Diet and dress of St. Lawrence Iroquois in “Canada: Grand Insulaire”

These people are handsome and almost all naked, clothed (only) in the skins of animals cured in the open air; these skins being sown the ones against the others covering their entire body the men as well as the women. Their breeches, upper and lower, and their shoes are of leather. They have neither shirts nor bonnets but have their heads covered with their hair tucked up and tied with kinds of bands of bark detached from trees. As for their food, they eat all their meat without salting it. They dry meat and fish which they carry with them in war.

Source: André Thevet, "[St. Lawrence Iroquois in] Canada: Grand Insulaire" in André Thevet’s North America: A Sixteenth-Century View, an edition-translation with notes and introduction by Roger Schlesinger and Arthur P. Stabler, (Kingston and Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1986), 121.

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