Chapter 4. New France
4.4 Wendake/Huronia and the Fur Trade
One of the distinguishing features of Indigenous cultures in much of what is now Canada is egalitarianism. This is a broad generalization but one that applies as much to hunter-gatherer societies as it does to sedentary agricultural societies. It was rare for a nominal leader in Indigenous communities to be able to dictate direction or policy. Even when councils, which dominated the longhouse societies, reached decisions, these were not always binding on all parties. In Iroquoian societies in particular, efforts were made to develop consensus arising from discussion, but the record of the Five Nations, for example, shows many instances where one or more member nations went their own way. Individuals had similar options. In hunter-gatherer societies, leadership was as much a recognition of proven success in the field as it was of personality or birth. These cultural traits were not always understood or appreciated by Europeans. What might appear to outsiders as a political union was very often an arrangement subject to regular renewal and rejuvenation. The newcomers were accustomed to hierarchical societies headed by nobles and high clergy; not surprisingly they looked for parallels in Indigenous communities and often mistook very different arrangements for “chiefdoms,” if not kingdoms. Errors such as these led the Europeans to assume, in some instances, that they could make treaties and pacts once and for all. Indigenous peoples, however, put an emphasis on renewal and reaffirmation: they expected gifts and declarations of loyalty from one another in commerce and diplomacy and expected no less from their European trading partners.
Europeans in an Indigenous Marketplace
Some of these features were immediately obvious to sharp-eyed French leaders like Champlain, but not to others. Certainly European traders needed to take pains to conduct themselves according to local standards of commerce and not those of France, Holland, or England. Making that adjustment was often the surest course to success and profits, so there was a powerful incentive for the Europeans to get it right. And sometimes they did.
In many tellings of the history of New France, Champlain appears to engage the largest Iroquoian-speaking nation north of the St. Lawrence and the Great Lakes in a trade and military alliance. In point of fact, the Wendat approached the French. The first few years of fur trading along the St. Lawrence involved the Omàmiwinini (Algonquin) and the Innu (Naskapi and Montagnais) in particular. Both were acting as middlemen in their own right, trading goods that had been procured first by their neighbours, generally farther north. That middleman role was taken over by the more powerful Wendat.
The French placed a premium on furs that had seen some use. Contact and wear removes the guard hairs from the pelt and leaves the fur glossier and richer looking — something that the French market preferred. T