Refugees: A World Made of Fragments Human populations construct their cultures in interaction with one another, not in isolation. The Frenchmen who traveled into the pays d'en haut, as they called the lands beyond Huronia, thought they were discovering new worlds. However, they were becoming cocreators of a world in the making. The world that had existed before them was no more; it had been shattered. Warfare, epidemics, and Iroquois attacks caused the fragmentation of the region's peoples. The Iroquois, seeking beaver and captives, created an engine of destruction that broke up the region’s peoples. The Algonquians and Frenchmen pieced together a new world from the shattered pieces, using an imported imperial glue to reconstruct a village world. This world sustained and was sustained by the French empire. The story of the creation of this world forms the beginning of this book. Historians have traced the blows of the Iroquois hammer. They have written about the victims of the Iroquois, focusing on groups like the Hurons, Petuns, Neutrals, and Eries, because these groups had Jesuit missionaries or lived beside neighbors that did. They have not concentrated on the shattering Algonquian world, as it is hard to tell a story of fragmentation. The result is a historical landscape that consists largely of dim shadows. There are tribal traditions, memories of French traders, and contemporary accounts. A fractured society has been preserved in fractured memory. For the French and the refugees alike, older patterns and routines were in collapse. This was a world where dreams and nightmares happened. It was a desperate world where accidental congruences and temporary interests became the stuff from which to forge meaning and structure. The fragments are the history. The horror that the Iroquois would bring to the pays d'en haut was first prefigured by another confederation of Iroquoian-speaking peoples. The Neutrals, soon themselves to become Iroquois victims, obtained iron weapons from Europeans when their enemies to the west still relied on stone. In the mid-1640s, a large Neutral war party attacked a stockaded Algonquian village in Michigan. These Algonquians were a people the Neutrals called the Nation of Fire. Most likely, they were Fox or Mascoutens. After a siege of ten days, the Neutrals captured the fort. They killed many on the spot, but they retained eight hundred captives – men, women, and children. Of these, they burned seventy warriors. The old men had a crueler fate. The Neutrals put out their eyes and girdled their mouths, leaving them to starve in a land they could no longer see. As Iroquois attacks depopulated the lands around Lake Ontario, refugees fled west and the Iroquois followed. Refugee OttawaRefugees: A World Made of Fragments Human populations construct their cultures in interaction with one another, not in isolation. The Frenchmen who traveled into the pays d'en haut, as they called the lands beyond Huronia, thought they were discovering new worlds. However, they were becoming cocreators of a world in the making. The world that had existed before them was no more; it had been shattered. Warfare, epidemics, and Iroquois attacks caused the fragmentation of the region's peoples. The Iroquois, seeking beaver and captives, created an engine of destruction that broke up the region’s peoples. The Algonquians and Frenchmen pieced together a new world from the shattered pieces, using an imported imperial glue to reconstruct a village world. This world sustained and was sustained by the French empire. The story of the creation of this world forms the beginning of this book. Historians have traced the blows of the Iroquois hammer. They have written about the victims of the Iroquois, focusing on groups like the Hurons, Petuns, Neutrals, and Eries, because these groups had Jesuit missionaries or lived beside neighbors that did. They have not concentrated on the shattering Algonquian world, as it is hard to tell a story of fragmentation. The result is a historical landscape that consists largely of dim shadows. There are tribal traditions, memories of French traders, and contemporary accounts. A fractured society has been preserved in fractured memory. For the French and the refugees alike, older patterns and routines were in collapse. This was a world where dreams and nightmares happened. It was a desperate world where accidental congruences and temporary interests became the stuff from which to forge meaning and structure. The fragments are the history. The horror that the Iroquois would bring to the pays d'en haut was first prefigured by another confederation of Iroquoian-speaking peoples. The Neutrals, soon themselves to become Iroquois victims, obtained iron weapons from Europeans when their enemies to the west still relied on stone. In the mid-1640s, a large Neutral war party attacked a stockaded Algonquian village in Michigan. These Algonquians were a people the Neutrals called the Nation of Fire. Most likely, they were Fox or Mascoutens. After a siege of ten days, the Neutrals captured the fort. They killed many on the spot, but they retained eight hundred captives – men, women, and children. Of these, they burned seventy warriors. The old men had a crueler fate. The Neutrals put out their eyes and girdled their mouths, leaving them to starve in a land they could no longer see. As Iroquois attacks depopulated the lands around Lake Ontario, refugees fled west and the Iroquois followed. Refugee Ottawa