Tionontate

The Tionontati, whose name means “people of the place where the mountain stands,” were an Iroquoian people southwest of Wendake, south of Georgian Bay. The French called them the Petun, or Tobacco people, for the crop they raised and traded. Organised as a confederacy of the Wolf and Deer nations, they held eight or nine palisaded longhouse villages.

They numbered perhaps eight thousand before contact, falling to about three thousand after the epidemics of 1634 to 1640. Samuel de Champlain visited them in 1616, and their language was mutually intelligible with that of their Wendat kin.

In 1649, having destroyed Wendake, the Dutch-armed Haudenosaunee overran the Petun towns in the Beaver Wars. The survivors joined Wendat and Wenro refugees among the Odawa on Manitoulin Island, and this coalescence became the Wyandot, who later spread into the Ohio Country.