Wyandot (Huron)

The Wyandot, heirs of the Wendat (Huron) confederacy, were born in the fire of the Beaver Wars: when Haudenosaunee armies dispersed the Petun, Wenro and Wendat in the mid-17th century, the refugees coalesced at Michilimackinac and then Detroit into a new people. Iroquoian-speaking farmers of corn, beans and squash who lived in palisaded longhouse towns, the Wyandot became the keepers of the western door, middlemen between the French and the pays d'en haut, then British allies and pillars of the Northwestern Confederacy against American expansion. Their Ohio towns anchored the resistance until Fallen Timbers in 1794. Removal in the early 1840s carried them to Kansas and then Oklahoma, where the Wyandotte Nation endures; the Huron-Wendat Nation at Wendake, Quebec, keeps the eastern fire. Feast of the Dead ossuaries, clan matrons and a diplomacy famous across three empires mark a people twice reborn, and the Wyandotte Nation of Oklahoma with the Huron-Wendat Nation of Wendake both guard burial grounds and language programs today.