MASCOUTIN

[Michael McCafferty]

The Mascouten were first identified in history by names that the Huron applied
to them. One of these, a reference to the late prehistoric location of the
Mascouten in the southwestern Lake Erie watershed, is recorded in the form
<Totontaratonhronon>, which means ‘people where the lake disappears’.
(Translation by Blair Rudes, personal communication)

There is also another, and quite famous, Huron tribal name for the Mascouten,
written historically by the French as <a,tsistaee,ronnon>(The commas should be
under the preceding vowels and facing the other direction). This means "people
of the place where there is fire". (Also a translation by Blair Rudes.) This
attestation has particular historical importance since it was this term,
translated by the French to "les Gens du Feu" (the People of the Fire), that
was also the generic French name in the **early 1600s** for all the Central
Algonquian-speaking tribes living west of Lake Erie in the area now known as
southern Michigan and northwestern Ohio. The term seems to refer to the bison
hunting practices of the lower Great Lakes Algonquian peoples who would
intentionally start prairie fires both to create “parklands” supporting
vegetation that would attract the animals and to drive the animals in the
hunt. The term latter applied specifically to the Mascouten.

Then came along the incorrect analysis of Ojibwe /pooteewaataamii/ and
Potawatomi /potewatmi/ as "he makes a fire". (The ethnonym in fact has no
known analysis.) But this interpretation naturally got tied into "Les Gens du
Feu" and hence the Mascouten. As I mentioned earlier today, however, Ives
Goddard sorted this out in his 1972 paper.

The precise origin of the ethnonym “Mascouten” is not known, but its meaning
is clear. “Mascouten” is definitely cognate with Old
Illinois /maskoteenta/ ‘small-prairie person’. This name appears to allude to
the Prairie Peninsula of southwestern Michigan or even to small prairies in
northwestern Ohio. In late prehistory the Mascouten are thought to have lived
along the western shores of Lake Erie as members of what archaeologists term
the Sandusky Tradition (ca. 1250-1650 AD). Later, during part of the second
half of the seventeenth century the Miami and the Mascouten, war refugees,
shared a town on the upper Fox River near present-day Berlin, Wisconsin.
Then, from the late 1600s through the 1700s the Mascouten were divided into
basically two groups. In the eighteenth century, one lived on the Wabash River
below the Wea (near present-day Lafayette) and was allied with the latter and
the neighboring Piankashaw. The other was allied with the Fox and Kickapoo and
lived generally in what is now Illinois. Reduced in number by warfare and
European-introduced contagions, the Mascouten people are thought to have
merged with their linguistic and cultural cousins, the Vermillion Kickapoo,
and disappeared as a tribe known as the Mascouten. However, as Dave mentioned
yesterday, there is attractive evidence that some Mascouten continued as a
distinct linguistic entity at least into the last decade of the eighteenth
century.


Michael