As with the Huron, streets and schools also bear this name. The Mohawk autonym is �����Ծ����’k���á:�첹 or �Ҳ��Բ���’g���:����ˀ, meaning “people of �����Ծ����’k�� or �Ҳ��Բ��’g��,”��literally meaning “at the flint.”��It refers to what was their principal community in the 17th��century.��The -��á:�첹– or -ha:gaˀ– is an suffix for “people of.”

North of the Kanienkehaka and east of the Wendat are people whose neighbors, the Mikmaq, called Malecite or Maliseet. Their two languages are closely related Algonquian languages.��The word is typically translated as a negative comment about their speech, that it is “broken,” “lazy,” “bad” or more neutrally “different.”��Their own name for themselves refers to the Saint John River central to their territory in New Brunswick and Maine: Wolastoqiyik, “people of the Wolastoq or beautiful river.”

If you swing to Canada, back to the 18th��century and to the Northwest Territories, you will see a lake known as Great Slave Lake. It is the deepest lake (at maximum depth of 2,014 feet) in North America and the 10th��largest lake in the world.��Traditionally, Dene-speaking people known to themselves as Dene Tha —��who are also known as Slave or Slavey —��inhabited the area.��This springs from a name that came from the Algonquian-speaking Cree.

During a period in the 18th��century, the Cree had a weapons advantage over the Dene Tha and related peoples because they were earlier intensively involved with fur trade companies who supplied them with guns.��This resulted in the Cree labeling the Dene Tha Awokanak, which typically refers to a domesticated animal, but could be extended to captured prisoners.��The French traders called the lake that was at the center of their territory the Grand lac des Esclaves.

Move down south to the American southwest and you will encounter another Dene people called by a negative term, Apache. The Spanish encountered them late in the 16th��century.��They had a name imposed on them from their Zuni neighbors, who spoke an unrelated language. It came from their word meaning “enemy.” Their own term for themselves is Dine (people).

Undoing the Colonial

Like the name Apache, one learns the word Comanche early in life, in the cowboys-and-Indians films that you would regularly watch on Saturday afternoons.��That word comes from the distantly related language of Ute, and means “enemy” or “stranger.” This certainly fit with the role they often played in the popular shows. Their autonym is Nᵾmᵾnᵾᵾ — “people.” The word is hard for English speakers to say as the vowels are front rounded.��It is rather like saying “oo” with your lips sticking out and in a round shape.

The Anishinaabe people (usually known by imposed names such as Ojibwa, Chippewa, Saulteaux and Algonquin) traditionally spoke of people who did not speak an Algonquian language as Naadawe, which means “snake.”��Iroquoian people such as the Kanienkehaka (Mohawk) would be called that.��The Saulteaux (named by the French because some had moved west from the Sault Ste Marie area of northwestern Ontario) referred to certain neighbors speaking a different language as Naadawensiw (with -ag added for the animate plural), which added a diminutive and meant “little snakes.” This was recorded by a French writer as Nadaouessioux, from which the name for the people was taken from the last five letters Sioux.

The people themselves have names such as Dakota, Lakota and Nakota, all of which refer to people who are “friends, allies” in different dialects.��At least in this case two states were given the first of these names.

How do you undo or disrupt the colonial here?��First, as they say in 12-step programs, you have to recognize that there is a problem.��This article is directed towards that end.��Secondly, the history of the names should be made available to teachers and writers of educational textbooks.��The rest is up to you, the reader.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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I work with reviving an indigenous language in the two dialects known as Wendat and Wyandot.��It is related to the six languages of the Haudenosaunee or Iroquois (Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, Seneca and Tuscarora) and Cherokee.��They are descendants of the peoples that the French first named the Huron and Petun early in the 17th century.��Their homeland was in southern Ontario, close to Georgian Bay in Lake Huron, one of the Great Lakes on the Canada-US border.��

The people were driven out of this homeland in the mid-17th century.��The Wendat went east to the edges of the city of Quebec, which is where they live now.��The people called Wyandot were forced to make several major moves.��They went to live in the Detroit area in the early 18th century, later to Ohio, then Kansas and to Oklahoma in 1867.��There are Wyandot communities still in Michigan, Kansas and Oklahoma.��I am the tribal linguist for the people who call themselves the Wyandotte of Oklahoma.

My main reason for working with the language is so people can reconnect with the language and traditional culture of their ancestors.��But over the last few years, I have discovered another important reason.��The language can also teach people about an alternative view of life at a time when such a view can certainly help the world today.

A good part of this alternative view can be termed, “lessening or altering of hierarchy.”��When the French came to Wendat country in the 17^th century, they had many terms of hierarchy that could not easily or readily be translated into the language of the people:

Political hierarchy: lord, master, commander, baron, duke, prince or king

Religious hierarchy: bishop, archbishop, cardinal or pope

During the 17th��century, the first bishop that the Wendat encountered was François de Montmorency Laval, the first bishop of New France.��He was adopted into the Bear Clan and given the respected name Harihwawayi,��meaning: “He holds a matter, an affair.”��The pope came to be called Harihwawayiywannen, meaning: “He is the large, great one who holds a matter, affair.”

When I was translating the last recorded traditional stories of the Wyandot, I came across a character named Kurakuwah.��He was an influential man who in one story was constantly being tricked by a Wyandot trickster.��I did not at first recognize the name as being a Wyandot one.��Then, while researching something else, I discovered that people speaking a related language, Mohawk, used to refer to the governor of Massachusetts as Kora.��Then I saw that the name for the king of England was Korakowah.��The��kowah is the Mohawk equivalent of the Wyandot ywannen, so the name means “big Kora.”��Wyandot has a “u” where Mohawk has an “o.”��So, the person constantly being fooled by the Wyandot trickster was the namesake of the king of England.

Not only were strict positions of hierarchy absent from the language, but there were no terms in the language for “command,” “order” or “obey.”��You can “put your word” or “be with someone’s word.”��The verb meaning “to tell” refers to telling a story or informing someone, not telling that person what to do.

There are no ways of saying “best” or “worst.”��When I discovered this, I quite quickly became aware of how often English speakers use these terms, especially “best,” and how often they are misleading or inaccurate ways of seeing things. Think, for example, of misleading questions such as:��“Who was the best writer in the English language?” or the very Canadian argued-in-a-bar question, “Who was the best hockey player?”��The answer I favor for these questions is a simple: “No one, but the following were or are very good.” You will notice that I avoided saying “the best.”��If you are on Facebook, think of how often you read the inaccurate statement, “the best X ever.”

Now we tend to think of the opposites “rich” and “poor” as a hierarchy of material goods.��It doesn’t work that way with Wendat and Wyandot.��The term that would come to be used for the material rich referred primarily to the spiritually rich.��Hondaki means, “they are spirits or are linked with spirits.”��Add the ywannen referred to above and you have hondakiywannen,��which means, “they are or have large spirits.” This is the term that came to be used by the Jesuit missionaries as meaning, “they are rich.” ��

Just in case you think that the ywannen was always a positive attribution, there was the term yandetaraywannen��that��referred to someone who was pompous or arrogant.��The literal meaning is, “‘to be a big or large pumpkin.”

For “poor” there is a verb root esa that for years I translated as, “to be in a poor state” or “to be poor.”��It took my translating traditional stories to realize that a significant use of this verb was having it mean “to be family poor” because of meanings such as the following:

Huwesandih: He is in a family poor state.��He is a widower.

Uwesandih: She is family poor, a widow.

Hotiesandi: They are in a family poor state, are orphans.

In terms of hierarchy and in a number of other key terms in speaking of human life, Wendat and Wyandot present an alternative way of thinking and speaking that should be preserved and served as a teacher.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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The Wendat (Huron) are an Aboriginal people whose descendants live in four communities across North America – in Quebec, Michigan, Kansas and Oklahoma – and separately across the continent. Their ancestors of the 17^th century became well-known in Europe because of the writings of Jesuit missionaries who lived with them.

Obviously, a Catholic order of men sworn to celibacy might not seem the best source for talking about the sex life of an entire people, but the Jesuit drive for encyclopedic knowledge about their mission charges has made them a good source on this topic, nonetheless.

The Wendat formed a loose confederacy of four smaller nations or tribes: the Bear, Cord, Rock and Deer. They were a horticultural people, growing corn, beans and squash, which probably made up over two-thirds of their diet, the rest comprising fish, fruit and meat, fundamentally in that order. Most of the work of their horticulture — the planting, weeding, harvesting and grinding — was done by women. The most important social unit was the clan, a unit determined matrilineally. You belonged to the clan of your mother, not your father.

People who belonged to your clan were considered related to you. People of your own generation you would address as “brother” or “sister.” That meant it was considered incest to have sex with or marry them. In a detailed study of the 18^th century Wyandot, one of the descendent groups of the Wendat and their linguistically and culturally closely related cousins, the Etionnontateronnon (people of where there is a mountain) – or Petun, as the French called them – there were no marriages between people of the same clan, despite the fact that they typically numbered between 500-600 people during the 18^th century. To use a technical term, the people were still exogamous (i.e. marrying outside the clan).

A Woman’s Choice

Adultery happened (there was a Wendat term for it), but the person would have to be of a different clan. It must have been difficult to find the right place, as each house belonged to a particular clan, and could have between eight to 70 people sleeping there. The Wendat were a trading people, the men often canoeing a long distance to visit long established trading partners of other nations. They might have had marital partners there as well, as that would strengthen the social bonds between trading partners and nations. Early European recorders speak of such relationships in terms of a male perspective, not even considering that young women might have had decision-making authority in these matters. At the time, Aboriginal women generally had more say in mate-choosing — and disposing — than did their European sisters.

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Wendat attitudes toward�� were certainly much more open and free than were the attitudes to which the French coming over to Canada (then called New France) were accustomed. Nothing recorded in writing illustrates this better than a sexual ceremony of the Wendat.

Brother Gabriel Sagard, a member of the Recollect order, not a Jesuit, observed during his stay with the Wendat in 1623-24 a significant healing ceremonial event in the culture:

“In the Huron country there are also assemblies of all the girls in a town at a sick woman’s couch, either at her request according to an imagination [vision] or dream she may have had, or by order of the Oki [shaman] for her health and recovery. When the girls are thus assembled they are all asked, one after another, which of the young men of the town they would like to sleep with them the next night. Each names one, and these are immediately notified by the masters of the ceremony and all come in the evening to sleep with those who have chosen them, in the presence of the sick woman, from one end of the lodge to the other, and they pass the whole night thus, while the two chiefs at the two ends of the house sing and rattle their tortoise-shells from evening till the following morning, when the ceremony is concluded.”

It is important to note that it was the young women that did the choosing, not the young men. This reflects the importance and respect given to women in Wendat culture.

“Be Enveloped in Sex For Me”

But Sagard did not speak of the name of this ceremony. The first one to do so was Jesuit Father Jerome Lalemant, writing in 1639. He wrote of an old man, Taorhenche, who was dying. He wished (through riddles that people had to guess) for a White Dog Ceremony, sufficient cornmeal to feed the people involved in the festivities, other unnamed ceremonies. At the end there was to be:

“The ceremony of the ‘andacwander,’ a mating of men with girls, which is made at the end of the feast. He specified that there should be 12 girls, and a thirteenth for himself.

“The answer being brought to the council, he was furnished immediately with what could be given at once, and this from the liberality and voluntary contributions of individuals who were present there and heard the matter mentioned, – these peoples glorying, on such occasions, in despoiling themselves of the most precious things they have. Afterward, the Captains went through the streets and public places, and through the cabins, announcing in a loud voice the desires of the sick man, and exhorting people to satisfy them promptly.

“They are not content to go on this errand once, – they repeat it three or four times, using such terms and accents that, indeed, one would think that the welfare of the whole country was at stake. Meanwhile, they take care to note the names of the girls and men who present themselves to carry out the principal desire of the sick man; and in the assembly of the feast these are named aloud, after which follow the congratulations of all those present, and the best pieces … then ensue the thanks of the sick man for the health that has been restored to him, professing himself entirely cured by this remedy.”

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Unfortunately, the man was not cured in this context, but he died knowing he had the significant social support of his community.

The name of the ceremony was endakwandet, which literally means “they (indefinite) are enveloped in sex.” If you wished for the ceremony, you would say “tayendakwandeten” – be enveloped in sex for me. The Jesuit fought to suppress this custom. By 1649, when the Wendat were on the brink of being driven out of their traditional territory, the most Christian of the communities refused to hold this ceremony.

It speaks of several aspects of traditional Wendat culture. It seems to demonstrate that their publicly-articulated attitude toward sex was one that it was something to celebrate, not constrain. And it suggests that female sexuality was something thought natural, not something to be controlled. The Wendat language had no terms for “innocence” or “guilt,” so did not have those cultural concepts to condemn female sexuality.

This was an Aboriginal society at the time of first contact. This is before white male fur traders sought compliant women among the people; before gallons of alcohol were��poured into the fur trade; before the Indian Act gave men power and took it away from women; before colonial oppression and poverty turned the Algonquian (language family) word “squaw” meaning “female” or “woman” took on the negative connotations of “cheap brown whore”; before residential schools taught Aboriginal peoples the meaning of sexual abuse.

More recently, Aboriginal women have been sexual targets for Canadian serial killers John Martin Crawford and Robert Pickton. They are the most likely women in Canada to be sexually assaulted, murdered and to disappear. Fortunately, women such as those who initiated are fighting for a return to the respect traditionally received by Aboriginal women, a respect readily seen in the 17^th century culture of the Wendat.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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