Where is Hochelaga?
The question about the location of the village of Hochelaga that Jacques Cartier reported seeing in 1535 is once again hashed over by Taylor C. Noakes, who comes to no conclusions.
Because the answer is: it doesn’t matter. It was on the island of Montreal, and if it left any traces, they’ve almost certainly been paved over or otherwise obliterated by now. Even finding a few indigenous artifacts would never be conclusive. Pinning down exactly where the people Cartier met were living wouldn’t provide any information that we don’t already have: indigenous people lived here, where we live now.
Taylor C. Noakes 21:19 on 2022-10-24 Permalink
Thanks for posting this Kate, but I don’t think the point of the article was to come to any conclusions about Hochelaga’s actual location – I didn’t set out to do that and never mentioned that as an aim of the article itself.
Rather, the effort was to explain how monuments can occlude historical reality even as they try to illuminate it, something I think I did rather well. I explained the whole history of how the monument came to be where it is and say what it says, and the associated game of historical broken telephone that went with it.
And as a historian I would say the location of Hochelaga, were it ever to be found, would indeed provide a wealth of potential information. Yes, we already known Indigenous people lived here, but there is so much more to learn about how they lived, who they traded with. And yes, it could still be found… it’s why we mandate archeological surveys for every new construction project. New evidence is found all the time, and each new finding adds important new information to our narrative.
Assume for a moment that evidence was found that then led to an excavation which demonstrated the full size of the community… its tools, its goods, what (and with whom) they traded… a community of 1500-2000 people, that would be a massive site. It would change how we view Indigenous people quite a bit.
Just a year or so ago I wrote a rebuttal to Conrad Black, who argued in the NatPo that Indigenous people were at the level of stone aged people at the point of contact. Cartier’s relations, and what we know of the ‘Hochelagans’ already, disproves his unlettered assertion.
But make no mistake, there are a lot of people who think like Black.
Kate 08:30 on 2022-10-25 Permalink
Taylor, if they think like Conrad Black, facts will not change their minds.
Also, does it matter what the technological level of the St Lawrence Iroquoians was? I’m not saying it wouldn’t be interesting to know more about those residents of the original Hochelaga, but it shouldn’t have any ethical weight when considering the argument that white people had the right of domain over these lands. The value of the Iroquoians as human beings and as a culture doesn’t depend on their level of technological sophistication.
Whatever their technology, those people managed to live here, in our climate, for generations, and do it hardly leaving a trace. We don’t know how to do that!
Uatu 10:36 on 2022-10-25 Permalink
Right. Those “primitives” saved colonists from scurvy and showed them the awesomeness of maple syrup. Maybe not so primitive after all…
Taylor C. Noakes 16:03 on 2022-10-25 Permalink
Kate –
I think we’re having two very different conversations. My article was primarily about the inherent irony in monuments tending more to occlude historical reality than illuminate it, something I think is doubly ironic when we consider that the Hochelaga Rock was a) the first of the new ‘living history’ series of monuments commissioned by the HSMBC after WW1, and b) that the Anglo-Franco culture wars of the early decades of the 20th century played a larger role in determining the monument’s location than even what was known of the Dawson Site.
It’s stranger still that, in McGill’s effort to accomplish their reconciliation goals and make Indigenous history (and their presumed connection to it) more visible, they actually moved the monument farther away from where artifacts were found. It stikes me as odd that McGill didn’t even seem to be aware of the work of Bruce Trigger, who had been a ‘James McGill Chair in History’.
I thought that was the main thrust of the research I did for this article, your reading of it seems to go in a very different direction. I’m legit wondering if I did a very poor job expressing myself. Perhaps you could let me know.
To your last comment more directly:
1- People change their minds all the time based on new information and well-reasoned arguments. My NatoPo article revealed there were seemingly a lot of regular NatPo readers who didn’t care for Black one iota.
2- I’d say absolutely yes, it does matter, but not to determine their technological maturity per se. Concerning Indigenous studies, we’re dealing with the interconnected problems of a) a colonizing power consigning their history to the ash heap, b) multi-generational assimilation efforts leading to an attempted cultural genocide on a mass scale, c) reinforced misunderstanding and misinterpretation of available archeological evidence by so-called experts (which is partly why the stone says what it says, despite the evidence), and d) the physical limitations of the available evidence, in terms of quantity, quality, and that the people who settled this land in particular presumed it had been both unhabited for a long time, and sparsely inhabited at the time of contact.
So much of what we think we know is based on the description of one man who spent just a few hours in Hochelaga, whose record was then translated, mistranslated, embellished upon (etc). And Cartier wasn’t a journalist or historian, but primarily interested in trade. There’s a lot of potential information that’s missing.
The ‘what ifs’ could be very interesting. Assuming evidence of Hochelaga were conclusively found, and we then discovered 15th century European goods at the site (something that’s entirely possible), we’d have a vastly different understanding of trade networks. If we found Algonkian cultural artifacts at about the same age-range as mid-16th century Hochelaga (also possible – they cohabitated with the Huron at Machillinac), we might then presume the Hochelagans could have been more closely related to the Huron. But imagine if we found jars of preserved birchbark scrolls with an entire Hochelagan cosmography? Or the Iroquoian equivalent of a Rosetta Stone?
No part of my argument in the article or above indicates that my perception of the Hochelagans is conditional on their technological evolution, not at all. Quite the opposite in fact, I think reconcilliation means trying even harder to ‘get the histiry right’ and learn just about everything that can be known about all Indigneous nations and peoples. If this means you can’t sink a shovel into the ground in Montreal without a team of archeologists completing an exhaustive survey first, I’m all for it.
Lastly, I worked with the architect who built the main pavilion at the Meadowcroft Rock Shelter, and he in turn had worked with the archeologist who had conducted the excavation of the objects found at Meadowcroft. It started with one arrowhead. By the end of the project, they had evidence of Indigenous habitation in Southwestern Pennsylvania dating back 19,000 BCE, roughly double the previously accepted estimate of how long Indigenous people had been living in North America.
Something like that might be right under our feet. Moving an inaccurate monument to serve contemporary socio-political goals without bothering to scan the recent scholarship on the matter seems pretty cavalier for the so-called ‘Harvard of the North’.
Paul 09:43 on 2022-10-26 Permalink
Hi Taylor,
Thanks for the article and explanation(s).
You may have been attempting to write about how monuments can often shed light in the wrong direction, but, in my opinion much of the article comes off as a criticism of McGill for (a) not making an effort to validate and change the content of a Federal plaque which isn’t under their jurisdiction, and (2) relocating the stone from an inaccessible location to a more prominent one with the support of the local indigenous community. Even referring to the new location beside the ‘driveway’ is disingenuous IMO, as the main road is a pedestrian thoroughfare accessed by thousands of McGillians, Montrealers and visitors on a daily basis.