Strangers No More: Kinship, Clanship, and the Incorporation of Newcomers in Northern Iroquoia

Abstract

In this paper, we consider how institutions of kinship facilitated the integration of peoples originating in the St. Lawrence Valley into ancestral Huron-Wendat communities in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries AD. We present some general principles regarding the role of kinship in structuring social relations, processes of population movement, and the integration of newcomers. Data on the distributions and frequencies of characteristic St. Lawrence Iroquoian artifacts on four ancestral Huron-Wendat village sites in Ontario, Canada are utilized to infer the scale of population movement and processes of incorporation into lineages and clan segments. We argue that interpretive frameworks that explicitly incorporate categories and institutions of relatedness with traditional material culture analyses can shed new light on how groups of newcomers of varying scale and composition were integrated into Huron-Wendat households and communities.