Wyandot Erotic

The Wyandot are what came out of the wreckage of the Wendat confederacy. In 1649 the Haudenosaunee broke the Wendat and their Petun neighbors in what is now southern Ontario and scattered the survivors. Some fled east to the walls of Quebec, where their descendants still live at Wendake. Others went west to Michilimackinac, then to the new French post at Detroit in 1701, then down into the Ohio Country, where the name Wyandot (from Wendat, roughly meaning islanders) stuck. The defining fact is that they stayed a people through all of it.

The language is Northern Iroquoian, a close relative of Wendat and a more distant cousin of Mohawk and Seneca. Its last fluent speakers died in the twentieth century, and revival work in Oklahoma and Quebec is rebuilding it from Marius Barbeau's 1911 recordings and Jesuit-era dictionaries. Society is matrilineal, organized in clans (Big Turtle, Deer, Bear, Wolf, Porcupine and others) that governed marriage and chieftainship. In the Ohio years the Wyandot were the acknowledged grandfathers of the regional council and keepers of its fire, a seniority the Shawnee, Delaware and Ottawa recognized even though the Wyandot were few. Tarhe signed the Treaty of Greenville in 1795 and held the tribe to the American side in 1812 while Roundhead's faction fought beside Tecumseh.

Religion has been layered on for centuries. Jesuit Catholicism took root before the dispersal and remains the majority faith at Wendake. In Ohio, John Stewart, a free Black Methodist preacher, opened the first Methodist mission to Native Americans at Upper Sandusky in 1816, and Methodism became the Wyandot's own. Beneath both sits the older ceremonial calendar: the Green Corn feast, and the memory of the Feast of the Dead, the great reburial by which the Wendat once gathered their dead into common ossuaries.

They were the last tribe removed from Ohio, in 1843, to the fork of the Kansas and Missouri rivers where Kansas City now stands. An 1855 treaty dissolved the tribe into citizens. Those who refused moved to Indian Territory and became the Wyandotte Nation of Oklahoma. In 1909 Lyda Conley, defending the Huron Indian Cemetery in Kansas City from sale, became the first Native American woman to argue before the US Supreme Court, having first barricaded the graveyard with a shotgun. Today four communities carry the name: the Wyandotte Nation in Oklahoma, the Wyandot Nation of Kansas, the Wyandot of Anderdon on the Detroit River, and the Huron-Wendat at Wendake. In 1999 they re-formed the Wendat Confederacy, three and a half centuries after it was supposed to have ended.