Tionontate

The Tabacco people, Tabacco nation, the Petun, or Tionontati in their Iroquoian language, were a historical First Nations band government closely related to the Huron Confederacy (Wendat). Their homeland was located along the southwest edge of Georgian Bay of Lake Huron, in the area immediately to the west of the Huron territory in Southern Ontario of present-day Canada. One of the smaller Iroquoian tribes when they became known to Europeans, they had eight to ten villages around the 1610s, and may have numbered several thousand prior to European contact.

Following decimation by Eurasian infectious diseases after 1634, such as smallpox, to which Native Americans had no immunity, both the Huron-Wendat and Petun societies were in a weakened state through the late 1630s-1640s. They were attacked, destroyed and dispersed by warriors of the Iroquois Confederacy, raiding in 1648–1649 from their base south of the Great Lakes in present-day New York. The remnants joined with some refugee Huron to become the Huron–Petun Nation, who were later known as the Wyandot.

The Jesuit Relations of 1652 describes the practice of tattooing among the Petun and the Neutrals:

And this (tattooing) in some nations is so common that in the one which we called the Tobacco, and in that which – on account of enjoying peace with the Hurons and with the Iroquois – was called Neutral, I know not whether a single individual was found, who was not painted in this manner, on some part of the body.

French traders called these First Nations people the , from a French word for tobacco, for their industrious cultivation of that plant. Pétun as a word for tobacco became obsolete; it was derived from the early French-Brazilian trade and comes from the Guarani indigenous language.

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