Thread by @MarkBourrie

During or soon after a solar eclipse, the original five nations of the Haudenosaunee agreed to be part of a federation. There were total eclipses in the region in 1349 and 1478. The Bear and Cord nations formed the core of the Huron Confederacy in about 1420. So it's hard to say who responded to whom.

We may never understand the pre-contact history of the Huron and Iroquois, and important groups like the Neutrals and Petuns. The archaeology that's done these days is mainly rush jobs to salvage information and artifacts from construction sites.

This information is rarely published and evaluated for its insights into history. It's box-checking to meet the requirements of heritage laws. So we don't know what happened to entire groups of people. We don't understand how much "Mound Builder" culture reached Ontario.

Nor are we training and paying historians to take this data and make sense of it. People like Conrad Heidenreich of U of T used multi-disciplined approaches, looking at known village sites of varying ages, soils, and post-contact written records.

Because we're stumped on oral history. The Haudenosaunee have an unbroken oral record but the Hurons were shattered. The Petun are the core of the Wyandotte and had several generations of misery as refugees that overwhelmed them culturally.

(One Huron nation did merge with the Seneca and kept its identity for a while before being assimilated)..

As for the Neutral of Niagara and the northwest shore of Lake Ontario and the St. Lawrence "Iroquois" who met Cartier and lived between where Brockville is and Montreal, we haven't got a clue. They're gone. "Disappeared".

The St. Lawrence Iroquois had been so powerful that they were able to deter French settlement above Tadoussac for 80 years. The Neutrals were so powerful that, until the late 1640s, neither the Hurons nor Iroquois wanted to tangle with them. They probably have descendants. We just don't know.

The Neutrals,

If anyone is doing that kind of work now, their publications are impossible to find.

Were the most powerful First Nation in the Great Lakes region until the epidemics and arrival of firearms. What happened to them? No one really knows. Some ended up as Iroquois but if any were able to flee during that war, no one knows their fate. No one claims descent from them.