Erie people
Whittlesey tradition[1] )
possibly Whittlesey tradition[1] (including those of ancestral descent) | |
Regions with significant populations | |
---|---|
New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio | |
Languages | |
Erie language | |
Religion | |
Indigenous |
The Erie people were
Their villages were burned as a lesson to those who dared oppose the Iroquois. This destroyed their stored maize and other foods, added to their loss of life, and threatened their future, as they had no way to survive the winter. The attacks likely forced their emigration. The Iroquois League was known for adopting captives and refugees into their tribes. The surviving Erie are believed to have been largely absorbed by other Iroquoian tribes, particularly families of the Seneca, the westernmost of the Five Nations. Susquehannock families may also have adopted some Erie, as the tribes had shared the hunting grounds of the Allegheny Plateau and Amerindian paths that passed through the gaps of the Allegheny. The members of remnant tribes living among the Iroquois gradually assimilated to the majority cultures, losing their independent tribal identities.[4]
The Erie were also called the Chat ("Cat" in French) or "Long Tail" (referring, possibly, to the raccoon tails worn on clothing). Like other Iroquoian peoples, they lived in multifamily
Language
The Erie spoke the Erie language, an unattested Iroquoian language said to have been similar to Wyandot.
Name
The Erie people were also known as the Eriechronon, Yenresh, Erielhonan, Eriez, Nation du Chat, and Riquéronon.
As to the Etymology of the name- in Native American cultures across the Eastern Woodlands, the terms cat & long tail tend to be references to a mythological creature which, depending on the tribe and time period is described as/ rendered as either a giant bobcat with a human face and a long tail, a sea serpent with deer antlers or some kind of dragon like entity. Iroquoian names associated with this creature in English include Blue Panther, Underwater Panther, Blue Snake, Horned Serpent, Comet Lion, etc. One of the various actual Iroquois names for this creatures is given as Oniare,[5] which might be the closest we can get to Erie. Geh is Iroquoian for "of the" & ronon is Iroquoian for "people" or "nation."[6]
Territory
The known boundaries of Erie lands extended from the Allegheny River to the shores of Lake Erie. They were once believed, due to a misidentification of villages by early French explorers mapping the Great Lakes, to control all the land from northwestern Pennsylvania to about Sandusky, Ohio, but archaeologists have now attributed the western half of that to another culture referred to as the Whittlesey's, who were likely an Algonquian people.[7]
A site once thought to be Erie in Conneaut, Ohio, is attributed to Whittlesey culture, who surrounded their villages with earthen embankments instead of wooden palisades and lived in longhouses, rather than wigwams, by the time of European contact. However, a second village on the east side of the river likely had been an Erie settlement.[8] Another Erie settlement was discovered in Windsor, Ohio, at the southwestern corner of Ashtabula County, which is two river valleys further west than the sites at Conneaut.[9] No significant settlement remains from prior to the Beaver Wars was ever documented in Trumbull or Mahoning Counties, leaving the exact border between the two peoples in question.
Villages
The names of only some villages have survived, and those include Kentaientonga (Gentaguehronon, Gentaienton, Gentaguetehronnon), Honniasont (Black Minqua, Honniasontkeronon, Oniassontke), and Rigué (Arrigahaga, Rigueronnon, Rique, Riquehronnon).[10]
At the time the Erie existed, their immediate neighbors included the
History
Precontact
While
Haudenosaunee
The editors of New American Heritage state the various confederacies of Iroquoian tribes migrated from south to the Great Lakes regions and in between well before pre-Columbian times. Conversely, others such as the editors of the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica suggest the tribes originated in what became Algonkian territories along the Saint Lawrence and moved west and south when the Algonquian tribes moved north up the coast and spread west.
Post-contact
By the time of European contact, Algonquian and Iroquoian tribes traded and competed with each other and spent most years in uneasy peace. Separation between tribes living in wilderness ensured contacts were mainly small affairs before the use of firearms tipped the balance of warfare to enhance the killing ability of a people who could not outrun a bullet, a limitation which existed before guns and the ability to kill at range. Rivalries and habitual competition among American Indians tribes for resources (especially
The Erie encroached on territory that other tribes considered theirs.
Consequently, in 1654 the whole Iroquois Confederacy went to war against the Erie and neighboring tribes such as the
Historically the
Because the Erie were located further from the coastal areas of early European exploration, they had little direct contact with Europeans. Only the
After the Haudenosaunee routed the Erie in 1654 and 1656, the group dispersed.
See also
- Mingo
- Neutral Nation
- Wenrohronon
- Shawnee
- Susquehannock people
Notes
- ^ In Virginia, visiting Susquehannocks were described by an admiring Captain John Smith. Further, Tuscarora and Cherokee lived in the south from before Jamestown was founded, and the powerful Susquehanna had a lock on the Susquehanna basin into the upper Chesapeake Bay shores, probably into the northern Shenandoah Valley.
- ^ Beaver Wars are usually blamed upon the Iroquois who were believed to have a joint population dwarfed by surrounding tribes.
- ^ If the Erie tribe had used poison on their arrows, they would have been the only tribe in North America to do so.[17]
Footnotes
- ^ a b "Chapter 8. Archaeology" (PDF). Ohio Department of Natural Resources. pp. 8–9. Retrieved 17 October 2022.
- ^ ] ...the Erie... struck first in 1653. The next year [a counter-offensive] ...a victory which should have won the war on the spot, but ... two more years of fighting were required before the Erie, too, had been vanquished.
- ^ "THE ERIE INDIANS". Avon Historical Society. Retrieved 2022-11-26.
in 1656, after one of the most relentless and destructive Indian wars, the Erie were almost exterminated by the Iroquois. The surviving captives were either adopted or enslaved.
- epidemics in 1669-1671. By 1672-1673 they were beset on all sides and, like the Erie, went extinct as a tribe because of their high mortality rate. Their small percentage of survivors had to disperse among kindred tribes. The Iroquois adopted their remnants under the terms of a formal treaty in 1678. Some of the Susquehannock fleeing during 1676 triggered Bacon's Rebellionin the south.
- ^ "Oniare, the Iroquois horned serpent (Onyare, Oniont)".
- ^ English-Cayuga/ Cayuga-English Dictionary; Froman, Francis; Keye, Alfred; etc.; University of Toronto Press, Jan, 2002
- ^ "Whittlesey Culture - Ohio History Central". ohiohistorycentral.org. Retrieved January 29, 2020.
- ^ Brose, David S.; Wentzel, Gregory; Bluestone, Helga; Essenpreis, Patricia (1976). "Conneaut Fort, a Prehistoric Whittlesey Focus Village in Ashtabula County, Ohio". Pennsylvania Archaeologist. 46 (4): 29–77.
- ^ "Prehistoric Earthworks / The Prehistoric Erie". Historical Market Database. Retrieved 22 September 2023.
- ^ Gabriel Sagard
- ^ The Iroquois Book of Rites; Hale, Horatio; 1883
- ^ The Iroquois Trail: Footprints of the Six Nations in Customs, Traditions and History; Beauchamp, W. M.; 1802.
- ^ Sugar Run Mound and Village: Hopewell/ Middle Woodland in Warren County, Pennsylvania; McCanaughy, Mark A.; 2003
- ^ The North Benton Mound: A Hopewell Site in Ohio; Magrath, W. H.; 1945
- ^ https://knappnotes.com/2016/01/01/towners-woods-a-burial-mound-and-a-hopewell-princess/&ved=2ahUKEwjV-M_Bz-X6AhWMVTABHcInBxYQFnoECCYQAQ&usg=AOvVaw0hgS5nyhRPQod-HO4FUus3[permanent dead link] [bare URL]
- ^ a b c d ERIE HISTORY, "The Erie needed beaver for this trade and probably encroached on other tribal territories to get it. The result was a war with an unknown Algonquin enemy in 1635 that forced the Erie to abandon some of their western villages.", 2016-0612.
- ISBN 1-889758-37-X
- ^ http://www.virginiaplaces.org/nativeamerican/rickahocan.html
- ^ https://peachstatearchaeologicalsociety.org/index.php/11-culture-historic/402-westo-indians
- ^ a b c May, Jon D. "Erie". he Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture. Retrieved 18 October 2022.
References
- Bowne, Eric E. (2005). The Westo Indians: slave traders of the early colonial South. Tuscaloosa, Ala.: University of Alabama Press. OCLC 56214192.
- Bowne, Eric E. (2006). "Westo Indians". The New Georgia Encyclopedia. Georgia Humanities Council and the University of Georgia Press. Archived from the original on 2005-12-17. Retrieved 2008-03-16.
- Engelbrecht, William E. (1991). "Erie". The Bulletin: Journal of the New York State Archaeological Association (102): 2–12. OCLC 17823564.
- Engelbrecht, William E.; Lynne P. Sullivan (1996). "Cultural context". In Lynne P. Sullivan (ed.). Reanalyzing the Ripley Site: earthworks and late prehistory on the Lake Erie Plain. New York State Museum Bulletin 489. Albany: University of the State of New York, the State Education Department. pp. 14–27 [volume References, 176–87]. OCLC 38565296.
- Hewitt, J. N. B. (1907). "Erie". In Frederick Webb Hodge (ed.). Handbook of American Indians north of Mexico, part 1. BAE Bulletin 30. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office. pp. 430–32.
- Smith, Marvin T. (1987). Archaeology of aboriginal cultural change in the interior Southeast: depopulation during the early historic period. Ripley P. Bullen Monographs in Anthropology and History 6. Gainesville, Fla.: University Press of Florida. OCLC 15017891.
- White, Marian E. (1961). Iroquois culture history in the Niagara Frontier area of New York State. University of Michigan Museum of Anthropology Anthropological Papers 16. Ann Arbor, Mich. )
- White, Marian E. (1971). "Ethnic identification and Iroquois groups in western New York and Ontario". Ethnohistory. 18 (1): 19–38. JSTOR 481592.
- White, Marian E. (1978). "Erie". In Bruce G. Trigger (ed.). Handbook of North American Indians, Vol. 15: Northeast. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution. pp. 412–17.
- Wright, Roy A. (1974). "The People of the Panther-a long Erie tale (an ethnohistory of the southwestern Iroquoians)". In Michael K. Foster (ed.). Papers in linguistics from the 1972 Conference on Iroquoian Research. Mercury Series Paper 10. Ottawa: National Museum of Man. Ethnology Division. pp. 47–118. OCLC 1429124.
External links
- Seneca-Cayuga Nation
- Erie Indians, Encyclopedia of Cleveland History
- Erie, Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture