Property
In July 1761, as Joseph Brant traveled east to join Wheelock’s
school, Sir William Johnson headed west, ascending the Mohawk River
into the country of the Six Nations, his five boats hauled
thirty-eight soldiers, their equipment, and presents for the
Indians. The traveling party also included his nineteen-year-old
son, John, and their cousin and secretary, Guy Johnson. In high
spirits, the Johnsons anticipated a victory tour in Indian country
to consolidate the recent British conquest of French Canada. With
the French banished from North America, British officials expected
easily to control the Indians.
Instead, Johnson found pervasive Indian dread and disgust, even
among the nearby Mohawks, who had so long cooperated with him. As
British allies, the Mohawks had lost about 100 warriors, half of
their men, during the recent war with the French. In return for that
heavy sacrifice, the Mohawks expected Johnson to protect their
villages against conniving land speculators and encroaching
settlers. Frustrated in that expectation, the Mohawks complained
bitterly to Johnson, who reported that they felt in “danger of being
made slaves, and having their lands taken from them at pleasure,
which they added would confirm what the French have often told the
Six Nations.”
Preaching patience, Johnson promised justice to the Mohawks-but New
York’s leaders and settlers kept breaking his every promise. Fed up,
the Mohawks threatened to move away deeper within Indian country.
That possibility delighted settlers and speculators who lusted after
Mohawk land, but alarmed Johnson, who relied on his special Mohawk
connection to influence the Six Nations. Without nearby and content
Mohawks as allies, his superintendency would become impotent.
Proceeding upriver beyond the Mohawk country, Johnson reached German
Flats, colonial New York’s westernmost settlement. There, Johnson
met Oneidas, who also bitterly complained of encroaching settlers.
The chief Conoghquieson warned Johnson that the Oneida settlers
would fight rather than lose their lands. Instead of consolidating
British power over the Indians, the conquest of Canada threatened to
unravel the alliance with the Six Nations that was essential to
frontier security.
In helping the British to attack Canada, the Iroquois had
miscalculated, for they had never expected such a rapid and complete
collapse by the French forces. No longer could the Indians play off
the French against the British to maintain Iroquois independence, to
maximize their presents, and to ensure trade competition. A British
general explained, “They saw us sole Masters of the Country, the
Balance of Power broke, and their own Consequence at an End. Instead
of being courted by two Nations, a Profusion of Presents made by
both, and two Markets to trade at, they now depend upon one Power.”
That dependence exposed Iroquoia to land-hungry colonists.
THE SIX NATIONS
The Iroquois pursued a mixed subsistence strategy combining
horticulture, gathering, fishing, and hunting. In fields of fertile,
alluvial soil, they cultivated mounds of maize topped by climbing
beans and surrounded by low-lying squashes and pumpkins. After the
fall harvest, the natives dispersed into the hills, occupying many
small camps, tended by women, while the men pursued bear, deer, and
beaver for meat and pelts. Returning to their villages, they spent
the early spring collecting maple sap to make a brown sugar. After
planting their crops in May, the Iroquois spent June and July in
fishing camps strung along the lakes and streams. Having exhausted
the previous year’s harvest, the people sought relief by catching
eels, salmon, trout, and whitefish. During that hungry season, the
women and children also gathered wild onions, followed by
strawberries, raspberries, whortleberries, and blackberries. From
the forest floor, they also harvested ginseng for sale to colonial
merchants.
This mobile, but seasonally patterned, way of life conserved most of
the forest and streams-and their wild things-over the generations.
Native use contrasted with the colonists’ drive to clear most of the
forest to provide pastures for cattle and fields for grain. Compared
to the colonists, the Iroquois used land extensively rather than
intensively. The natives did clear and cultivate compact fields near
their villages, but they kept most of their domain as a forest to
sustain wild plants and animals. To colonial eyes, the Iroquois
peoples wasted their land by keeping a wilderness; but the Indians
exploited their domain in ways that the colonists did not
understand.
Most colonists disdained the Iroquois as improvident, living from
hand to mouth for want of incentives for accumulating private
property. Indeed, the Iroquois considered it foolish and demeaning
to labor beyond what they needed to subsist. Sir William noted, “The
Indians are a Lazy people, & naturally Enemies to Labour.” But
colonial charges of Indian indolence focused on men seen during the
warm months in their villages or on visits to colonial towns:
periods and places of male inactivity and heavy drinking. Colonial
observers rarely saw Indian men during their strenuous winter hunts,
when they endured severe hardships pursuing game for miles over
rugged terrain in bitter weather. The colonial view also discounted
the evident industry of native women in cultivating and gathering,
which the colonists treated as exploitation by lazy husbands and
fathers.
John Heckewelder, a missionary, noted that the Indians disliked the
competitive and acquisitive values of the colonists: “They wonder
that the white people are striving so much to get rich, and to heap
up treasures in this world which they cannot carry with them to the
next.”
They cherished the collective security maintained by expecting
generosity from the fortunate to the needy. Instead of storing up
wealth, prospering chiefs accumulated prestige by gifts to their kin
and to the hungry and ragged. These values of hospitality and
reciprocity spread resources through the seasons and across a
village, sustaining a rough equality. No one starved in an Iroquois
village unless all did so.
If paltry by colonial standards, the material wants of the Iroquois
exceeded those of their ancestors. The eighteenth-century Iroquois
relied upon traders to provide European manufactured goods that
exceeded the Indian technology to make. In return for furs, the
Iroquois procured metal knives, hatchets, axes, hoes, and
kettles-all vastly better than their stone and wood predecessors.
And with cloth, mirrors, glass and silver jewelry, and alcohol, the
traders provided new luxuries to the Indians. Above all, they needed
guns, gunpowder, and metal shot for hunting and war. Dependence on
that imported technology also entailed an Indian reliance on
colonial blacksmiths and gunsmiths to repair metal tools and
weapons.
In personal appearance, the Iroquois conveyed a mix of tradition and
adaptation, of America and Europe, of subsistence and commerce, and
of ease and pride. Except for moccasins on their feet, the Iroquois
donned more British cloth than traditional buckskin. In warm
weather, men wore little more than a loose, linen shirt over their
shoulders and a loincloth held by a leather belt. Women’s attire
consisted of a linen shirt and a cotton petticoat. In colder
weather, both men and women wrapped themselves in woolen blankets,
while men covered their lower limbs with leather leggings. Both
genders delighted in abundant jewelry, especially silver worn as
bracelets, gorgets, rings, and earrings. Women and older men wore
their hair long, but warriors shaved the sides of their head to
leave a scalp lock on top. The young men also plucked their facial
hair out by the roots.
Gender and age, rather than social class, structured Iroquois labor.
Assisted by children, women tended the crops and gathered the wild
plants, while men fished, hunted, waged war, and conducted
diplomacy. Men’s activities took them deep into the forest and far
from the villages. Consequently, those villages and their fields
belonged to the women, the enduring people of the community. They
controlled the harvest and determined the location of their village.
No land could be forsaken without their consent. In 1763, the
Mohawks explained to Johnson that women were “the Truest Owners,
being the persons who labour on the Lands.” The Mohawk matrons then
assured Johnson that “they would keep their Land, and did not chuse
to part with the same to be reduced to make Brooms.” The Mohawks
well knew the Algonquian Indians of the Hudson Valley and New
England as negative reference points: as native peoples who had lost
most of their lands and become the impoverished makers of brooms and
baskets for colonial consumers.
Chiefs
The Iroquois dispersed and divided political power from a dread of
coercion. They understood the world as constantly embroiled in a
struggle between the forces of good and evil, of life and death, of
peace and war. Because those conflicts raged within every nation,
village, and person, all forms of power had to be dispersed and
closely watched to preserve the freedom of a people.
An Iroquois nation was an ethnic and linguistic group divided into
several jealous villages and subdivided by internal factions led by
rival chiefs. Although one village usually was a bit larger and more
prestigious, hosting the council fire of the nation, the chiefs
there could only admonish and advise, but never command, their
fellow people in other, smaller villages. No nation was united under
the rule of a single headman, although one chief might enjoy more
honor as the keeper of sacred objects-principally wampum belts-and
as the host of public councils. Instead of representing an entire
village (much less the collective nation), a chief represented a
particular clan, which the Iroquois called “a tribe.” Most Iroquois
nations had three clans (or tribes): Bear, Wolf, and Turtle. A clan
consisted of several extended families, related through the maternal
line: matrilineages. Johnson noted that a chief’s clout depended on
“the number of Warriors under his influence, which are seldom more
than his own relations.”
The proper chief had been accomplished in war but mellowed by time,
becoming eloquent, patient, tactful, dignified, and methodical. The
duty of a chief was to keep his head while others were losing
theirs. In 1765, Sayenqueraghta, a Seneca, described the ideal chief
as “a wise, dispassionate man [who] thinks much & thinks slowly,
with great caution & deliberation, before he speaks his whole mind.”
A proper chief worked to soothe the discontented, to calm troubles,
and to keep the peace by sage advice. Unable to command people, the
chief exercised influence through persuasion, which rested upon his
prestige, example, and reason. A bullying chief risked his life to
assassination by disgruntled warriors.
The clan chiefs (or “sachems”) had to share village authority with
warriors and matrons. The senior women of the matrilineages chose
the chiefs who represented their clan on the village council.
Although birth within the proper matrilineage mattered, the clan
mothers favored merit and personality in determining their choice.
In effect, chiefs were so many male ambassadors, representing
matrilineages. Once chosen, a chief ordinarily served for life, but
an incompetent could be ousted by the matrons of his clan.
Chiefs promoted harmony and peace, but they could not always
succeed-especially beyond the nation among outsiders without kinship
ties to the Iroquois. Consequently, the people also needed to summon
the darker powers of their young warriors. They could not, and
should not, possess the chiefly virtues of calm forbearance.
Instead, warriors needed to be decisive, violent, cruel, and
proud-quick to take offense and terrible in seeking vengeance.
Without formidable warriors, no people could remain free. In theory,
chiefs restrained warriors, but ambitious young men longed for the
honors of war to demonstrate their courage and prowess. Bristling
under restraint by their chiefs, warriors sometimes forced a war by
raiding foes or by killing their emissaries. But women could compel
the warriors to make peace by withholding the food needed for
long-distance raids.
Within their villages, the Iroquois dreaded contention and coercion,
preferring the deliberative search for consensus, however elusive.
That search led to highly formalized speeches in public council by
chiefs closely watched by all the villagers. If those deliberations
failed to reach an acceptable consensus, the people agreed to
disagree, permitting factions and families to chart varying courses.
For example, during the imperial wars, the Oneidas disagreed on a
common front, so some helped the French and others the British,
while most clung to neutrality.
If a village majority did commit to a provocative decision, the
disgruntled voted with their feet by moving away. Over the years,
village populations ebbed and surged as some people moved out and
others moved in. Driven by the elusive ideal of consensus, this
fission helped to sustain that ideal-if not the reality-by
temporarily ridding villages of the most discontented.
The lack of coercive power within the Six Nations frustrated colonial officials
who hoped to command the Indians by co-opting their chiefs. Early and often,
those chiefs tried to explain their limited influence over hotheaded warriors or
over another village. Indeed, a chief lost influence if he did colonial bidding
by coercing his own people. Johnson eventually gave up trying to mandate head
chiefs for each of the Six Nations, explaining that “the extreme jealousy which
the Northern Indians entertain of one another would render a particular choice
of any one of them unserviceable; and make his Nation pay no regard to him.”
Noting that chiefs had greater power in the past, or at a distance from the
settlements, Johnson concluded that colonial meddling had weakened authority in
Indian villages. But, of course, Johnson was the consummate meddler.
The imperial wars diminished the authority of the sachems. Eager to recruit
warriors, colonial leaders treated the war chiefs as the real locus of power in
an Iroquois village. Consequently, they could drive hard bargains to secure
abundant presents including weapons and ammunition. By redistributing this
largesse to their followers, war chiefs built their influence at the expense of
the sachems. Indeed, warriors and their war chiefs waxed increasingly arrogant.
In 1762, the Seneca war chiefs assured Johnson: “We are in fact the People of
Consequence for Managing Affairs, Our Sachems being generally a parcell of Old
People who say Much, but who Mean or Act very little.”
From a colonial perspective, the Iroquois lived in virtual anarchy-owing to the
crisscrossing interests of chiefs, warriors, and women; the elusive ideal of
consensus; and the powerful animus against coercion. And yet, native villages
were remarkably harmonious-except when alcohol abounded. Heckewelder noted,
“They have no written laws, but they have usages founded on the most strict
principles of equity and justice…. They are peaceable, sociable, obliging,
charitable, and hospitable among themselves.” Their public councils were
dignified-in stark contrast to the rancor of colonial politics. Johnson
marveled, “All their deliberations are conducted with extraordinary regularity
and decorum. They never interrupt him who is speaking, nor use harsh language,
whatever may be their thoughts.”
Kinship and conversation framed the obligations, duties, and norms of an Indian
village. Authority ultimately lay in the constant flow of talk, which regulated
reputation through the variations of praise and ridicule, celebration and
shaming. The close quarters of Indian villages kept few secrets and enforced
moral norms by rendering individuals hypersensitive to their standing in the
eyes of kin and neighbors. Humiliated and shunned, a thief or rapist could not
endure in an observant, gossiping village. Consequently, theft and rape were
virtually unknown among the Iroquois.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from The Divided Ground
by Alan Taylor
Copyright © 2006 by Alan Taylor.
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Knopf
Copyright © 2006
Alan Taylor
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0-679-45471-3
