Petun

The Petún (old word for tobacco in French), or Tionontati in their language, were an Iroquoian-speaking First Nations people closely related to the Wendat (Huron) Confederacy. Their homeland was located along the southwest edge of Georgian Bay, in the area immediately to the west of the Huron territory in Southern Ontario of present-day Canada. They had eight to ten villages, and may have numbered several thousand prior to European contact.^[1]

Following decimation by infectious disease after 1634, when immigration of children from England, France and Holland increased, both the Wendat and Petun societies were in a weakened state. They were attacked, destroyed and dispersed by Iroquois warfare in 1649 and encroachment in the late 17th century. The remnants joined with some refugee Huron to become the Huron-Petun Nation, later known as the Wyandot.

Name

French traders called these First Nations people the Petún (tobacco), for their industrious cultivation of that plant. Petun as a word for tobacco became obsolete; it was derived from the early French-Brazilian trade^[2], and comes from the Guarani language^[3]. In the Mohawk dialect of the Iroquois, the name for tobacco is O-ye-aug-wa^[4].

French colonial tradesmen in the Ohio Valley called the Wyandot, Guyandotte, their spelling of how it sounded in their language. Later European-American settlers in the valley adopted this name. They named the Guyandotte River in south-western West Virginia for the Wendat people, who had migrated to the area during the Beaver Wars of the late seventeenth century. Later they were forced to move to Ohio, and finally most went to Indian Territory in present-day Kansas and Oklahoma. there are three federally recognized tribes in the United States: the Wyandotte Nation, the Wyandot Nation of Kansas, and the Wyandot of Anderdon, Michigan.

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