Neutral Confederacy

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The Neutral Confederacy (also Neutral Nation, Neutral people, or Attawandaron) was a tribal confederation of Iroquoian peoples. Its heartland was along the Grand River and the eastern end of Lake Ontario in what is now Ontario, Canada. At its height, its wider territory extended west along the shores of Erie to Huron, and east to the Niagara River. To the northwest were the neighbouring territories of the Wendat and Petun who called the Neutral the Attawandaron. East of the Neutral and south of Lake Ontario was the five-nation Haudenosaunee Confederacy (Iroquois). The Neutral often raided neighboring polities, often in conjunction with allies like the Odawa. They were frequently at war with an Algonquian-speaking confederacy of five nations who lived to the west known as the Mascouten, or Fire Nation. The Neutral Confederacy were proficient hunters and traded furs and dressed deerskins to the Wendat in exchange for European goods which the Wendat had acquired from the French. The largest Neutral group was known as the Chonnonton ('keepers of the deer'), partly because of their practice of herding deer into pens, a strategy used while hunting. The Chonnonton territory also contained large deposits of flint, which was a valuable resource for sharp tools, fire-starting and, eventually, firearms, which, as a primary resource, allowed them to trade simultaneously with often-warring Wendat and Haudenosaunee tribes. Another group, the Onguiaahra whose name meant "near the big waters" or possibly "the strait," populated the Niagara Peninsula and allegedly account for the origin of the word "Niagara". Since they were not at war with the Wendat or the Haudenosaunee in the early-1600s, Jesuits travelling in the area of what is now Hamilton, the lower Grand Valley and Niagara, called them the Neutrals. However, the confederacy had feuds with an Algonkian people called the Mascouten or "Fire...