<p>Cet essai analyse les rapports entre les Français et les Iroquois entre 1701 et 1760. L&... more <p>Cet essai analyse les rapports entre les Français et les Iroquois entre 1701 et 1760. L'interprétation historique courante les caractérise comme hostiles, froids, et insignifiants. Mais les archives canadiennes révèlent des rapports culturels intimes, réciproquement salutaires, et soutenus par de fréquents contacts personnels entre les Français et les Iroquois au dix-huitième siècle. Après 1701, les Français acceptaient la neutralité iroquoienne, et fondaient leur alliance avec ces puissantes nations amérindiennes sur des principes qui ressemblaient de près le concept iroquoien de kaswentha: un rapport pacifique basé sur la coexistence du pouvoir dans un contexte de respect pour l'autonomie et le caractère distinctif de chaque groupe. La bonne volonté des Français en réglant leur politique vis-à-vis des Iroquois après une période prolongée de guerre au dix-septième siècle permet aux peuples iroquoiens de retenir leurs positions comme nations indépendantes pendant la conquête du Canada et jusqu'au présent.</p>
This essay analyzes the colonial era documentary record for corroboration of Haudenosaunee (Iroqu... more This essay analyzes the colonial era documentary record for corroboration of Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) oral tradition regarding the kaswentha (as currently understood and represented in the form of a Two-Row wampum belt). Eighteen different recitations of the tradition appear in documentary sources from 1656 to 1755. These findings demonstrate substantial convergence and complementarity between two perspectives on the past and suggest that the comparison and integration of indigenous oral tradition and documentary research may yield a more robust understanding of the past than would be the case of either undertaken alone.
This brief essay provides an overview of my current research project on Cornell University's in I... more This brief essay provides an overview of my current research project on Cornell University's in Indigenous dispossession. New York State received nearly one-tenth of the “public land” granted by the 1862 Morrill Act, the income from which was to constitute an endowment for at least one college in the state providing instruction in agriculture and the “mechanic arts.” The subsequent administration of those resources by Ezra Cornell and succeeding Cornell University officials took advantage of minimal federal regulatory oversight at the time to adopt innovative financial mechanisms which yielded, by 1935, nearly one-third of the total Morrill Act land-grant revenues generated by all the states to Cornell University. Analysis of the parcels of Morrill Act acreage located, entered, and subsequently managed by Ezra Cornell (and later, by Cornell University staff), permits us to identify nine specific treaty surrenders of Indigenous land concluded circa 1825-1851 with six different tribal nations that later generated direct benefits to Cornell University. By demonstrating the relationship between Cornell University’s founding and particular incidences of Indigenous dispossession, the project aims to inform subsequent conversations regarding the University’s obligations as a land-grant institution to some of the key original stakeholders in its founding: the Indigenous nations whose birthright served as the economic fuel sustaining the University from its founding in 1865 until the outbreak of World War I.
Colonisations: Notre Histoire (ed. Pierre Singaravélou, et al), 2023
This is a brief essay written for a French-language encyclopedia of colonialism. I have included... more This is a brief essay written for a French-language encyclopedia of colonialism. I have included the published text (in French) and the English-language original draft on which it is based. The published citation is: “La Ligue haudenosaunee, ou l’art du récit,” in Pierre Singaravélou, et al, eds., Colonisations: Notre Histoire (Paris: Seuil, 2023), 887-89.
<p>Cet essai analyse les rapports entre les Français et les Iroquois entre 1701 et 1760. L&... more <p>Cet essai analyse les rapports entre les Français et les Iroquois entre 1701 et 1760. L'interprétation historique courante les caractérise comme hostiles, froids, et insignifiants. Mais les archives canadiennes révèlent des rapports culturels intimes, réciproquement salutaires, et soutenus par de fréquents contacts personnels entre les Français et les Iroquois au dix-huitième siècle. Après 1701, les Français acceptaient la neutralité iroquoienne, et fondaient leur alliance avec ces puissantes nations amérindiennes sur des principes qui ressemblaient de près le concept iroquoien de kaswentha: un rapport pacifique basé sur la coexistence du pouvoir dans un contexte de respect pour l'autonomie et le caractère distinctif de chaque groupe. La bonne volonté des Français en réglant leur politique vis-à-vis des Iroquois après une période prolongée de guerre au dix-septième siècle permet aux peuples iroquoiens de retenir leurs positions comme nations indépendantes pendant la conquête du Canada et jusqu'au présent.</p>
This essay analyzes the colonial era documentary record for corroboration of Haudenosaunee (Iroqu... more This essay analyzes the colonial era documentary record for corroboration of Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) oral tradition regarding the kaswentha (as currently understood and represented in the form of a Two-Row wampum belt). Eighteen different recitations of the tradition appear in documentary sources from 1656 to 1755. These findings demonstrate substantial convergence and complementarity between two perspectives on the past and suggest that the comparison and integration of indigenous oral tradition and documentary research may yield a more robust understanding of the past than would be the case of either undertaken alone.
The United States has engaged with Indigenous nations on a government-to-government basis via fed... more The United States has engaged with Indigenous nations on a government-to-government basis via federal treaties representing substantial international commitments since the origins of the republic. The first treaties sent to the Senate for ratification under the Constitution of 1789 were treaties with Indigenous nations. Treaties with Indigenous nations provided the means by which approximately one billion acres of land entered the national domain of the United States prior to 1900, at an average price of seventy-five cents per acre – the United States confiscated or claimed another billion acres of Indigenous land without compensation. Despite subsequent efforts of American federal authorities to alter these arrangements, the weight of evidence indicates that the relationship remains primarily one of a nation-to-nation association. Integration of the history of federal relations with Indigenous nations with American foreign relations history sheds important new light on the fundamen...
This essay examines the history of Pontiac's War from the perspective of the western Algonquians'... more This essay examines the history of Pontiac's War from the perspective of the western Algonquians' entry into the Anglo-Iroquois Covenant Chain alliance system in I758. Recognized formally as equal diplomatic partners to Great Britain and the Six Nations by Sir William Johnson in I76i, the Great Lakes and upper Ohio Valley peoples directed their military and diplomatic efforts over the next five years toward securing and extending that status. The I766 Treaty of Oswego represented a political victory for the western Indians, as it established their territorial integrity and confirmed their status as independent allies in the Covenant Chain. Pontiac's War and the Covenant Chain Historians are now revising earlier interpretations of Pontiac's War, which stressed the Indians' military shortfall and overlooked their diplomatic success.1 Michael McConnell characterizes Pontiac's War as a defensive conflict on the part of the Indians; he argues that the war represented an effort by the Indians to restore their alliance with the French of Canada.2 Gregory Dowd builds on McConnell's thesis, contending that the war constituted an Indian attempt to manipulate France into returning to North America as a counterweight to the westward expansion of the American colonies, while also stressing the significance of native religious revitalization as a motivating factor in the conflict.3 Richard White portrays Pontiac's War as a qualified success for the Indians in the reestablishment of a diplomatic "middle ground" of common understanding and cooperation between themselves and the British.4 Recently, Ian K. Steele has pointed out that Pontiac's War was the first major multitribal war against Europeans in North America to create a balance of power between the Indians and the British.5 Ethnohistory 44:4 (fall I997). Copyright ?) by the American Society for Ethnohistory. ccc 00I4-I80I/97/$I.50.
Oxford Research Encyclopedia of American History , 2020
The United States has engaged with Indigenous nations on a government-to-government basis via fed... more The United States has engaged with Indigenous nations on a government-to-government basis via federal treaties representing substantial international commitments since the origins of the republic. The first treaties sent to the Senate for ratification under the Constitution of 1789 were treaties with Indigenous nations. Treaties with Indigenous nations provided the means by which approximately one billion acres of land entered the national domain of the United States prior to 1900, at an average price of seventy-five cents per acre – the United States confiscated or claimed another billion acres of Indigenous land without compensation. Despite subsequent efforts of American federal authorities to alter these arrangements, the weight of evidence indicates that the relationship remains primarily one of a nation-to-nation association. Integration of the history of federal relations with Indigenous nations with American foreign relations history sheds important new light on the fundamental linkages between these seemingly distinct state practices from the beginnings of the American republic.
“The Fort Stanwix Treaties: An Ethnohistory of Iroquois Diplomacy and Dispossession.”, 2019
Chapters 2 and 3 of “The Fort Stanwix Treaties: An Ethnohistory of Iroquois Diplomacy and Disposs... more Chapters 2 and 3 of “The Fort Stanwix Treaties: An Ethnohistory of Iroquois Diplomacy and Dispossession.” Report Prepared Under the Cooperative Ecosystems Study Unit P15AC01320 Between the National Park Service and the University of Massachusetts Amherst, Northeast Ethnography Program, National Park Service (Lowell, Mass.), 2019 (with Matthew J. Hill), pp.13-90.
The Fort Stanwix Treaties Ethnographic Study was designed to document the legacy of treaty-making... more The Fort Stanwix Treaties Ethnographic Study was designed to document the legacy of treaty-making at Fort Stanwix for Haudenosaunee peoples and its impact on Indian policy from the colonial period to the present. Fort Stanwix was the site of several treaties between the British and the Iroquois, and subsequently after the American Revolution, the Iroquois and the United States as well as the State of New York. These treaties include: the1768 Boundary Line Treaty, the 1784 Treaty of Fort Stanwix and the Pennsylvania-Six Nations Land Transaction, and four Treaties negotiated by the State of New York with the Oneida (1788), Onondaga (1788 and 1790) and Cayuga (1790) Nations. When taken together, these treaties provide a historical lens through which to consider how a sequence of actors (British, Iroquois, Congress and states like New York and Pennsylvania) played critical roles in westward expansion in the periods of late colonial and early United States history. The Iroquois’s role in treaty-making figured centrally in directing the course of empire in the colonial and post-colonial periods. After the arrival of Europeans in North America, two factors made Iroquois conventions pervasive in cross-cultural diplomacy in northeastern North America: the combination of Iroquois political acumen and the geographical location of their homelands astride key water routes linking the Atlantic to the continental interior. Through the end of the American Revolution, the Iroquois engaged actively with competing empires on the periphery of their homelands, balancing skilled negotiations conducted by a large and experienced corps of diplomats with calibrated direct involvement in warfare that preserved their well-known reputation for military strength. Post-revolutionary Iroquois diplomacy witnessed efforts to protect remaining homelands from the depredations of settler governments. The legacy of traditional Iroquois diplomacy continues in the contemporary era through calls from Iroquois political activists for the return of treaty-making as a critical means of restoring their sovereign standing eroded by colonialism and post-colonialism. Chapter Two provides a summary overview of the history and culture of Iroquois treaty-making from the pre-contact era through the early national period of the United States. Chapter Three considers the issue of freedom of movement as reflected in the Iroquois diplomatic record from 1624 to 1794, with special attention to the impact of the 1768 and 1784 Fort Stanwix Treaties on this crucial aspect of Iroquois political sovereignty. Yet the Iroquois’s diplomatic acumen did not prevent widespread land loss and dispossession over a period beginning with the 1768 Fort Stanwix Treaty and extending into the mid-nineteenth century when a majority of Oneidas had relocated to Wisconsin and Canada due to the expropriation of Oneida lands by New York State and factional divisions dating from the mid-eighteenth century. The second part of this report, then, attempts to reckon with the various actors, legal regimes, and cultural values that contributed to this process of Iroquois confinement and removal. In the course of dispossession, the ethnohistory reveals that legal instruments based on notions of European superiority played a critical role in this process of land loss, enabling the land grab involved in establishing federal and state borders. Foremost among these instruments was a monopoly right, known as preemption, which the British, and its successor, the United States, claimed in expropriating Iroquois property at depressed prices through treaties, and then reselling it at a handsome profit to land speculators. This period is also characterized by a transition in Iroquois sovereignty over a vast area that encompassed the Mohawk and Ohio River Valleys to a reduced sovereignty that was confined to bounded reservations located in central and western New York. Chapter Four, then, considers the issue of Iroquois dispossession from the vantage of the loss of Iroquois neutrality in the context of the Seven Years’ War, Iroquois incorporation into the British Empire, and their attempts to redirect the course of white settlement away from their ancestral homelands to West Virginia and Kentucky through the 1768 Fort Stanwix Boundary Line Treaty. Chapter Five examines the United States’ expropriation of the Iroquois’ lands in the Ohio Valley through the application of the “conquest doctrine” in the aftermath of the Revolutionary War at the 1784 Fort Stanwix Treaty. It also explores the Iroquois’ reluctant decision to negotiate with the federal government in exchange for receiving recognition of their status as independent nations as well as the territorial integrity of their homelands in central and western New York. Chapter Six examines the New York State treaties with the Oneidas and Onondagas, resulting in the loss of the majority of their lands. It situates this land loss in the context of the intense competition for Iroquois lands on the part of the federal government, New York and Massachusetts, and private land speculators as well as the strategic location of eastern Iroquois lands astride several key transportation and communication routes. These routes (including the Mohawk River, Wood Creek, and Oneida Lake), which would subsequently form important components of the Erie Canal (1825) and the Genesee Turnpike (1813), contributed as place-making actors in their own right to a “transportation revolution” in central New York that would lead to the “undoing of the Iroquois” (Hauptman 1999:3). Finally, Chapter Seven examines the contemporary legacy of the Fort Stanwix Treaties, focusing on contemporary Oneida land claim cases and the ways in which they invoke the historic Fort Stanwix treaties.
In Aboriginal People and the Fur Trade: Proceedings of the 8th North American Trade Conference, A... more In Aboriginal People and the Fur Trade: Proceedings of the 8th North American Trade Conference, Akwesasne, ed. Louise Johnston (Akwesasne Notes Publishing, 2001), 40-47.
in Gordon Martel, ed., The Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Diplomacy (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and... more in Gordon Martel, ed., The Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Diplomacy (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons, 2018).
<p>Cet essai analyse les rapports entre les Français et les Iroquois entre 1701 et 1760. L&... more <p>Cet essai analyse les rapports entre les Français et les Iroquois entre 1701 et 1760. L'interprétation historique courante les caractérise comme hostiles, froids, et insignifiants. Mais les archives canadiennes révèlent des rapports culturels intimes, réciproquement salutaires, et soutenus par de fréquents contacts personnels entre les Français et les Iroquois au dix-huitième siècle. Après 1701, les Français acceptaient la neutralité iroquoienne, et fondaient leur alliance avec ces puissantes nations amérindiennes sur des principes qui ressemblaient de près le concept iroquoien de kaswentha: un rapport pacifique basé sur la coexistence du pouvoir dans un contexte de respect pour l'autonomie et le caractère distinctif de chaque groupe. La bonne volonté des Français en réglant leur politique vis-à-vis des Iroquois après une période prolongée de guerre au dix-septième siècle permet aux peuples iroquoiens de retenir leurs positions comme nations indépendantes pendant la conquête du Canada et jusqu'au présent.</p>
This essay analyzes the colonial era documentary record for corroboration of Haudenosaunee (Iroqu... more This essay analyzes the colonial era documentary record for corroboration of Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) oral tradition regarding the kaswentha (as currently understood and represented in the form of a Two-Row wampum belt). Eighteen different recitations of the tradition appear in documentary sources from 1656 to 1755. These findings demonstrate substantial convergence and complementarity between two perspectives on the past and suggest that the comparison and integration of indigenous oral tradition and documentary research may yield a more robust understanding of the past than would be the case of either undertaken alone.
This brief essay provides an overview of my current research project on Cornell University's in I... more This brief essay provides an overview of my current research project on Cornell University's in Indigenous dispossession. New York State received nearly one-tenth of the “public land” granted by the 1862 Morrill Act, the income from which was to constitute an endowment for at least one college in the state providing instruction in agriculture and the “mechanic arts.” The subsequent administration of those resources by Ezra Cornell and succeeding Cornell University officials took advantage of minimal federal regulatory oversight at the time to adopt innovative financial mechanisms which yielded, by 1935, nearly one-third of the total Morrill Act land-grant revenues generated by all the states to Cornell University. Analysis of the parcels of Morrill Act acreage located, entered, and subsequently managed by Ezra Cornell (and later, by Cornell University staff), permits us to identify nine specific treaty surrenders of Indigenous land concluded circa 1825-1851 with six different tribal nations that later generated direct benefits to Cornell University. By demonstrating the relationship between Cornell University’s founding and particular incidences of Indigenous dispossession, the project aims to inform subsequent conversations regarding the University’s obligations as a land-grant institution to some of the key original stakeholders in its founding: the Indigenous nations whose birthright served as the economic fuel sustaining the University from its founding in 1865 until the outbreak of World War I.
Colonisations: Notre Histoire (ed. Pierre Singaravélou, et al), 2023
This is a brief essay written for a French-language encyclopedia of colonialism. I have included... more This is a brief essay written for a French-language encyclopedia of colonialism. I have included the published text (in French) and the English-language original draft on which it is based. The published citation is: “La Ligue haudenosaunee, ou l’art du récit,” in Pierre Singaravélou, et al, eds., Colonisations: Notre Histoire (Paris: Seuil, 2023), 887-89.
<p>Cet essai analyse les rapports entre les Français et les Iroquois entre 1701 et 1760. L&... more <p>Cet essai analyse les rapports entre les Français et les Iroquois entre 1701 et 1760. L'interprétation historique courante les caractérise comme hostiles, froids, et insignifiants. Mais les archives canadiennes révèlent des rapports culturels intimes, réciproquement salutaires, et soutenus par de fréquents contacts personnels entre les Français et les Iroquois au dix-huitième siècle. Après 1701, les Français acceptaient la neutralité iroquoienne, et fondaient leur alliance avec ces puissantes nations amérindiennes sur des principes qui ressemblaient de près le concept iroquoien de kaswentha: un rapport pacifique basé sur la coexistence du pouvoir dans un contexte de respect pour l'autonomie et le caractère distinctif de chaque groupe. La bonne volonté des Français en réglant leur politique vis-à-vis des Iroquois après une période prolongée de guerre au dix-septième siècle permet aux peuples iroquoiens de retenir leurs positions comme nations indépendantes pendant la conquête du Canada et jusqu'au présent.</p>
This essay analyzes the colonial era documentary record for corroboration of Haudenosaunee (Iroqu... more This essay analyzes the colonial era documentary record for corroboration of Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) oral tradition regarding the kaswentha (as currently understood and represented in the form of a Two-Row wampum belt). Eighteen different recitations of the tradition appear in documentary sources from 1656 to 1755. These findings demonstrate substantial convergence and complementarity between two perspectives on the past and suggest that the comparison and integration of indigenous oral tradition and documentary research may yield a more robust understanding of the past than would be the case of either undertaken alone.
The United States has engaged with Indigenous nations on a government-to-government basis via fed... more The United States has engaged with Indigenous nations on a government-to-government basis via federal treaties representing substantial international commitments since the origins of the republic. The first treaties sent to the Senate for ratification under the Constitution of 1789 were treaties with Indigenous nations. Treaties with Indigenous nations provided the means by which approximately one billion acres of land entered the national domain of the United States prior to 1900, at an average price of seventy-five cents per acre – the United States confiscated or claimed another billion acres of Indigenous land without compensation. Despite subsequent efforts of American federal authorities to alter these arrangements, the weight of evidence indicates that the relationship remains primarily one of a nation-to-nation association. Integration of the history of federal relations with Indigenous nations with American foreign relations history sheds important new light on the fundamen...
This essay examines the history of Pontiac's War from the perspective of the western Algonquians'... more This essay examines the history of Pontiac's War from the perspective of the western Algonquians' entry into the Anglo-Iroquois Covenant Chain alliance system in I758. Recognized formally as equal diplomatic partners to Great Britain and the Six Nations by Sir William Johnson in I76i, the Great Lakes and upper Ohio Valley peoples directed their military and diplomatic efforts over the next five years toward securing and extending that status. The I766 Treaty of Oswego represented a political victory for the western Indians, as it established their territorial integrity and confirmed their status as independent allies in the Covenant Chain. Pontiac's War and the Covenant Chain Historians are now revising earlier interpretations of Pontiac's War, which stressed the Indians' military shortfall and overlooked their diplomatic success.1 Michael McConnell characterizes Pontiac's War as a defensive conflict on the part of the Indians; he argues that the war represented an effort by the Indians to restore their alliance with the French of Canada.2 Gregory Dowd builds on McConnell's thesis, contending that the war constituted an Indian attempt to manipulate France into returning to North America as a counterweight to the westward expansion of the American colonies, while also stressing the significance of native religious revitalization as a motivating factor in the conflict.3 Richard White portrays Pontiac's War as a qualified success for the Indians in the reestablishment of a diplomatic "middle ground" of common understanding and cooperation between themselves and the British.4 Recently, Ian K. Steele has pointed out that Pontiac's War was the first major multitribal war against Europeans in North America to create a balance of power between the Indians and the British.5 Ethnohistory 44:4 (fall I997). Copyright ?) by the American Society for Ethnohistory. ccc 00I4-I80I/97/$I.50.
Oxford Research Encyclopedia of American History , 2020
The United States has engaged with Indigenous nations on a government-to-government basis via fed... more The United States has engaged with Indigenous nations on a government-to-government basis via federal treaties representing substantial international commitments since the origins of the republic. The first treaties sent to the Senate for ratification under the Constitution of 1789 were treaties with Indigenous nations. Treaties with Indigenous nations provided the means by which approximately one billion acres of land entered the national domain of the United States prior to 1900, at an average price of seventy-five cents per acre – the United States confiscated or claimed another billion acres of Indigenous land without compensation. Despite subsequent efforts of American federal authorities to alter these arrangements, the weight of evidence indicates that the relationship remains primarily one of a nation-to-nation association. Integration of the history of federal relations with Indigenous nations with American foreign relations history sheds important new light on the fundamental linkages between these seemingly distinct state practices from the beginnings of the American republic.
“The Fort Stanwix Treaties: An Ethnohistory of Iroquois Diplomacy and Dispossession.”, 2019
Chapters 2 and 3 of “The Fort Stanwix Treaties: An Ethnohistory of Iroquois Diplomacy and Disposs... more Chapters 2 and 3 of “The Fort Stanwix Treaties: An Ethnohistory of Iroquois Diplomacy and Dispossession.” Report Prepared Under the Cooperative Ecosystems Study Unit P15AC01320 Between the National Park Service and the University of Massachusetts Amherst, Northeast Ethnography Program, National Park Service (Lowell, Mass.), 2019 (with Matthew J. Hill), pp.13-90.
The Fort Stanwix Treaties Ethnographic Study was designed to document the legacy of treaty-making... more The Fort Stanwix Treaties Ethnographic Study was designed to document the legacy of treaty-making at Fort Stanwix for Haudenosaunee peoples and its impact on Indian policy from the colonial period to the present. Fort Stanwix was the site of several treaties between the British and the Iroquois, and subsequently after the American Revolution, the Iroquois and the United States as well as the State of New York. These treaties include: the1768 Boundary Line Treaty, the 1784 Treaty of Fort Stanwix and the Pennsylvania-Six Nations Land Transaction, and four Treaties negotiated by the State of New York with the Oneida (1788), Onondaga (1788 and 1790) and Cayuga (1790) Nations. When taken together, these treaties provide a historical lens through which to consider how a sequence of actors (British, Iroquois, Congress and states like New York and Pennsylvania) played critical roles in westward expansion in the periods of late colonial and early United States history. The Iroquois’s role in treaty-making figured centrally in directing the course of empire in the colonial and post-colonial periods. After the arrival of Europeans in North America, two factors made Iroquois conventions pervasive in cross-cultural diplomacy in northeastern North America: the combination of Iroquois political acumen and the geographical location of their homelands astride key water routes linking the Atlantic to the continental interior. Through the end of the American Revolution, the Iroquois engaged actively with competing empires on the periphery of their homelands, balancing skilled negotiations conducted by a large and experienced corps of diplomats with calibrated direct involvement in warfare that preserved their well-known reputation for military strength. Post-revolutionary Iroquois diplomacy witnessed efforts to protect remaining homelands from the depredations of settler governments. The legacy of traditional Iroquois diplomacy continues in the contemporary era through calls from Iroquois political activists for the return of treaty-making as a critical means of restoring their sovereign standing eroded by colonialism and post-colonialism. Chapter Two provides a summary overview of the history and culture of Iroquois treaty-making from the pre-contact era through the early national period of the United States. Chapter Three considers the issue of freedom of movement as reflected in the Iroquois diplomatic record from 1624 to 1794, with special attention to the impact of the 1768 and 1784 Fort Stanwix Treaties on this crucial aspect of Iroquois political sovereignty. Yet the Iroquois’s diplomatic acumen did not prevent widespread land loss and dispossession over a period beginning with the 1768 Fort Stanwix Treaty and extending into the mid-nineteenth century when a majority of Oneidas had relocated to Wisconsin and Canada due to the expropriation of Oneida lands by New York State and factional divisions dating from the mid-eighteenth century. The second part of this report, then, attempts to reckon with the various actors, legal regimes, and cultural values that contributed to this process of Iroquois confinement and removal. In the course of dispossession, the ethnohistory reveals that legal instruments based on notions of European superiority played a critical role in this process of land loss, enabling the land grab involved in establishing federal and state borders. Foremost among these instruments was a monopoly right, known as preemption, which the British, and its successor, the United States, claimed in expropriating Iroquois property at depressed prices through treaties, and then reselling it at a handsome profit to land speculators. This period is also characterized by a transition in Iroquois sovereignty over a vast area that encompassed the Mohawk and Ohio River Valleys to a reduced sovereignty that was confined to bounded reservations located in central and western New York. Chapter Four, then, considers the issue of Iroquois dispossession from the vantage of the loss of Iroquois neutrality in the context of the Seven Years’ War, Iroquois incorporation into the British Empire, and their attempts to redirect the course of white settlement away from their ancestral homelands to West Virginia and Kentucky through the 1768 Fort Stanwix Boundary Line Treaty. Chapter Five examines the United States’ expropriation of the Iroquois’ lands in the Ohio Valley through the application of the “conquest doctrine” in the aftermath of the Revolutionary War at the 1784 Fort Stanwix Treaty. It also explores the Iroquois’ reluctant decision to negotiate with the federal government in exchange for receiving recognition of their status as independent nations as well as the territorial integrity of their homelands in central and western New York. Chapter Six examines the New York State treaties with the Oneidas and Onondagas, resulting in the loss of the majority of their lands. It situates this land loss in the context of the intense competition for Iroquois lands on the part of the federal government, New York and Massachusetts, and private land speculators as well as the strategic location of eastern Iroquois lands astride several key transportation and communication routes. These routes (including the Mohawk River, Wood Creek, and Oneida Lake), which would subsequently form important components of the Erie Canal (1825) and the Genesee Turnpike (1813), contributed as place-making actors in their own right to a “transportation revolution” in central New York that would lead to the “undoing of the Iroquois” (Hauptman 1999:3). Finally, Chapter Seven examines the contemporary legacy of the Fort Stanwix Treaties, focusing on contemporary Oneida land claim cases and the ways in which they invoke the historic Fort Stanwix treaties.
In Aboriginal People and the Fur Trade: Proceedings of the 8th North American Trade Conference, A... more In Aboriginal People and the Fur Trade: Proceedings of the 8th North American Trade Conference, Akwesasne, ed. Louise Johnston (Akwesasne Notes Publishing, 2001), 40-47.
in Gordon Martel, ed., The Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Diplomacy (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and... more in Gordon Martel, ed., The Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Diplomacy (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons, 2018).
... Rony Blum. Ghost Brothers: Adoption ... kin. Rony Blum attempts to illustrate this through pa... more ... Rony Blum. Ghost Brothers: Adoption ... kin. Rony Blum attempts to illustrate this through pairings of 'unlike twins' indigenous and European who illustrate similarities and differences as well as metaphors of brotherhood. Blum also ...
OXfORD UNIVERS1TY PRESS Great Clarendon Street, Oxford 0x2 6op Oxford University Press is a depar... more OXfORD UNIVERS1TY PRESS Great Clarendon Street, Oxford 0x2 6op Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. If furthers the University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York ...
... Collection; Helen Hornbeck Tanner, senior researcher; Jim Grossman, director of education; an... more ... Collection; Helen Hornbeck Tanner, senior researcher; Jim Grossman, director of education; and Brian Hosmer, director of the D'Arcy McNickle Cen-ter ... Several others I want to thank include:Patricia Kennedy and Tim Dube at the Library and Archives of Can-ada, Ottawa; Bob ...
Reconciliation has become an increasingly important component of political discourse and practice... more Reconciliation has become an increasingly important component of political discourse and practice in North America over the past three decades. Often invoked as a way of (re)building peaceful relations between ethnic, cultural, and religious communities after periods of conflict or oppression, reconciliation has had a profound effect on the shaping of contemporary public discourse related to the rights of Indigenous peoples in "settler states" such as Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and the United States. Canada's recent Truth and Reconciliation Commission (2015), established to acknowledge and assess government-inflicted damage on Indigenous children in federally-managed Residential Schools, represents a prime example of a constitutionally-sanctioned, court-driven jurisprudence of reconciliation.
Introduction As we approach the 250 th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independe... more Introduction As we approach the 250 th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, this course provides students with a comprehensive understanding of the origins, character, and results of the American Revolution, as well as engaging the enduring significance of its memory in contemporary American life – why do we choose to remember the American Revolution in ways that occlude its divisive and bloody events? The course explores many of the key themes of this critical period in American history: the rise of opposition to Britain, the nature of the Revolutionary War, and the republican experiment that followed the Treaty of Paris in 1783. The course emphasizes student interaction with documentary evidence from the Revolutionary era, along with up-to-date scholarly interpretations with an eye toward analyzing the comparative experiences of women and men, "everyday people" and famous leaders, Native Americans, African-Americans, and those who opposed the Revolution. Course work will include analysis of contemporary public memory of the Revolution, participation in discussion sections, two examinations, and a research essay.
Reconciliation has become an increasingly important component of political discourse and practice... more Reconciliation has become an increasingly important component of political discourse and practice in North America over the past three decades. Often invoked as a way of (re)building peaceful relations between ethnic, cultural, and religious communities after periods of conflict or oppression, reconciliation has had a profound effect on the shaping of contemporary public discourse related to the rights of Indigenous peoples in “settler states” such as Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and the United States. Canada’s recent Truth and Reconciliation Commission (2015), established to acknowledge and assess government-inflicted damage on Indigenous children in federally-managed Residential Schools, represents a prime example of a constitutionally-sanctioned, court-driven jurisprudence of reconciliation. This course seeks to apply critical insights from scholarship on reconciliation to the phenomenon of Indigenous dispossession in North American history. Acknowledging that the dispossession of Indigenous nations by Europeans represents the foundation of the past five centuries of North American history, we still find the truth of that history cloaked behind various Western legal-religious justifications for the dispossession of Indigenous American populations by Europeans (i.e., terra nullius, the Doctrine of Discovery, the right of conquest, and Manifest Destiny). Through analysis of primary texts and up-to-date historical and legal scholarship, students in this course will unpack these still-thriving tropes of settler-colonial justification for dispossession, assess the true impact of the taking of Indigenous lands, and explore prospects for meaningful reconciliation in the present. Reconciliation may include strategies for legal, constitutional, and political redress, including financial reparations, the restoration of land, and even health and wellbeing outcomes for members of affected communities. Yet we must also be alert to the ways in which the reconciliation practices and processes of settler states might replicate colonial ideals of national benevolence and white civility, and thereby overwrite or elide power asymmetries and inequities.
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Papers by Jon Parmenter
Analysis of the parcels of Morrill Act acreage located, entered, and subsequently managed by Ezra Cornell (and later, by Cornell University staff), permits us to identify nine specific treaty surrenders of Indigenous land concluded circa 1825-1851 with six different tribal nations that later generated direct benefits to Cornell University. By demonstrating the relationship between Cornell University’s founding and particular incidences of Indigenous dispossession, the project aims to inform subsequent conversations regarding the University’s obligations as a land-grant institution to some of the key original stakeholders in its founding: the Indigenous nations whose birthright served as the economic fuel sustaining the University from its founding in 1865 until the outbreak of World War I.
The Iroquois’s role in treaty-making figured centrally in directing the course of empire in the colonial and post-colonial periods. After the arrival of Europeans in North America, two factors made Iroquois conventions pervasive in cross-cultural diplomacy in northeastern North America: the combination of Iroquois political acumen and the geographical location of their homelands astride key water routes linking the Atlantic to the continental interior. Through the end of the American Revolution, the Iroquois engaged actively with competing empires on the periphery of their homelands, balancing skilled negotiations conducted by a large and experienced corps of diplomats with calibrated direct involvement in warfare that preserved their well-known reputation for military strength. Post-revolutionary Iroquois diplomacy witnessed efforts to protect remaining homelands from the depredations of settler governments. The legacy of traditional Iroquois diplomacy continues in the contemporary era through calls from Iroquois political activists for the return of treaty-making as a critical means of restoring their sovereign standing eroded by colonialism and post-colonialism.
Chapter Two provides a summary overview of the history and culture of Iroquois treaty-making from the pre-contact era through the early national period of the United States. Chapter Three considers the issue of freedom of movement as reflected in the Iroquois diplomatic record from 1624 to 1794, with special attention to the impact of the 1768 and 1784 Fort Stanwix Treaties on this crucial aspect of Iroquois political sovereignty.
Yet the Iroquois’s diplomatic acumen did not prevent widespread land loss and dispossession over a period beginning with the 1768 Fort Stanwix Treaty and extending into the mid-nineteenth century when a majority of Oneidas had relocated to Wisconsin and Canada due to the expropriation of Oneida lands by New York State and factional divisions dating from the mid-eighteenth century. The second part of this report, then, attempts to reckon with the various actors, legal regimes, and cultural values that contributed to this process of Iroquois confinement and removal. In the course of dispossession, the ethnohistory reveals that legal instruments based on notions of European superiority played a critical role in this process of land loss, enabling the land grab involved in establishing federal and state borders. Foremost among these instruments was a monopoly right, known as preemption, which the British, and its successor, the United States, claimed in expropriating Iroquois property at depressed prices through treaties, and then reselling it at a handsome profit to land speculators. This period is also characterized by a transition in Iroquois sovereignty over a vast area that encompassed the Mohawk and Ohio River Valleys to a reduced sovereignty that was confined to bounded reservations located in central and western New York.
Chapter Four, then, considers the issue of Iroquois dispossession from the vantage of the loss of Iroquois neutrality in the context of the Seven Years’ War, Iroquois incorporation into the British Empire, and their attempts to redirect the course of white settlement away from their ancestral homelands to West Virginia and Kentucky through the 1768 Fort Stanwix Boundary Line Treaty. Chapter Five examines the United States’ expropriation of the Iroquois’ lands in the Ohio Valley through the application of the “conquest doctrine” in the aftermath of the Revolutionary War at the 1784 Fort Stanwix Treaty. It also explores the Iroquois’ reluctant decision to negotiate with the federal government in exchange for receiving recognition of their status as independent nations as well as the territorial integrity of their homelands in central and western New York. Chapter Six examines the New York State treaties with the Oneidas and Onondagas, resulting in the loss of the majority of their lands. It situates this land loss in the context of the intense competition for Iroquois lands on the part of the federal government, New York and Massachusetts, and private land speculators as well as the strategic location of eastern Iroquois lands astride several key transportation and communication routes. These routes (including the Mohawk River, Wood Creek, and Oneida Lake), which would subsequently form important components of the Erie Canal (1825) and the Genesee Turnpike (1813), contributed as place-making actors in their own right to a “transportation revolution” in central New York that would lead to the “undoing of the Iroquois” (Hauptman 1999:3). Finally, Chapter Seven examines the contemporary legacy of the Fort Stanwix Treaties, focusing on contemporary Oneida land claim cases and the ways in which they invoke the historic Fort Stanwix treaties.
Analysis of the parcels of Morrill Act acreage located, entered, and subsequently managed by Ezra Cornell (and later, by Cornell University staff), permits us to identify nine specific treaty surrenders of Indigenous land concluded circa 1825-1851 with six different tribal nations that later generated direct benefits to Cornell University. By demonstrating the relationship between Cornell University’s founding and particular incidences of Indigenous dispossession, the project aims to inform subsequent conversations regarding the University’s obligations as a land-grant institution to some of the key original stakeholders in its founding: the Indigenous nations whose birthright served as the economic fuel sustaining the University from its founding in 1865 until the outbreak of World War I.
The Iroquois’s role in treaty-making figured centrally in directing the course of empire in the colonial and post-colonial periods. After the arrival of Europeans in North America, two factors made Iroquois conventions pervasive in cross-cultural diplomacy in northeastern North America: the combination of Iroquois political acumen and the geographical location of their homelands astride key water routes linking the Atlantic to the continental interior. Through the end of the American Revolution, the Iroquois engaged actively with competing empires on the periphery of their homelands, balancing skilled negotiations conducted by a large and experienced corps of diplomats with calibrated direct involvement in warfare that preserved their well-known reputation for military strength. Post-revolutionary Iroquois diplomacy witnessed efforts to protect remaining homelands from the depredations of settler governments. The legacy of traditional Iroquois diplomacy continues in the contemporary era through calls from Iroquois political activists for the return of treaty-making as a critical means of restoring their sovereign standing eroded by colonialism and post-colonialism.
Chapter Two provides a summary overview of the history and culture of Iroquois treaty-making from the pre-contact era through the early national period of the United States. Chapter Three considers the issue of freedom of movement as reflected in the Iroquois diplomatic record from 1624 to 1794, with special attention to the impact of the 1768 and 1784 Fort Stanwix Treaties on this crucial aspect of Iroquois political sovereignty.
Yet the Iroquois’s diplomatic acumen did not prevent widespread land loss and dispossession over a period beginning with the 1768 Fort Stanwix Treaty and extending into the mid-nineteenth century when a majority of Oneidas had relocated to Wisconsin and Canada due to the expropriation of Oneida lands by New York State and factional divisions dating from the mid-eighteenth century. The second part of this report, then, attempts to reckon with the various actors, legal regimes, and cultural values that contributed to this process of Iroquois confinement and removal. In the course of dispossession, the ethnohistory reveals that legal instruments based on notions of European superiority played a critical role in this process of land loss, enabling the land grab involved in establishing federal and state borders. Foremost among these instruments was a monopoly right, known as preemption, which the British, and its successor, the United States, claimed in expropriating Iroquois property at depressed prices through treaties, and then reselling it at a handsome profit to land speculators. This period is also characterized by a transition in Iroquois sovereignty over a vast area that encompassed the Mohawk and Ohio River Valleys to a reduced sovereignty that was confined to bounded reservations located in central and western New York.
Chapter Four, then, considers the issue of Iroquois dispossession from the vantage of the loss of Iroquois neutrality in the context of the Seven Years’ War, Iroquois incorporation into the British Empire, and their attempts to redirect the course of white settlement away from their ancestral homelands to West Virginia and Kentucky through the 1768 Fort Stanwix Boundary Line Treaty. Chapter Five examines the United States’ expropriation of the Iroquois’ lands in the Ohio Valley through the application of the “conquest doctrine” in the aftermath of the Revolutionary War at the 1784 Fort Stanwix Treaty. It also explores the Iroquois’ reluctant decision to negotiate with the federal government in exchange for receiving recognition of their status as independent nations as well as the territorial integrity of their homelands in central and western New York. Chapter Six examines the New York State treaties with the Oneidas and Onondagas, resulting in the loss of the majority of their lands. It situates this land loss in the context of the intense competition for Iroquois lands on the part of the federal government, New York and Massachusetts, and private land speculators as well as the strategic location of eastern Iroquois lands astride several key transportation and communication routes. These routes (including the Mohawk River, Wood Creek, and Oneida Lake), which would subsequently form important components of the Erie Canal (1825) and the Genesee Turnpike (1813), contributed as place-making actors in their own right to a “transportation revolution” in central New York that would lead to the “undoing of the Iroquois” (Hauptman 1999:3). Finally, Chapter Seven examines the contemporary legacy of the Fort Stanwix Treaties, focusing on contemporary Oneida land claim cases and the ways in which they invoke the historic Fort Stanwix treaties.
This course seeks to apply critical insights from scholarship on reconciliation to the phenomenon of Indigenous dispossession in North American history. Acknowledging that the dispossession of Indigenous nations by Europeans represents the foundation of the past five centuries of North American history, we still find the truth of that history cloaked behind various Western legal-religious justifications for the dispossession of Indigenous American populations by Europeans (i.e., terra nullius, the Doctrine of Discovery, the right of conquest, and Manifest Destiny). Through analysis of primary texts and up-to-date historical and legal scholarship, students in this course will unpack these still-thriving tropes of settler-colonial justification for dispossession, assess the true impact of the taking of Indigenous lands, and explore prospects for meaningful reconciliation in the present. Reconciliation may include strategies for legal, constitutional, and political redress, including financial reparations, the restoration of land, and even health and wellbeing outcomes for members of affected communities. Yet we must also be alert to the ways in which the reconciliation practices and processes of settler states might replicate colonial ideals of national benevolence and white civility, and thereby overwrite or elide power asymmetries and inequities.