The Storied Landscape of Iroquoia: History, Conquest, and Memory in the Native Northeast

Perhaps no regional landscape in North America experienced as rapid a transformation after the War for Independence as the homelands of the Haudenosaunee, more commonly known as the Iroquois or Six Nations. Their territory stretched across modern New York from the Hudson River to Niagara Falls, and before 1776 little of it was known to Europeans beyond the Mohawk Valley. The war brought political division to the Iroquois confederacy and uprooted many of its people, especially after the 1779 Sullivan-Clinton campaign, an invasion by the Continental Army that destroyed the towns and fields of the Senecas and Cayugas. After the war, land speculators and federal and state officials conspired to acquire Iroquois land and open it to veteran soldiers and other settlers. By the time the Erie Canal opened in 1825, the remaining Native peoples in Iroquoia lived on tiny reservations, surrounded by their former enemies, and in the case of the Oneidas and Tuscaroras their former allies. This narrative is familiar to historians of the Revolutionary era, but in The Storied Landscape of Iroquoia, Chad L. Anderson takes a new approach to telling it. His focus is not so much on the military and political events that dispossessed the Iroquois as it is on the stories that Natives and newcomers told about this contested landscape, inventing for it an ancient past that served their contemporary purposes.Anderson begins in the mid-eighteenth century, when cartographers John Mitchell, Lewis Evans, and Guy Johnson incorporated Iroquoia into their maps of colonial New York and the mid-Atlantic borderlands. As pioneers of colonial map-making, Mitchell and Evans had little firsthand knowledge of Iroquoia, but they knew how important its Native inhabitants were to British imperial designs, and so they took care to place this region squarely within their imagined British North America. At the same time, the Iroquois expressed their own sense of the mythical and geopolitical importance of their homelands when they pointed out to missionaries and other European visitors ancient battle and village sites or told them stories about supernatural beings and places with whom they shared this landscape. The influx of speculators, squatters, and other opportunists into Iroquoia after 1783 altered the nature of this dialogue seemingly overnight. The newcomers now perceived the Natives as the remnants of a savage race destined to disappear like the mountain lions and wolves they hunted to near extinction. Despite eyewitness accounts left by soldiers who had burned Iroquois towns and cornfields, George Clinton and other leaders of post-Revolutionary New York justified the dispossession of the Iroquois by describing them as nomadic hunters who lived off the land rather than on it, literally wiping them off the maps that colonial cartographers had created a half-century earlier.Anderson illuminates this process in a long middle chapter on Painted Post, a town established in the 1790s in western New York that took its name from an Indian landmark first observed by Continental Army soldiers during the Sullivan-Clinton campaign. The story of this post involves a long and convoluted interweaving of Native and European lore surrounding the Senecas, the métis Montour family, and several Revolutionary era battles and raids fought nearby. Nonnative tellers of the tale added dimensions of Indian captivity and torture to it, in essence appropriating a Native American landmark that predated their arrival as a site commemorating their own historic suffering and conquest of the region.In two chapters covering the early nineteenth century, Anderson turns his attention to the efforts by American scholars to uncover an ancient history of Iroquoia that would support their notions of the future material and spiritual greatness of the United States. Sparked in part by the discovery of mastodon fossils and the excavation of pre-Columbian burial mounds, these intellectual pursuits further eroded the claim of the Haudenosaunee to their homelands by casting Native Americans as interlopers, savage conquerors who arrived from Asia to destroy a lost civilization that had flourished in an even more distant past. In New York DeWitt Clinton popularized this view of Iroquoia’s past, but he was checked by Tuscarora historian David Cusick, whose Sketches of Ancient History of the Six Nations (1826) depicted the Iroquois as the inheritors rather than destroyers of an ancient empire. Turning his attention to the Second Great Awakening, Anderson illuminates historical precedents for Joseph Smith’s prophetic account of the battle between Nephites (ancient Israelites) and Lamanites (ancient Native Americans) in the Book of Mormon, perhaps the most influential and enduring version of this debate about the ancient history of North America.In some respects, The Storied Landscape of Iroquoia tells a familiar tale about how conquerors justify the dispossession of their enemies in part by imposing new histories and creating new sacred spaces on the landscape they occupy. This was a process repeated many times throughout colonial America and one repeated as the United States expanded westward during the nineteenth century. Indeed, it continues to occur around the world today. However, the erasure is never complete, and continued friction between conquerors and the conquered produces new and sometimes surprising disruptions in stories the landscape is supposed to tell (could DeWitt Clinton or any of his contemporaries have predicted the persistence of Iroquoian people in New York state today?). Anderson’s rendering of this story can at times reflect the confusion of these contesting narratives, never coming to clear resolution, but that uncertainty confirms his thesis: the layering of history on any landscape is perpetually uneven and incomplete.

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