Brothers at War: The Huron and the Iroquois
They were kin—of a kind. The Wendat, whom the French called the Huron, and the Iroquois, or Haudenosaunee, who would form one of the most famous Indigenous confederacies in history, sprang from the same linguistic and cultural root. Both spoke dialects of the Iroquoian language family. Both lived in palisaded villages, cultivated the “Three Sisters” of maize, beans, and squash, and practiced matrilineal clan systems. Their societies were organized, spiritual, and politically adept. And yet, like Cain and Abel, their story is one not of unity, but of tragic division.
In the thick forests of the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence region, long before the French dropped anchor, the Wendat and the Haudenosaunee were neighbours—sometimes trading partners, sometimes rivals. “They were more alike than different,” noted Bruce Trigger, the foremost scholar of Huron history. “But their similarities bred competition as much as kinship.” Their villages were dense, teeming with people, their governments based on councils and consensus. Women held enormous social power, selecting chiefs and tending to property and agriculture. But geography and geopolitics would drive a wedge between these mirror nations.
The Wendat Confederacy—comprising four major nations (Attignawantan, Attigneenongnahac, Arendarhonon, and Tahontaenrat)—sat north of Lake Ontario, around the fertile fields of what is now southern Ontario. The Iroquois Confederacy, meanwhile, took root in present-day upstate New York. Formed under the Great Law of Peace, the Haudenosaunee Confederacy was an alliance of five (later six) nations: the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca. As Pierre Berton might have put it, they were “like two rival trading companies who began as family businesses and ended in corporate war.”
The Iroquois constitution, the Great Law of Peace, is often regarded as a model of Indigenous diplomacy and statecraft. It codified unity, balance, and deliberation—a council of clans led by hereditary sachems, or peace chiefs, chosen by clan mothers. But it applied only to those within the Confederacy. The Wendat were outsiders, despite their shared heritage. To the Iroquois, the Wendat were not enemies by default—but nor were they brothers-in-law under the Tree of Peace.
To the Huron, the Iroquois Confederacy represented a powerful, sometimes threatening presence. There was admiration, even mimicry—the Wendat too had their own confederacy, their own councils and rituals. But there was no invitation into the Iroquois alliance. Instead, the two groups jostled for control of trade networks, particularly in fur. “The fur trade,” writes Olive Patricia Dickason, “was not merely about pelts—it was about survival, prestige, and political leverage.”
By the early 1600s, the arrival of the French inflamed these simmering tensions. The Wendat quickly allied themselves with the French, providing access to pelts and acting as intermediaries with more distant nations. In return, they received iron tools, guns, and most significantly—Jesuit missionaries. To the Iroquois, this was betrayal. The Wendat were now partners with an alien power, armed and backed by a foreign god. The Iroquois, meanwhile, turned toward the Dutch and later the English, acquiring firearms and seeking to control the flow of furs to Albany.
Then came war. Not an impulsive skirmish, but a cold, calculated campaign of eradication. In the 1640s, the Iroquois launched a series of brutal assaults on Wendat villages. They used new muskets, superior logistics, and battle-hardened warriors. The attacks were systematic—burning villages, killing or absorbing populations, and targeting the very heart of Huron society: its cohesion. Jesuit records, vivid and horrified, describe the destruction in apocalyptic terms. “The nation is in ruins,” wrote Father Paul Ragueneau. “We have seen towns erased in a single night.”
What brought the two nations—so similar in blood and culture—into such a fatal conflict? Part of the answer lies in pressure. The Iroquois faced shrinking hunting grounds, growing populations, and a ravenous demand for pelts from their Dutch allies. “The Mourning Wars,” as some historians call them, were also spiritual—meant to replace lost kin through adoption. But the attack on the Wendat went further. It was elimination, not mere substitution.
By 1649, the Wendat Confederacy was shattered. Some survivors fled to the Jesuit mission of Sainte-Marie among the Hurons. Others were absorbed by the Iroquois. A few migrated west and north, forming new communities, including the Wyandot in the Ohio Valley. “Their nation was destroyed,” Trigger writes, “but their identity persisted.”
This is the tragedy of the Huron-Iroquois relationship: a story of shared roots, diverging paths, and fatal misalignment. Had they formed a single alliance, history might have turned differently. But as Berton might have framed it, “They stood at a fork in the forest—and chose different trails, never to meet again.”
References:
- Trigger, Bruce G. The Children of Aataentsic: A History of the Huron People to 1660. McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1976.
- Dickason, Olive Patricia. Canada’s First Nations: A History of Founding Peoples from Earliest Times. Oxford University Press, 2009.
- Ragueneau, Paul. Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents, Vol. 34. Reuben Gold Thwaites (ed.), The Burrows Brothers Company, 1899.
- Richter, Daniel K. The Ordeal of the Longhouse: The Peoples of the Iroquois League in the Era of European Colonization. University of North Carolina Press, 1992.
- Jennings, Francis. The Ambiguous Iroquois Empire. Norton, 1984.
- Tooker, Elisabeth. The Iroquois Ceremonial of Midwinter. Syracuse University Press, 1970.
- Snow, Dean R. The Iroquois. Blackwell Publishing, 1994.
