Arendaronon

The Arendaronon, or Arendaenronnon, “people of the lying rock,” were the Rock nation of the Wendat Confederacy in southern Ontario, joining the older Bear and Cord alliance around 1590.

Their chief village was Cahiague, near Lake Simcoe, which grew into the largest settlement in Wendake and may have held as many as four thousand people at the time of French contact. They were sedentary farmers of maize, beans and squash, living in bark-covered longhouses behind timber palisades and trading furs with Algonquian neighbours and the French.

When the Dutch-armed Haudenosaunee overran Wendake in 1648 and 1649, the Arendaronon shared the general ruin: survivors were absorbed into Haudenosaunee communities, fled to the French on the St. Lawrence, or joined the Tionontati in a fusion that produced the Wyandot.