"Chronicles" was made possible thanks to a community assets grant provided by the Erie County Gaming Revenue Authority, support by the Department of Education, and the generous support of Thomas B Hagen.

(resonant ambient music) This is WQLN.

(no audio) (no audio) (slow impassioned jazz music) Before the White man came to this great continent, it was inhabited by a stalwart race of people known as Indians.

Though they were all brothers under the red skin, the Indians were divided into different tribes, such as the Blackfeet, the Flatheads, (matches igniting) the Hotfoots, (tribe yelps) and of course, the Cleveland Indians.

When you see Injuns, be careful.

And when you don't see Injuns, be more careful.

(no audio) (no audio) (no audio) You know, we don't dismiss what we read.

Why should they dismiss what we tell them?

(no audio) (no audio) I have no idea what Erie means.

Nope.

No, I do not know that.

I (chuckles), I don't know.

I don't know, see.

I do not know.

(crowd chattering) I don't.

Ah... (onlooker laughs) (crowd chattering) I don't even, I don't know.

No idea.

That's a great question.

(respondent chuckles) I believe Erie got its name from the people, but it was a particular way they got the name for Erie.

Is it the Eries Indians?

Nailed it.

The Native Americans.

I don't like to say Indians, I'm sorry.

The Indigenous individuals, the Cat people.

Meow.

They were probably here before the settlers and probably helped the settlers, you know, make use of the lake.

Just what I'm guessing (chuckles).

I know the Indian tribe, but that's the controversy.

Sort of starting the episode off with the simple question of like, "What does Erie mean?"

Kind of like, just what does the word mean?

And from there, I think, obviously, we know that it comes from the Erielhonan, but want to try to get to- But where does Erielhonan come from?

Where does Erielhonan come from?

How to approach this in a sensitive manner where it doesn't look, or it doesn't result in us just making, you know, a trauma bond.

Yeah.

I think by being as transparent as we possibly can be, as being as open to as many voices- It's good to know the conflicts, but we have to get to that specific level.

Like, this is still something that is real and painful and challenging and hurtful and damaging.

Yeah.

We have to be careful how we do this.

Mike, what's the takeaway you wanna have?

(Mike exhales deeply) The biggest problem is that there's so much in there that you can only sort of tap the tip of the iceberg.

You know what I want the takeaway to be?

I want the takeaway to be people having a more informed conversation.

Right.

Are you ready for the backlash?

Because that's gonna happen.

I'll accept that backlash.

I do not anticipate and I do not expect that we are going to get everything right, because at the end of the day, we do not know the history, and I think we have to be ready to be wrong.

(no audio) (no audio) At their height, the Erielhonan likely included an estimated 14,000 members in their confederacy.

Today, less than 800 people living in Erie County identify as Indigenous to this continent, according to data from the United States Census and United Nations.

At less than half a percent of the population, this community's presence is a fraction of what it once was in Erie.

(no audio) (no audio) (no audio) (no audio) (no audio) Take one.

(clapperboard claps) Awesome.

All right, Miguel, how's it going?

I'm doing well.

Well, welcome to Pittsburgh.

So I'm diving into it.

Who were the Erielhonan?

These people were part of a larger group that actually covered a great deal, well, all of Pennsylvania, a huge portion of New York State, a large chunk of Ohio, and across the border in Canada on the other side of the lakes, of the two Great Lakes, Lake Erie and Lake Ontario, and it included not only the Erie but also the neighboring tribes around the Erie, the Hurons, the Petuns, the Tobacco Nation, the Neutrals, in Central Pennsylvania, the Susquehannocks.

These were all people that spoke related language.

And when I say related language, think in terms of the language we speak now, English.

English is a Germanic language.

So that means like when a person says "Sitzen Sie" in German, you know that they're saying, "Sit down," you know, "Sit."

And when they say "Kommen Sie hier", that's German, you know that they're saying, "Come here."

These languages are sister languages.

By the same token, the languages of these people that I'm talking about, they were all different languages, but they were related enough so that they felt that kinship with each other.

My traditional name is (indistinct).

I am from the Tonawanda Seneca territory, Hawk Clan.

The Eries were a unique nation.

They, a lot of times, they were considered as younger brethren to the Haudenosaunee.

And so they actually sat under our, under our white root of peace.

When the white root of peace is offered, that is a permanent agreement.

And so they were able to travel within the territory and stuff as, as Indigenous families.

And it's not just a physical, it's a spiritual.

It's a, a religious domain, but it's also cultural.

Hi, my name is Dr. Joe Stahlman.

I'm the director of the On öhsagw ë:de Cultural Center.

I'm also an independent scholar.

Yeah, so the Erie got its name from the Eriehronon, or the Kahkwa.

These were the peoples that were living around the Erie area and along the shores of Lake Erie at the time when the French came down into the Great Lakes.

And so coming into the area, the primary people that they noticed were the Erie, and so that's kind of how the name kind of stuck.

I'm Dr. Will Meyer.

I am assistant professor of Anthropology and Archeology at Mercyhurst University.

I am not entirely certain where the actual term Erie came from.

Often, in the literature, these people are referred to as the Cat Nation.

So in the French literature, the Nation du Chat.

And that's apparently because these Native Americans decorated their clothes with the tails of some creatures, and that might be chat laveur, which would be the raccoon.

So you can imagine raccoon tail coats.

Or it could have been cougars.

So wild cats.

And interestingly, not in the Erie language because we don't have recorded examples, but in Seneca, the name for a cougar is he:es, which means "long tail".

So maybe their coats had long cougar tails.

So when you talk about the Eries and the Cat people, most Indigenous people think, you know, it was the fisher cat that they were, what they were commonly known for and not the puma or the panther and stuff, and these drawings and stuff from the Jesuits.

And you know, they're showing the long teeth, and they're showing these long claws, but they also show this long, fuzzy tail.

This is a smaller female, and I mean, she's 38 inches, but I've got male hides and stuff that, you know, that are well over four foot, and they're a very aggressive animal.

You know, the Cat people or the Lynx people, you know, I do see that as being closer than maybe the Fishers in our cosmology.

We actually have three epics of Haudenosaunee creation.

The second one is the creation of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy.

And within this story of the confederacy, The Peacemaker, he comes from Canada.

He comes from the North Shore of Lake Ontario in a stone canoe.

And when he comes across, the first place he lands is where Fort Niagara was, and he comes down into the Lewiston area.

And there was a Neutral village there called Kienuka, which was controlled by a queen by the name of Jig öhsahs ë', which is translated as "lynx woman".

And she was a notorious arms dealer, and she also provided food and shelter to any warring party.

And so when The Peacemaker came upon her, he started to have a conversation with her, and he realized the role that she played.

She played this intermediary between two factioning armies, and he thought that was kind of wrong.

And so he told her his mission of peace, and she's actually credited as being the first convert of hearing his message of peace.

And so she's been bestowed the name of Peace Queen, the first woman's title.

And she is called, her translated name is Lynx Woman, and she's an Erie.

While some parts of the tribe moved around the region to key hunting grounds, the Erielhonan, like many of their neighbors, were an agricultural people who built permanent homes and villages.

The Eries were known for having a lot of blowguns.

And it's funny because people are, "Oh, well blowguns were only down south."

Well, the Eries were known for using a lot of these different types of like curare-based plants and stuff, like foxglove, you know?

It's been harvested and used for digitalis.

And a lot of times, what it is, it's not quite the poison, but it's used to stop the heart.

You know, when they stop the heart and they keep that, it doesn't pollute the system.

Men, typically, at the growing season, would go out and begin their hunting season again, and they would stay gone for as long as six months.

And they did have a range that they would travel, they would hunt, they would trade, and they would ensure that diplomacy was still occurring between the nations.

And so using the constellations, they would keep track of time, and they would try to make it back home by the start of winter.

When I was a student in the Erie in the 1990s, I was told a story about where Presque Isle came from, but some part of me suspects that there may be a long oral tradition of this story.

And it involved some hunters who were out in a canoe, and they had gotten rather far away from the shore.

And a storm was coming up, and the hunters prayed, and the Creator set down his thumb.

And that made the Presque Isle peninsula, where they could safely dock and weather the storm.

It does speak to a system of navigation where you never got very far from shore.

You know, when they went hunting, they had the first collapsible tent.

And they would, like, look at these bent willows that were tied together, and they could come into a place, they could set 'em down, and then pull 'em out, and you know, it would make what they would call a wigwam or a wickiup, and then just covered it with hides.

But then they had their permanent, permanent housing and permanent areas.

We know that the Erie were an Iroquoian-speaking group.

So this put them together with the people that we grew up talking about as the Iroquois, who call themselves the Haudenosaunee, "The People of the Longhouse".

The longhouse was where all the people were brought together.

And a lot of times, some of these longhouses were a couple hundred feet long, you know, 60, 80 feet wide.

And so as they would go, and they have a lot of different clan and family units or groups that are that are living in there and multiple fires, but it was a security.

It was also to help in raising the children and the offspring.

I guess that some of these longhouses were pretty extensive.

So in anthropology, very early on, one of the most studied areas of human endeavors was this idea of kinship and how do we go about it and why do we go about it.

And so, typically, we have three strands of lineal descent.

We have matrilineal, which is through the mother's line.

We see that with Iroquoian speakers.

Most famously, we have Jewish people who are matrilineal.

And then we have patrilineal, and that's your typical Western European kind of descent, you know, through the father's line, taking the father's name.

In the New World, it was a real mix.

So for example, we know that among the Haudenosaunee, the clan mothers, the women, the eldest women usually from each clan were making important decisions about what men would be sent to counsel for representation, what people would be selected to be faith keepers or holy people.

And so, we think of the family from a western point of view as being sort of the private space, but for Iroquoian speakers, all throughout the Northeast as well as down into the Southeast, the Cherokee are also Iroquoian speakers, we find the family is tightly wound up with the public space of civic governance.

And so, feasibly, if you're traveling east to west, you would look, when you enter a community, if you were allowed to enter a community, you would look for your clan home within that community because that clan is supposed to take care of you.

They are your family.

So first of all, what I didn't tell you at the beginning, this is an Erie site.

And so when the Seneca moved over here, they're moving onto lands that they recently required during the Beaver Wars because this wasn't technically a Seneca area.

This was still Erie, right?

And so the Seneca have settled on top of the Erie, but the Seneca are also Erie, and the Erie are Seneca.

We do have some oral history where we believe that the Erie were nothing more than a western branch of the Erie, or of the Seneca, and who we call the Seneca are nothing more than the eastern branch of the Seneca.

And so what we have are just two communities that we're starting to kind of split apart.

Because if you look at the oral history, the oral history says after the Beaver Wars, the Seneca readopted the Erie back into the Seneca fold.

But they were related enough so that they felt that kinship with each other.

Unfortunately, that didn't mean that they were always were living in peace.

And so, unfortunately, there was a certain amount of conflict.

For me, I don't like talking about war because war is really seen through a particular lens, and through the West, it is a war of conquest.

And it's always rigged as a war between good and evil.

And we see it in the media in our contemporary times all the time, right?

I also know the history of the United States, and it does have a history of conquest.

If I go back a little further, all of this gets sort of complicated by Western ideas about borders and nations.

And so, you know, when we say the Erie were living here, this might have been the Erie heartland, but there might have been a number of other people living here at the same time, some Native people who came from the north and some from the west and the east and up from the south.

Ultimately, when Europeans arrive, they really do start to bring a new way of dividing up the landscape and thinking about how that landscape is demarcated.

And so borders function very differently in a French or English mindset, and that means frontiers function very differently.

After Étienne Brûlé became the first European to travel beyond the St. Lawrence River in the early 17th century, various French Jesuit missionaries spread into the surrounding lands to observe and convert the Indigenous peoples.

Within their records are some of the few written references to the Erielhonan.

I don't hold anything against the Jesuits, and actually, I use their records a lot.

Their records are really helpful.

These are people coming into a territory, and they're the first ones to make the first effort to really put on paper who they were encountering.

The Jesuit Fathers who, you know, depending on how you feel about missionization, you might not think that they had good intentions, but quite often, I would be generous and say the Jesuit Fathers had good intentions in writing things down.

And so they're not necessarily right, but they're not necessarily wrong.

They're just making sense out of language and a diversity of cultural customs happening around them that they're very much strangers to.

They're strangers in strange lands, and so they're learning language, they're learning culture, and they're learning everything about the new world around them.

And I think it's really remarkable that we still have this record to look at.

And so when you talk about preservation, is telling the whole story, not just the French story, not just the Indian story, not just the British or the English.

You know, telling the whole story, the good, bad, and the ugly, you know?

And that's the thing is, is that we can't whitewash things just to cover it all and make it all look nice and clear.

I said there was good and bad on both sides, you know, from Indigenous standpoints and from the French and English.

So as we're going through and we're teaching and we're working about preservation, we need to tell the full story.

A lot of times when Western eyes look at this idea of reincorporating a community back into a larger community, they take kind of like a Roman view of history and military conquest when it's not like that.

Because individuals and clans and entire communities have the agency to either join or not.

Because of the limited amount of and subjective nature of the Jesuit writings, most of the information about the Erielhonan is colored by the assumed destruction of that people through a conflict with the Haudenosaunee at the time of the missionaries' arrival.

In our communities, war is not a business.

It's actually a detriment.

And so when I think about the Erie or the Susquehannocks or any other community that's gone and gone into the past, I don't see these moments as wars of conquest.

These are really moments where communities are at the last straw, where they couldn't find that peaceful path, and there's a flareup.

And these flareups are short-lived.

And what people don't take into account immediately after these flareups, there's a condolence moment where there's reconciliation and reparations in every ceremony, and there's an exchange of peace belts between communities highlighting that moment.

And those piece belts are given to representatives who go back home, and once a year, they would bring out these belts and remind people of their responsibilities as individuals to uphold those treaties.

And unfortunately, we've lost a lot of our elders.

We've lost a lot of those teachings.

(clears throat) Some of it was, some of it was written down, some of it was translated, but a lot of it was mouth to mouth.

It was, you know, oral history.

Oral tradition was the original way in which wisdom and history and advice was imparted from one generation to the other for everybody, because the written language is really relatively new.

5,000 years ago, there was no written language anywhere, you know?

And then there was that moment when people started developing the written word.

Before that, all information, all wisdom was passed on through oral tradition.

We have the same issue with some of our ceremonies and some of our things that we do, is that we lost some of that translation of some of those words and, you know, where it was, or even some of those titles of some of those, you know, those different ceremonies.

It's important to use accurate language, especially when you're talking about ethnic groups.

It just so happens that, first of all, Native Americans are not a monolithic group.

They're, from the very beginning, it was all these different tribes, with cultures and languages as different from each other...

The culture of, say, a Northwest coast Indigenous person from Washington State is as different from the culture of the Erie as Chinese is to Irish.

Generally, in anthropology, especially contemporary anthropology, we try to call people what they call themselves.

And you know, that's just a politeness.

But students always ask, "Where did this term Iroquois come from?"

We know it comes from, our usage comes from the French "Iroquois".

And what we think is that this was actually the way that Haudenosaunee people were referred to by the Algonquin speakers who were the closer allies of the French.

And throughout history, the relationships between those Algonquin speakers and the Haudenosaunee were not always pleasant relationships.

When the French came here and they got into fighting and stuff, and they were finding out that a small band of warriors could take out a whole regiment you know, of their soldiers.

And so it started as "Iroquois", and then the French pluralized it and it became "Iroquois".

It was an insult.

It meant "snake".

(chuckles) It was a word that was used, is derived from a word that was used by the enemies of the Haudenosaunee, of the Iroquoian people to call them "serpent", to call them "snake", which was used as an insult.

Historically, the Haudenosaunee would've not liked being called Iroquois.

Everybody has their own ethnic identity, and if somebody calls you out of your name, out of the word that you prefer, and it could even be insulting.

So that's why it's important what words you use.

That's my answer to your question.

"Chronicles" was made possible thanks to a community assets grant provided by the Erie County Gaming Revenue Authority, support by the Department of Education, and the generous support of Thomas B. Hagen.

(resonant ambient music) We question and learn.