"Nindoodemag": The Significance of Algonquian Kinship Networks in the Eastern Great Lakes Region, 1600-1701

Abstract

N the summer of 1701, the twelve hundred French residents of Montreal played host to some thirteen hundred Native American visitors from communities throughout the Saint Lawrence lowlands and Great Lakes region. They had gathered to ratify a peace agreement, carefully constructed during a decade of difficult and complex negotiations, which was intended to end conflicts among the Haudenosaunee (the Iroquois Confederacy) and the French and their native allies. As Gilles Havard has illustrated in The Great Peace ofMontreal, the ratification ceremony on August 4 concluded a two-week-long trade fair at a spectacular grand council. There the amalgam of European and Native American diplomatic protocols created a hybridized feast for the senses: the scent of tobacco burning in peace pipes mingled with powder and perfume as the members of the assembly, wearing their finest in dress and adornment, listened to the French and Native Americans give elaborate performances drawn from their respective oratorical traditions. Exchanges of gifts, from wampum and beaver pelts to bread and wine, punctuated the speeches.1 The relationships forged and strengthened as