Akwesasne - History

History

Beginning about 1000 AD, nomadic indigenous people around the Great Lakes began adopting the cultivation of maize. By the 14th century, Iroquoian-speaking peoples, later called the St. Lawrence Iroquoians, had created fortified villages along the fertile valley of what is now called the St. Lawrence River. Among their villages were Stadacona and Hochelaga, visited in 1535-1536 by explorer Jacques Cartier. While they shared certain culture with other Iroquoian groups, they were a distinctly separate people and spoke a branch of Iroquoian called Laurentian. By the time Samuel de Champlain explored the same area 75 years later, the villages had disappeared. Historians theorize that the stronger Mohawk from the South waged war against the St. Lawrence Iroquoians to get control of the fur trade and hunting along the river valley. By 1600, the Mohawk used the valley for hunting grounds and as a path for war parties.

In the early 17th century, some mixed Iroquois (Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga and Seneca) migrated from present-day New York to Kahnawake, a Catholic mission village established south of Montreal by French Jesuits. Kahnawake is a Kanien'kehá:ka Mohawk word meaning "at the rapids". Here, many First Nations people converted to Roman Catholicism. During the colonial years, this community participated in the fur trade. Some men regularly traveled to Albany, New York for better prices from the English and Dutch than the French were willing to give.

Due to exhaustion of land at Kahnawake and problems with traders' rum at the village, in 1754 about 30 families migrated upriver about 20 leagues to set up a new community. Leaders included the brothers John and Zachariah Tarbell. Father Pierre-Robert-Jean-Baptiste Billiard accompanied the migrants as their priest. French officials supported the move, paying for a sawmill at the new mission. With tensions rising prior to the Seven Years' War (also known in North America as the French and Indian War, the French wanted to keep the Mohawk as allies, away from English influence.

The Tarbell brothers were English colonists from New England who had been taken captive as boys during Queen Anne's War. With their sister Sarah, they were taken 300 miles to Montreal. They all became Catholic and were renamed. Sarah/Marguerite entered the Congregation of Notre Dame, a teaching order founded by French women in 1653. Adopted by Mohawk families in Kahnawake, the two boys became thoroughly assimilated: learning the language and ways, and being given Mohawk names. They each married daughters of chiefs and reared their children as Mohawk. The brothers each became chiefs (as were some of their sons.) They were examples of the multicultural community of the Mohawk, who absorbed numerous captives into their tribe. In 1806 Catholic Cayuga, Oneida and Onondaga from Ogdensburg, New York joined the St. Regis band.

Starting in 1755, French-Canadian Jesuit priests founded the St. Regis Mission at Akwesasne. First they built a log and bark church, then a more formal log church. In 1795 the Mohawk completed construction of a stone church, which still stands. Named after the French priest Saint Jean-François Regis, the mission was the source of the French name of the adjacent Saint Regis River, an island in the St. Lawrence River, and the nearby village. In New York, the name was later adopted to apply to the Saint Regis Indian Reservation. The villagers have since renamed their community Kana:takon (the village, in Mohawk).

After victory in the Seven Years' War, the British took over Canada and New France east of the Mississippi River. They allowed the Kanien'kehá:ka to continue to have Catholic priests at their mission.

At the time of the American Revolutionary War, the Mohawk and three other of the six Iroquois nations were allied with the British against the American colonists. Forced to cede most of their remaining lands in New York to the new government after the colonists' victory, the Iroquois nations migrated to Canada, where many settled at the Six Nations of the Grand River First Nation. Some Mohawk joined the growing community at Akwesasne. Under the Jay Treaty, the Mohawk had rights to independently cross the newly established borders between Canada and the United States.