Archive Note
The Wendat, whom the French called Hurons, and their Northern Iroquoian neighbors practiced permanent body marking documented from Champlain's overwintering in Wendake in 1615 and 1616 through the naturalist Pehr Kalm's 1749 visit to the Wendat community at Lorette outside Quebec. Accounts in Champlain, Gabriel Sagard, the Jesuit Relations, and others describe a hand-puncture method using sharpened bone, fish bone, or thorn needles, and later metal trade needles, with charcoal-and-soot pigment rubbed into the wound; reported designs included clan animals, geometric bands, snakes, arrows, the sun, and crosses after Christian contact. The dominant register among adult men was enumerative, a kind of military shorthand recording war exploits, captives taken, and wounds received. The Jesuit Relation of 1652 claimed that tattooing was so common among the Petun and Neutral nations that scarcely anyone was unmarked. The practice fell away sharply after the Haudenosaunee dispersed Wendake in 1649 but did not vanish, since Kalm still saw tattooed Wendat at Lorette in 1749. The Wendat and the Haudenosaunee Five Nations are distinct peoples and are not collapsed into one.