Michigan’s ‘undocumented Iroquois’

Ontario archaeologists overlook them regularly

Docupahge

Since at least the 1990s there has been an explosion of archaeological/anthropological information about pre-contact Ontario Iroquoian indigenous people. The reasons are many but the result is as Gary Warrick (1) put it, “There are an estimated 750 village sites for south-central Ontario alone, a figure which can be doubled when including southwestern Ontario.” He said this “exceeds that of the Valley of Mexico and Neolithic Britain.”

When he mentions southwestern Ontario, I believe he means the physical boundaries of present day Ontario. But there was perhaps as many village sites in southeastern Michigan. In the 1830s, Michigan naturalist/geologist Bela Hubbard wrote,"It was hardly possible to dig a cellar or level a hillock without throwing out some memorial of the red races.... To unearth a human skeleton was a common occurrence. They were thrown out by spade and plough, and sometimes were seen protruding from the soil where the action of the waves had broken into the land.”

In Ontario these people were popularly known as Huron and Neutral. In Michigan they are called Younge Tradition or Western Basin Tradition, yet they are all Iroquoian-speakers and cut from the same cloth which anthropologists call ‘Owasco’.

According to David Stothers (2), “It is suggested that early Late Woodland (ca A.D. 500-1300) Western Basin tradition" (aka Younge Tradition) “populations that inhabited the Saginaw Valley and the greater western Lake Erie region were ethnically and linguistically Iroquoian and constituted a separate cultural-historical branch of the Ontario Iroquois tradition.”