Orangeville

Orangeville is a town in south-central Ontario, Canada, and the seat of Dufferin County.HistoryThe archeological record in Dufferin County dates indigenous occupation of the area to the "early Paleo-Indian" time period from 9000 to 8400 BCE. What eventually became Orangeville and Dufferin County, was historically the traditional territory of the Tionontati or Petún (Tobaco) People. "The Petun occupied from eight to ten villages located below the Niagara Escarpment along the southwest margin of Georgian Bay". Although described in the Encyclopædia Britannica as "living in the mountains south of Nottawasaga Bay, in what are now Grey and Simcoe counties", according to Sawden's "A History of Dufferin County" the Petún also lived farther south at the source of the Grand River in Dufferin County.The Petún were decimated by European diseases in 1630s, going from a population of approximately 8000 to 3000, and were subsequently attacked by the Iroquois in December of 1649 further reducing their numbers to fewer than 1000. They then fled along with other Huron peoples into the United States, while other Petún sought refuge with their French allies and settled in Quebec. This Iroqouis attack was not exclusive to the Petún, but was a part of the Beaver Wars, in which the Iroquois sought to expand their territory and monopolize the fur trade, the trade between European markets, and the trade between tribes of the Great Lakes region.After the decimation and dispersal of the Huron, Petún, and Neutral people of southern Ontario, Algonkian peoples from northern Ontario moved into the area at the end of the 17th century and the beginning of the 18th century, while members of the Three Fires Confederacy (Chippewa, Odawa, Potawatomi) moved into southern Ontario from Ohio and Michigan in the late 1700s. During the pre-confederation Treaty era, Anishinaabe or Chippewa First Nations signed Treaty #18 on Oct 17th, 1818, which included the Dufferin County area. Today, the descendants of Petún call themselves Wyandotte, and despite the 350 years since their displacement from southern Ontario, and despite the heteroglot and diasporic nature of their contemporary communities (located in Oklahoma, Michigan, Kansas, and Quebec), they continue to recognize their shared history and are united through a modern-day Wyandotte Confederacy.