Erie people

The Erie people were an Indigenous people of the Northeastern Woodlands historically living on the south shore of Lake Erie. An Iroquoian-speaking tribe, they lived in what is now western New York, northwestern Pennsylvania, and northern Ohio before 1658. Their nation was almost exterminated in the mid-17th century by five years of prolonged warfare with the powerful neighboring Iroquois for helping the Huron in the Beaver Wars for control of the fur trade. Captured survivors were adopted or enslaved by the Iroquois.

Their villages were burned by Haudenosaunee warriors. This destroyed their stored maize and other foods, added to their loss of life, and threatened their future, as they had no way to survive the winter. The attacks likely forced their emigration. The Haudenosaunee Confederacy was known for adopting captives and refugees into their tribes. The surviving Erie are believed to have been largely absorbed by other Iroquoian tribes, particularly families of the Seneca, the westernmost of the Five Nations. Susquehannock families may also have adopted some Erie, as the tribes had shared the hunting grounds of the Allegheny Plateau and Kittanning Path that passed through the gaps of the Allegheny. The members of remnant tribes living among the Iroquois gradually assimilated to the majority cultures, losing their independent tribal identities.

The Erie people were also known as the Eriechronon, Yenresh, Erielhonan, Eriez, Nation du Chat, and Riquéronon.^{[citation needed]} They were also called the Chat ("Cat" in French) or "Long Tail", referring, possibly, to the raccoon tails worn on clothing; however, in Native American cultures across the Eastern Woodlands, the terms "cat" and "long tail" tend to be references to a mythological creature which, depending on the tribe and time period is described as either a giant bobcat with a human face and a long tail, a sea serpent with deer antlers or some kind of dragon-like entity. Iroquoian names associated with this creature in English include Blue Panther, Underwater Panther, Blue Snake, Horned Serpent, Comet Lion, etc. One of the various actual Iroquois names for this creatures is given as Oniare, which might be the closest we can get to Erie. Geh is Iroquoian for "of the" & ronon is Iroquoian for "people" or "nation."

The Erie spoke the Erie language, an unattested Iroquoian language said to have been similar to Wyandot.

The known boundaries of Erie lands extended from the Allegheny River to the shores of Lake Erie. They were once believed, due to a misidentification of villages by early French explorers mapping the Great Lakes, to control all the land from northwestern Pennsylvania to about Sandusky, Ohio, but archaeologists have now attributed the western half of that to another culture referred to as the Whittlesey's, who were likely an Algonquian people.

A site once thought to be Erie in Conneaut, Ohio, is attributed to Whittlesey culture, who surrounded their villages with earthen embankments instead of wooden palisades and lived in longhouses, rather than wigwams, by the time of European contact. However, a second village on the east side of the river likely had been an Erie settlement. Another Erie settlement was discovered in Windsor, Ohio, at the southwestern corner of Ashtabula County, which is two river valleys further west than the sites at Conneaut. No significant settlement remains from prior to the Beaver Wars was ever documented in Trumbull or Mahoning Counties, leaving the exact border between the two peoples in question.

Like other Iroquoian peoples, the Erie lived in multifamily long houses in villages enclosed in palisades. These defensive works often encompassed their fields for crops. They cultivated the "Three Sisters: varieties of corn, beans, and squash, during the warm season. In winter, tribal members lived off the stored crops and animals taken in hunts.^{[citation needed]} The names of only some villages have survived, and those include Kentaientonga (Gentaguehronon, Gentaienton, Gentaguetehronnon), Honniasont (Black Minqua, Honniasontkeronon, Oniassontke), and Rigué (Arrigahaga, Rigueronnon, Rique, Riquehronnon).

At the time the Erie existed, their immediate neighbors included the Neutral Nation, across Lake Erie, the Wenro to the north, between the Genessee and Niagara Rivers, the Susquehannock east of the Allegheny River and two historically unknown nations- the Monongahela culture to the south of the Allegheny River (named for the Monongahela River, which itself was named after a nickname for the Lenape, who lived there later) and the Whittlesey culture to the west. The Monongahela Culture was most likely a Siouan-speaking society.