Why are the Erie the Cat People?

I don't often have original ideas of my own—true originality is difficult.  But occasionally I do come up with something that I think might be worth sharing.  This post is about an idea I had a while back concerning the old nickname of the Erie tribe: the Nation du Chat.

 

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The Erie were a people who once lived south of the Great Lake which still bears their name.  Not much is known about them as they were invaded and dispersed by the Iroquois in the 17th century, before literate Europeans (which is to say: Jesuit missionaries) were able to record much about their culture and language.  The same is more-or-less true for several other Iroquoian tribes who once lived in the lower Great Lakes: the Wenro, the Neutral, the Petun, the Susquehannock.  A popular theory has it that after the Iroquois conquest, many Eries fled south and became the slave-trading Westo.

 

There's a lot hiding inside that little name: Erie.  One is that, though the modern name has two syllables, it was originally supposed to have three: e-ri-e.  Let me explain:

 

Although it's highly likely the Eries spoke an Iroquoian language, almost nothing else is known about their language including the precise name they called themselves—"Erie" itself comes from the name that the Huron called them.  Of all the Iroquoian-speaking tribes and confederacies that used to live in the Great Lakes region before they were destroyed or driven off by the Five Nations, the Huron are by far the best documented since it was among the Hurons that the Jesuits devoted most of their missionary activities.  Ever the cunning linguists, the Jesuits learned to speak and write the Huron language fairly well—they even compared it to Greek and Latin in its elegance and complexity.  As such most of the tribal names that appear in the early French records (some more or less mysterious) are also in Huron, such as the labels on this map:

 

 

That map was made in 1641 by an unidentified draftsman—one theory is that it was made by Jean Bourdon.  It will come up later.

 

The Huron language served as the Jesuits' lingua franca when communicating to other northern Iroquoian peoples, since it was similar enough to their own tongues to be understood.  You can go on Amazon and buy a translation by John Steckley of a text written in Huron by Jesuit missionaries in order to teach Christianity to the Iroquois.

 

The Huron (and perhaps other Iroquoian peoples) called the Erie the "People of the Cherry Tree Place".  Rendered into a kind of koiné Iroquoian, that name would be something like: Eriʔkehro:nǫʔ, deriving from: eriʔ (cherry tree), keh (locative suffix), ro:nǫʔ (people).  The word for cherry tree, eriʔ, had an additional shortened variant riʔ, and ro:nǫʔ has a counterpart morpheme ha:kaʔ with more or less the same meaning [but see note 1].  Thus a name like "Richohockan" represents a slightly different form of the same name, riʔkeha:kaʔ, while "Riquehronnons" comes from yet another form riʔkehro:nǫʔ.  But you can see that these are all just minor variations of the same essential word.

 

When the name comes from Huron, another variation occurs.  See in Huron the proto-Iroquoian sound *k was softened into another sound which the Jesuits spelled sometimes with a <g>, sometimes with a <y> or <i>, and sometimes with a little lowered apostrophe-thing <˛>.  No one quite knows exactly how this sound was pronounced.  In modern Wyandot—which descends from colonial Huron ("modern" in the sense that Wyandot was still spoken until the mid-20th century)—this sound became /y/.  But it must have been at least a little different in colonial Huron, because it also had another /y/ sound which it inherited from proto-Iroquoian *y, and the two sounds are distinguished in writing:

 

            

 

These examples are from Charles Julian's dissertation on the History of the Iroquoian Languages, which uses "x" to represent the Huron "mystery consonant".  Guesses as to how it was pronounced vary from [x] to [ɣ] to [ç] to [ʝ].  Some favor a more yod-like sound since—in addition to it becoming /y/ in Wyandot—the Jesuits' character <˛> looks like a Greek iota subscript.  The Jesuit orthography definitely contains Greek influence: /th/ was written with θeta, /kh/ with χi, and /h/ was sometimes written with a raised apostrophe-thing <ʽ> probably based on the spiritus asper.

 

But anyway, this means that the standard Huron name for the Eries would be Eriʔxehro:nǫʔ, which the Jesuits who adhered strictly to Huron orthography would spell <Eri˛ehronnons>.  The –hro:nǫʔ element varied a little in spelling but not by much.  One final thing to know is that in the Northern Bear dialect of Huron, which was the Jesuits' main dialect for a while, the "mystery consonant" was just dropped entirely, so in that dialect the Eries were called Eriʔehro:nǫʔ which they would spell "Eriehronnons".  Even if it came from another dialect, though, they might still write it as "Eriehronnons" because not everyone who wrote these names down were strictly adhering to the special Huron orthography—weird looking letters like <ʽ> and <˛> would just be ignored and dropped.  And of course no one ever indicated any glottal stops or vowel length.

 

From here you can see how "Eriehronnons" could be shortened by chopping off the gentilic suffix to make "Erie".

 

(This isn't my original idea by the way.  The "cherry tree" etymology has been around for a while, but was unfortunately not included in the Handbook of North American Indians or in Bright's Native American Placenames of the United States.)

 

The Erie also went by another name: the Cat Nation.  You can see it on the Huron map from above: "Enrie – Nation du Chat".

 

 

Or on the Jean Boisseau map of 1643: "Les gens de Chat".

 

 

As is often the case, the tribe's existence on maps outlived its existence in real life.  Here we see the "Nation du Chat" on the 1718 map of Guillaume Delisle, which we are informed, a éte detruite par les Iroquois.

 

 

This English-language map of Jonathan Senex from 1721 has an interesting take on the cat nation, calling them the "Felians":

 

 

You might have noticed: cherry trees aren't cats.  So why weren't the Erie the Nation de la Cerise?

 

There have been a few theories for why this is.  A century ago the Tuscarora linguist J.N.B. Hewitt tried to derive the name "Eriehronnons" from the Huron for "Cat People"—Hewitt either didn't know of, or didn't care for, the "cherry tree" etymology.  He based this on the modern Wyandot word for mountain lion, which is yęriš (according to Kopris' grammar-dictionary).  This seems a little more plausible once you realize that Eriehronons was sometimes written "Eriechronons" as on the Jaillot map of 1674:

 

 

which isn't a bad match for *Yęrišro:nǫʔ.  However the French misspelled the populative suffix as "chronons" rather often: I sifted the following examples from the index of the Jesuit Relations:

 

Achirwachronnons, Ahouenrochrhonons, Andoouanchronon, Ataronchronon, Attochingochronon, Awanchronon, Oiochronon, Oiotchronon, Oneiochronons, Oneiocheronon, Oneouchoueronon, Onneiotchronnons [+ many more variants on the last]

 

Sometimes the "ch" was further distorted into "ck", as on this 1704 map by Louis de Hennepin which calls the Erie the "Erieckronois":

 

 

I don't know if all these "chronon" spellings are just misspellings of "ehronon" or if something else is going on.  But in any case, Hewitt's theory for the Erie is wrong: the "cherry tree" etymology is well supported by all the various attested spellings which reflect known variations on Common Iroquoian *Eriʔkehro:nǫʔ ~ *Eriʔkeha:kaʔ.

 

 

(Some *keh spellings may still come from Huron where the reflex of PNI *k was sometimes written with a <g>.  The point is more whether it's written at all.  The lack of *[e]riʔxeha:kaʔ forms isn't surprising because in Huron, the only language with k-lenition, the -ha:kaʔ suffix is evidently less common: Charles Julian doesn't give a Huron reflex for it at all, though Steckley (1990) does.) 

 

Another theory for why the Eries were the Nation du Chat has it that they weren't actually the nation of the cat at all.  Instead, the "chat" in question was actually a "chat sauvage"—which in Canadian French (supposedly) is the term for a raccoon.  Raccoons were at first unknown to the Europeans, just as domestic cats (Felis catus) were unknown to Native Americans.  In the 1600's people were still working out what to call these new animals; this was the same period when the English down in Virginia were borrowing their word "raccoon" from Powhatan.  The Recollet friar Gabriel Sagard wrote in 1632:

 

"Les Loups ceruiers, nommez Toutſit-ſaute, en quelque Nation ſont aſſez frequents: mais les Loups communs, qu'ils appellent Anariſqua, ſont aſſez rare, auſſi en eſtiment ils grandement la peau, comme auſſi celle d'vne eſpece de Leopard, ou Chat ſauuage, qu'ils appellent Tiron (Il y a vn pays en cette grande eſtendue de Prouinces, que nous ſurnomons la Nation de Chat, i'ay opinion que ce nom leur a eſté donné à cauſe-de ces Chats ſauuages, petits Loups ou Leopards qui ſe retrouuvent dans leurs pays) deſquelles ils font des robes ou couuertures, qu'ils parſement & embelliſſent de quantité de queuës d'animaux, couſuës tout à l'entour des bords, & par deſſus le dos: Ces Chats ſauuages ne ſont gueres plus grands qu'vn grand Renard, mais ils ont le poil du tout ſemblable à celui d'vn grand Loup[.]

 

The Loups cerviers [lynxes], called Toutsit-saute, are quite common in some Nations: but the Loups communs [wolves], called Anarisqua, are rather rare, such that the skin is valued as highly as that of that of a kind of Leopard, or Chat sauvage, which they call Tiron (there is a country in this great expanse of Provinces which we name the Cat Nation, I am of the opinion that their name has been given on account of these Chats sauvages, little Wolves or Leopards that are found in their country).  With these [skins] they make robes or blankets, which they adorn with a multitude of the animals' tails, sewn all around the edges, and upon the back: these Chats sauvages are scarcely bigger than a large Fox, but have fur which entirely resembles that of a large Wolf."

 

(Gabriel Sagard, Le Grand Voyage du Pays des Hurons (1632), page 307)

 

[Note: I may be misreading the word Toutſit-ſaute—the scan is speckled and the pdf mid-quality.]

 

We can confirm that Sagard is actually talking about raccoons by comparing his "Tiron" with the attested Iroquoian words for raccoon: Mohawk entì:ron, Oneida ʌti·lú, Huron "entiron".  The Powhatan also decorated their cloaks with raccoon tails.

 

So then, cherry trees aren't cats... but I guess raccoons are?

 

Roy A. Wright in his article article on the Erie question wasn't quite on board with the idea that the Erie were actually the Raccoon Nation:

 

"Since Huron tiron clearly means 'raccoon' and chat sauvage may as well, the identity of Sagard's valued fur-bearing animal is simply resolved, though its relation to the Eries is not.  Perhaps Sagard is merely surmising on his own that the Cat nation must be named after this prised 'cat' of the Hurons; just such a prioricity is indicated by his "I am of the opinion", rather than "I am told" or an equally affirmative omission of qualification: "This name has been given..."."  (Wright 1974:77)

 

Why the Erie should be named after raccoons or cats is another matter entirely: Wright proposed a connection with other Woodlands tribes which had panther clans or sodalities.  William Engelbrecht argued in favor of the raccoon explanation, saying "it should be remembered that the male raccoon is unusual in possessing a bony element in his penis, a fact which the Iroquois were well aware since the raccoon os penis occurs without other associated skeletal parts on Iroquois sites ... its presence is usually assumed to reflect a concern with virility as it does in areas of the rural South today".  I don't find either of those arguments particularly convincing—lots of tribes are named after animals—nor do they explain why the Eries must have been named after the one animal and not the other.

 

At one point I decided that I was just going to figure out what "Cat People" and "Raccoon People" would be in Huron, and then see if the Eries—or anyone else—were ever called anything that sounded like it.  It turns out Sagard slightly misheard the Huron word for raccoon: it is not tiron but rather entiron, phonetically reconstructible as ętíʔrǫ.  But I could not and can not find any such nation named as the "Entironhronnon" or the "Entironhaga" [see postscript 1]

 

But...

 

The word for "mountain lion" in the modern Iroquoian languages are: kèn:reks in Mohawk, kʌ̀:leks in Oneida, kə̢hreks in Tuscarora, and yęriš in 20th-century Wyandot—what the Seneca, Cayuga, and Onondaga words are I don't know, but no matter.  Charles Julian's dissertation doesn't reconstruct this root directly, but using his sound changes I was able to figure out that the Proto-Northern-Iroquoian ancestor would be *kęhreks.  The modern Wyandot yęriš is the odd one out of this bunch: if the PNI form was *kęhreks then the Wyandot should be yɛ̢:rehš according to Julian's sound changes.  I'm not worried about this, since the modern Wyandot record is less than excellent.

 

If you derive forward from *kęhreks then the word for mountain lion in colonial Huron should be xęhrehš.  That initial "x" is the Huron mystery consonant, so in Northern Bear dialect the word would be ęhrehš.  Combined with the nominal suffix -aʔ which connected the populative suffix with unincorporated nouns (see Julian page 153), that gives us ęhrehšaʔro:nǫʔ.

 

So is there any Native group mentioned in the French historical records whose name looks like Ęhrehšaʔro:nǫʔ?  Yes there is.

 

In the Jesuit Relation of 1640, written by Paul Le Jeune, there is a list of the Indian tribes who lived south of lakes Ontario, Erie, and Huron:

 

"Depuis le ſault S. Louis montant touſiours ſur ce grand fleuue, on trouue de belles nation au Sud, & toutes ſedentaires, & fort nombreuſes, comme les Agneehrono, les Oneiochronon, le Onontaehronon, les Konkhandeenhronon, les Oniouenhronon, les Andaſtoehronon, les Sonontouehronon, les Andoouanchronon, les Kontareahronon, les Ouendat, les Khionontatehronon, les Oherokouaehronon, les Aondironon, les Ongmarahronon, les Akhrakvaeronon, les Oneronon, les Ehreſſaronon, les Attiouendaronk, les Eriehronon, les Totontaratonhronon, les Ahriottaehronon, les Oſcouarahronon, les Hvattoehronon, les Skenchiohronon, les Attiſtaehronon, les Ontarahronon, les Aoueatſiouaenhronon, les Attochingochronon, les Attiouendarankhronon.  Toutes ces nations ſont ſedentaires, comme i'ay deſia dit, elles cultiuent la terre, & par conſequent ſont remplies de peuples, i'ay tiré leurs noms d'vne carte Huronne, que le Pere Paul Ragueneau m'a communiqué[.]"

 

(Paul Le Jeune, in Thwaites, Jesuit Relations, Vol 18, pp 232-5)

 

These names are all in Huron, and most of them were identified by John Steckley and/or Conrad Heidenreich in their analyses of the Huron Nouvelle France map that I showed earlier.  Inserting the modern names of known Native groups into the English translation from Thwaites' edition, this reads:

 

"Continuing to ascend this great river from the sault St. Louis, we find to the South very flourishing nations, all sedentary and very numerous,—such as the Mohawk, the Oneida, the Onondaga, the Konkhandeenhronon, the Cayuga, the Susquehannock, the Seneca, the Andoouanchronon, the Contarea [a Huron village], the Huron, the Petun, Oherokouaehronon, the Aondironon, the Ongmarahronon, the Akhrakvaeronon, the Wenro, the Ehressaronon, the Neutral, the Erie, Totontaratonhronon, the Potawotami, the Fox, the Sauk, the Fox, the Mascouten, the Kickapoo, the Winnebago, the Attochingochronon, the Neutral.  All these nations are sedentary, as I have already said.  They cultivate the land, and consequently are very populous.  I have taken their names from a Huron map that Father Paul Ragueneau sent me."

 

These tribes extend from the east end of Lake Ontario all the way south and around to the west side of Lake Michigan.  The Neutrals and the Foxes are listed twice.  Some are of unknown reference, which I've kept in Huron italics.  But I hope you also noticed the big fat bold-texted "Ehressaronon" right in the middle of them.

 

Not many people seem to have written about the Ehressaronon specifically.  Conrad Heidenreich says that "from their position on Le Jeune's list they may have been an Erie group".  David Sorg's article on the legendary "Alligewi" of Pennsylvania spends a little time talking about them, albeit in an attempt to identify them with the "Hereckeenes", a tribe said to be enemies with the Massawomeck.  I agree there is probably some connection, but I'm pretty sure the names are distinct: "Ehressaronon" from xęhrehšaʔro:nǫʔ and "Hereckeene" from some variant of eriʔkehro:nǫʔ.  In other words the Hereckeenes were the Eries.

 

(Note that the name "Hereckeene" comes via the Massawomeck language, which was probably Iroquoian and probably did not drop its /k/'s.  Of all the Erie spellings, "Hereckeene" is one of the weaker ones, so it's possible that they weren't Eries at all, but I certainly think it's highly probable.  This by the way is also strong evidence that the Erie and the Massawomeck were not the same.)

 

According to Sorg, the only other appearance of the Ehressaronon under that name is in the account of Pierre-Esprit Radisson, in a similar list of Indian nations, but as Sorg points out Radisson's list is just cribbed wholesale from Le Jeune.  Though his spelling is different, and a little funny: he calls them the "Eressaronoms".

 

But people have noticed them before: Roy A. Wright's article includes "Ehressaronon" as a possible synonym of Erie.  But he has this name listed seemingly only as a possible variant of "Erie(c)hronon", and doesn't consider that they come from different roots.  They do look a little similar, that's why Hewitt thought he could link Erie(ch) with yęriš after all.  But as far as I know, nobody has suggested that Ehressaronon and Eriehronon both refer to the Erie while at the same time having separate etymologies.  So, this is my "original" hypothesis:

 

HYPOTHESIS:

The Ehressaronon mentioned by Le Jeune are the "Cat People", from Huron *xęhrehšaʔro:nǫʔ (< PNI *kęhreks-aʔ-ronǫʔ, with the initial reflex of Proto-Iroquoian *k either omitted orthographically or lost as in the Northern Bear dialect).  Their name is etymologically distinct from that of the Erie (< Eriehronon et var.), who are the "People at the Cherry Tree", from Huron *eriʔxehro:nǫʔ (< PNI *eriʔ-keh-ronǫʔ).  Since the name of the Ehressaronon—"Cat People"—was extended by the French to refer to the entire Erie confederacy, they may have been one of its constituent tribes.

 

In other words, the Nation du Chat are not named after raccoons after all.

 

The phenomenon of using the name of one division to refer to a larger group is well-attested in history: the Persians call Greeks yunâni after the Ionians, the Yup'iks call white people kass'aq after the Cossacks, etc.  In fact Roy Wright himself brings this up as something that may have happened to the Erie, though he wasn't talking about the Ehressaronon but rather another mysterious tribe called the Kahkwa:

 

"[It] is often hard to be sure whether Kahkwaʔkekaʔ was originally the Seneca name applied to the "whole" people (confederation??) called Erie by the Hurons and later by the whites, or whether it simply denoted the closest constituent group, much as the French call all Germans by the name of the closest tribe, allemands.  In much the same way, the Dutch first applied the Mohican name Seneca 'stone people' to the Oneida (Mohawk /onę́:yoteʔ/ 'stone standing'..."

 

I can see two problems with my hypothesis.  The first is that François Le Mercier explicitly said in 1654 that the Erie were named after the raccoon:

 

"Ils nous aprẽnent qu'vne nouuelle guerre leur eſtoit ſuruenuë, qui les iette tous dans la crainte.  Que les Ehriehronnons arment contre eux, (nous les appellons la Nation du Chat, à cauſe qu'il y a dans leur pais vne quantité prodigieuſe de Chats Sauuages, deux & trois fois plus grands que nos Chats domeſtiques, (mais d'vn beau poil, & precieux[.])

 

They [the Onondaga] informed us that a fresh war had broken out against them, and thrown them all into a state of alarm; that the Ehriehronnons were arming against them (these we call the Cat Nation, because of the prodigious number of Chats Sauvages in their country, two or three times as large as our domestic Cats, but of a handsome and valuable fur)."

 

(Le Mercier, in Thwaites, Jesuit Relations, Vol 41, 80-1; translation slightly altered)

 

These chats sauvages are clearly the same raccoons that Sagard described.  However the same points apply here as Wright raised about Sagard: Le Mercier is implying that "Nation du Chat" is a particular name that the French call the Erie: "nous les appellons".  Still though, no one said that "Nation du Chat" had to be a translation of a Native American name—maybe the French did invent it on their own, and maybe it was because of the raccoons?  Ordinarily I wouldn't doubt Le Mercier about this, except that if I'm right about the etymology of "Ehressaronon" then there was an apparently-named "People of the Panther" conspicuously sitting there right in the middle of everything.

 

Paul Le Jeune said that his names were taken from a Huron map sent to him by Fr. Paul Ragueneau.  That map has been lost, but was probably the prototype for Bourdon's map from earlier.  Bourdon's map omits the Ehressaronon, but by interpolating it with Le Jeune's list of names Conrad Heidenreich estimated that the Ehressaronon were located near the head of Conewango Creek, a tributary of the Allegheny.  David Sorg, reviewing Heidenreich's estimate, located them a bit further south on the Clarion River tributary.

 

 

These estimates are based partly on the assumption that the order in which Le Jeune named his tribes was based on their spacial distribution on Ragueneau's map: this is mostly borne out for the known groups that he names.  Heidenreich speculated that the Ehressaronon were an Erie group, and he placed them within the territory of the Erie—though I don't know in which direction his reasoning went.  Sorg's location is still no further from the Eries than to the likely territory of the Massawomecks, but that's an issue for another time.

 

A different conclusion was come to by Lucien Campeau.  His reading of Le Jeune and the Bourdon map led him to think that the Ehressaronon were politically Neutral:

 

"Le P. Ragueneau n'avait pas omis les noms particuliers des nations neutres, puisqu'on les voit dans cette région sur la liste de Le Jeune.  Il y a trois noms dont on est certain qu'ils représentent des nations neutres.  Le premier, Akrakouaeronon, est dans la liste et sur la carte, mais au sud du lac Érié en celle-ci.  Cela semble sa juste position.  Cette nation, seule restante des Neutres, fut détruite en 1652.  Le deuxième nom est Aondironon.  Cette nation est rapportée par Le Jeune, mais non sur la carte.  Les Aondironons furent détruits par les Tsonnontouans en 1647.  Une troisième nation neutre est représentée chez Le Jeune par Ongmarahronon, qui est une mauvaise lecture d'Onghiarahronon, nation vivant dans un seul bourg et qui a donné le nom de Niagara.  Une quatrième nation, enfin, n'est ni dans la liste de Le Jeune ni sur la carte, parce qu'elle s'était réfugiée chez les Huron en 1638.  Ce sont les Ouenroronons.  Connaissant quatre noms certains de nations neutres, on peut facilement compléter cette ligue par trois autres, qui sont voisins dans la liste de Le Jeune, mais sont omis sur la carte.  Ce sont Eressaronon, Oneronon et Oherokouaeronon.  Donc, sept nations neutres: une ligue très populeuse, puisqu'elle pouvait fournir quatre mille guerriers en 1641.  Si les Akrakouaeronons vivaient au sud du lac Érié, les Ouenroronons demeuraient à l'est de la rivière Niagara.  Les cinq autres nations occupaient le nord du lac Érié sur toute sa longueur, bien que moins densément à l'ouest."

 

(Lucien Campeau, "La découverte du lac Érié" pp. 33-4)

 

Campeau unfortunately didn't notice that "Oneronon" is a misprint for "Ouero[ro]non" and that the Wenro are in fact present on Le Jeune's list.  That's okay: I didn't notice at first either.  But his view is that since the Ehressaronon are listed amidst several other Neutral tribes, they were probably Neutral as well.  Comparing his and Heidenreich's interpretation of the relevant part of Le Jeune's list:

 

           

 

The Wenro aren't usually spoken of as being a Neutral tribe though maybe they were.  The identity of the Akhrakuaeronon (a.k.a. the Atrakwaeronnon) is an extremely fraught issue, but Steckley and Pendergast's articles don't pin them as a Neutral tribe.  But the Attiouendaronk (the Huron name for the Neutral) seem to be the real odd-one-out on Le Jeune's list; the Bourdon map also has "Atiovandarons" written in a strange place, south of the Eries, entirely the wrong spot.  I think we can ignore that entry and assume the original Ragueneau map had it written in an odd place.  And if you ignore the Attiouendaronk, then the Ehressaronon are listed immediately between the Wenro (who may have been Neutral-aligned) and the Erie (who were definitely Erie-aligned).  So on the evidence of the map and the list alone, it's slightly more likely that the Ehressaronon were aligned with the Erie.

 

The second problem with my hypothesis is that "Ehressaronon" is not actually a fantastic fit for *Ęhrehšaʔro:nǫʔ.  We would want something more like "Enrecharonon" since the French spell [š] with <ch> and not <ss>.  I really have no rebut to this other than to vaguely wave in the general direction of dialect variation and imperfect spelling.  If it was a dialect issue then it could be easily explained as a conservatism since in the proto-form *kęhreks the consonant is in fact an [s].  More generally, though, my real problem is that I'm not actually an Iroquoianist.  I'm lucky to be in contact with a number of people who know Algonquian linguistics well, but I have no such advisor for Iroquoian.  I studied Mohawk a little bit, some time ago, but it was a really really little bit and not enough to help me much—I really don't know what I'm doing.  For all I know ęhrehšaʔro:nǫʔ might not even be grammatically correct.

 

So I don't know if I'm right about this Ehressaronon thing.  Nevertheless I wanted to at least suggest the idea.

 

 

Postscript 1:

I said that there were no tribes with a name like Entironhronnon – "Raccoon People".  That's actually not true, there are two groups whose names look sort of like that, but they both have etymologies unrelated to the word for raccoon.  The first are the Entioronnon, one of the Wyandot clans from the 18th century.  Steckley inteprets this to mean "people of the large field" (1985:10)—one of many Indian groups in that general area to have a name like that.

 

The second are the Atiraguenrek.  These guys show up on a couple maps in the area where the Neutral had formerly dwelt:

 

"Atiraghenrega" on the (Italian) Coronelli map of 1695

 

Most people identify them as a Neutral tribe, but Wright says:

 

"One of the most enigmatic names comes from John Norton, whose diary has recently been published, unfortunately without vocabulary.  Writing before 1816, he alone refers to the Eries as Rad-irageai ka [sic] /ratirakę(r)ikhaʔ/, a Mohawk counterpart to Quen's AtiraguenreK /atirakęrek/ [...] It has been asserted that the Attiragenrega were likely members of a Neutral Confederacy ... on the basis of the fact that their name never appears together (i.e., contrasts) with that of the Attiwandaronks ... But there is never a definite identification of the two; furthermore, the Radirageaika are clearly identified by Norton as Eries."

[note: the "[sic]" is Wright's]

 

Whoever they were, their name doesn't refer to a raccoon.  The initial "ati" represents the Huron 3rd person masculine plural prefix /hati/: it nothing to do with the ętíʔrǫ root (Steckley 1992, cf. Lukianec p.82).  In modern Mohawk the 3masc.pl prefix is /rati/ hence the John Norton form quoted by Wright.

 

The second element of Atiraguenrek probably doesn't come from *kęhreks either, in case you were thinking that.  The closest I've found to an explanation for what the name actually does mean is by John Steckley:

 

"Additionally, under the entry for the Hawk clan we find the words "hatiraenre" and "Araenre".  While it is possible that these terms are derived from a noun and verb combination -˛ara˛enie- meaning 'to roll or turn over', and that this term could refer to the spirally dive of a hawk, lacking further evidence, this is highly speculative at best.  More likely, but still speculative, is the possibility that the hatira˛enre were the Hawk 'tribe' of the Neutral."

(John Steckley, "When Did the Wenro Turn Turtle?", Arch Notes 1985:3)

 

 

Postscript 2:

One thing that David Sorg suggested to me is that "Riquehronnon" etc. might not actually come from the word for cherry tree at all.  Allegedly the modern lexicons of Iroquoian languages don't actually show eriʔ to have any such variant as riʔ.  I thought I remembered seeing one in the online Mohawk dictionary but unfortunately I can't check it because the website is down and this is why you don't rely on the internet for your dictionaries!  It is a bit awkward that the full "koiné Iroquoian" form *Eriʔkehro:nǫʔ isn't attested in any spelling, but Printz's "Arrigahaga" is just as good.  Combined with all the other variants from the table above, I'm still pretty confident in this etymology.

 

 

 

Note 1 :

Keh-ro:nǫʔ is how Charles Julian analyzes these two morphemes, but others sometimes separate them as ke-hro:nǫʔ, and I'm not sure why there seems to be disagreement on which morpheme has the aitch.  I'm also fudging the two populative suffixes a bit: Julian reconstructs ro:nǫʔ as Proto-Northern-Iroquoian *ronǫʔ, but the first vowel seems to almost always lengthen secondarily.  The other populative suffix is actually technically ka:ʔ according to Julian, and the ha: element is something else.  But at least in Mohawk, ha:kaʔ is treated as a single suffix (e.g. Kahnawa'kehá:ka' = "the people of Caughnawaga") and seems to have in the case of names such as Rickahockan.  I'm also note sure to what extent -ro:nǫʔ and –ha:kaʔ are actually synonymous: Bonvillain's grammar of Akwesasne Mohawk calls the latter a "characterizer suffix" and gives examples where it doesn't necessarily refer to people.  But the same group could evidently be referred to using the same stem with either ro:nǫʔ or ha:kaʔ so for my present purposes we can consider them synonymous.  Note that I'm especially uncertain of the long vowels in my "Common Iroquoian" forms since individual languages add and remove vowel length differently and I haven't studied them all.  Also whenever I say "Iroquoian" or "proto-Iroquoian" I'm... pretty much just ignoring Cherokee, sorry.

 

 

 

Sources:

 

Nancy Bonvillain (1973) A Grammar of Akwesasne Mohawk.

Lucien Campeau (1989) "La découverte du lac Érié", Les Cahier des dix 44.

William Engelbrecht (1991) "Erie", The Bulletin: Journal of the New York State Archaeological Association.

Conrad E. Heidenreich (1988) "An Analysis of the 17-th Century Map 'Novvelle France'", Cartographica 25(3).

Charles Julian (2010) A History of the Iroquoian Languages, PhD diss., University of Manitoba.

Megan Elizabeth Lukianiec (2018) The elaboration of verbal structure: Wendat (Huron) verb morphology, PhD diss, State University of New York at Buffalo.

James F. Pendergast (1994) The Kakouagoga or Kahkwas: An Iroquoian Nation Destroyed in the Niagara Region, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 138(1).

Gabriel Sagard (1632) Le Grand Voyage du Pays des Hurons.

David J. Sorg (2012) "A Preliminary Model for the Alligewi Tribe", Pennsylvania Archaeologist 82(2).

John Steckley (1985a) "A Tale of Two Peoples", Arch Notes 85.

John Steckley (1985b) "Why Did the Wenro Turn Turtle?", Arch Notes 85(3).

John Steckley (1990) "The Early Map 'Novvelle France': A Linguistic Analysis, Ontario Archaeology 51.

John Steckley (1992) "Niagara: An Interpretation", Arch Notes 92(4).

Reuben Gold Thwaites (1896-1901) The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents.

Roy A. Wright (1974), The People of the Panther – A Long Erie Tale.