Extinct Tribe: the Ais

The Spanish encountered many tribes during their exploration and conquest of what is now Florida.  Unfortunately, warfare and disease would decimate these Natives long before Europeans would have time to lean more about them.  The Ais were one of these tribes.

The Ais lived along coastal Florida, approximately what is now Cape Canaveral to St. Lucie Inlet, in the modern-day Brevard and St. Lucie County.  They were first encountered in 1566 by Pedro Mendez de Aviles, the found of St. Augustine.  He named the tribe Ais or Ays after a Cacique or chieftain of the name.  The Spanish built a town called St. Lucia near an Ais village, but were forced by repeated attacks to give it up and head back to St. Augustine.  After this rocky start, the Ais became allies of the Spaniards and learned to view other Europeans with hostility, perhaps because the Spanish did.  In 1696, an English merchant and sea captain named Jonathan Dickinson set sail from Port Royal, Jamaica and became shipwrecked on the Florida coast, living several weeks with the Ais before being rescued.  Much of modern-day knowledge about this people comes from his journal.

According to Dickinson, the Ais were a hunting and gathering people with a primary diet of fish, which they speared themselves from the various lakes and inlets in their territory.  They had developed a thriving trading economy with the Spanish at St. Augustine, spoke Spanish and relied on trade goods such as mirrors, axes and knives.  They dwelled in towns in which were large cabins made primarily of palmetto wood and thatched with leaves.  The towns were headed by a Cacique or chief, and there were alliances between the various towns and other tribes in the area.  Unfortunately, Dickinson recorded little of the Ais people's language and customs.  Sources differ on whether they were related to the Muskogean tribes or Arawakan tribes such as the Caribe.  As we've seen in other posts, English raids from what was then the Colony of Carolina decimated the Native population of Florida in the early 18th century.  Sources also differ on whether Ais survivors may have joined with later migrants such as the Seminole. 

Extinct Tribe; The Neutral

The Beaver Wars of the 17th century coupled with disease and ill-treatment decimated many Native tribes and caused others to lose their tribal identity entirely.  The Neutral, an Iroquoian-speaking people whose home range lay between that of the Five Nations, the Tobacco or Wenro, the Huron, the Susquehannock and the Erie, would suffer that fate. 

Although the name suggests that they were a buffer between larger Iroquoian-speaking tribes, or that they tried to remain neutral during the ongoing conflicts, there was constant friction within the Iroquoian peoples themselves, as well as with Algonquian-speaking tribes.  When the French first encountered them, they comprised about 40 permanent settlements.  Neutral is a French designation.  The people referred to themselves either as Keepers of the Dear, due to their practice of herding deer into pens to hunt.  Another group were the Onguiaarha, or Near the Big Water, from which the word Niagara may have come.  The Huron knew them as "People Whose Speech is Awry/Different".  Flint was found in their territory and became a valuable trade item until European firearms became more plentiful in the frontier and the market for local flint dropped off.  Jesuit sources in 1652 described the Neutral Natives' practice of tattooing. 

The Neutral occupied what is now southern Ontario and around modern-day Buffalo, New York.  At one time, they may have consolidated their power under a war leader named Souharissen.  Souharissen ranged as far as Michigan defending his people's home and hunting range and welcomed a French missionary who later wrote of the Neutral people's power at that time and of their war leader.  French missionaries and explorers of the 17th century made frequent mention of how powerful these people were, and the amount of plentiful wild game and food resources in their country.  Another leader, Tsouharrisen, Child of the Sun, who may be the same person or a relative, also led the Neutrals during their declining years in the latter 17th century as war and disease took their toll on all the Iroquoian peoples.  Constant wars with their fellow Iroquois, the Five Nations, led to the loss of the Neutral tribal identity, though individuals may have sought refuge with other tribes, such as the Huron and Wenro.  There is no further mention of this tribe in French sources after 1671.