Shirts Powdered Red: Haudenosaunee Gender, Trade, and Exchange across Three Centuries 9781501767890

Table of contents :
Contents
Note on Language
Introduction: Clothing the People without History
1. Domestic Work and Exchange in Early Contact
2. Purchased Cloth and the Transformation of Labor in the Seventeenth Century
3. Cultural Entanglement and European Anxiety in the Early Eighteenth Century
4. Women’s Cross-Cultural Exchange in the Mid-Eighteenth Century
5. Gender, Race, and Civility in Eighteenth-Century Education
6. Erasure and Violence against Women in the American Revolution
7. Caroline Parker and Making a Modern Traditionality
Epilogue: Miss Mountpleasant and the Indian Wigwam
Acknowledgments
Glossary
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

SHIRTS POWDERED RED

SHIRTS POWDERED RED H AU D E N O SA U N E E G E N D E R , T R A D E , A N D E XC H A N G E A CR OSS T H R E E C E N T U R I ES

Maeve Kane

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS Ithaca and London

Copyright © 2023 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. Visit our website at cornellpress.cornell.edu. First published 2023 by Cornell University Press Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Kane, Maeve, 1986– author. Title: Shirts powdered red : Haudenosaunee gender, trade, and exchange across three centuries / Maeve Kane. Description: Ithaca, New York : Cornell University Press, 2023. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2022012878 (print) | LCCN 2022012879 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501767883 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781501767890 (pdf ) | ISBN 9781501767906 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Iroquois women—Social conditions— 17th century. | Iroquois women—Social conditions— 18th century. | Iroquois women—Social conditions— 19th century. | Iroquois Indians—Clothing—History. | Clothing and dress—Symbolic aspects—New York (State)—History. | Clothing and dress—Symbolic aspects—Québec (Province)—History. | Clothing and dress—Political aspects—New York (State)—History. | Clothing and dress—Political aspects—Québec (Province)—History. | Iroquois Indians—Commerce— History. | Iroquois Indians—Ethnic identity—History. Classification: LCC E99.I7 K27 2023 (print) | LCC E99.I7 (ebook) | DDC 973.04/9755—dc23/ eng/20220713 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022012878 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022 012879 Jacket photograph: Daguerreotype of Caroline Parker, c. 1849. Gift of John R. and Eileen K. Reidman, Acc. #2021.01.01. From the Rochester Museum & Science Center, Rochester, NY.

Co nte nts

Note on Language

vii

Introduction: Clothing the People without History

1

1. Domestic Work and Exchange in Early Contact

15

2. Purchased Cloth and the Transformation of Labor in the Seventeenth Century

48

3. Cultural Entanglement and European Anxiety in the Early Eighteenth Century

77

4. Women’s Cross-Cultural Exchange in the Mid-Eighteenth Century

113

5. Gender, Race, and Civility in Eighteenth-Century Education

138

6. Erasure and Violence against Women in the American Revolution

173

7. Caroline Parker and Making a Modern Traditionality

205

Epilogue: Miss Mountpleasant and the Indian Wigwam Acknowledgments Glossary 257 Notes 259 Bibliography Index

347

305

251

245

Note on L a nguage

Each of the Six Nations remains linguisti­ cally and politically distinct in the twenty-first century, and my use of the common Onondaga spelling Haudenosaunee rather than the Mohawk Rotinonshonni or other spellings is not intended to flatten these important distinctions. For the sake of readability for readers unfamiliar with the languages of the Six Nations, I use the English names of individual nations to avoid possible confusion between, for example, Onödowága:’ (Seneca nation in Seneca) and Onoñda’gegá (Onondaga nation in Onondaga). I use modern Onondaga spellings in the text for culturally specific terms such as goyá:neh (clan mother) and hoyá:neh (condoled chief ). I use goyá:neh and hoyá:neh to empha­ size the specific nature of clan-based Haudenosaunee governance and leadership. I chose the orthography used in Hanni Woodbury’s Onondaga-English dictionary that was produced in collaboration with living Onondaga speakers, in acknowledgment of the Onondaga nation’s place as the central fire of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, in recognition of Onondaga as a living language, and in recognition of the differences in dialect and orthography among Onondaga speak­ ers at Six Nations and Onondaga Nation.1 Following the example of the Native Hawaiian scholar David Chang and others working in the broader field of Native American and Indigenous studies, I do not itali­ cize Haudenosaunee language words in the text to help emphasize the primacy of Haudenosaunee cultural and spatial knowledge in discuss­ ing their nations’ histories.2 In choosing a single language and orthography, I follow the example of leaders Tsaɂdegaihwadeɂ Irving Powless and Sakokweniónkwas Tom Porter in their transcribed oral histories and scholars like Susan M. Hill and Penelope Kelsey by using a single orthography for the sake of consistency.3 For names of rivers and lakes, I use the contemporary orthography of the nation whose territory the body of water was in or near (with the acknowledgment that some bodies of water bordered vii

viii

N OT E O N L A N G U A G E

multiple territories and had multiple names). I use the orthography used in the most recent published dictionary where possible, with the acknowledgment that dialects and orthography vary within nations. A glossary of terms and place names is included at the end of this book. For personal names, I follow the published orthography used by contemporary living individuals for their own names, and I follow the Haudenosaunee Documentation Committee’s convention of placing a person’s Haudenosaunee name as their first name where it is known to me. For historical figures like Jigonsaseh, I use the orthography used by the Encyclopedia of the Haudenosaunee where available.4 Each individual nation and community has its own history and concerns; in discussing them together with a single orthography it is my intention to draw out their common shared concerns while acknowledging their distinctions.

SHIRTS POWDERED RED

Introduction Clothing the People without History

Over the course of the seventeenth, eigh­ teenth, and nineteenth centuries, Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) people bought clothing in ways that reflected and created their national iden­ tity. Haudenosaunee people used cross-cultural trade to reinforce their nations’ sovereignty and maintain a distinctly Haudenosaunee iden­ tity. A long view of Haudenosaunee gendered labor from contact with settlers in the seventeenth century through the creation of academic anthropology in the nineteenth century reveals both the major changes and continuities in Haudenosaunee communities. This long view is necessary to examine how Haudenosaunee people used change in some areas of life to preserve their nations in the face of growing colonial pressures.1 Indigenous histories are often told as a series of traumatic breakages, crises, or ruptures with the past. The Six Nations of the Haudenosaunee (also known as the Iroquois Confederacy or Iroquois League) have certainly experienced hardship in their dealings with set­ tler powers. A reframing of how Haudenosaunee history has been periodized over a long span helps emphasize survivance into the present rather than rupture with the past.2 Haudenosaunee women have always been essential to their nations, especially when their communities faced the crises that have characterized the settler scholarship of their nations’ 1

2

INTRODUCTION

histories, and analysis of women’s work helps reframe these academic narratives of decline. As the late Onondaga Nation Deer Clan Mother Goñwaiani Audrey Shenandoah said at a women’s suffrage celebration in Seneca Falls, New York, “Haudenosaunee women have worked with the men to successfully guard their sovereign political status against persistent attempts to turn them into United States citizens. We have always had these responsibilities.”3 Throughout the three centuries covered by this work, Haudenosaunee women’s political and domes­ tic work was central to how both Haudenosaunee and European peo­ ple understood the continuance of Haudenosaunee sovereignty and identity. Before 1722, the Confederacy was comprised of five nations linked by common cultural and political goals. In the seventeenth and eigh­ teenth centuries they were often known to Europeans as the “Five Nations.” These included the Mohawk, nearest to modern Albany, the Oneida, Cayuga, Oneida, and Seneca in the far west, covering the Fin­ ger Lakes and stretching to and sometimes past modern Buffalo. After 1722 they were known as the Six Nations when the Tuscarora nation was welcomed home following its forced displacement from territories in what is now North Carolina.4 Indigenous feminist spatial theorists emphasize Indigenous ways of knowing both histories and places as part of the ongoing work of decolonization.5 To emphasize continuity between the present and the history of the Haudenosaunee discussed, I use Ononda’gega’ or Kanién’keha (Onondaga and Mohawk language) place names as much as possible. The nations of the Haudenosaunee have often differed politically, socially, religiously, and economically throughout the period covered by this book and in the present. Before and after contact with settlers, they shared a matrilineal accounting of descent in which belonging to fam­ ily, clan, and nation descended through the mother’s line.6 Goyá:neh, or clan mothers, guided the use of clan fields for maize agriculture in matrifocal towns that expanded and diffused as political and mili­ tary conditions required. Together, they controlled access and travel through their territories for both Europeans and other Indigenous groups well past the American Revolution. In the twenty-first century, their national territories are the only continuously held Indigenous ter­ ritories encompassed by former British colonies, with additional com­ munities in Wisconsin and Oklahoma since the nineteenth century, as shown in figure 0.2.

Figure 0.1. Mohawk Woman, attributed to George Heriot. Musée du Nouveau Monde, La Rochelle, France, MNM.1980.1.15. Courtesy G. Dagli Orti / © NPL—DeA Picture Library/Bridgeman Images.

Haudenosaunee national territories in 2020.

Source: Map by the author. GIS data for this and figures 1.1, 5.1, 6.1, and 7.1 drawn from Natural Earth 1:10m; Aboriginal Lands of Canada Legislative Boundaries, Quebec and Ontario subsets,

Government of Canada, English shapefiles, https://open.canada.ca/data/en/dataset/522b07b9-78e2-4819-b736-ad9208eb1067; American Indian Reservations / Federally Recognized Tribal Entities, USGS ScienceBase-Catalog, United States Department of the Interior, https://www.sciencebase.gov/catalog/item/4f4e4a2ee4b07f02db61576c.

Figure 0.2.

INTRODUCTION

5

The colonial history that created many reserves and reservations out of reduced Haudenosaunee historical territories is the same process that separated the woman in figure 0.1 from her nation’s history. The watercolor is an embodiment of “Europe and the people without his­ tory,” or the historical reduction of non-European people to anony­ mous others with no histories of their own.7 As historical evidence, the image is as confounding as it is useful because its creation and preserva­ tion erase exactly the things it gives the most evidence of: the woman’s choices in clothing herself and her baby. Clothing is one of the most personal choices an individual makes, but the history of this image divorced the woman in it from any information about her own his­ tory or choices. Everything this woman is wearing was manufactured in Europe and purchased from a European trader. She wears a blue wrapped wool skirt, red wool leggings, and a blue blanket decorated with green and red ribbons and silver pins, all of them imported from Europe and trimmed by a white seamstress or the Mohawk woman herself. Her blue-striped cotton or linen overdress echoes fashionable white women’s ruffled mantuas of the eighteenth century but does not exactly match them. Her deerskin moccasins are perhaps the only part of her ensemble never touched by European hands. Even the baby’s cradleboard appears to be decorated with black wool and trimmed with imported ribbon. Clothing in all its forms is inherently political.8 An action need not be considered political at the moment it is taken to have wider significance either in the moment or retrospectively.9 As the Mohawk scholar Audra Simpson argues, refusal is as political as action—to refuse to vote, pay taxes, or buy certain things is political. As Simpson argues, the “story of refusal is the language that people use to talk about themselves.”10 Political acts, in their broadest sense, are actions taken in dialogue with others’ choices and actions that have broader impacts beyond the indi­ vidual. Buying or refusing to buy an object is a decision enmeshed in networks of social meaning that has wide-ranging effects beyond the buyer and the seller. Consumption brings distant production into the home, while rejection refuses its entry.11 Eighteenth-century Europeans also understood production to extend the reach of the buyer through the chain of production because many saw consumption as “the sole end and purpose of all production,” as Adam Smith observed in Wealth of Nations.12 The politics of consumption do not end at the moment of purchase because objects take on political meaning through their use in social contexts.13

6

INTRODUCTION

The politics of clothing extend beyond the cultural meaning com­ municated by individual use, and extend through the meaning ascribed to the collective and political identity that common use creates.14 Clothing marks individuals’ social position as they, their community, and their observers perceive it. The choice to buy or wear clothing that fits perfectly within socially constructed expectations for one’s gender, race, age, or social position implicitly upholds those roles. The con­ scious or unconscious choice to clothe oneself outside those norms implicitly or explicitly pushes on the boundaries of social categories and their political reality. As a daily, domestic choice, Haudenosaunee clothing was a site of explicit and implicit self-positioning both within communities and within larger regional and global networks of power. Clothing purchases and reworking reflected not only individual agency but also the process of Haudenosaunee national self-fashioning. The transformation of European cloth into Haudenosaunee cloth­ ing could be, and has been, interpreted from a colonial vantage as a replacement or erasure of Haudenosaunee material culture by Euro­ pean manufacturing and trade.15 That transformation, and the ways it has been interpreted, is the heart of understanding how Indigenous people navigated and shaped exchange with settlers. Cross-cultural interactions across three centuries have been perceived by settlers to erode Haudenosaunee and other Indigenous nations’ sovereignty and identity, in large part because this narrative serves settler goals of eras­ ing and replacing Indigenous people and nations.16 Haudenosaunee people in the past and present have shaped mate­ rial objects to preserve their sovereignty. In his oral history of the first treaty between the Dutch and the Haudenosaunee, the late Wampum Keeper and Onondaga Beaver Clan Chief Tsaɂdegaihwadeɂ Irving Powless Jr. said that the Onondaga promised that “from this day forward we will know each other as brothers. And in the future when we meet, you will know who we are by the way we are dressed and the way that we speak.” For this reason, Powless said, he always wore his ribbon shirt and a silver bolo bearing the symbols of his nation and clan when he appeared in court to show that he was “dressed in the laws and the tra­ ditions of the Onondagas and the Haudenosaunee” rather than those of the United States.17 Powless drew a direct line from his ancestors’ treaty promises, their distinction as nations marked by their clothing, and the sovereignty of his nation today. Scholars have long acknowledged the importance of Haudenosaunee women in directing their communities and protecting their nations’

INTRODUCTION

7

sovereignty.18 However, directly accessing these women’s thoughts and actions is difficult and, at times, impossible because archival records were created and preserved by a settler colonial system hostile to Indigenous women’s voices, histories, and agency. Oral histories and community-based archival studies by Indigenous scholars have centered on Haudenosaunee understandings of the past; this book asks how archivally based scholarship can respond to the questions raised by that important work.19 Scholarship on early modern European consumers has explored the ways consumption made new avenues of choice and self-determination to women and men throughout the Atlantic World. Consumers used goods to declare community, family, and other affili­ ations. Relatively little similar work has been done on nonwhite com­ munities.20 European and settler women’s purchasing roles are taken as evidence of their agency, and consumption is framed as both a unifying political act and an exercise of individual self-determination.21 Indig­ enous people, and especially Indigenous women, are rarely afforded the same empowerment.22 Haudenosaunee communities used clothing to construct their own categories of nation, race, gendered power, and political legitimacy. This Haudenosaunee understanding of identity and sovereignty shaped engagement with the new American nation well into the nineteenthcentury. Haudenosaunee self-fashioning was done in conversation with the evolving standard of European consumer civility as marked by the use of clothing and other material culture. Many Europeans from the seventeenth century on believed that adherence to a gendered, socially constructed standard of order, bodily control, and comportment was a necessary prerequisite to individual participation in civil society. The legitimacy of larger groups and nations as political actors depended on the civility of their members.23 The daily performance of European-style civility included binary gender roles of subdued, laboring masculinity and modest, chaste femininity; the restraint of the lower impulses of the body; agricultural and commercial labor; and rituals of respectabil­ ity like tea service for elites. All of these performances were mediated by the use of clothing and material culture in culturally prescribed ways. The European concept of civility was closely tied to Christian values and European self-image as Christians. Europeans and later Americans viewed the material performance of civility as a necessary prerequisite to Christian conversion. The material performance of civility was con­ veyed by the use of clothing and other consumer goods like tea sets that were understood to signal the owner’s adherence to settler gender,

8

INTRODUCTION

hygiene, labor, and religious ideals. Material civility was an abstract ideal that settlers perceived as available for purchase and transfer, along with the material objects that were weighted with its social meaning. Civility as a concept has long been wielded as a weapon of colonialism.24 However, like the clothing that Haudenosaunee people bought and remade, the material signs of European civility were likewise remade to fit a framework of Haudenosaunee sovereignty, political legitimacy, and civility. The Haudenosaunee are in some ways unique in early America, at least in the way non-Indigenous scholars have approached the study of their history. Haudenosaunee people are, as the anthropologist and “dean” of Iroquois studies William Fenton once put it, the most overstudied group in the world.25 This vast overstatement, which does not include that other most overstudied group (powerful men of European descent), has been used to dismiss the need for further study after aca­ demic Iroquois studies calcified in the late nineteenth and early twen­ tieth centuries. A distinction exists between Haudenosaunee studies, which is con­ versant with the academic discipline of Native American and Indige­ nous studies and the concerns of modern Haudenosaunee people, and Iroquois studies, which built upon a nineteenth-century colonialist salvage ethnography foundation. Academic Iroquois studies grew in large part from the early hobby ethnologist and foundational anthro­ pologist Lewis Henry Morgan’s fascination with defining Iroquois traditional culture so as to more properly “play Indian” himself. NonIndigenous scholarly obsession with defining and dissecting Iroquois culture has been baked into the American academy from the start. Morgan’s paean on the responsibilities of the white race to the red in League of the Iroquois, the seminal historian Francis Parkman’s excoria­ tion of the “highest type” of Indian, and the father of the American university George Bancroft’s lyric triumph of colonists over greedy Iro­ quois scoundrels all helped lay a foundation for academic history on racial hierarchy.26 Iroquois history has long been fetishized by the set­ tler colonial academy without much consideration of Haudenosaunee people. Academic Haudenosaunee studies have undergone something of a renaissance in the twenty-first century. Scholarship has shown renewed interest in spatial mobility, diplomatic neutrality, gender, domestic economy, sovereignty, and imperial entanglements. The old chestnut of Iroquois empire and inevitable decline has been reconsidered in

INTRODUCTION

9

tandem with a turn in the broader field of Indigenous studies to center­ ing Indigenous homelands and continuities. The Haudenosaunee were able to keep control of their lands for longer than other eastern Indig­ enous groups, but the Haudenosaunee use of exchange is suggestive of the broader study of political economy and settler colonialism. The longer Haudenosaunee experience of trade without dependency shows that Indigenous groups could and did engage with the Atlantic world in ways that reinforced rather than undermined their sovereignty. Land loss, debt, and trade dependency for the Haudenosaunee and other Indigenous groups were the products of settler violence, colonial coer­ cion, and loss of Indigenous diplomatic and military power, rather than a result of trade. A long view of Haudenosaunee history beginning with the earliest indirect integration of European trade goods shows the important con­ tinuities between the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. The integration of this trade with Europeans was shaped by Haudeno­ saunee gendered labor roles. Women were responsible for integrating both new goods and new people who arrived in Haudenosaunee territo­ ries via long-standing Indigenous trade routes. This gendered work of domestication and transformation first brought Haudenosaunee and European people and goods together in Haudenosaunee communi­ ties. European gender ideology of the seventeenth century increasingly viewed women’s proper place as separated into a private or domestic sphere. This created tension between the European goal to change Haudenosaunee gendered work and the very ability to perceive Haude­ nosaunee gendered work. Haudenosaunee women’s work included the formal direction of political and diplomatic decisions. Their work also included the familial work of transforming and integrating new goods and adopted captives as Haudenosaunee. Early seventeenth-century French efforts to more closely link Haudenosaunee diplomatic and military interests to French interests focused on converting Haudeno­ saunee women both to Catholicism and to French modes of gendered labor. Both Haudenosaunee and French leaders understood women’s labor in clothing families to be central to creating each community’s identity. Haudenosaunee people were able to choose how to incorporate Euro­ pean goods and people because their nations’ diplomatic and military power allowed individuals and communities to keep settlers at a dis­ tance. Haudenosaunee free movement meant that Haudenosaunee con­ sumers, and not settler merchants or officials, were in control of beaver

10

INTRODUCTION

supplies. French, Dutch, and English colonial officials dependent on beaver exports for their colonies’ profitability bemoaned this Haude­ nosaunee mobility and control of their territories because they could not control beaver supply. This supply fluctuated across the seventeenth century. Fluctuations coincided with periods of epidemic disease, war­ fare, and cool diplomatic relations between the Haudenosaunee and European settlements rather than depletion of hunting areas. Haudenosaunee labor was not rearranged toward market-driven hunting. During periods of inter-Indigenous war or tense relations with European colonies, a realignment of Haudenosaunee priorities away from market hunting negatively affected colonial profits but not Haudenosaunee access to goods or the basics of life.27 Haudenosaunee communities fit the new trade into their labor systems, and only shifted to buying a major portion of their garments when cloth prices fell at the end of the seventeenth century. Women domesticated imported cloth and clothing acquired through this trade as Haudenosaunee gar­ ments. An analysis of Haudenosaunee purchases and material culture shows that the time and work these women saved with their purchases were put toward specifically Indigenous decorative forms like twined and fingerwoven fabrics. Settlers found this assertion of indigeneity profoundly distress­ ing on both a political and a religious level, driving more than three centuries of pressure to convert to Christianity. European desires to view clothing as a signifier of civility fueled French and British hopes for Indigenous education, conversion, and incorporation as imperial subjects. The complete reform of Haudenosaunee gendered labor was the preferred method of these diplomatically oriented religious conver­ sion schemes. British and French efforts at religious conversion created connections between European and Haudenosaunee communities that Haudenosaunee people put to use in facilitating cross-border, interimperial trade. This trade depended on women’s religious connections, both between Haudenosaunee women and between European and Haudenosaunee women. It also enriched settler men in New France and New York. Both the trade and the connections between women that it relied on were increasingly viewed as subversive and dangerous as tensions between France and England escalated in the 1740s. British and French colonial officials were unable to successfully suppress the trade or the inter-cultural connections it relied on without alienating the independent Haudenosaunee communities they depended on dip­ lomatically and militarily.

INTRODUCTION

11

Haudenosaunee individuals’ continued disinterest in the adoption of European material civility underlined the performativity and instabil­ ity of European-style civility. Haudenosaunee disinterest raised the wor­ rying possibility that Haudenosaunee nations might decide to pursue military as well as economic goals counter to British or French interests. Eleazar Wheelock’s Indian Charity School in Lebanon, Connecticut, is a case study of diplomatic and domestic Anglo-Haudenosaunee conflict over material, political, and religious conversion. Earlier French conver­ sion efforts in the seventeenth century and later American attempts in the nineteenth century centered on similar anxieties. For Wheelock and other settler missionaries, the Haudenosaunee represented the imag­ ined religious and political key to control of eastern North America. Haudenosaunee women’s labor was the essential foundation on which these missionaries believed material, political, and religious reform of the Six Nations rested. These shared Haudenosaunee and American experiences as Atlantic consumers and tensions around consumption exacerbated conflicts over political legitimacy in the years leading to the American Revolu­ tion.28 American attacks on Haudenosaunee women’s property early in the war were symbolic denials of Indigenous claims to consumer civility and political legitimacy. As the war progressed, American hos­ tility turned to attacks on Haudenosaunee women themselves. The American Revolution was a crisis in Haudenosaunee territories for its shocking violence between former neighbors and in the conflicts it caused within the Confederacy. Despite this and punitive land loss after the war, Haudenosaunee women remained central to the political and diplomatic life of their nations. Haudenosaunee leaders critiqued American attempts to marginalize Haudenosaunee women in treaty negotiations over women’s lands, making Haudenosaunee women’s political and diplomatic influence more visible even as it was under threat. After the American Revolution, Haudenosaunee women like Seneca Caroline Parker used clothing and religious rhetoric to posi­ tion Haudenosaunee communities as sovereign and continuing. Nineteenth-century American missionaries, like seventeenth-century French and eighteenth-century English efforts, attempted to make Haudenosaunee individuals politically legible as American citizens through the performance of material civility. These changes in civil­ ity depended on changing Haudenosaunee women’s labor in clothing their families. As pressure mounted for the Haudenosaunee to remove

12

INTRODUCTION

or be subsumed in the American nation, women like Parker responded with their constructions of civility. An overdress made and worn by Parker in the iconic photograph of “traditional Iroquois women’s dress” in Morgan’s 1851 work articulated her views of Haudenosaunee civility. In this overdress, she constructed her own vision of Haudeno­ saunee women’s dress as modern, dignified, and distinct from white middle-class American consumer civility. Parker’s political act of cre­ ating clothing for the New York State Museum, although dismissed by Morgan and later scholars because of its domestic nature, under­ lined the political nature of all women’s domestic work. Nineteenthcentury Haudenosaunee clothing, from everyday adaptations, to silk regalia overdresses, to Parker’s cotton and wool ensemble for the State Museum, was a material construction of historical memory and a rejection of settler assimilation. The image in figure 0.1 is the only image of a Haudenosaunee woman made before 1800.29 Early European images of generalized or imagined Native American women are common. There are only a few images of Indigenous women who could be either Iroquoian or Algonquian, the two major cultural groups in what is now upstate New York and the ter­ ritories of the Haudenosaunee. There are even fewer images of named Indigenous women who sat for portraits.30 This image of an anony­ mous Mohawk woman is both unusually direct and unusually detailed. Looking at the viewer, the specificity in her clothing suggests she was painted from life and might even have been a specific woman who the painter saw, rather than a composite of many women. Even if the image itself is an amalgamation of what the painter saw many women wear, the rich detail is a significant record of eighteenth-century Indigenous women’s clothing. The woman pictured might have been a real, specific person with a name, a history, and a reason for looking at the viewer so directly. This woman is who I was looking for when I set out to write an archivally based history of Haudenosaunee engagement with settler colonialism. The image is attributed to George Heriot, but Heriot’s other known work is much more stiffly classical in posing and stylized in its depic­ tion of Indigenous clothing.31 Even the identification of the woman as Mohawk is uncertain and based on tentative ethnographic details. Her clothing resembles written descriptions of Haudenosaunee women’s clothing in the late eighteenth century, but she could have been a member of another Indigenous nation, or she could have been

INTRODUCTION

13

an imagined composite based on no specific nation and no specific woman. Having sat with this image and the questions that led me to it for many years now, it encapsulates the many possibilities and frus­ trations with trying to write an archivally based history of Indigenous people in early America. The many historical layers that separate the viewer in the present from both the moment this image was created and the woman it depicts have felt to me at times like a vast uncross­ able distance. These layers of distance are the products of gendered colonial power.32 Imperialism and settler colonialism are processes of econom­ ics, politics, and culture that accumulate over time rather than total­ izing or inevitable natural forces.33 This watercolor is one manifestation of those processes. In the catalog of the Musée du Nouveau Monde, the image is listed as “Squaw Mohawk,” an ugly colonialist term that has a long, dehumanizing history in both English and French.34 Whether this is an image of a specific woman or a composite, the colonial label applied to the image separates her from her own history and places her in the imagined European context of sexualized Indian drudges. As yet one more settler scholar of Indigenous history in a long tra­ dition of settler scholars who have attempted to tell Indigenous his­ tories, it is not my goal to give voice to the voiceless or recover a past for the woman in this image.35 It is my goal to examine how and why Indigenous people like the Mohawk woman pictured in the water­ color above have been so often rendered anonymous in settler archival records and histories. Settler hierarchies of gender and race helped sever this Mohawk woman from her own history and nation in the archive. These dynamics are still at play to deny Indigenous nations’ ownership of their lands and histories. Prosaic and anonymous moments like the one captured by this watercolor might yet speak to how people like her saw and thought of the changing world of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. If history is a cloth woven of many threads, a book is a garment tai­ lored from many patchwork fabrics. The author pieces it together, while the reader inhabits it. The lived experience of any time is composed of a wide variety of intersecting warps and wefts, but over time that fabric becomes moth-eaten, patched, and occasionally burned by the vagaries of time and archival preservation.36 A garment made from such fabric must necessarily patch together many small pieces. In tailoring the gar­ ment that you hold now, I have attempted to examine the reasons for that patchwork. The anonymous woman in the opening image does

14

INTRODUCTION

and did have a history. Unlike her frank gaze, the path to her history is not direct. Her choices are not evident from a single image alone, but they can be traced through the intersecting patchwork of evidence that remains. In the eighteenth and twenty-first centuries, her identity and the identity of her descendants remain clear, dressed in the laws and traditions of the Haudenosaunee.

C ha p ter 1

Domestic Work and Exchange in Early Contact

Sometime between 1580 and 1600, a woman born in the tropics died in the Seneca town of Ganounata.1 Her bones were deformed in a way that suggests she suffered from yaws or a related disease, which was endemic to coastal West Africa and tropical areas of North and Central America.2 Her arrival at Ganounata was part of larger regional and global changes that would eventually bring more people and things from far beyond North America to Haudenosaunee territory. The Ganounata woman was not the first non-Haudenosaunee person to be adopted into a Seneca community. However, her arrival in Seneca country was made possible by a long history of extensive Haudenosaunee trade and signaled impending changes to that trade. The Ganounata woman might have been an African who escaped from enslavement in the Spanish city of San Agustín on the Atlantic coast of Florida, or one of the three hundred enslaved Africans abandoned by Sir Francis Drake near Roanoke in 1586, or she may have been an Indig­ enous refugee of the upheavals that racked the Cofitachequi chiefdom to the southeast in the wake of repeated Spanish incursions.3 Whatever her origins, she probably arrived in Seneca country via the long-standing Kawehnohkowanénhne (Susquehanna River) valley trade routes that connected the lakes and valleys of what is now upstate New York with the Chesapeake region and the southeast.4 15

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The Ganounata woman entered a region that was fundamentally shaped by women’s work and women’s relation to land. As Mohawk Bear Clan Mother Iakoiane Wakerahkats:teh has said, “Women are indeed the first environment . . . With our bodies we nourish, sustain, and create connected relationships and interdependence. In this way the Earth is our mother. In this way, we as women are the Earth.”5 Women were connected to their land through the creation story of Sky Woman’s descent to Turtle Island, through the founding story of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, and through their daily political and agricultural work. When Sky Woman’s daughter Zephyr died in child­ birth, her mother Sky Woman planted corn, beans, squash, tobacco, and strawberries on her grave. These plants connected women’s bod­ ies, agriculture, and lives to their lands in Haudenosaunee cosmology. Zephyr’s son Skyholder created the first humans from the soil of his mother’s grave, giving the soil life with his own blood, underpinning the philosophy that all life comes from the land and returns to the land. These connections formed the foundation of Haudenosaunee matrilin­ eal identity and territoriality.6 When Hiawatha and the Peacemaker united the five related nations of the Haudenosaunee in the Confederacy, they sought the help of Jigonsaseh, or “She who lives along the road to war,” to provide provi­ sions to warriors. As owners and cultivators of the land, women like Jigonsaseh supplied food for war parties, giving them an effective veto if they denied warriors supplies. With Jigonsaseh’s help, the Peacemaker and Hiawatha brought together the warring nations at her hearth to create a lasting peace within the Haudenosaunee Confederacy. Called the Peace Queen and Mother of Nations, Jigonsaseh’s provision of food for war parties made women’s agriculture central to their diplomatic and political power to appoint and depose leaders, sanction war and peace, and direct the political life of their nations.7 Seneca and other Haudenosaunee women owned land through matrilineal clans headed by a goyá:neh. They practiced extensive maize agriculture, and they adopted newcomers like the Ganounata woman into their clans. Seneca country is cold and damp in the winter and moderate in the summer, a far cry from the tropics where the Ganounata woman was born. When the Ganounata woman arrived in Seneca country dur­ ing the usual trading season of late spring to early fall, she saw rolling corn fields before she arrived at a town. These fields extended for miles around the settlement. Before arriving at the town, she had already traveled through the parklike expanse of older corn fields left fallow

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when the town relocated to a new location every twenty to thirty years. Every few decades, Haudenosaunee communities sought out fresher soil for farming and woods for gathering and moved to new town sites. They left behind cultivated stands of edible plants to forage and new growth to lure in deer and other game for easy hunting. Women’s culti­ vation of the land quite literally reshaped it for generations and created a bountiful landscape to support them and their communities. As they neared the town, the Ganounata woman’s traveling party encountered Haudenosaunee women, children, and older men on their way. They passed groups out in the fields who tilled interplanted mounds of corn, beans, and squash, or scared away birds from mounted platforms.8 The town of Ganounata was a bustling place, situated atop a long, high hill and surrounded by a tall, circular palisade wall made of trees nearly a foot around. A generation earlier, intermittent warfare made these palisades necessary for protection against raids, but Ganounata bore little evidence of warfare by the time Ganounata woman arrived. Inside the palisade wall were long, tall homes sheathed in elm bark, about twenty feet wide and forty to one hundred feet long. The town was home to anywhere from several hundred to more than a thousand people. Depending on the time of year, not everyone was at home. In addition to the vast corn fields, Haudenosaunee families and small par­ ties traveled seasonally for fishing, hunting, foraging, and trade. Small family groups lived away from the town sometimes for months at a time at seasonal camps or traveled between towns for trade and visiting relatives. Born outside of Haudenosaunee territory, the Ganounata woman lacked the clan affiliation that eased travel between Haudenosaunee nations. Clans extended across national lines. They offered recipro­ cal hospitality to members and marked their affiliations with animal emblems on longhouse peaks and other places. These longhouses were large bark and pole constructed buildings with a row of central fires down the middle and a peaked or rounded roof some ten to twenty feet high punctuated with smokeholes. If the Ganounata woman was a war captive, she would have been ritually tortured at the edge of the town to atone for the loss of Haudenosaunee family members. How­ ever, because she was a woman and her bones did not show evidence of trauma besides her yaws infection, she was probably not tortured. More likely she was adopted by a goyá:neh who accepted the Ganounata woman into her household and family in place of a recently deceased family member.

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During her life in Ganounata, the Ganounata woman lived in a communal longhouse of anywhere from twenty to one hundred peo­ ple. This longhouse was presided over by the goyá:neh and housed her daughters, their spouses and children. Raised platforms within the longhouse were paired across from one another, separated by a row of central fires, and families occupied these alcoves with their possessions. Corn was stored for winter in covered pits at the cooler ends of the longhouse with fish, meat, dried herbs, berries, and other necessities stored higher in the smoky loft. Families lived side by side with siblings, aunts, cousins, and grandparents, and worked together in communal, lineage-owned corn fields and seasonal camps.9 Men married into fami­ lies. On marriage, a man moved to his wife’s mother’s longhouse and hunted with his brothers or his wife’s brothers. A man took primary responsibility for educating his sisters’ children, making uncle a much more potent metaphorical relation in Haudenosaunee diplomacy than father. When the Ganounata woman married, her husband came to live in her adopted mother’s longhouse. Her children were regarded by other Seneca people as part of her adopted clan rather than part of her husband’s clan. The Ganounata woman’s arrival and adoption were probably not regarded as unusual by her Haudenosaunee family. The Ganounata woman entered Seneca country during a time of increasing women’s travel between the Five Nations. This reflected a period of peace and sta­ bility between Haudenosaunee communities and security from outside incursions that made women’s travel for trade safer. This was reflected in a homogenization of ceramic pot designs over the course of the six­ teenth century as far west as Tiorá:kahre (Niagara Falls), a result of Haudenosaunee women’s movement both between what would become the Five Nations and beyond to culturally related groups on the Niag­ ara frontier.10 Women traded fish, sugar, venison, baskets of corn, and other goods between communities, and ceramic pots with their incised collar decorations traveled along with the goods. Like farming, pottery was women’s work, and pots were coiled by hand in matrilocal house­ holds by groups of women working and learning together. The dis­ persal of collar designs in the sixteenth century suggests that as decorative designs circulated and became more widely traveled, so too did the women who made them. The Ganounata woman was part of the last generation of Haudeno­ saunee women to clothe themselves without imported cloth. As part of her adoption and integration, the Ganounata woman was dressed as

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a Haudenosaunee woman with a wrapped skirt of soft-tanned deerskin, and she saw men in leather breechclouts. Cold, damp winters required the addition of leggings for both women and men along with moc­ casins and warm fur wraps. All of these garments were the product of women’s and men’s complementary labor throughout the year. Family groups traveled together in the summer and fall to trap and hunt, and women processed the furs and hides by tanning and smoking before sewing them into garments. In addition to learning to tan and sew leather as she integrated into her new household, the Ganounata woman probably also learned to make cloth. In Haudenosaunee territory and elsewhere in North Amer­ ica, women spun thread against their thighs from gathered animal hair, elm bark, and other plant fibers. With this thread, they wove bands, bags, fishing nets, and mantles without looms in a process that resem­ bled a multistranded braid. Sometimes women wrapped the threads with dyed animal hair to produce a decorative embroidery effect, or they wrapped turkey feathers into the weave to produce a warm feather mantle. This process of twining and plaiting differed both from the strap and upright looms of western Africa and the highly mechanized and increasingly industrial woolen looms of Europe. When the Ganou­ nata woman died, she was among the last generation living in Haude­ nosaunee territories who never bought, wore, or used European cloth. Her daughters or nieces who were born before direct contact with Euro­ pean traders probably bought European woven cloth during the course of their lives. They probably mixed purchased cloth together with the leather and twined garments that the Ganounata woman made, a mix­ ture that would quickly become recognized as distinctly Indigenous and Haudenosaunee. The Ganounata woman’s presence in Seneca territory was part of a larger global change. This global process would bring her daughters, nieces, and granddaughters a wide variety of imported textiles from around the world that they would use to create a uniquely Haudeno­ saunee identity. Although speculative, the Ganounata woman’s experi­ ence of adaptation and adoption mirrored the adoption of goods and people in Haudenosaunee territory during the first several decades of Haudenosaunee indirect contact with “saltwater” people of the Atlantic World.11 The Ganounata woman arrived in a Haudenosaunee territory on the brink of change. Like the Ganounata woman’s integra­ tion into her Seneca family, much of the change in Haudenosaunee communities would not be witnessed or directed by Europeans. The

Haudenosaunee territories and selected settlements circa 1650–1660.

Source: Map by the author after Parmenter, Edge of the Woods, 101, 143, and Richter, Ordeal of the Longhouse, 100.

Figure 1.1.

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Ganounata woman was adopted and integrated into a Seneca commu­ nity on Seneca terms, using Seneca rituals, and made wholly Seneca. Her arrival in Seneca country (see figure 1.1) was the initial product of distant European actions. Their consequences and effects were directed by Haudenosaunee women.

Behaved Themselves Very Modestly Like the Ganounata woman, new goods from Europe, Africa, and Asia initially entered Haudenosaunee territory via existing Indigenous trade routes. Contact with goods preceded direct contact with Europeans sometimes by decades and progressed slowly. As new goods and new people entered Haudenosaunee territory, they were domesticated within Haudenosaunee frameworks of use. Women’s work was at the heart of this domestication and made early contact spaces both diplomatic and domestic. The boundary lines between the two often blurred, if they were acknowledged at all. For Europeans who recorded encounters with Indigenous people, the distinction between diplomatic and domestic was gendered and all-important. From the perspective of Haudeno­ saunee people, early diplomatic contact was often both domestic and directed by women in ways that Europeans misread as making that contact specifically not diplomatic. In early European explorers’ accounts, the presence of Indigenous women was sometimes taken as an indication that an encounter was not diplomatic. In encounters that European observers had a vested interest in portraying as diplomatic, the presence of Indigenous women was sometimes downplayed or erased because the masculine diplomatic and feminine domestic space were viewed as mutually exclusive. However, Haudenosaunee women and girls were key players in cross-cultural encounters that were not considered diplomatic by Europeans precisely because they were domestic. At home, Haudeno­ saunee women were primarily responsible for integrating both new people and new goods, and they transformed both to work within the domestic space of the town and longhouse. Beyond the fields and towns of Haudenosaunee territories, girls and women moved into European domestic spaces as traders and diplomats in training. In European settlements, these Haudenosaunee women and girls learned European modes and habits by living in households with European women, and they brought cross-cultural encounters into Haudenosaunee and European domestic spaces.

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The European insistence on defining women as inherently nondip­ lomatic is most visible in one of the earliest European-Haudenosaunee encounters. On a sunny clear day in the fall of 1609, two teenage girls, two women, and four older men had dinner in the cramped, dark­ ened captain’s quarters of a small sailing ship. The ship anchored in the Ka’nón:no (later to be known as the North or Hudson River to the Dutch and English), just north of what is now the city of Albany. The presence of the girls and women was so anomalous to the English crew­ man who recorded the encounter and later historians that the girls and women are often omitted from the narrative of the meeting. Robert Juet, the English sailor who recorded the meeting, noted only that the women were quiet, and the girls were modest. The women’s presence was both anomalous and unremarked on, yet their presence points to the long history of Haudenosaunee women’s involvement in intercul­ tural trade, often in ways European observers did not understand. Henry Hudson’s ship Halve Maen anchored just south of what would become Fort Orange and later Albany, New York, in September 1609. They were among the small handful of Europeans on the North Ameri­ can continent at the time. Further south, the Virginia Company colony Jamestown faced increasingly desperate food shortages and attempted to establish trade with “Massawomeks,” or Haudenosaunee warriors who ranged south to attack Susquehannocks and other southern Indigenous groups.12 To the north, the nascent French colony of Qué­ bec found itself ever more deeply entangled in intricate alliances with Algonquian groups that earlier that summer had resulted in a dramatic raid into Haudenosaunee territory. Hudson and his men found them­ selves at a busy crossroads but mostly failed to recognize this. The crew put a boat ashore to fish, sound the river’s depths, and repair a foreyard that had been damaged off the coast of Virginia. Juet eyed the Indigenous “Countrey people” who fished nearby with suspicion even after Hudson allowed them aboard the Halve Maen to trade. The national identity of the group (or groups) Hudson and Juet interacted with is almost impossible to determine. Juet and other early European writers rarely understood or recorded national differences between the Indigenous people they encountered. The Indigenous people the Halve Maen encountered may have been Algonquian Mahi­ cans, Mohawk Haudenosaunee, or some other group. Their encounter suggests the prevalence of Haudenosaunee diplomatic norms in the region, such as exchanging wampum, extending food and domestic hospitality to strangers, and having women present. Juet’s recording of

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the encounter also demonstrates gendered European misunderstand­ ings of Indigenous diplomacy. The Indigenous people Hudson’s crew encountered brought the products of women’s agriculture, including “ears of Indian Corne, and Pompions, and Tabacco . . . Grapes . . . Beuers skinnes and Otters skinnes” to trade “for Beades, Kniues, and Hatchets.”13 From the per­ spective of the Indigenous traders, this encounter with Hudson and his men was one more opportunity to exchange agricultural products for interesting items from far away. They routinely traded with other Indigenous groups to acquire crystals and copper, and trade with Hud­ son’s crew was integrated within this system. The Ganounata woman had arrived in Seneca country via such long distance trade routes a few years previously. The Indigenous diplomats’ offer to share food at this initial meet­ ing was especially significant. In Haudenosaunee diplomatic metaphor, the “dish with one spoon” signifies an agreement between nations to meet peacefully and treat one another with reciprocity under the Great Law of Peace. At the founding of the Confederacy, the Peacemaker had brought together the hodiyanéshų’ (chiefs, plural) to eat from a single dish with no knives present, an act that created mutual responsibility and an agreement to put aside bloodshed in the first, tentative estab­ lishment of diplomatic relations.14 Hudson and his crew were to be integrated into both trade and diplomatic networks with an invitation that was at once domestic and diplomatic. Juet, Hudson, and the rest of the Halve Maen crew viewed the encoun­ ter with much more suspicion. Ten days south in the Manhattan har­ bor, crewman John Coleman had been killed in an altercation with another Indigenous group over a supposedly stolen pillowcase, and Hudson remained wary of other Indigenous people the crew encoun­ tered. Despite these misgivings, Hudson and his men sought out “some of the chiefe men of the Countrey” to establish relations with them and determine “whether they had any treacherie in them.” The anchorage the Halve Maen had reached was the northernmost navigable section of the river, a strategically important location to secure for further trade and exploration.15 The friendliness of the local people was important for Hudson to determine and secure. The several days of visiting that followed bore many hallmarks of what the Dutch and later English residents of Albany came to recog­ nize as Haudenosaunee diplomacy. An “old Sauage, a Gouernour of the Countrey” invited Hudson to his home and “made him good cheere,”

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followed by an evening of drinking aboard the Halve Maen. The Indig­ enous diplomats may have viewed this as a reciprocation of their earlier offer of food and an acknowledgment of diplomatic protocols. During this shipboard visit, “one of them had his wife with him, [who] sate so modestly, as any of our Countrey women would doe in a strange place.” The group presented Hudson with “stropes of Beades,” the dip­ lomatically significant wampum belts or strings that were assembled by women, possibly even the woman who dined with Hudson that evening. Like hunting, the creation of wampum was a cooperative endeavor. Men made beads by cutting and drilling the delicate shell. The shell’s origin in water made the meanings they carried pure and clear, while the dark edge of the shell and the light middle represented the dual­ ity and balance of creation.16 Haudenosaunee women performed the important work of stringing the white and purple beads into wide wampum belts or single strands. These wide belts or strands of beads were used to invest a hoyá:neh (clan chief ) or goyá:neh with lineage names, mark treaties and agreements, and as diplomatic credentials that allowed runners to carry messages. The diplomatic use of wampum had deep roots in the founding of the Confederacy when Hiawatha used wampum strings as mnemonic devices to carry the Peacemaker’s message and created what is now called the Hiawatha belt to record the agreement uniting the terri­ tories of the Five Nations in the Confederacy.17 The presentation of wampum strings to Hudson signified the group’s diplomatic status, and that their visit had been condoned by onahgí:weh (clan mothers, plural) who made and kept wampum.18 The presentation of wampum belts or strings thus represented a communal investment in the mes­ sage conveyed, as well as the specific endorsement of the women who strung the wampum or allowed its use. The presence of wampum con­ veyed the presence of women. Hudson, Juet, and many other Europe­ ans dismissed both the women and the “stropes of Beades” as equally insignificant. Juet’s is the first written description of a European-Iroquoian encounter, but it was probably not the first encounter. His descrip­ tion of the interactions near what would become Albany suggests that although Hudson and Juet were unfamiliar with the diplomatic and exchange protocols they sailed into, their Indigenous hosts knew what to do with them. The extensive history of long-distance trade in the area meant that Hudson’s crew and the goods they offered fit neatly into existing trade patterns. The easy extension of diplomatic and trade

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overtures suggests that the Indigenous people in the area did not view Hudson’s presence as unusual. Hudson and his crew were also probably not the first Europeans to enter these trade networks. Juet’s dismissal of Indigenous requests for “trifles” belied the com­ plexity of the Indigenous networks that he and other Europeans sought to enter. Earlier in the summer of 1609, Samuel Champlain had found himself entangled in complex inter-Indigenous politics when he agreed to accompany Huron and Algonquian allies on an expedition against the Mohawk. Europeans like Champlain, Hudson, and Juet entered a complex landscape of Indigenous alliances, rivalries, and exchange networks that shaped “New World” encounters. On one side of Kani­ atarowanénhne, Champlain found himself embroiled in a long-running conflict with the Haudenosaunee by Algonquian allies whom he at turns despised and courted. Champlain’s expedition into Mohawk territory ended in “loss and shame” when Champlain withdrew from battle with two Haudenosaunee arrows in his leg.19 Champlain’s account of a violent encounter on the frontier between two competing Indigenous powers emphasized the conflict between French and Haudenosaunee as nearly inevitable. Juet’s account suggests a long history of integration into homeland domestic spaces rather than conflict along frontiers. On the southern side of Kaniatarowanénhne, Juet and Hudson exchanged knives, beads, and other trifles that went on to circulate in a wider con­ tinental trade network. They saw evidence of that continental network without knowing it. Juet frankly assessed the potential of the land for settlement and indus­ try. He eyed the cliffs, mountains, and people for evidence of copper, gold, or silver mines. Juet noted that some of the Indigenous women and men they encountered had “red Copper Tabacco pipes, and other things of Copper they did weare about their neckes.” Juet took the pres­ ence of these objects as evidence of potential mines in the region, hop­ ing for riches to rival the Spanish silver mines of Peru. At least some of the copper ornaments may have been European in origin, and the rest originated far from Haudenosaunee territory. Ornaments made of both native copper from the Great Lakes and reworked European cop­ per kettles appeared side by side at Haudenosaunee towns from the mid-sixteenth century on. These were often visually indistinguishable from one another and even now require chemical testing to determine their exact geographic origins.20 At Onondaga sites occupied in the late sixteenth and early seven­ teenth centuries, archaeological evidence suggests that copper kettles

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were disassembled for use as small knives, hide scrapers, ornaments, awls, and beads. European ceramics were broken and bored with holes for hanging, and lead shot was remolded as small figures. Long before direct contact, European goods entered Haudenosaunee communities via established Indigenous trade routes through the Kaniatarowanénhne valley to the north and the Kawehnohkowanénhne to the south, inter­ mingling with goods traded from the interior via the Great Lakes.21 Like the shells, stones, crystals, and native copper that circulated before European contact, European manufactured goods were integrated smoothly into Haudenosaunee exchange networks and use.

So Brought Me to Her Cottage Haudenosaunee women were responsible for integrating both Euro­ pean goods and European people into Haudenosaunee communities. During the process of adoption, captives were both physically and metaphorically stripped of their European, African, or Indigenous identities when their clothing was taken from them and replaced with Haudenosaunee clothing. Women were responsible for the adoptee’s social and physical integration into the community. This echoed Jigon­ saseh’s care for the wicked Tadodaho, an evil hoyá:neh of Onondaga who attacked other Haudenosaunee nations until Jigonsaseh cleared the evil and aggression from him with medicine and helped Hiawatha comb the snakes from his hair.22 As mothers and onahgí:weh, Haude­ nosaunee women assumed the responsibility of clothing children and raising them within a matrilineal clan. They likewise assumed the responsibility for remaking former enemies and outsiders into family and community members. European settlers quickly found themselves integrated in this way, often paradoxically at times when conflicts between Haudenosaunee nations and settler communities peaked. Fifty years after the Ganou­ nata woman’s death, Pierre Radisson found himself taken captive by a Haudenosaunee war party outside the French settlement of TroisRivières on Kaniatarowanénhne. Radisson had only been in New France for about a year.23 His captivity was the result of the decades-long con­ flict between New France and several Haudenosaunee nations that grew from Champlain’s alliance with Laurentian Huron and Algon­ quian groups. As Champlain attempted to secure the prospects of the fledgling Quebéc in 1608, he somewhat haplessly agreed to accompany his new Wendat, Montagnais, and Iroquet Algonquian allies on a raid

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against their long-standing enemies to the south. The initial encounter resulted in a handful of Haudenosaunee deaths and almost a century of war. Haudenosaunee war parties successfully raided French, Wendat, and Algonquian settlements in an effort to secure Haudenosaunee free­ dom of movement along their northern and western frontier and push back French and Indigenous incursions into their territories.24 When the sixteen-year-old Radisson became separated from his French hunting companions in the spring of 1652, he was seized by a raiding party of Mohawks. Radisson’s account of the captivity that followed was far from neutral, but his is one of the earliest written accounts of Haudenosaunee women who adopted outsiders. Radisson penned his account several decades later in order to secure employment with what would eventually become the English Hudson’s Bay Com­ pany. This led him to emphasize his own daring, his innocence in the deaths of many of his French and Indigenous companions, and his cul­ tural experience with the Haudenosaunee, whom the English were by that time attempting to woo into full diplomatic alliance.25 The raiding party marked Radisson as a captive by stripping away his jacket and hat so that he was “naked” in only his shirtsleeves. They also “combd my head, and wth a filthy grease greased my head, and dashed all over my face wth redd paintings.”26 This redressing clothed Radisson in several layers of spiritually charged meanings. Sunflower oil, bear grease, and bone grease were used to protect skin from mos­ quitos, lice, and cold, and offered a layer of spiritual protection.27 Red was a powerful signal in Haudenosaunee cosmology and in Radisson’s journey from French to Haudenosaunee. Seventeenth-century Jesuits and eighteenth-century adoptee Mary Jemison reported that captives marked for execution had their faces painted black for its associations with death, whereas red face paint was associated with continuing life and adoption. When Skyholder, the elder of the creator twins associ­ ated with light and life, brought the first and most important medici­ nal plants into the world for humans to use, they were red plants that heal and nourish.28 When Skyholder made the first man and woman, he made them from the red clay of his mother’s body and embodied them with his blood, giving them a connection to the land and promising a return to the red earth of his mother’s body after death.29 Female spiri­ tual power was also connected to the color red, evoked in the creation story with Skyholder’s promise to the first humans that Sky Woman, who became the Moon, would mark women’s menstrual cycles and their ability to produce children.30

Figure 1.2. “Sauvage Hyroquois de la Nation de Gandaouaguehaga en Virginie,” Louis Nichols, Codex Canadensis, c. 1700. Courtesy Gilcrease Museum, Tulsa, Oklahoma.

Figure 1.3. “Sauvage de la Nation des Onneiothiaga,” Louis Nichols, Codex Canadensis, circa 1700. Courtesy Gilcrease Museum, Tulsa, Oklahoma.

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With Radisson’s hair powdered red and traveling with the severed heads of his French companions, Radisson was marked out during the journey south by his liminal status as neither hostile combatant nor fully Haudenosaunee. He was a new creation. His red paint was a marker of his potential, someone who might be ritually tortured or adopted for the spiritual and emotional benefit of his captors’ commu­ nity.31 Torture of captives revenged the loss of a beloved family mem­ ber and cosmologically restored balance to the community by allowing grieving relatives to vent violence on outsiders instead of damaging their communities with festering anger and grief that clouded judg­ ment.32 Adoption of captives replaced family members who were lost to disease and war and calmed the grief of their families.33 Onahgí:weh and female members of families directed these choices and the grieving rituals that followed and decided which captives would be tortured and which adopted. Radisson’s Haudenosaunee captors were aware his fate lay outside their hands and marked him as such. Closer to their settlement on Teionontatátie (or Mohawk River), Radisson’s Haudenosaunee captors further prepared him for the decision of the goyá:neh. The party of men, including one Radisson had come to call brother, styled Radisson’s hair to resemble their own. They “cutt off my hair in the front and upon the crowne of the head, and turning up the locks of ye hair they dab’d mee wth some thicke grease. So done, they brought me a looking-glasse. I viewing myselfe all in a pickle, smir’d wth redde and black, covered wth such a cappe, and locks tyed up wth a peece of leather and stunked horridly, I could not but fall in love wth myselfe, if not yt I had better instructions to shun the sin of pride.”34 Radisson’s description of his new hairstyle aligns with early European depictions of Haudenosaunee and other northeastern Indigenous men’s hair. In two seventeenthcentury drawings of Haudenosaunee men, the French Jesuit Louis Nichols (shown in figures 1.2 and 1.3) depicted the men with shaved crowns and long wrapped or greased braids and hair “turned up,” simi­ lar to Radisson’s descriptions. Nichols depicted other Indigenous men with similar half-shaved, half-greased styles, including the eponymous shaved mohawk hair style.35 Radisson found his transformation seductive and protested that he was only marginally saved by his Catholic upbringing to shun pride. For Radisson’s hoped-for English audience, this was intended to signal his unique strengths in navigating the dangers of moving among Indians.36 For his Haudenosaunee brother, Radisson’s transformation served two

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purposes. The addition of the black face paint and its association with death marked Radisson as a potential candidate for ritual torture, and his haircut made him legible as a young man within Haudenosaunee frameworks. Women and children were typically not tortured before adoption, while young men were more often tortured. After being stripped of his markers of European identity, Radisson’s second sarto­ rial change was to become legible as a candidate for torture. At home in the Teionontatátie Valley, Radisson was presented to the gauntlet, ritual torture that had the victim driven down a path lined with men, women, and children who beat the victim. Facing down the gauntlet and what Radisson did not yet know was the possibility of torture, he was finally transferred from the custody of the man he alter­ nately called his brother and his keeper. This unnamed Mohawk man was responsible for Radisson’s initial transformation and liminal sta­ tus as neither hostile outsider nor adopted family member. Radisson’s brother/keeper bade him run the gauntlet “as fast as I could drive.”37 At the last moment an older woman, possibly a goyá:neh, averted Radisson’s torture and instead “covered” Radisson in both a literal and symbolic sense. “The old woman made me step aside from those that weare ready to stricke att me. There I left the 2 heads of my com­ rades.”38 The goyá:neh sheltered Radisson physically and socially from the impending torture. She sheltered him socially within her lineage through adoption by giving him the shelter that the Peacemaker prom­ ised to adoptees in the founding of the Confederacy. The ability to change, whether Tadodaho’s turn away from evil or the integration of individuals, families, or whole nations into the Confederacy, was a foundational part of Haudenosaunee worldview.39 There, a quarter mile outside the town, Radisson left behind the grisly remains of his French companions. In the eyes of his new Haudenosaunee adopted family, he finally left behind his French identity as well. Inside the town, in the presence of witnesses, the goyá:neh “speaking aloud, whom they answered wth a loud ho, then shee tooke her girdle and about mee shee tyed it, so brought me to her cottage.”40 Radisson’s Haudenosaunee mother physically marked him with her possessions and as being in her possession. She then took the last of his European clothing as well as the red and black paint that marked his liminal status between life and death. Another woman of the same lineage “greas[ed] and combe[d] my haire, and tooke away the paint yt the fellows stuck to my face . . . shee gave me a blew coverlett, stockins and shoos, and where wth to make me drawers . . . I suffered no wrong att their hands, taking

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all freedom.”41 The Haudenosaunee men in the raiding party were responsible for Radisson’s initial transformation into potential victim/ potential kin, but the goyá:neh who adopted Radisson was responsible for his final transformation into a member of their family. In the case of both Tadodaho and Radisson, women’s hands com­ pleted their transformation when Jigonsaseh placed the antlers of authority on Tadodaho’s head, and the goyá:neh reclothed Radisson.42 Radisson’s initial transformation at the hands of men was done mainly through the removal of European clothing and the addition of painted markings that were temporary even for Haudenosaunee warriors. His final transformation was done through the addition of clothing viewed by his adopted family as both Haudenosaunee and permanent. The rit­ ual of reclothing effectively changed Radisson from an outsider to a member of a family and community. These items of clothing did not acquire their transformative power because they were specifically of Haudenosaunee or European manu­ facture. They were powerful markers of an adoptee’s transformation because they were gifts from a family to a newly adopted member. When captives were integrated into families, the adoptee was given not just any items of clothing, but often clothing that belonged to other fam­ ily members. These gifts carried with them expectations of reciprocity, responsibility, and duty to the household.43 Haudenosaunee women named both children and adoptees. Names were kept within clans and used to invest goyá:neh and hoyá:neh with their positions. A goyá:neh also sometimes gave names of the dead to adoptees or other members of their lineage to appease a deceased family member’s spirit.44 Like the gift of clothing, the gift of a lineage name both allowed a person to assume the privileges of inclusion in the lineage of that name and the responsibilities of that name to the lineage.45 Europeans saw these reciprocal gifts and responsibilities only impre­ cisely when they were adopted into Haudenosaunee families, and often did not fully understand the implications of the gifts they received. In 1691, Gouentagrandi, an Oneida woman, gave Jesuit Father Peter Milet “a white shirt and a blanket of fine stuff that belonged to her daughter” to bring him into her family even though he already wore some items of Indigenous clothing.46 When Father Joseph Poncet was adopted among the Mohawk in 1653, he was given stockings, moccasins, a blanket, and “as soon as I had been made a relative of my house . . . I was also pre­ sented with an old and very greasy shirt,” with the implication that it

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had been worn before.47 Father Poncet’s shirt was probably not pur­ chased new for him but rather worn for some time before being given to him. Used clothing had the benefit of being ready to hand, but at a time when most people—Indigenous and European—had only a few sets of clothing, a new person wearing old clothing in a small community marked them as integrated into a family. As part of his new family, Radisson was called Orinha, the name of his adopted mother’s dead son, and expected to perform all Orinha’s responsibilities.48 Like Poncet and Milet, Radisson was probably clothed in Orinha’s clothes that first night. Radisson took his place in the household both literally and symbolically when Radisson’s adopted mother bid Radisson make his bed next to her younger son and hunt with him. Just as domestic household labor by both men and women was and is unpaid as part of the household economy, adoptees were expected to reciprocate. They were not expected to fulfill their responsi­ bilities with gifts of similar value to their gifted clothing but rather with unpaid labor and symbolic acceptance of integration into the family. Adoptees like Radisson performed domestic labor as part of the fam­ ily economy, and from the perspective of their Haudenosaunee family, captives accepted integration into that family as part of their reciproca­ tion of the gift. Men hunted on their mother’s behalf before marriage or their wife’s mother’s behalf after marriage and cleared new fields of trees for their mother or their wife’s mother. Women in the household worked together to cultivate their lineage’s fields under the direction of a goyá:neh.49 In return, families in the longhouse supported one another with shelter and food.50 Like men’s and women’s work in hunt­ ing or the reciprocal responsibilities clothing conveyed, the work of the household was cooperative. In the view of his Haudenosaunee family, Radisson accepted these reciprocal responsibilities when he accepted the gift of clothing, name, and place in the household. Radisson hunted, trapped, and labored for his adopted Mohawk family for several weeks, seeming to fulfill his reciprocal responsibili­ ties. Radisson himself understood at least a part of this transformation. After several weeks, his adopted mother asked him with some concern if he was still French. Radisson answered her that he was “of their nation, for wch shee was pleased.”51 Radisson’s answer may have satisfied his mother’s concern that he had become Haudenosaunee and understood his reciprocal obligations within the family, clan, and nation. For his adoptive Mohawk family, Radisson’s assumption of Orinha’s clothing

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and place in the household was a final step in their grieving for Orinha. Radisson was intended to more or less become Orinha, and the cloth­ ing his mother gave him was the outer manifestation of Radisson’s assumption of this role. Stripped of his French clothes and cleaned of the paint that had marked him as a liminal outsider, Orinha’s clothes remade Radisson into Orinha. Radisson’s later betrayal of his family’s trust must have seemed especially cruel because of this. After living with his adopted family for about two months and fulfilling Orinha’s responsibilities, Radis­ son conspired with an Algonquian captive during a hunting trip to murder their three Mohawk companions (but not Radisson’s adopted brother). Radisson and his accomplice fled but were quickly recaptured. Radisson’s narrative of his two captivities ran in parallel. Captured the first time, he was treated relatively well as a liminal subject with the potential for adoption, not harmed, and adopted immediately. Cap­ tured the second time, Radisson’s recapture was “the beginning of my miseries and calamities that I was to undergo.” Radisson was bound and “in that pickle” carried back along with thirty-three other French and Indigenous captives who had been taken by the vengeful raiding party that overtook him.52 During the sojourn back, Radisson used the name of his adoptive family and placed blame for the murders entirely on his dead Algonquian accomplice in an attempt to position himself as Mohawk. During the journey, he avoided torture under the protection of an older man who knew Radisson’s adoptive Mohawk family. Radisson was once again in a liminal state but a much more precarious one. Back in the town, Radisson was once more prepared for the gaunt­ let.53 In the eyes of the Mohawk community, Radisson had rejected the protection of his adoptive family by murdering his three Haude­ nosaunee companions and had become a hostile outsider once more. He had rejected his duties toward his family and clan and in doing so, rejected the reciprocal duties of protection others held toward him.54 Murder, and especially the murder of brothers or other Haudeno­ saunee, violated the foundational peace of the Confederacy.55 The grief and loss caused by a murder could be “covered” by covering the grave of the deceased with gifts of clothing by the murderer or the murderer’s family. This restored balance by recognizing the essential social com­ pact at the foundation of the Confederacy, but Radisson rejected this social compact by attempting to flee.56 By doing so he endangered his adopted family, who were responsible for restoring the families of the

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dead. Radisson’s murder left his adopted family open to the vengeance of the murdered men’s families or a blood feud if they allowed the mur­ derer to escape.57 Radisson’s adoptive mother and father advocated for him before an assembled council of elders, where they argued against his execu­ tion. When Radisson murdered his Haudenosaunee companions and rejected his Mohawk family, he rejected their protection and the gifts they had made to him in his role as Orinha. After his recapture, he was tortured naked as a stranger by the community until his adoptive par­ ents intervened and reclothed him as Orinha once more. After he was nursed back to health by his adopted mother, Radisson was gifted with a new shirt, but he was never again trusted to leave the town except in the company of his younger brother.58 Ties specifically to the family, rather than to the larger community or to the adopting nation thus were especially important. To the larger Haudenosaunee community, Radisson had rejected his family’s protection when he rejected them and their gifts of clothing. After his recapture he was treated as an unas­ similated stranger until his family reclaimed him with another sym­ bolic act of reclothing. Returned to his family, Radisson eventually took up Orinha’s respon­ sibilities once more and joined his brother on a raiding expedition in which he took a female captive to gift to his mother and beaver skins he gifted to his sisters.59 Radisson noted that his adoptive mother was herself a former captive, an adopted Huron who Radisson believed deferred to her Mohawk-born husband despite her love for him.60 Nev­ ertheless, she made decisions regarding Radisson and the captives he and his brother brought to her. As the senior woman of her house, she was the arbiter of which captives were to be integrated into the lineage she had been adopted into.61 Radisson’s second escape attempt was successful and made possi­ ble in part by his Haudenosaunee clothing. During a trading visit to Orange with his Mohawk brother, Radisson passed as Haudenosaunee without “ben knowne a french . . . all dabbled over wth painting and greased.” Radisson believed himself to pass as Mohawk to the Dutch he traded with by virtue of his Mohawk clothing and paint. Or, Radis­ son passed temporarily, until a French soldier detected an accent to Radisson’s Mohawk and revealed him as French to the Dutch.62 Radis­ son rejected offers from French and Dutch soldiers and officials to ran­ som him from the Mohawk. Radisson rebuffed these offers, he said, partly from his affection for his Mohawk family and partly for fear of

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being beholden to the Dutch. He did not say so in his account, but he may have also hesitated at another escape attempt for fear of being tortured again. Once more Radisson used his account of his captivity to perform for his English audience the bravery and ability to move safely among Indians and French required for the agent of an English merchant company. Radisson later used his ability to pass as Haudenosaunee among the Dutch when he decided to make his escape. Radisson slipped away from his Mohawk brother some weeks later and promised the Dutch settlers who mistook him for Haudenosaunee that he would bring them more trade if they did not tell other Indigenous people of his passing.63 His transformation at the hands of his Mohawk family, “who loved me as if I weare their owne naturall Son” allowed Radisson to pass as Haudenosaunee among the Dutch and ultimately effect his escape. Radisson’s ability to pass as Mohawk leading up to his escape suggests that clothing functioned as a primary marker of culture and identity to his Haudenosaunee family and many of the Dutch he encountered at Orange. For some Europeans, like the French soldier who caught Radisson’s accent, other cultural markers like language trumped cloth­ ing. Ethnic and national distinctions between Haudenosaunee, French, and Dutch existed and mattered, but the markers of these identities depended on the communities in which one moved. Radisson’s final transformation, from Mohawk son to French exile, also involved a change of clothes. After Radisson’s escape, the Dutch governor at Fort Orange Johannes Dyckman, along with the visiting French Jesuit Joseph Noncet and a Dutch merchant, reclothed Radis­ son. They “caused an other habit to be given me, wth shoos and stokins and also linnen.”64 Radisson’s many reclothings suggest the instability of ethnic and national identity in the seventeenth-century Northeast. In attempting to secure English employment a decade later, Radisson protested the stability of his French (and European) identity through­ out his captivity.65 However, Radisson moved from French to Haudeno­ saunee to French again via changes of clothing, making his ethnic and national identity only as stable as the clothing at hand and the choices he made in wearing it. For the Dutch settlers who sheltered Radisson outside of Fort Orange and the Dutch governor, Radisson’s clothing sufficed to mark him as Haudenosaunee. For Radisson’s adoptive fam­ ily, his wearing of Orinha’s clothing had signaled an even deeper trans­ formation. Radisson hid in the fort for three days until his departure

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for Manhattan and ultimately France, with his adoptive Mohawk fam­ ily searching for him the entire time.

Les Habiller, les Peigner et les Accoustrer Just as Haudenosaunee communities integrated captives like the Ganounata woman and Radisson, and the goods observed by Juet, European outposts on the fringes of Haudenosaunee territory sought to culturally transform Haudenosaunee individuals using many of the same tactics. Early settler attempts to assimilate Haudenosaunee people focused on their integration into familial structures, transformation of the body, and domestic education. The hope of Indians eager for Chris­ tian conversion fueled the financial support of colonies and justified both peaceful and violent European incursions into Indigenous lands. Both French and English colonial officials hoped to convert entire Indigenous nations, but Haudenosaunee women and men experienced conversion attempts in different, gendered ways. Haudenosaunee men feature much more prominently in written records of formal cross-cultural diplomacy of the period. However, Haudenosaunee individuals who undertook long-term cross-cultural contact outside of Haudenosaunee territory in the seventeenth cen­ tury were almost exclusively women and girls. Men spoke at treaty con­ ferences and sojourned outside of Haudenosaunee territory for long periods as galley slaves on French ships, but they rarely entered into long-term domestic arrangements outside of Haudenosaunee territory. The women and girls who sojourned outside of Haudenosaunee terri­ tory experienced a spectrum of captivities and freedoms and moved in and out of European domestic spaces of different types. One of these Haudenosaunee girls, Félicité, was probably in her midteens when she arrived in Quebéc to live at the Monastère des Ursulines for “some years.” Six years later, in 1674, the Jesuit Pierre Milet noted that Félicité was “of great use to me in instructing the faithful, and for the advancement of this Church” at his mission in Oneida country. By that date, Félicité “was able to assume and even to maintain a certain ascendancy over all the other Christians” through her knowledge of the “principles of piety . . . all the prayers, the chants of the Church, and the mysteries of our Faith; and she explains them so clearly that the men themselves willingly listen to her as their teacher.”66 Félicité’s leader­ ship within her community so soon after returning from her convent

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education suggests that she may have been older than the average French girl with whom she boarded. She was perhaps in her early twen­ ties when she assisted Milet at home in Oneida country. Félicité may have been selected from among the “children of the chief men” because she belonged to a lineage of spiritual leaders and anticipated one day formally assuming the role of spiritual leader despite—or because of— her education in French spiritual power. Like the Ganounata woman and Radisson’s adoptive mother, Félic­ ité was an unlikely diplomat. Like them, she spent a part of her life as a captive in all but name. Félicité did not enter the religious life entirely of her own volition. Félicité was, by Milet’s account, a pious Catholic by the time she returned to her family in Oneida country. She entered the Ursuline convent school in Quebéc more or less as a hostage to ensure the safety of Jesuit missionaries like Milet in Haudenosaunee territory. Haudenosaunee relations with New France were tense nearly from the beginning, from Jacques Cartier’s 1535 kidnapping of seven Laurentian Haudenosaunee people, including a ten-year-old girl, to Champlain’s disastrous 1609 excursion into Haudenosaunee territory on behalf of the French-allied Wendat. Félicité’s 1668 arrival was the product of more than a decade of ambition and maneuvering on the part of the Ursulines and the Jesuits. Félicité arrived in Quebéc during a time of rising diplomatic tensions in order to secure a tentative Haudenosaunee-French peace. As early as 1655, the leader of the Ursuline convent, Mère Marie de l’Incarnation, proposed educating the daughters of influential Haudenosaunee hodiyanéshų’. Her goal was part spiritual and part political, to ease tensions between the French colony and the Haudenosaunee, who had nearly destroyed it and its Indigenous allies in the colony’s early years. Félicité was a young hostage. She was nonetheless seen as a diplomatic figure by both the Oneida family who gave her up for this temporary adoption and by the governmental and ecclesiastical structures of New France that organized and financed her education. When Félicité, another unnamed Haudenosaunee girl, and a girl identified as a “former captive of the Iroquois,” who may have been a Haudenosaunee adoptee, arrived together in Quebéc 1668, they were one-half of a prisoner exchange in all but name.67 The girls probably represented the Oneida, Seneca, and Onondaga nations, the Haudeno­ saunee nations that were most involved in conflict with New France at the time.68 From the French side, the exchange was intended to secure the safety of Jesuit missionaries in Oneida, Seneca, and Onondaga

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country. From the Haudenosaunee side, the exchange was brokered to free adult male hostages and facilitate negotiations to end French inter­ ference in inter-Native politics between the Haudenosaunee and other Indigenous nations. Félicité and the other girls entered a polyglot, cos­ mopolitan space behind the cloister walls, one that was already home to Indigenous, French, and English girls. The English girls themselves were already likewise captives in all but name as a result of the ongoing border skirmishes between New France and New England. The bucolic girls’ boarding school in Montreal was both a political prison and a cloistered refuge. After arriving at the convent, the first task was brisk bathing and redressing. Describing the school’s earlier Wendat and Montagnais stu­ dents, Mère Marie de l’Incarnation wrote that “when they are given to us, they are naked as a worm, and one must wash them from head to foot because of the grease that their parents have smeared all over their bodies . . . no matter how diligently one does it or how often one changes their clothes, it takes a long time before one can get rid of the vermin caused by the abundance of their grease. One sister spends part of each day at this.”69 The first step in the Ursuline conversion process was to entirely remove traces of the home country and natal family. Haudenosaunee and Algonquian people in the Northeast prac­ ticed skin greasing to protect against both insects and cold and provide spiritual protection. The Ursuline’s wiping away of grease attempted to remove this physical marker of non-Catholic spiritual practice. Félicité had likely bathed more often than the nuns who wiped the grease from her skin. Bathing in streams and lakes was relatively common among the Haudenosaunee, but most Europeans at the time maintained cleanliness through changes of clothing rather than bathing the body. L’Incarnation’s account of the girls’ bathing also had a baptismal slant; an unusual ritual performed to cleanse and give a new beginning. To Félicité, the bathing may have echoed Hiawatha and Jigonsaseh’s comb­ ing of Tadodaho’s hair and the spiritual transformation that entailed. Once the Ursuline nuns judged her clean, Félicité was dressed in a gown in the French style. She was clothed in a white chemise and restrictive set of stays to confine the upper body, followed by a pet­ ticoat, a “simarre” or long, loose overgown of red wool, an apron over everything, and a fichu around the neck and shoulders, as well as red shoes and red mittens.70 The echo of red wool and red paint might have been legible to Félicité as a signal of her liminal, transformed sta­ tus, just as Radisson’s had been. All the girls were dressed the same in

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French style regardless of national origin, a sight that delighted at least some visiting Indigenous parents “to see the girls all dressed so alike.”71 Although they were not dressed exactly like the Ursuline sisters who wore habits of black and white wool serge, the girls might have been expected to follow the example of the nuns and hide their hands in their sleeves unless necessary. Covered from head to toe and past the wrist unless working, the bodies of both the sisters and their young charges were shielded from view and regulated by the clothing of their positions. Like the adoption of captives at home in Haudenosaunee territory, the process of redressing was an assimilative, recreative one. It incorporated small foreign bodies into the larger body of the group and smoothed over the superficial differences between individuals of different national origins. The ideal of equal treatment, which was to render all the girls into sisters, might not have been the case in daily practice. In 1643, the Jesuit Jerome Lalemant visited a class of Indigenous girls and asked how well they liked the convent. In answer, the class of little girls crowded around him and confessed a “grand secret.” The little girls confided in Lalemant, “You see, Father, that our dresses are old and worn, and that we are not given new ones; we do not look as nice as the French girls and it makes us sad.”72 Lalemant and Mère St. Thomas, who recorded the encounter, regarded the incident as more or less amusing and relayed it as an example of Indian children’s frivolity. In response, Mère de l’Incarnation sought out “une pièce de belle serge” (a fine piece of wool) to make the girls new stockings, shoes, and mit­ tens, lest the distress of being treated differently from the French girls prevent “divine seeds from casting roots deep enough to produce the fruits of a pure life.”73 For young girls stranded, in some cases, several hundred miles from home, the disparity in treatment and the poor state of their cloth­ ing were not vanity, even though Mère St. Thomas and later chroni­ clers ascribed the girls’ complaints to “the coquetry of the Indian.”74 Just as the Ursulines viewed the girls’ clothing as a necessary part of their conversion, the girls may well have regarded their clothing as an indicator of how they would be treated in their temporary home and whether they had been truly adopted on equal footing with their French schoolmates. Adoption into a Haudenosaunee lineage created a set of duties from the adoptee to the family and nation. It also cre­ ated obligations of care and protection to the adoptee as well, obliga­ tions that the girls feared were not being fulfilled. For both French

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and Indigenous people, clothing signaled the security of an adopted individual’s place in their community. As in Haudenosaunee territory, redressing signaled integration into a new family and an attempt to reeducate Indigenous girls. They had first received a domestic education from their mothers; the goal of the convent was to reeducate them in French domestic norms. The convent community was not familial in the traditional sense, but the sororal community of lay and religious sisters effectively functioned as fictive kin. Nuns are commonly addressed as “Sister” in both English and French, but the Ursulines of Quebéc addressed one another as Mère, or mother. These many mothers assumed the reproductive duties of care for their young charges, including the domestic task of changing political prisoners into kin through the transformative power of laun­ dry. The routines of the cloister brought Indigenous girls from a variety of nations into the hierarchical domestic space of a fictive European family. French and Indigenous girls slept, played, and ate together. Lay sisters—the lower-class women who performed manual labor and were not admitted to certain privileges of the cloister such as singing in the choir—administered to bodily needs like cleaning and laundry. Reli­ gious sisters drawn from the petite bourgeoisie and nobility adminis­ tered to needs of the mind like the teaching of catechism, Latin, and basic household mathematics. The convent functioned as a space distinct and separate from both the nearby French and Indigenous homes; residents were separated by a grille in the visiting room past which lay guests were not allowed. However, the hierarchy of lay and religious sisters who tended to the domestic education of French and Indigenous girls reproduced the hierarchies of a petite bourgeoise family that included children and servants headed by a matron whose domestic education ordered the business of the household. Perhaps Haudenosaunee girls like Félicité found the structure of the cloister somewhat familiar, with communal dormitories for the girls and leadership by an older matron as Mother Superior who oversaw the mistresses of each class of girls. The domestic, and especially sartorial, conversion of Indigenous girls was essential to the Ursulines’ mission. L’Incarnation and others hopeful for the conversion of the Haudenosaunee and other Indigenous groups saw differences between French and Indian as even less than skin deep. Writing proudly of two Huron students in 1663, l’Incarnation noted that once clean and dressed in the French style; the two were “taken for French girls because in their pronunciation they do not differ from

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the French.”75 Stripped of sartorial markers of cultural difference like clothing and grease, these two Huron girls proved for l’Incarnation that it was possible to transform Indians into French habitants. Like Radisson’s slippage between French and Haudenosaunee in the eyes of Dutch and French observers at Fort Orange, the Ursulines focused on the importance of changeable cultural markers like cloth­ ing and cultural constructions of hygiene over phenotype. The Ursu­ lines believed identity and ethnicity to be fluid, changeable things. As a young widow in France, Marie de l’Incarnation had been called to take the cloth by a vision of the Virgin Mary. L’Incarnation said the Virgin beckoned her across the ocean to a church shrouded in fog, calling her to come lift the fog in which the country lay. As a metaphor for conver­ sion and bringing the light of Christ to the Indians, it was not a subtle one. L’Incarnation followed the call and arrived in New France in 1639 to spend the rest of her life in pursuit of a grand diplomatic and reli­ gious goal: the education of Indigenous girls. Although a cloistered order, the Ursulines’ vow to educate girls was a far-reaching and profoundly political goal. The roots of the project dated to as early as 1655, when the French-allied Wendat and Algon­ quian communities from which the convent drew most of their Indig­ enous students were under attack by Haudenosaunee raiding parties. L’Incarnation proposed that Haudenosaunee girls should be exchanged for adult male Haudenosaunee hostages then held in Quebéc, Trois Rivieres, and Montreal. She further argued that the girls should be kept to ensure the security of Jesuit missionaries among the Haudenosaunee and prevent future attacks. By 1658 the newly arrived Governor Pierre de Voyer d’Argenson agreed and refused to release male Haudenosaunee hostages “until those Barbarians bring the children of the chief men of the country, to be kept securely confined in the Seminaries and reared in the Christian faith, and to serve the French as hostages against the incursions and undertakings of the Barbarians, who know no law but that of self-interest.”76 D’Argenson departed New France by 1661, but the policy persisted into the late 1670s, though not at the levels of enrollment l’Incarnation and others may have wished. Félicité and the other unnamed girls who arrived with her were the first of eleven known Haudenosaunee girls out of sixty-nine Indigenous or metís (mixed European and Indigenous ancestry) girls enrolled before the convent ceased enrolling Indigenous girls at the end of the seventeenth century. Félicité may have been among the most exemplary of the school’s alumnae with her assistance of Milet’s mission at Oneida, but the effort to educate Indigenous girls

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as Catholic wives and mothers eventually shuttered because of the per­ ceived failures of the program. Of the sixty-nine known Indigenous and metís students, only three Indigenous girls and two metís girls married French men. Girls who entered domestic service in New France after their education reported difficulties finding or keeping employment and often returned to their families.77 Haudenosaunee girls made up the second largest national contingent of Indigenous students after Wendat girls and none married French men. The Ursuline plan floun­ dered after a few decades. It did not fail for lack of trying, however. Félicité and other girls may have assisted in creating the Ursuline 1668 Haudenosaunee dictionary and catechism. The translation project was part of the Ursuline program to convert girls, prepare them to educate their future children in the faith, and provide resources for Jesuits and others who carried the mission to Haudenosaunee territory. Unlike later American and Canadian board­ ing and residential schools, at the Ursuline convent girls were educated in and encouraged to retain their own languages and cultural practices when these were perceived to be beneficial to the conversion mission. In the second year of the mission, Mère St. Claire admitted embarrassment that she could not teach her young charges in their own language, and from the beginning the convent employed young Algonquian and Wen­ dat women as translators for the sisters. In addition to learning to sing and play European instruments like the viol, girls danced and sang “a la mode de leur pays,” in the custom of their country.78 Félicité’s education was intended not to erase her indigeneity but rather to rework it in a fashion compatible with Catholicism, francisa­ tion, and a return to Haudenosaunee territory. New France could not survive as a colony by forcing conversions, and relied heavily on Indig­ enous allies to compete against the many rival English colonies to the south.79 The francisation at the Ursuline convent attempted to thread the needle of embroidering an Indigenous identity with French layers. The Ursuline aim was to educate girls who would remain friendly to French interests and raise their own families to be amenable to French alliance and Catholic conversion. This attempt to weaponize converted girls against their nations ultimately failed as Félicité and other women like her incorporated Catholicism within their own spiritual practice.

Charmed with the Fervor of Their Children At home in Oneida country, Félicité and the other Haudenosaunee alumnae further domesticated the practice of Catholicism and its

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attendant material objects to fit into the daily life of their communi­ ties. Félicité herself may have even assisted in selecting girls to be sent to school in Quebéc. Milet’s reports of Félicité’s own leadership of the Catholic community at Oneida in 1674 coincided with the arrival at the school of Oneidas Marie Madeleine, Marguerite, and Marie Ursule, who stayed at school for several years.80 Jesuit missions were estab­ lished in Haudenosaunee territory intermittently from 1656 on, with longer-lasting missions at the Seneca towns of Candagarae (Mission St. Michel), Gandachioragon (Mission La Conception), and Gandagan (Mission St. Jacques), the Onondaga town of Onnontagué (Mission St. Jean Baptiste), and the Oneida Mission St. Francis Xavier, all estab­ lished during Félicité’s education from 1668 to 1670 until the outbreak of war with New France in 1683 forced the Jesuits to flee—and, not coin­ cidentally, ended the practice of exchanging hostage Haudenosaunee girls for education at the Ursuline convent.81 The establishment of Jesuit missions and the return of converted Ursuline alumnae may have helped introduce future generations of Haudenosaunee children to the Catholic catechism. However, it did not necessarily ensure that the practice of Catholicism was transmitted unchanged in Haudenosaunee territory. Unlike Félicité, Marie Mad­ eleine, Marguerite, and Marie Ursule’s first exposure to Catholicism may have been something as small as a little black glass button, won as a prize for successfully recalling their catechism. In 1639, Father Le Jeune rewarded Huron catechists with “a knife, or a piece of bread, at other times a chaplet—sometimes a cap, or an ax, for the tallest and most intelligent; it is an excellent opportunity for relieving the misery of these poor peoples. The parents were charmed with the fervor of their children, who went through the cabins to show their prizes.” Also among the Huron, Father Le Mercier rewarded adult women catechists with small items: “It costs me something, but that is not ill spent. The one who can repeat, on Sunday, all that has been taught during the week, has for reward a string of colored glass beads, or two little glass tubes, or two brass rings.”82 French Jesuits intended these items as material motivators and markers of the conversion process, but Haudenosaunee communities used and interpreted them in ways that aligned with their own exist­ ing spiritual paradigms. These useful little items made their way into Haudenosaunee communities in ways that fit neatly in Haudenosaunee cosmology and sartorial norms. In communities with Jesuit missions, children were buried with the little black buttons they had won for their knowledge of the catechism. Grieving parents often buried children

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with many beads, including black glass buttons they may have received in life. Two children buried at the Seneca town of Sononteeonon with massive quantities of glass beads and dozens of black glass buttons may have been buried by parents who specifically sought out the black glass buttons from Jesuit missionaries for their association with death. This association might have been cemented by the outbreak of epi­ demics in every town where Jesuits established missions and enticed young catechists with black buttons.83 With their similarity to the dark, glassy flint that the Ganounata woman and others were buried with, the black glass buttons may have echoed existing associations of dark, shiny objects with mourning and death.84 Although Jesuit missionaries wore black glass buttons as closures on their eponymous black robes, the Haudenosaunee people who were buried with them appear to have used them as decorative or symbolic objects, not utilitarian ones. One child was buried with several buttons sewn to the moccasins, while an adult man wore them as decorations on leggings or garters at the knee. Even with exposure to and knowledge of French use of the buttons, they were domesticated in Haudenosaunee spaces as objects that fit within existing usage patterns. Two adult Sen­ eca women buried with black glass buttons were of an age to have been Félicité’s classmates.85 It is impossible to know if one of the two women buried in this way was Félicité or one of the other girls who attended the Ursuline convent school. But it is not impossible to suppose, like the two women buried with a blend of European and Indigenous mate­ rials, that Félicité incorporated parts of her French education into her life after returning to Oneida. After returning home, even after several years of sartorial conversion intended to lay the foundation for spiritual conversion, Félicité was likely buried in the typical Haudenosaunee way: wrapped in a blan­ ket, curled in a fetal position and taking with her a cooking pot, food, and her jewelry.86 The objects she took with her, including her cook­ ing pot and black buttons as tokens of her Catholic spiritual practice, helped her carry on in the afterlife as she had in her life. After 1650, many Haudenosaunee were buried in an extended position, lying on their backs. Even in these burials, the interred continued to carry grave goods with them for use in the afterlife. Félicité and other Haudeno­ saunee converts may not have seen their Catholic and Haudenosaunee spiritual beliefs as mutually exclusive. Félicité’s return to Oneida stands in counterpoint to the tumultu­ ous life of Mohawk Kateri Tekakwitha, who died at the French mission community of Caughnawauga on the banks of Kaniatarowanénhne. The

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daughter of a Mohawk hoyá:neh and an adopted Algonquian woman, Tekakwitha’s conversion was contentious during her life and after her death. Her status as the first North American Indigenous Catholic saint since her 2012 canonization and the Jesuit hagiographies that documented her life make her one of the most well-known examples of Haudenosaunee women’s religious conversion.87 Tekakwitha’s conver­ sion and the controversy surrounding her conversion in both the seven­ teenth century and the twentieth and twenty-first centuries emphasize the profoundly local nature of conversion. Where Félicité journeyed to Quebéc and chose to return to a stable community after her educa­ tion, Tekakwitha converted during a time of upheaval in her Mohawk community, which her family may have read as rejection. Scarred by the smallpox epidemic that killed her family when she was only six, Tekakwitha later refused marriage and Mohawk domesticity while she embraced Catholic virginity and penitent mortification of the flesh. Jesuit missionaries deeply divided Haudenosaunee communities during the existential crises that epidemic disease brought, promising salvation from both disease and spiritual woes to converts. Seemingly immune to the terrible diseases that raged around them, the salva­ tion the Jesuits offered may have seemed especially attractive to young people like Tekakwitha, who suddenly found themselves without the anchor of a family that structured Haudenosaunee life.88 This salvation came at a price: both Jesuits and unconverted Haudenosaunee believed that family members would be permanently separated in the afterlife, with Catholic converts ascending to a different spirit world.89 Accord­ ing to her Jesuit hagiographer, Tekakwitha was eventually driven out by her extended family from her home in the Mohawk town of Caugh­ nawauga in present-day eastern New York. After leaving the Mohawk Valley town of Caughnawauga, she settled at the Laurentian town of Caughnawauga (later called Kahnawà:ke) in 1677 before dying there in 1679. Jesuit missionaries also encouraged the relocation of converts to Laurentian mission towns, where they could be brought more closely into the circle of New France’s control.90 Tekakwitha’s conversion and life were recorded by the Jesuit Father Jacques de Lamberville, whose visit to Caughnawauga was made pos­ sible by Félicité’s 1668 captivity. Lamberville’s hagiography reflected and symbolized the Jesuit struggle in New France as both full of potential and fraught with the ever-present danger of failure.91 Through the lens of Lamberville’s hagiography, the towns of Caughnawauga and Kahnawà:ke appeared shattered by disease and sharply divided by Christian

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conversion. Tekakwitha’s life, as the prototypical template for Haude­ nosaunee women’s conversion, symbolizes this hagiographic—and historiographic—memory of Haudenosaunee communities disrupted and factionalized in the wake of European contact. Even prior to her 1980 beatification, Tekakwitha was understood by Lamberville and others to be exceptional. Her life was recorded and pre­ sented because her experience of conflict with her Mohawk extended family over her extreme mortification during her conversion was excep­ tional. Although they likely never met, Tekakwitha and Félicité were contemporaries. They both converted to Catholicism as young teenage girls during the tumultuous 1660s and 1670s. Tekakwitha’s conversion has also been read as a particularly Haudenosaunee form of Catho­ lic conversion and incorporation of Christ by bringing him within a matrilineal longhouse through spiritual marriage.92 Félicité may have understood her incorporation of Catholic spiritual practice in a similar way. Tekakwitha’s prominence in the historical memory of Haudeno­ saunee women’s conversion as emblematic of fracture and loss belies the ways in which other women like Félicité domesticated Catholicism and its material markers into their daily lives. Individuals like the Ganounata woman, Radisson, and Félicité were incorporated into Haudenosaunee and settler communities with the labor of women. Women’s domestic and reproductive work in clothing and maintaining the members of their communities created those com­ munities. Cloth and outsiders like the Ganounata woman and Radis­ son were integrated into Haudenosaunee communities through similar processes of domestication, in which Haudenosaunee women incorpo­ rated new objects and people into familiar domestic spaces and roles. Women’s work is and always has been political. As the primary creators and maintainers of community identities and boundaries through their reproductive labor, Indigenous and settler women’s reproductive labor was deeply political for the very domesticity that caused Euro­ peans to dismiss women’s presence. That articulation of community identity through markers like clothing created and transformed in domestic spaces would become ever more entangled with diplomatic and political concerns as Haudenosaunee and settler groups attempted to understand one another.

C h a p ter 2

Purchased Cloth and the Transformation of Labor in the Seventeenth Century

In 1690, an Onondaga woman named Osis­ sijenejo and her husband Nachssasija traveled to Albany.1 They brought with them an otter pelt that would later go on to England, the Ger­ manies, or Muscovy. In Onondaga country, the otter pelt could have been used alone as a bag, or it could have been combined with many other small pelts to make a warm winter cloak. In Albany in 1690, the otter pelt could become a shirt, a kettle, lead shot, or fabric. It could be made into garments that needed more time and more hides than a sin­ gle otter to make, or into consumer luxuries and symbolically charged conduits of power. In Albany, one animal skin could be exchanged for an expanding global market of consumer manufactures and exotic imports. Osissijenejo’s ability to travel to Albany for trade was made possible through Haudenosaunee military and diplomatic efforts that ensured safety and freedom of movement through Haudenosaunee ter­ ritories for hunting and trade. Osissijenejo traded her otter pelt for a shirt and a pair of leggings, both the products of a team of European spinners and weavers and a New York seamstress. Seven spinners produced woolen yarn in York­ shire to supply a weaver. Another seven spun flax in Campen to employ a weaver there. Additional Europeans worked as shepherds, farmers, shearers, fullers, dyers, merchants, tax inspectors, and other specialists 48

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who contributed to wool and linen cloth production in Europe. Later in Albany, a settler woman paid down her own account with a merchant by taking raw cloth and sewing up a shirt or a pair of leggings for the Indian trade.2 If people like the Ganounata woman, Pierre Radisson, and Felicité were transformed and integrated into new communities through the gift of clothing, the transformative power of that cloth­ ing was due to its transformation in Haudenosaunee communities by women like Osissijenejo. This domestication happened in two parts: first in the purchase of cloth and clothing, and then in its use. Osissijenejo’s purchase and reworking of the linen shirt had politi­ cal meaning, but it also had profound impacts on her daily life as well. Osissijenejo exchanged her otter for the value of the future labor it saved her community. Women in Europe and their families performed respectability through their production and maintenance of domes­ tic luxuries, freed from some basic production tasks by the purchase of consumer goods.3 Osissijenejo purchased consumer goods in order to reduce the time she had to expend on labor. With a single otter, trapped and only minimally dressed, Osissijenejo purchased the labor of at least eighteen Europeans. With a single otter, Osissijenejo saved herself and her family the time and effort of hunting, dressing, tanning, and sewing up the four deer necessary to make the shirt and leggings she purchased.

Their Dress by Day Haudenosaunee consumers quickly and easily integrated newly avail­ able cloth into their cultural frameworks soon after contact with Euro­ pean traders. A small factorij or outpost of the United New Netherlands Company was established on an island in the Ka’nón:no (Hudson River) in 1614. The outpost was intended to both trap and trade for furs, but flooding and financial issues closed the post by 1617 or 1618. The more permanent outpost of Fort Orange was established in 1624, when twenty-five or twenty-six Dutch men huddled against the banks of the Ka’nón:no made a covenant with the “Mahikanders or River Indians, [the] Maquase: Oneydes: Onondages Cayougas and Sinnekes, Maha­ wawa or Ottawaes Indians came and made Covenants of friendship” who offered “great Presents of Bever” and requested free trade.4 Cloth made its way into Haudenosaunee hands soon after. Lead cloth seals from Campen and Leiden, the Netherlands’ major woolen and linen centers, appeared in Onondaga country by 1625. As the central

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fire of the Confederacy longhouse, this may indicate that Onondaga onahgí:weh and hodiyanéshų’ were the first to initiate direct trade for cloth and other European goods. Lead seals were metal markers affixed to lengths of cloth ten to twenty yards long. They were used in Europe to mark that the cloth had been inspected for quality and that appro­ priate taxes were paid. In Haudenosaunee communities these and other lead items like musket balls were often reworked into ornaments or small objects or discarded in midden heaps. In Europe, lead seals were typically removed before retail sale, so their presence in Haudenosaunee towns suggests that large pieces of cloth made their way to Onondaga communities.5 Haudenosaunee people expressed interest in and acquired cloth and loom woven fabric early, but cloth did not immediately supplant leather and hides as the primary material of Haudenosaunee garments. In 1628, the first written Dutch description of Haudenosaunee cloth­ ing noted that it left the body “almost naked. In the winter time they usually wear a dressed deer skin; some have a bear’s skin about the body; some a coat of scales; some a covering made of turkey feathers which they understand how to knit together very oddly, with small strings. They also use a good deal of duffel cloth, which they buy from us, [the Dutch at Fort Orange] and which serves for their blanket by night, and their dress by day.”6 Naked was a relative and culturally constructed concept. Anyone who has spent a winter in what is now upstate New York can attest that the truly naked do not last long.7 By the seventeenth century, many Europeans understood nakedness as a conceptual category that denoted both poverty and distance from God. Adam and Eve discovered their nakedness at the moment they became most distant from God’s grace. Nudity in both Dutch and English was the more literal condition of being unclothed.8 Haudenosaunee people were, in Dutch eyes, spiri­ tually naked, even if not literally nude. Dutch descriptions of Haudeno­ saunee clothing as untailored and used for bedding at night underlined their perceptions of Indians’ poverty even as they bought Dutch cloth. A generation after the introduction of cloth, the woven fabric still appeared interchangeable with furs in the early seventeenth century Haudenosaunee wardrobe without replacing leather and hide gar­ ments. Dutch minister Johannes Megapolensis tutted over Indian van­ ity in 1644. He wrote that “in winter, they hang about them simply an undressed deer or bear or panther skin . . . or they buy of us Dutchmen two and a half ells of duffel, and that they hang simply about them, just

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as it was torn off, without sewing it, and walk away with it. They look at themselves constantly, and think they are very fine.”9 Two and a half ells of broad cloth was about the size of an extra-long modern twin blanket, large enough to wrap an adult by day or night. Megapolensis attempted to preach to Haudenosaunee women who might have included Osissijenejo for their vanity just as he did the Dutch women who traded with them. Vanity brought together Dutch and Haudenosaunee; a parallel Megapolensis drew in the tradition of many European polemics who critiqued European society with the reflection of an imagined “natural man” modeled heavily on imagin­ ings of Native Americans.10 Megapolensis’s letters describing Mohawk dress were published in the Netherlands in 1655, part of the expanding genre of New World narratives printed for a European audience eager for descriptions of the strange and foreign. Haudenosaunee people made their own commentary on Dutch van­ ity with items like a bone comb topped by the image of Dutchmen in hats. Haudenosaunee women who made wampum belts also marked Dutch otherness with a treaty belt depicting bare-headed (unmarked) Indigenous men clasping hands with (marked, foreign) Dutchmen in hats.11 Both Haudenosaunee and Dutch people saw the strangers they encountered at Fort Orange as exotic and odd, not fully comprehend­ ing the systems of meaning communicated by the items they traded. This did not stop them from integrating those objects into their own systems of meaning. Haudenosaunee people were buried wearing cloth garments or wrapped in purchased blankets as early as 1645 in Seneca country. The shirt that Osissijenejo bought in Albany—or one like it—was buried with its last owner in 1700 and disinterred by a white hobby archaeolo­ gist in 1989. The physical remains of this shirt and what we now know from it also carry the weight of colonialist claims to Indigenous bodies, lands, and histories.12 Up to the eve of the passage of the Native Ameri­ can Graves Protection and Repatriation Act in 1990, white professional and hobby archaeologists disturbed the graves of more than two thou­ sand Seneca individuals at more than twenty cemeteries. Many of these graves were disturbed multiple times and refilled with bed springs, car parts, and other metal objects to make it easier for other hobbyists to relocate with metal detectors. Over the course of several decades, professional and hobbyist archaeologists removed human remains and objects from these graves, many of which were later donated to museums like the Rochester Museum and Science Center.13 The cloth

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remnants taken from these graves represent the only direct examples of extant trade cloth in Haudenosaunee hands as well as an example of settler entitlement to Indigenous lands and bodies. Through the eighteenth century, most Haudenosaunee people were buried in a flexed (or fetal) position. They were dressed in their daily clothing and wrapped in a blanket or mantle with legs pulled up to the chest and surrounded by goods necessary in this world and the next. Both men and women were often buried with metal cooking pots and other metal items like knives and ornaments. The copper salts these metal items produced as they corroded in contact with water preserved some cloth fragments and provide a snapshot of some of the fabrics available to Haudenosaunee communities, visualized in figure 2.1. At the earliest site, occupied between 1626 and 1645, the only surviving cloth was incredibly coarse, with four large threads per centimeter and little to no fulling. Fulling is a part of the cloth production process, which partially felts the cloth, making it less permeable to water and air by closing the spaces between individual threads and giving the surface a smooth surface. These low-thread count fabrics were probably a coarse blanket cloth typically described as duffels.

7.5 D

Median Threads/cm B

7.0

C

6.5 G B

6.0

E

F

5.5 A

5.0

H

4.5 4.0

4.0

4.5

Site

5.0

5.5 6.0 Median Threads/cm A

6.5

7.0

7.5

A 1626–1645 Warren

D 1655–1675 Marsh

G 1676–1687 Boughton Hill/Ganondagan

B 1641–1655 Powerhouse

E 1656–1675 Dann

H 1676–1687 Rochester Junction

C 1646–1654 Steele

F 1672–1687 Beale

Figure 2.1. Median threads per centimeter of loom-woven wool fabrics at seventeenth-century Seneca sites. Bubble size indicates the range of deviation from the median at each site. Source: Visualization by the author, based on analysis of the Seneca archaeology collection at the Rochester Museum and Science Center, Rochester, New York.

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The low quality of cloth may, in part, explain why cloth did not quickly replace leather and hide garments. Early descriptions of Haude­ nosaunee cloth purchases suggest that Haudenosaunee people, like many other Northeastern Indigenous consumers, initially used pur­ chased cloth in place of fur matchcoats. These matchcoats were labori­ ously stitched together using as few as four beaver pelts or more than a dozen martin or other small mammal pelts.14 Cloth existed side by side with leather and hide garments as an equivalent substitute because it filled an analogous role, but did not fully replace fur mantles because it offered no innate benefit. The early imported cloth might actually have been less warm or less comfortable if most cloth on offer was coarsely woven and minimally fulled. By the 1650s, however, Haudenosaunee people near Fort Orange appear to have begun using mainly purchased cloth for their garments. One Dutch writer noted in 1650 that Haudenosaunee people “use[d] for the most part duffels cloth, which they obtain in barter from the Christians. They make their stockings and shoes of deer skins or elk’s hide, and some have shoes made of corn-husks.”15 In 1655, Adrien Van Der Donck observed that leather had become a substitute for cloth, rather than fabric serving as a substitute for hide. “Before duffel cloth was common in that country, and sometimes even now when it cannot be had, they took for [breechclouts] some dressed leather or fur, cut it like such a cloth and made it fit.”16 Thirty to forty years after its intro­ duction, Haudenosaunee consumers substituted cloth as preferable for leather and fur garments. The benefit that Indigenous people sought in acquiring goods like kettles, knives, and cloth has long been assumed to be due to these objects’ innate technological superiority over Indigenous manufactures or because of the imported objects’ spiritual significance. Kettles were supposedly lighter and more thermally efficient than ceramic cook­ ing vessels, knives sharper and more durable than stone, cloth lighter, more colorful, and more washable than leather.17 European observers certainly shared this outlook, noting, as one Dutch observer did, that “they trade their beavers for duffels cloth, which we give for them, and which they find more suitable than the beavers, as they consider it bet­ ter for the rain.”18 Other early observers’ disgust for Indigenous bodies and hide clothing was evident in their descriptions of “foul and dirty” or “careless and indifferent” Indigenous dress.19 The long coexistence of imported and Indigenous manufactures alongside one another for several generations suggests that Haudenosaunee people did not

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perceive purchased objects like knives, kettles, and cloth as innately superior. Items like kettles and knives filled already-known material niches within Haudenosaunee daily practice, where they substituted and coexisted with stone and ceramic items that performed the same function.20 Native people may have initially sought out cloth in part for the same sort of accessible novelty offered to them by kettles and knives and to Europeans by calicoes, tea, tobacco, and chocolate.21 Luxury imports like calico, tea, tobacco, and chocolate were integrated into European material culture as markers of refinement and props in the performance of respectability. For Europeans, these imported items retained their status as markers of refinement precisely because of their remaining valence as expensive, novel luxuries that showed the con­ sumer’s sophisticated taste.22 In Haudenosaunee territories, cloth underwent a slightly different process of syncretic domestication. Cloth and beads in the Haudeno­ saunee context underwent symbolic recasting because of their potential as raw materials for creating Haudenosaunee identity. Rather than see use for their original, European, “toil-alleviating” purposes, objects like kettles, axes, and other early trade goods were substantially reworked before being put to use in other labor-saving ways as awls, small scrap­ ers, knives, and decorations.23 In the mid-seventeenth century, Haude­ nosaunee use of European metal trade goods shifted as the reworking patterns of the early part of the century began to coexist alongside the use of items such as kettles and axes for their manufactured purposes.24 Cloth followed a similar pattern. Haudenosaunee use of European cloth remained limited until the mid-seventeenth century, when cloth prices dropped significantly.

Four Hands of Long Cloth Over the course of the seventeenth century, Haudenosaunee traders acquired increasing amounts of European goods for the same number of furs. As relative prices declined, this impacted both the attractiveness of European goods and the ability of large numbers of Haudenosaunee people to acquire and use them. The earliest price data is the most tentative. In the winter of 1635, Harman van den Bogaert headed a three-man diplomatic-economic envoy from Fort Orange. Their goal was to increase Dutch fur exports and secure diplomatic relations with the Mohawk and Oneida after the disruptions of the Mohawk-Mahican

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war. The twenty-one-year-old van den Bogaert was sent on behalf of the Westindische Compagnie (WIC), which held a monopoly granted by the Dutch Republic to trade in New Netherland. This monopoly was enforceable among the Dutch at Fort Orange, but not among the Haudenosaunee suppliers who either declined to bring their furs to market or took them to the French instead. Van den Bogaert’s envoy foundered at times because the three Dutchmen first refused the help of three Oneida women traveling to trade fish, uncomfortable with the leadership of women. After reject­ ing the women’s offer to guide them, van den Bogaert’s party had dif­ ficulty finding male Haudenosaunee guides willing to travel with them through the deep December snows of the Mohawk Valley. Those guides they did find showed a distinct disinterest in whether the Dutchmen were able to keep up with the pace of travel.25 Van den Bogaert’s dif­ ficulties in traveling to Oneida country underlined both Fort Orange’s dependence on individual Haudenosaunee traders as well as the limits of the Dutch ability to control the relationship, especially when the Dutch proved unwilling to look past their own gendered frameworks.26 Europeans who traveled through Haudenosaunee territories, whether for trade or for other purposes, were dependent on Haudenosaunee communities.27 When van den Bogaert finally arrived in Oneida country, he was able to promise little and accomplish less with his Oneida hosts. He brought few gifts and no wampum, which gave his diplomatic overtures little weight in Oneida eyes. In the context of adoption, gift giving created an expectation of reciprocal family obligation, as Radisson had experi­ enced. Offering diplomatic gifts signaled the giver’s forethought, and created a reciprocal obligation that paved the way for further exchange. Offering wampum signaled familiarity with diplomatic protocol under the Great Law and seriousness of intention. Van den Bogaert’s lack of gifts and wampum showed his Oneida hosts either Dutch ignorance or Dutch lack of serious commitment to the relationship. Worse still, van den Bogaert had not been empowered to promise any substantive changes on WIC’s behalf. This was unfortunate because the primary Oneida complaint van den Bogaert faced was that the high prices WIC traders demanded and the low supply they kept on hand discouraged Haudenosaunee hunters from making the long trip to Orange. In the context of Haudenosaunee diplomacy, the unequal terms of exchange offered at Orange were insulting. Diplomacy was trade, and trade was diplomacy. The exchange of goods between equals

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in one channel promised equal and fair exchange in other channels. In 1613, the Dutch had agreed to what is now known as the Two Row treaty, marking an agreement to treat one another as brothers in a bal­ anced relationship of noninterference. In Haudenosaunee philosophy, brothers treat one another as equals, and in agreeing to the Two Row treaty, the Dutch had recognized the principles of both the treaty and Haudenosaunee diplomatic protocol.28 Both van den Bogaert’s inabil­ ity to offer wampum or diplomatic gifts and his inability to promise fair trade signaled that the Dutch were not willing or able to conduct diplomacy or trade on Haudenosaunee terms. Several Oneida hodiyanéshų’ “requested that they would like to have four hands of [wampum] and four hands of long cloth for each large beaver because ‘We have to travel so far with our pelts and when we arrive we often find no cloth, no [wampum], no axes, kettles or any­ thing else; thus we have labored in vain.’ Then we have to go back a long way carrying our goods.”29 The prices on offer at Fort Orange were so poor that Oneida traders preferred to carry their furs back with noth­ ing in exchange. Wool cloth varied in width from about twenty to sixty inches, with a piece of “long cloth” the widest available. A hand was a measure of length of about four inches, or roughly the width of a man’s palm. In requesting four hands of long cloth per beaver, the Oneida hodiyanéshų’ requested an exchange rate of a piece of cloth sixteen inches long by sixty inches wide. This was about equivalent to the size an adult beaver skin, plus a foot and a half of wampum beads for the trouble of bringing the beaver to Fort Orange. At the time of Van den Bogaert’s 1635 visit, the Oneida hodiyanéshų’ viewed beaver and cloth as roughly equivalent in value. Van den Bogaert could not promise the requested exchange rate of four hands of cloth per beaver, suggesting that the then-current rate of exchange in 1635 was much higher. Adrien van der Donck noted in 1650 that “as covering for the upper part of the body both men and women use a sheet of duffel cloth of full width, i.e. nine and a half quarter-ells and about three ells long [roughly twenty hands of long cloth].”30 At the lower price the Oneida hodiyanéshų’ requested in 1635, buying such a blanket of duffels would have cost five beaver, and van den Bogaert could not promise even that. Cloth was simply not a good deal in 1635: six beavers could make a mantle without the long trip to Orange.31 Van der Donck and other Dutch writers’ descriptions of Haude­ nosaunee clothing suggest that by the 1650s, Mohawk and other

Figure 2.2.

Blanket prices in beaver, 1635–1700.

Sources: Albany, 1635: Van den Bogaert, Gehring, and Starna, A Journey into Mohawk and Oneida Country. Albany, 1679–1688: “Account Book of an Unidentified Dutch Trader, 1679–1690,” Rockefeller Archives Center. Albany, 1689–1700: Wendell, Waterman, and Michelson, To Do Justice to Him and Myself. French 1654 and 1683: Price at Trois Rivieres. Kent, Fort Pontchartrain at Detroit. French 1665: Price at St. Lawrence. Kent, Fort Pontchartrain at Detroit. French prices have been kept separate by the location of trade fair. When multiple prices at Albany or French sites were available for a single location and year, they have been averaged.

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Haudenosaunee people near Fort Orange increasingly wore cloth in place of leather and fur garments. What sketchy price information there is, shown in figure 2.2, suggests that the reason had to do with falling prices. Beaver pelt exports out of New Netherland peaked in the 1650s, possibly aided by furs from French Canada. The increased sup­ ply of pelts may have been fueled by a drop in prices for goods coupled with competition from French traders on the banks of the St. Lawrence. Mohawk and Oneida Catholic converts established the settlement of Kentake on the south bank of the St. Lawrence in 1667, a community that later moved upriver to what became Kahnawà:ke in 1676.32 Many of these Laurentian Haudenosaunee maintained family ties with other Haudenosaunee communities and traveled between communities fre­ quently.33 During the period of relative peace with New France in the 1650s and 1660s that was bought with the exchange of hostages like Felicité, Haudenosaunee consumers had access to more markets. Con­ verts like Felicité and or adoptees like Radisson may have circulated gifts of furs and blankets as well as information about prices, helping drive down prices both at Fort Orange and along the Saint Lawrence, and drive up Haudenosaunee use of cloth.34 Other indirect evidence suggests a shift in the cloth markets on the edges of Haudenosaunee territories. At the earliest Seneca site with sur­ viving cloth remnants, occupied at roughly the same time as van den Bogaert’s unsuccessful 1635 envoy, the cloth buried with Seneca people was rough and only minimally processed. The roughness suggests it was a cheap, coarse product. At sites occupied later in the seventeenth century, however, the quality of cloth buried with Seneca people gradu­ ally increased. The number of threads per inch on average doubled, and many fabrics show evidence of fulling (see figure 2.1). With a larger settler population growth in both the Saint Lawrence and the Hudson Valley, a greater variety of fabrics may have been imported.35 Even if prices did not fall in the 1650s, the quality of available cloth increased. At Fort Orange, prices fell precipitously after the English takeover of New York in 1664. The porous and unenforceable WIC monopoly on the fur trade was broken for all practical purposes by the 1640s.36 After the Third Anglo-Dutch War (1672–74) and the final disposi­ tion of New Netherland as New York the prices at Fort Orange—now Albany—dropped considerably. Safer trans-Atlantic shipping brought steadier supplies and more competition among settler traders. One Dutch trader near Albany retailed wool blankets and linen shirts at one beaver each in 1679.37 The six beaver hides necessary in 1635 to warm

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one person could be used to clothe six by 1679. With linen shirts priced at only one beaver as well, six people could buy most of their clothing with what previously would have only barely covered two. The labor saved with these drops in price is hard to overstate. Susan M. Hill observed that Haudenosaunee integration of European goods like metal kettles as replacements for more labor-intensive pottery cooking vessels may have been due in part to labor pressures from the loss of working-age adults in waves of epidemic disease.38 The adoption of cloth may have offered similar relief in the labor of clothing and feeding families. At a minimum, clothing an adult required about four deer per year and six beaver. An adult man needed two doe hides for a pair of leggings, another hide for a breechclout, and six to eight bea­ ver skins for a mantle. An adult woman required one doe for leggings, two for a skirt, and five or six beaver hides for a mantle. Both needed a buck deer hide per year for moccasins.39 A beaver mantle might have been worn for multiple winters, but leggings and moccasins needed to be replaced annually for adults doing the hard work of agriculture and hunting. Considering the communal clothing needs of even a small twenty-person longhouse and the communal efforts of the resident women in preparing hide clothing and of men in hunting, the benefit of purchasing clothing is staggering. Before contact, a small longhouse needed at least sixty deer and ninety beaver a year for clothing alone as shown in table 2.1. Table 2.1

Retail prices of clothing, 1680–1710

ITEM

HANDMADE GARMENTS

1680–1690 RETAIL

1690–1700 RETAIL

1700–1710 RETAIL

2 martens or ½ beaver 2 beaver or 4 martens

2 martens or ½ beaver 1 beaver and 3 martens or 7 martens 1 beaver or 4 martens 1 beaver 4 ½ beaver

Breechclout

½ to 1 deerskin

½ beaver

Leggings and moccasins

2 ½ to 3 deerskin

Shirt

1–2 deerskin

2 martens and 1 otter or 1 beaver 1 beaver

Blanket or mantle Total

6–8 beaver 4–6 deer and 6–8 beaver or 10–14 beaver er equiva­ lent in trade

1 beaver 3 ½ beaver

1 beaver or 4 martens 1 beaver 4 ½ beaver

Sources: 1680–1690 prices from “Account Book of an Unidentified Dutch Trader,” Rockefeller Archives Center. 1690–1710 prices from Wendell, Waterman, and Michelson, To Do Justice to Him and Myself. The unidentified trader sold small pieces of cloth he called a “clootlap,” a vulgar term that translates literally as “balls cover.” These are included here as breechclouts. Wendell did not record the sales of breechclouts as such, but he did record sales of small pieces of cloth of the appropriate size, and these are included under breechclout here. Prices Wendell recorded only in deer or marten have been converted here equivalencies Wendell used: three or four mar­ tens were converted to one beaver, and one deerskin to one beaver.

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Retail cloth prices rose at the end of the century from the lows of the 1680s. Even then, the cost of clothing for one adult purchased through Albany traders still represented less labor than the creation of compa­ rable clothing from hides alone. By 1679, a small longhouse of twenty people only needed eighty beaver to purchase all their clothing. The hunting, trapping, tanning, smoking, and sewing of hides to clothe one person in 1679 required less than 20 percent of the time and effort it had required in 1635. The fur trade did indeed reshape Indigenous labor patterns by allowing Haudenosaunee families to outsource the basic labor of creating some garments to workers in Europe.

A Great Scarcity of Peltry The relative cheapness of manufactured goods has been assumed to have driven overhunting and depletion of Haudenosaunee territo­ ries.40 Seventeenth-century European consumers were experiencing a paradigm shift in their view of work, and this has been extended to the analysis of Indigenous buyers as well. Europeans increasingly worked in order to buy consumer goods rather than creating consumer goods as a product of their work.41 Frequent Indigenous complaints about the high price of goods, years of low or zero exports, and flagging European markets for furs appear to confirm a collapsing fur trade in the late seventeenth century, viewed to be both disastrous and uncontrollable for its Indigenous participants.42 However, colonial officials’ laments over the collapsing fur trade in the seventeenth century must be disentangled from European selfinterest in defining the boundaries of Indigenous territories and Euro­ pean anxiety over dependence on Indigenous trade partners. English, French, and Dutch officials were all anxious about their inability to control or persuade Indigenous trade partners who frequently aban­ doned trading to pursue other priorities. These settler officials tended to overstate the centrality of market-oriented trade to Indigenous deci­ sion making because Europeans were so dependent on Indigenous traders. Such a framework centers on the limited perspective of anx­ ious European writers, while precluding the possibility of Indigenous influence on colonial or European centers of trade. Indigenous groups across the continent pursued their own goals, in which exchange with Europeans occasionally played a role. The Haudenosaunee beaver trade is one example of a contact frontier where Indigenous priorities frus­ trated and stymied Europeans reliant on them for trade.

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At its heart, the question of beaver depletion was a semantic rather than ecological problem. Understandings of depleted hunting territo­ ries differed depending on the vantage point. Colonial writers defined Indigenous territories in ways that served their imperial ambitions and did not reflect the realities of Haudenosaunee definition, movement, or control. Indigenous people continued to move between and beyond Haudenosaunee communities to trade beaver and other furs even after the reported depletion of beaver in their territories. It was only during times of war or epidemic disease that disrupted the safety of travel that Haudenosaunee beaver exports dropped. Beaver exports out of New Netherland and later New York are an imperfect proxy for Haudenosaunee access to beaver, but it provides an idea of the volume of the trade. Export numbers between 1635 and 1663 are based on rough contemporary estimates rather than reported rev­ enue, and official documentation does not include unreported trade.43 Along with current estimates of Haudenosaunee demographics for the period, these export numbers suggest that Haudenosaunee communi­ ties maintained consistent access to beaver and other furs necessary to purchase consumer goods throughout the seventeenth century (see fig­ ure 2.3). The Haudenosaunee were not the only Indigenous groups who sold furs through Fort Orange and later Albany. Contemporary set­ tler traders recorded accounts with Susquehannocks, Mahicans, Otta­ was, Schaghticokes, and Laurentian Haudenosaunee, but Five Nations Haudenosaunee were the primary suppliers for the seventeenth century Albany market, especially of beaver.44 Haudenosaunee people maintained access to fur bearing animals, including beaver, throughout the seventeenth century.45 After the 1613 Two Row treaty and 1623 “covenant of friendship” formalized trade relations and mutual military and political noninterference between the eastern Haudenosaunee nations and Dutch Fort Orange, exports under the WIC monopoly rose from four thousand beaver pelts per annum to more than seven thousand in 1627.46 By 1624, the Algonquian Mahican positioned themselves across the Ka’nón:no from Fort Orange and invited their Algonquian neighbors to trade. With Mahican control of routes to the richer beaver hunting of the Kaniatarowanénhne (St. Lawrence Valley) to the north, the Mahican and their Algonquian neighbors threatened to cut off the Haudenosaunee from trade at Orange, the closest friendly European outpost. During nascent hostilities with New France, with the English distant and irrelevant at the barely begun Plimouth and Massachusetts Bay settlements, this reorientation of the

0K

5K

10K

15K

20K

25K

30K

35K

40K

Beaver exports (shown by the black line) during times of war and disease, 1623–1700.

Sources: 1624–1663: Jacobs, The Colony of New Netherland, 201; 1685–1686 Norton, The Fur Trade in Colonial New York, 100; 1687 Munsell, Collections of the History of Albany, 384. Data for exports after 1690 is quantified in pounds sterling (New York currency) rather than hides, taken from Cutcliffe, Indians, Furs and Empires, 89; contemporary prices have been used here to convert pounds to pelts. For pricing, see Norton, The Fur Trade in Colonial New York. Note that dates for which a value of zero is given indicate that there is no data for that year, not necessarily that there were no exports that year.

Figure 2.3.

Raid & War

Year

25 27 29 31 33 35 37 39 41 43 45 47 49 51 53 55 57 59 61 63 65 67 69 71 73 75 77 79 81 83 85 87 89 91 93 95 97 16 16 16 16 16 16 16 16 16 16 16 16 16 16 16 16 16 16 16 16 16 16 16 16 16 16 16 16 16 16 16 16 16 16 16 16 16

Epidemic

Disruption

Beaver skins exported (estimated)

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trade threatened to restrict Haudenosaunee freedom of movement and trade. This movement was a necessary component of sovereignty over Haudenosaunee territories. Isolation from Fort Orange meant the loss of trade, the loss of strategic ability to draw on European allies against European enemies, and the loss of safe movement within and beyond territories threatened by Indigenous enemies armed with Dutch guns.47 The Mohawk attacked the Mahicans in 1624; two years later the Mahican destroyed the easternmost town of the Mohawks.48 This conflict has been interpreted as the opening salvo to later inter-Native conflicts, which made up the Beaver or Mourning Wars of the late sev­ enteenth century.49 In the short term, the Dutch benefitted from Mahi­ can victory, especially after a joint Dutch-Mahican raid on the Mohawk in 1626: exports out of Fort Orange almost doubled from 1624 to 1626. When hostilities ended in 1628, the Mahicans were dispersed or reduced to tributary status. Dutch settlers also evacuated from Fort Orange during the further conflict with the Mohawk between 1626 and 1628, which drew down exports out of New Netherland to preconflict levels. Wider imperial conflicts in North America may also have affected Dutch exports out of New Netherland. The disruptions caused by the 1626–29 English-French War and 1629 English occupation of Quebec drove down beaver exports out of New Netherland, not to recover until 1633.50 Harmen van den Bogaert’s ultimately fruitless 1635 envoy to the Mohawk and Oneida was part of an effort to restore better trade relations and export levels after these conflicts. Exports out of New Netherland/New York have often been unfavor­ ably compared to the far higher export levels of New France to argue that by the mid-seventeenth century, Haudenosaunee territories experienced ecological collapse.51 These comparisons largely rely on second-hand reports; they also depend on European definitions of the boundaries of Indigenous territories. Canadian exports far outstripped the volume of beaver exports out of New Netherland and later New York, but Cana­ dian exports were drawn from a much larger geographic area. Many European writers who recorded qualitative estimates of Haudeno­ saunee impact on the New Netherland/New York trade had a colonial interest in defining Haudenosaunee territories as small as possible. French writers of the period especially had an interest in defining the territories of their Indigenous allies as capaciously as possible in order to legitimate French territorial claims. Yearly estimates for beaver exports out of Canada ranged from 12,000 pelts to more than 30,000 between 1625 and 1648, an astronomically higher figure per year than

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the reported 5,295 to 8,800 skins exported from New Netherland between 1624 and 1639.52 Many beaver pelts stolen by the English dur­ ing their 1629 raid of Quebec may have been due to a combination of low demand in France and a desire by the French Canadian govern­ ment to maintain the diplomatically beneficial fur trade despite low exports.53 By 1647 New Netherland’s exports recovered and surpassed earlier levels and continued to climb for the rest of the seventeenth century.54 The period after the dissolution of the WIC’s monopoly and before the English takeover in 1664 brought record years for the seventeenthcentury beaver trade in New Netherland and coincided with the drop in retail cloth prices and increase in cloth quality described above.55 At the peak of the trade between 1650 and 1657, New Netherland reportedly exported thirty-five to forty thousand beaver pelts yearly.56 These peak years resulted from the culmination of intense Haudenosaunee conflicts with the Neutral nation in 1650–51 and the Wendat in 1650–58.57 These years also corresponded with the expansion of Haudenosaunee commu­ nities into the St. Lawrence Valley, the Ohio region, and present Ontario, in reintegration of lands formerly encompassed by the Confederacy.58 Haudenosaunee expansionist actions in this period prioritized their own freedom of movement, the curtailment of colonialist and especially French movement within Haudenosaunee territories, the demonstra­ tion of territorial control to settler groups, and the integration of other Indigenous nations.59 The English exports of the early eighteenth cen­ tury came close but never matched the peak years of the 1650s. The safety of Haudenosaunee home territories and trade routes had a much more significant impact on New Netherland beaver exports than Haudenosaunee expansion. The peak of the New York trade in 1657 coincided with a long period of expansion on the frontiers of Haudenosaunee territory, which kept neighboring Indigenous and French enemies busy outside of core Haudenosaunee homelands. Expansion of hunting territories, trading networks, or intensification of hunting and trading efforts may have contributed to this increase.60 The deeper cause of the conflict powering this expansion was Haude­ nosaunee freedom of movement for trapping and trade, and the power to control movement through Haudenosaunee territories. In 1666, one French writer complained that “those Iroquois . . . [have] obstructed the freedom of [the Ottawas’] commerce, attacking them when they were coming to trade and despoiling them of their beavers.”61 At the peak of beaver exports in 1657, Haudenosaunee hunters aggressively expanded

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into neighboring territories, hunted in them, and raided other Indig­ enous trading parties in these areas.62 French and hostile Indigenous incursions into Haudenosaunee core homelands after 1658 created unsafe conditions for Haudenosaunee people who wished to travel for trapping or trade. The New Netherland trade peaked at nearly forty thousand pelts in 1657 and faltered in 1660 with an export of approximately thirty thousand skins as FrenchHaudenosaunee hostilities escalated.63 Radisson’s captivity-adoption and Felicité’s captivity-education were both the products of these con­ flicts. By 1661, exports out of New Netherland fell precipitously to only about seventeen thousand pelts, and exports in 1663 barely passed ten thousand.64 This sharp, sudden decline correlates strongly with con­ temporary French assertions of beaver depletion in Haudenosaunee ter­ ritories. However, the safety of travel for trapping and trade, as well as upheavals caused by epidemic disease, likely had more impact on both Haudenosaunee motivations and New Netherlands’ exports. Five Nations Haudenosaunee continued their attacks on New France and neighboring northern Algonquian groups, and by 1661, the Cayuga, Oneida, and Mohawk sustained attacks on their towns by French-allied Algonquian groups in retaliation for earlier attacks, while the Seneca traveled to Fort Orange in caravans of hundreds for safety.65 The Seneca commented in 1660 that war had interrupted their trade of beaver to Orange.66 The return of epidemic disease to Haudenosaunee territory in 1663, the continuation of incursions by hostile Algonquian groups in 1664, and a mostly fruitless French incursion in 1666 tem­ porarily rearranged Haudenosaunee priorities away from trade toward defense and ensuring their freedom of movement through their own territories.67 The 1666 drop coincided with French assertions that by 1670, Haudenosaunee lands were depleted of beaver.68 However, the 1660s were also a period of difficult and unsafe travel because of FrenchHaudenosaunee war. French officials resented that not only did Haude­ nosaunee hunting carry away the valuable product of the land, but they also impaired French and allied Indigenous groups’ safe travel through contested territories. The eighteenth-century French historian ClaudeCharles Le Roy reflected on the 1701 Grand Settlement that brought an end to French-Haudenosaunee conflict, writing that fear of Haude­ nosaunee raids before the peace necessitated large convoys of French and Indigenous allies to protect the peltry export from French Mich­ ilimakinac.69 In the years of increasing hostilities between New France,

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its Indian allies, and the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, such attempts to curtail French travel represented a push back against similar French incursions into Haudenosaunee homelands. In 1664, the year of the English takeover of New York, Dutch trader Jeremias van Rensselaer and French Jesuit Simon Le Moyne both ascribed the reduction in the trade to the dangers of traveling to Orange for Haudenosaunee traders. Van Rensselaer wrote to his brother and business partner Jan Baptist van Rensselaer that “for some time no bea­ vers can be expected” because Algonquian warriors “infest the Maquas [Mohawk] trail and keep it unsafe.”70 During a period of peace with New France, the Seneca asked the missionary Le Moyne to send their request that the French “furnish them with the munitions of war— which they hardly dare any longer to go and obtain of the Dutch, as the Mahingans [Mahicans] render the roads very dangerous.”71 According to the Court of Fort Orange, the Haudenosaunee had “great trouble in getting the beavers through the enemy’s country.”72 It was not impos­ sible for Haudenosaunee people to hunt and trade in the 1660s because of a lack of beaver; it was difficult and dangerous because of conflict with the French and other Indigenous groups. Canadian governor Daniel de Remy de Courcelles’s 1666 expedi­ tion into Haudenosaunee territory intended to put an end to Haude­ nosaunee claims to hunting territories the French believed were under French and allied Algonquian control.73 The expedition’s chronicler argued that “the Iroquois do all their hunting, at present, on our allies’ lands, which belong in some sort to the French.” By the admis­ sion of the anonymous writer, “the Iroquois trade scarcely any with us,” with the implication that Haudenosaunee control of these ter­ ritories might have been forgivable if they had been willing to trade. More important, from the French perspective, Haudenosaunee hunt­ ing north of Lake Ontario represented an illegitimate usurpation of French property rights. Courcelles’s narrator wrote in distress that the Haudenosaunee “carry all their peltries to New Netherland, depriving us thereby of the fruits of our land; that is to say, of the peltries which they take from us on the lands belonging to us.”74 French assertions of depletion in Haudenosaunee territories in the late seventeenth cen­ tury depended on narrow European definitions of Haudenosaunee territories, as well as self-interested understandings of Indigenous motivations. These assertions also depended in large part on denying the legiti­ macy of earlier Haudenosaunee reintegration of traditional northern

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territories.75 By refusing to recognize the legitimacy of Haudenosaunee expansion into former Wendat territories, French writers such as Courcelles’s narrator mistook effect for cause and ascribed their own motivation of controlling peltry exports to Haudenosaunee aims of reintegration. Unable to interpret Indigenous goals outside their own framework of imperial competition and trade, colonial writers framed Haudenosaunee expansion into the St. Lawrence Valley in the late sev­ enteenth century as a product of increasing internal fractures resulting from the fur trade.76 French and English authorities fretted that the other received the benefit of Haudenosaunee hunting in lands to which each aspiring imperial power claimed rights. In October 1683, New York governor Thomas Dongan worried that Haudenosaunee hunters took their trade to “some other Government,” while barely a month prior in New France, Governor Joseph-Antoine de la Barre complained of his “Montreal rascals,” who arranged with Haudenosaunee groups to carry peltry to Albany.77 Neither were incorrect, but both missed the essential point that Haudenosaunee traders carried peltry from their own territories to colonial centers. Their travel was determined by the benefit to Haudenosaunee communities rather than imperial claims to Indigenous territories. The period immediately following the 1664 English takeover of New York has few remaining records of beaver exports, but the trade kept up a brisk pace interrupted at times by war and disease. French and English anxiety over the trade led colonial writers to believe that the ter­ ritories of the Haudenosaunee and the northern Algonquian lands they acquired were depleted “at least” by 1670, but New York exported more than fifty-one thousand beaver between 1685 and 1687, an extraordi­ nary number to ascribe to pelts smuggled in from French Canada or seized during Haudenosaunee raids.78 Beaver exports out of New York never again reached the heights of the 1650s but did not drop off precipitously.79 In 1687, Governor Dongan lamented that his government had been and would be unable to match the astronomical profits of the Dutch fur trade. Dongan mourned the bare “9000 and some hundreds Peltry” of that year’s take compared to the “35 or 40000 Beavers besides Peltry” the Dutch had exported before the English takeover of New Netherland.80 The fault for this great collapse, Dongan believed, lay with England’s fickle and recalcitrant Haudenosaunee allies. Dongan’s anxiety stemmed from his colony’s dependency on Haudenosaunee communities who prioritized

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their internal politics over the market hunting necessary for New York’s economic viability. Dongan’s lament that the beaver trade had fallen off from its aver­ age of “35 or 40000 Beavers besides Peltry” to “only 9000 and some hundreds Peltry”81 has been used to argue that the New York trade had collapsed by the end of the seventeenth century.82 Dongan’s extraor­ dinarily high figure was an accurate assessment of the 1657 peak, but this level of peltry exports was never repeated under the Dutch. Other contemporary writers ascribed low beaver returns to Haudenosaunee troubles with wars and disease. Labadist missionary Jasper Danckerts, who visited Manhattan in March 1680, heard “scarcely any news” from the “first boat arrived from Fort Orange” of the season, “except that a great number of Indians had died in the early part of the winter of small pox, and a large party of them had gone south to make war against the Indians of Carolina, beyond Virginia, for which reason the hunting of beaver had not been good, and there would be a great scarcity of peltries this year.”83 Danckerts’s news of “the chief trade of New Netherland” was not that no hunting existed, but that it was interrupted by sickness and war. Dongan’s 1687 lament coincided with greatly increased hostilities between the Five Nations and New France. In the summer of 1687, a few months before Dongan’s September complaint at the end of the trading season, the governor of New France the Marquis de Denonville led a major incursion into Haudenosaunee territories. Like the Cour­ celles raid of 1666, which burned several Mohawk towns but captured or killed only a few Haudenosaunee people, the 1687 French incursion encountered few Haudenosaunee people when they attacked empty Seneca towns and cornfields. As in 1666, the 1687 Denonville attack made travel unsafe and temporarily reoriented Haudenosaunee priori­ ties. Haudenosaunee trade in part drawn from trade with Indigenous groups in the Great Lakes, and Denonville’s 1687 raid on Seneca coun­ try attempted to curb Haudenosaunee power in order to direct the trade of the far western nations.84 Dongan observed that the French “reason for this Warr is that the Indyans would not submitt and joyn them­ selves to the French . . . [the French intend] by the Ruin of those Indians to engross both the Trade and Country wholly to themselves.”85 Con­ tinuing intermittent conflict between New France and Haudenosaunee through 1689 also diverted men from hunting, even if travel to Albany was relatively safer than during the Denonville incursion.86 At stake was not merely the beaver trade but the freedom of movement through

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Haudenosaunee territories that facilitated the trade. French incursions threatened the integrity of Haudenosaunee territorial claims and the ability to travel safely between communities, the connections at the foundation of the Confederacy. This prioritization of Haudenosaunee community and individual safety over the Atlantic market-oriented fur trade is evident in the pattern of Haudenosaunee visits to Albany in the years immediately before and after the 1687 Denonville raid. Between 1679 and 1689, one unnamed Dutch trader near Albany kept an account book, which recorded transactions with ten to thirty Haudenosaunee customers a year. Like many early modern account books, this anonymous account book recorded transactions made in credit or kind, with brief nota­ tions of Indigenous traders’ names, their nation, and occasional identi­ fying details of kinship or appearance.87 This anonymous account book recorded transactions with approximately 140 distinct Haudenosaunee and Algonquian individuals across ten years, only a few of whom were repeat customers. However, in 1687, the year of the Denonville raid, no Haudenosaunee traders made the trip to Albany.88 Women’s travel, as recorded in this account book, is a barometer for the safety of travel from different Haudenosaunee communities to Albany during this period of hostilities. The loss of women—holders of agricultural knowledge and potential mothers—may have been felt especially acutely in communities hit by recent waves of epidemic dis­ ease. Women may therefore have been less likely to travel during times of uncertainty for their nations. During the tensions of the 1680s, east­ ern Haudenosaunee communities remained largely uninvolved in con­ flict with the French until after the 1687 raid.89 Women were one-third of the Mohawk, Oneida, and Onondaga customers who bought from the anonymous Dutch trader in the 1680s.90 By contrast, twenty-five Seneca traders traveled to Albany between 1679 and 1689, but only one of them was a woman.91 Seneca communities bore the brunt of French hostilities through 1687, which greatly impeded safe travel out of Sen­ eca territories until a broader Confederacy coalition brokered the 1701 Grand Settlement that brought peace between the French and Haudeno­ saunee.92 Haudenosaunee women were never confined to the European private-sphere construct of the “village and clearing,” but Haudeno­ saunee women’s travel during times of war did greatly decrease.93 Colonial politics also affected Haudenosaunee travel. The 1689 sea­ son at Albany saw “very slender trade” while Albany opposed the Leisle­ rian takeover of New York. As part of a broader wave of colonial unrest

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after the 1688 English Glorious Revolution deposing King James II in favor of his daughter Mary and her Dutch husband William, the rebellion led by Jacob Leisler temporarily cast settler-Haudenosaunee diplomacy into chaos.94 This intra-colonial factionalism may have encouraged Haudenosaunee hunters to instead take their furs to the French trade fair in August 1689. French traders at the fair that year received more than 800,000 livres worth of beaver, or more than 200,000 beaver pelts, the same month Albany officials convened a convention to oppose the Leislerian government.95 Albany was also not immune from the impact of war and European conflict hampering trade. During the eventful winter of 1688–89, France invaded the German Palatinate as England experienced its own upheavals in the Glorious Revolution. That spring, England joined former antagonist and new ally the Dutch Republic in the war against France in what became the Nine Years’ War or King William’s War.96 Escalating Anglo-French ten­ sions in 1690 fueled Albany’s fears of Haudenosaunee neutrality in the wake of rumors of Haudenosaunee peace with New France.97 Amid these rising tensions Albany authorities reached out to Massa­ chusetts and Connecticut for assistance. In the spring of 1690, Robert Livingston, who benefited from Haudenosaunee-brokered trade with New France, wrote of the reorientation necessitated by war. Livingston wrote that “we must turn our trading into warring and instead of load­ ing our Canoes with goods for Canida for Beaver as formerly we must load the Canoes with provisions and ammunition to be revenged of our cruel and perfidious enemies.”98 Both metaphorically and literally, periods of war and political tensions necessitated a reallocation of pri­ orities, time, and material for both settlers and Haudenosaunee people. At the close of the seventeenth century, New York exported over fif­ teen thousand beaver pelts annually. This figure and the fur exports for the remainder of the eighteenth century suggest that despite fluctua­ tions due to disease, war, and price changes, Haudenosaunee people did not lack access to hunting grounds or peltry for trade. Richard Coote, earl of Bellomont and governor of New York in 1700, bemoaned his inability to match trade “when this province was in possession of the Dutch,” which he believed had reached an unobtainable (and fictional) sixty-six thousand beaver per year, when exports in 1699 were “but 15241.”99 Another French attack in 1696, as well as reports of epidemic disease in Haudenosaunee territories from 1688 to 1691 and again in 1696 probably did not help Bellomont’s outlook. Bellomont appealed to the English Board of Trade to lower the customs on beaver exports

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and imports in order to stimulate the trade. By 1700, there remained a significantly more robust beaver trade in New York than had existed under the WIC at the beginning of the century. Albany traders’ account books suggest that geographic distance also affected Indigenous groups’ access to beaver and other pelts for trade.100 In the 1680s, Haudenosaunee customers made less than half of their purchases with beaver pelts, as shown in figure 2.4. The non-Iroquoian Schaghticoke, who relied most heavily on beaver hunting, only made a bare majority of their purchases with beaver. Wawanpeeckenant and Trowrekent, a Schaghticoke husband and wife who were among the anonymous trader’s most frequent customers, made most of their purchases in Dutch guilders or martins. This suggests that they were paid in Dutch guilders for labor or fur by someone else even though they still hunted and trapped. The Schaghticoke were a multiethnic community of Mahicans and New England Indigenous refugees of King Phillip’s

Goods as a Percentage of Total Per Person

100% 90% 80% 70% 60% 50% 40% 30% 20% 10% 0% Mahican

Mohawk

Oneida

Goods %Other

Figure 2.4.

%Corn

Onondaga Nation %Fisher

Seneca Schaghticoke Unkown

%Martin

%Beaver

Relative importance of peltry in purchases, 1679–1690.

Sources: “Account Book of an Unidentified Dutch Trader, 1679–1690” Rockefeller Archives Center. The number of each pelt were tallied by nation and converted to a standard of 1 beaver = 1 by rates used in the account book. When direct rates were not available, prices for equivalent goods were used. For example, if the trader sold a shirt to one person for one beaver, and later sold a shirt to another person for three mink that was used to calculate conversion rates. Wendell traded 3 marten, 3 mink, 1.5 bear, 9 guilders, 4.5 skipple corn, 1 otter, or 1 fisher as equivalent to 1 beaver. The relative importance by nation was also calculated per capita. Groups with many individuals necessarily brought more pelts, which skews the apparent reliance of each group on different kinds of peltry. To compensate for this, I calculated the total number of each type of fur divided by the number of individuals from each nation. I then used that number to calculate the relative value of each type of peltry for each nation.

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War. They resided northeast of Albany and enjoyed larger hunting ter­ ritories and greater access to the contested Saint Lawrence Valley than did the Mahican and other Algonquian groups further south, who were increasingly pinched by Dutch and English settlement growth.101 Geography also mattered for Haudenosaunee access to hunting ter­ ritories. The easternmost Mohawk relied on marten, mink, and fisher trapping rather than beaver to make their purchases in the 1680s. Karisseradie and Karontharako, a Mohawk husband and wife, made their purchases with an even mix of fishers, martins, and beavers. One fisher purchased the same value in goods as did a beaver, but three mar­ tens or martins were required to purchase one beaver’s worth of goods. This meant that Mohawk women like Karontharako, who relied more heavily on small peltry than Onondaga women like Osissijenejo, had to trap and cure three times as many pelts to maintain their purchasing power. Location, colonial pressure, and inter-Indigenous conflict that con­ strained access to hunting also restricted an Indigenous nation’s access to European manufactured goods. The Mahican were located closest to Albany in the early seventeenth century and were pushed out of northern hunting grounds by Iroquoian groups later in the century. By the 1680s, the Mahican lagged far behind the nearby Mohawk, Schaghticoke, and other groups in their ability to bring peltry to mar­ ket. Corn, which made up almost 30 percent of the value of Mahican vendables, required 185 to 220 pounds to equal the value of a single beaver or a linen shirt. If used as seed corn, 200 pounds planted on more than twenty acres. When a Mahican man named Mattoch and his unnamed wife bought a small shirt and a pair of leggings for Table 2.2

Relative purchasing power by nation, 1679–1690

NATION

NUMBER OF INDIVIDUALS

VALUE IN BEA­ VER PER PERSON

Mahican Schaghticoke Mohawk Oneida Onondaga Seneca

5 4 6 6 16 25

0.76 2.05 1.97 1.94 1.23 0.84

Source: “Account Book of an Unidentified Dutch Trader, 1679–1690,” Rockefeller Archives Center. These num­ bers were calculated by tallying the number of pelts brought and weighted by conversion rates as in figure 2.5. This number was then divided by the number of identifiable individuals per nation. The unidentified trader used beaver as a common denominator as all goods were priced in beaver, while not all goods were priced by cash, corn, or other hides. Beaver did not make up the majority of hides in either value or number and is used here as a standard of comparison only.

SHIRTS POWDERED RED

73

250 pounds of corn in 1689, they not only had to carry those 250 pounds, but they also traded away a significant agricultural invest­ ment. The incredible amount necessary in both weight and volume to make even the most basic purchases accounts for the absence of corn in payments made by other nations. Even the relatively nearby Mohawk had to travel by both water and land to reach Albany, which made the transport of corn more costly than the goods available in return. Strikingly, the Seneca, though the largest in both population and number of customers at Albany, brought less beaver and other pelts to trade than any other nation of the League. The Seneca were suppos­ edly positioned ideally as intermediaries to western groups and for best access to northwestern hunting grounds in the Saint Lawrence Valley and the interior. In both the number of beaver pelts brought to trade and the overall value of pelts brought to trade per person, the Seneca as a group lagged far behind the other nations of the League (see table 2.2). The Schaghticoke and other more eastern Haudeno­ saunee groups like the Mohawk and Oneida brought furs of compa­ rable value to market, indicating that access was not a problem for more eastern groups. New France’s attack on Seneca country in 1687 may have discouraged Seneca hunters and traders from hunting. In absolute numbers, many more Seneca people than other Haudeno­ saunee chose to make the trip to Albany despite the danger. Busy with the complex diplomacy of post-1680 hostilities with western Indig­ enous groups and New France, Seneca groups may have visited Albany more frequently but with less opportunity for hunting and therefore fewer furs.102 Seneca people chose to engage with the trade less exten­ sively than did other Haudenosaunee nations. According to the bea­ ver depletion argument, they ought to have had the greatest access to undepleted hunting grounds or stolen furs. By the beginning of the eighteenth century, Haudenosaunee partici­ pation in the Albany trade shifted as western hostilities subsided. In an account book kept by Albany trader Evert Wendell from 1697 to 1724, Seneca participation increased dramatically from the 1679–90 anony­ mous account book (see table 2.3). The Mohawk led in the number of people, the overall value of furs brought to Albany, and the average value of furs per person. However, the Seneca and Onondaga became much more engaged in the Albany trade at the turn of the eighteenth century. In 1690, Osissijenejo only brought one otter pelt with her to trade, the equivalent value of one beaver pelt. When she returned ten years later, she brought four pelts to trade and more relatives and friends with her.

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She and her relatives bought more items more frequently. By the turn of the century, the Seneca brought many more furs per person than any other nation besides the Mohawk. The changing engagement apparent in these account books suggests that Indigenous groups actively chose their own degree of cultural and economic entanglement with Euro­ pean settlements. Even though retail prices for cloth rose slightly at the end of the century, the trip to Albany had become much more attractive to people like Osissijenejo. These two Dutch account books suggest that Haudenosaunee hunt­ ers did intensify their search for beaver, the most marketable peltry. As recorded in the 1680 anonymous account book, Mohawk and Sen­ eca consumers made thirty and 40 percent of their purchases with beaver. In Wendell’s turn of the century account book, visualized in figure 2.5, beaver made up almost 70 percent of Seneca peltry and 40 percent of Mohawk peltry. One Seneca woman Scadseeaaee paid more than forty-five beaver during one month in 1709 for stockings, a blanket, and many small kegs of rum. This suggested both that she had access to large numbers of beaver pelts and that she was purchas­ ing for resale to other Indigenous people. A Mohawk man Aeijawas­ sen, his unnamed wife, and her mother maintained separate accounts with Wendell for ten years and made their purchases mostly in martins, deer hides, occasional bags of hops, and some beavers. Beaver did not make up the majority of the pelts they sold as a family, but on average they brought more and more valuable pelts than earlier seventeenth century Mohawk traders had. This shift suggests that Haudenosaunee territories, whether traditional or newly acquired, were not overhunted. Haudenosaunee hunters continued to have access to beaver and other peltry by the turn of the eighteenth century, but it does suggest that market-oriented hunting had intensified. Table 2.3

Relative purchasing power by nation, 1697–1724

NATION Laurentian Haudenosaunee Mahican Mohawk Oneida Onondaga Cayuga Seneca

NUMBER OF INDIVIDUALS

VALUE IN BEA­ VER PER PERSON

CHANGE FROM 1679–1690

23

7.12

—

69 125 14 14 33 53

5.18 8.09 2.35 2.71 1.79 4.16

4.42 6.12 0.41 1.48 — 3.32

Source: Wendell, Waterman, and Michelson, To Do Justice to Him and Myself.

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75

Goods as a Percentage of Total Per Person

100% 90% 80% 70% 60% 50% 40% 30% 20% 10% 0% Mahican Mohawk Oneida Onondaga Cayuga Goods %Other Figure 2.5.

Seneca Laurentian Other

Nation %Corn

%Fisher

%Martin

%Guilders

%Beaver

Relative importance of peltry in purchases, 1697–1724.

Source: Wendell, Waterman, and Michelson, To Do Justice to Him and Myself.

The Mahican and Laurentian Haudenosaunee who came to trade at Albany offer an important counterpoint to other Haudenosaunee groups for the question of access to beaver hunting. In the 1680s, the Mahican brought no beaver to market. By the turn of the century beaver made up a small share of Mahican products sold relative to martens, corn, and cash. The Mahican brought in a larger value of goods to trader per person than did the Seneca. Laurentian Haudenosaunee, who were residents of Catholic mission settlements in the Saint Lawrence Valley, overwhelmingly brought beaver over other peltry to Albany despite their proximity to French outposts.103 Laurentian Haudenosaunee also brought more peltry per person than any other group besides the League Mohawk. Mohawks from Canada, like Aedecaijijka, brought only beaver for sale to Wendell, and they brought more beaver than any other group. They correspondingly carried away a greater variety and quantity of cloth, blankets, shirts, guns, paint, and other goods back to communities like Kahnawà:ke. Osissijenejo’s 1690 purchase of a shirt came at an important tipping point. The cloth and clothing she bought at Albany were far cheaper than they had been only a generation earlier. Osissijenejo bought her shirt because it fit within her family’s existing set of needs and allowed her to spend her time and labor on other work. Osissijenejo’s purchase

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brought the beaver pelts to market that settler traders craved but also provoked intense anxiety for settler governments over their own abil­ ity to define and control Indigenous territories. In many ways, settler traders and governments became dependent on Indigenous traders in ways that Indigenous consumers were not dependent on settler trad­ ers. Coupled with deep cultural anxieties expressed prosaically in domi­ nie Megapolensis’s tutting over Haudenosaunee nakedness and vanity, Osissijenejo’s seemingly mundane purchase of a shirt became a point of deep concern for European observers in the coming century. As an object, this linen shirt lacked an inherent meaning of its own, but its use, wear and reuse by Haudenosaunee people gave it symbolic weight. European and later American officials and missionaries fretted over this symbolic weight ceaselessly for the next century.

C h a p ter 3

Cultural Entanglement and European Anxiety in the Early Eighteenth Century

Pierre Pouchot, son of an indebted Grenoble merchant, a veteran of two wars of imperial succession, and noted engi­ neer of fortifications, found himself faced with a strange reflection at the French outpost of Fort Niagara.1 Pouchot’s path from the emerging French middle class to frontier imperial commandant depended in part on his ability to socially position himself through rituals of refinement and material civility.2 As a diplomat to the Haudenosaunee, he saw the pieces of this identity appropriated and altered by the Haudenosaunee and other Indigenous communities surrounding his command. A faint tinge of revulsion edged his fascination with what he saw. In his memoirs, Pouchot placed this revulsion and fascination on display for an equally intrigued European audience. “Imagine a shirt almost black, and powdered in red, a waistcoat laced or with tinsel glaz­ ing, a lace’d coat unbuttoned, a cap untied, sometimes a wig put on wrong side before, joined with a face to which a Venetian mask could not compare in singularity, and you will have an idea of the costume of an Indian.”3 Pouchot’s description betrayed his discomfort with the Indigenous appropriation of the most foundational signals of Euro­ pean identity. Pouchot wore white shirts. Even on the frontier, even during a siege, he wore white shirts that were laundered and bleached to clean brightness. White shirts were the most basic element of his 77

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wardrobe and of every other person he had ever met before coming to New France. A white shirt at once shielded the body from view and advertised the cleanliness of that body. A white shirt was the founda­ tional prerequisite to all other Christian and civil values that Pouchot and other Europeans understood. Pouchot’s white shirt formed the most basic component of his claim to adult masculinity and his class status, and therefore his claim to political, social, and economic auton­ omy and authority as well.4 Osissijenejo and her husband Nachssasija also wore white shirts, but Nachssasija wore shirts painted with red vermilion and grease at diplomatic conferences. As the relative prices for European cloth and clothing declined for Haudenosaunee consumers, they integrated more of these goods into their daily garments. In so doing, Haudenosaunee people domesticated European cloth and clothing and remade them as Haudenosaunee. Across the council fire, Nachssasija and Pouchot shared some common understandings of red’s symbolic meaning. To both, red signaled life and war, passion and rebirth, but to European men like Pouchot, Nachssasija’s shirt painted in vermilion evoked the dark and flaking blood red of Christ’s Passion more than the tamed red of a cardinal’s liturgical vestments.5 Onondaga people like Osissijenejo and Nachssasija and other Haudenosaunee made these choices about how and what European goods to integrate and domesticate deliberately. European traders brought a wide range of goods to Haudenosaunee territories, but only some were of interest to Haudenosaunee consumers, who rejected markers of European masculinity like hats and shoes. These buyers styled and remade purchased cloth and clothing in ways often disturb­ ing to European observers. Haudenosaunee consumers did not under­ take this remaking out of ignorance or poverty, as Europeans like Pouchot sometimes mistakenly thought. Haudenosaunee people were themselves keen observers of the Europeans who settled on the edges of their territories and the European missionaries and diplomats who wished to change Indigenous peoples. In this sense, Haudenosaunee choices of what to wear and how to wear it took on political signifi­ cance because these choices were made in dialogue with both Haude­ nosaunee and European expectations and affected wider relationships of trade and diplomacy.6 Individual choices may not always have been made with explicitly political goals in mind.7 However, these choices were made with the knowledge of what clothing communicated to

SHIRTS POWDERED RED

79

different audiences. These choices were understood by both Haudeno­ saunee and settler observers to have wider ramifications on diplomatic and day-to-day relationships. With the exception of some Haudenosaunee diplomats and cul­ tural mediators who created a consciously hybrid material culture, the majority of Haudenosaunee consumers used European material culture as a source of raw material for a Haudenosaunee identity. Intercultural mediators who adopted a hybrid style of dress did so to fur­ ther their political and diplomatic goals with a mixed Indigenous and settler audience. Likewise, Haudenosaunee individuals who wore their purchases at home in Haudenosaunee communities made choices that took on political significance because of what they communicated to Haudenosaunee people and settlers. In the aggregate, these individual purchases articulated clear distinctions between Haudenosaunee peo­ ple and settlers, a distinction that would become increasingly fraught as Europeans and later Americans sought to destroy it. Haudenosaunee material identity coupled with Haudenosaunee mil­ itary neutrality for much of the eighteenth century provoked intense anxiety for Europeans. For men like Pouchot, New York governor Wil­ liam Burnet, and Anglican minister Thomas Barclay, Indigenous people posed a problem and the Haudenosaunee a particularly thorny one. Geographically and militarily, Europeans understood Haudenosaunee territories as a buffer between British and French colonies. Haude­ nosaunee neutrality vexed European attempts to firmly yoke allies as subjects. Materially, Haudenosaunee consumers bought cloth in encouragingly large quantities, but refused to use those items in ways legible within the framework of European material civility. Religiously, enough Haudenosaunee people joined mission churches to keep evan­ gelical hopes alive, but did not join in great numbers or convert en masse. These problems mattered to settlers who interacted with Indige­ nous people in complex and intersecting ways because at their heart lay a fundamental question of identity and the future of the North Ameri­ can continent. Disparate moments such as Pouchot’s distaste, Burnet’s diplomatic maneuvering, and Barclay’s stance on Haudenosaunee con­ version were all informed by their understanding of Haudenosaunee and Europeans as inherently politically compatible. That political com­ patibility relied on settler hopes that Haudenosaunee people could be prepared for Christian conversion by changing how they used markers of European style civility like clothing.

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British Anglicans, in particular, viewed Haudenosaunee refusal to become materially converted as a problem of the utmost religious and political importance. Mainline British Anglicans and their evangeli­ cal beliefs shaped British policy toward Haudenosaunee allies as the largest, most militarily significant, and friendly Indigenous group in British North America. These Anglicans viewed the Haudenosaunee as not only a potential military and political bulwark but also a spiritual bulwark against the threat of Catholic French Canada. Unconcerned about the possibility of English becoming Indians, Anglican New York concerned itself with persuading Haudenosaunee to become British. Settlers and metropolitan officials viewed the material and spiritual conversion of the Haudenosaunee as essential to British interests in North America. But not all British subjects in New York were good Anglicans, or even English. The ongoing Anglican mission to the Mohawk is one of the longest enduring evangelical projects in North America, but actual conditions in early New York complicated the sweeping political and religious goals of early Anglican missionaries. Not least among these problems was settler ambivalence toward metropolitan standards and Haudenosaunee indifference to the performance of European style civility. Closely tied to Christian values and European self-image as Christians, civility was a necessary but not sufficient prerequisite to conversion. Haudenosaunee use of European goods, such as shirts, coats, hats, and cloth, without corresponding changes in their behav­ ior shook European conceptions of both civility and Christianity to the core. Europeans wanted to equate the use of material signifiers of civility with civility itself. Transported to Haudenosaunee territories and remixed with a strange combination of Indigenous embellishments and other improperly deployed European imports, Haudenosaunee consumers divorced the European goods they bought from the mean­ ings Europeans imposed on those objects. Haudenosaunee consumers fit purchased objects into their own systems of cultural meaning. This reworking brought into question the value of material culture in marking civility and underlined the performativity—and therefore instability— of civility itself.8 The Haudenosaunee occupied a problematic and frustrating place within this framework. Modest in their dress and prolific purchasers of clothing, they were no naked Indians, but neither did they regulate their bodies in ways Anglicans or other Europeans perceived as proper.9 Outside the emerging black/white binary of slave societies, they were

SHIRTS POWDERED RED

81

a racial other who nonetheless controlled the bodies of European captives. Accomplished orators and diplomats, the Haudenosaunee courted European education and missionization but resisted true con­ version and civility.10 So long as they lacked these essential markers of political legitimacy and Christianity, Europeans believed the Haude­ nosaunee could not be included within the framework of European political compatibility. However, their consumer interest in European manufactures suggested to Europeans that they might be converted materially, religiously, and politically.

His Great Heart Captivated One of the earliest diplomatic visits of Indigenous people to Europe fanned these British hopes for Haudenosaunee conversion to great heights. In the spring of 1710, one Mahican and three Mohawk leaders embarked from Albany for London. Called the “Four Indian Kings,” they were represented in the English press as the “King of the River Nation,” the “King of the Maquas,” the “King of Canajohare,” and the “Emperor of the Six Nations.” The Four Kings were a delegation of three young men and one seasoned diplomat, accompanied by Peter Schuyler as mayor of Albany, who sought to promote his city’s position (and his own) within the British empire.11 The visit was intended to cement the nascent British-Haudenosaunee Covenant Chain alliance, which repre­ sented a mutual commitment to noninterference and Haudenosaunee diplomatic protocols for the resolution of differences.12 When the Four Kings presented their request for a token English military outpost and an Anglican missionary, they brought the middle ground to Britain. The 1710 visit was a calculated integration of English imperial ambi­ tions into Haudenosaunee diplomatic protocols. Religious-political hostage exchange had an established place in Haudenosaunee diplo­ macy by this point. French Jesuit missionaries functioned as tokens of French diplomatic promises. Likewise, the daughters of prominent hodiyanéshų’ like Félicité, who were sent away to convent schools in New France, served as representations of their families’ commitment to peaceful relations. In intra-tribal hostilities, Haudenosaunee raiding and diplomatic parties brought adopted non-Haudenosaunee Indig­ enous people for their geographic and social knowledge; their useful­ ness was found in preventing former countrymen from attacking, and in their potential as arbiters and communicators.13 The 1710 transAtlantic visit went further than other Haudenosaunee efforts to secure

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resident cultural liaisons but underlined Mohawk commitment to the Covenant Chain alliance. The visit of the Four Kings sparked the popular English imagination with possibilities as one of the first official diplomatic visits by Indig­ enous people to the British court. (Earlier visits by Indigenous people were made by individuals like Pocahontas or the Arctic Indigenous men kidnapped by John Cabot, who did not represent their nations in a diplomatic capacity.)14 It is unclear what the Four Kings themselves thought of London or what they actually wore. For their presentation to Queen Anne’s court, the four men were dressed by the Queen’s Mas­ ter of Ceremonies, the member of the court who organized pageants and theater at the court. The official portraits painted of them by Jan Verelst were probably based on the clothing they wore at court (shown in figures 3.1 and 3.2). Three of the four men were shown wearing only toga-like belted shirts and blankets. They were posed as Ameri­ can Romans in savage pastiche against a dark wilderness and carrying instruments of war with representations of their clan animals reduced to snarling caricatures. The moccasins and moose hair belt that Verelst used as models in all four portraits are preserved in the British Museum. They are typi­ cal of Iroquoian decorative work of the period, but it is unclear if the objects were brought to England by the Four Kings or separately. Verelst duplicated some details in multiple portraits, including decorations on the men’s moccasins and moose hair belt, as well as the folds of the blankets around their shoulders, suggesting that many elements of the portraits were not painted from life. The dual mediation of Verelst’s staging and the staging of the Master of Ceremonies makes the portrait set more valuable as a record of English construction of Indianness than a record of Haudenosaunee material culture.15 The fourth portrait of the set reveals English hopes for Haudenosaunee conversion. Hendrick, a recognized diplomat of the HaudenosauneeNew York frontier, was painted wearing a half-buttoned coat, breeches, and English-style shoes as shown in figure 3.1. His open shirt and coat exposed his bare chest in a scandalous violation of restrained mascu­ line propriety. Otherwise he was posed as any nobleman of the period in a position of confidence and dressed in the subdued clothing of a prosperous tradesman or courtier. Notably, Hendrick was depicted without the facial and chest tattoos prominently depicted on the other three men. The background of his portrait lacked the hunting scenes included in the other three portraits. Hendrick’s portrait offered the

Figure 3.1. “Tejonihokarawa (baptized Hendrick). Named Tee Yee Neen Ho Ga Row, Emperor of the Six Nations.” Engraving by John Simon after Jan Verelst, 1710. Accession number 04504, call number En710 V492t. Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library.

Figure 3.2. “Sagayenkwaraton (baptized Brant). Named Sa Ga Yeath Qua Pieth Tow, King of the Maquas,” Engraving by John Simon after Jan Verelst, 1710. Accession number 04505, call number En710 V492s. Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library.

SHIRTS POWDERED RED

85

English viewer a Haudenosaunee diplomat performing ambivalent civil­ ity, cued by his stance, clothing, and wampum belt as foreign but legibly equivalent to European nobility. His portrait suggested the possibility that the other three kings and the nations they represented could also be brought from primitive republicanism to this alternative civility. By presenting the Four Kings in the same register as European diplomats and emphasizing their role as diplomats as well as exotic spectacles, the 1710 portraits represented a moment in English consciousness when Indigenous people could have been incorporated into British civility and subjecthood without becoming wholly British. The popular English response to the 1710 visit was also ambigu­ ous on the possibility of Haudenosaunee incorporation as British sub­ jects. Images of the four men based on the Verelst portraits circulated in England throughout the eighteenth century, sometimes remixed with details of a later eighteenth-century Cherokee visit. The engrav­ ings based on the portraits became more fanciful further from the date of the actual visit but lingered on as a signifier of dignified savagery.16 Stories of the 1710 visit also circulated in the years following. In a clear parallel with the Gospel story of the poor woman who was healed by touching the hem of Christ’s robe, one (likely apocryphal) story of the visit described a ragged woman who touched the blanket of one of the Four Kings while begging.17 In this telling, the Haudenosaunee man gave the beggar woman his gold-trimmed, red stroud blanket and expressed disgust with the abject poverty of London after the spectacle of the court that had gifted him the blanket.18 At the time of the Four Kings’ visit, the English public regarded the ruling Queen Anne with deep suspicion. As the first female sole head of state since Elizabeth I, Anne’s lack of a surviving heir and her reliance on female courtiers made her suspect in the eyes of many, heightened by the tensions of the War of Spanish Succession, also known as Queen Anne’s War.19 The apocryphal story both rebuked the frivolity and lack of maternal care of the Queen for her people and presented the four Indigenous men as so near to conversion as to be Christ-like. The masculinity of the Four Kings visiting a Queen critiqued for her femininity gendered this encounter in a way different from the Poca­ hontas story of the Indian maiden who helped birth an English Amer­ ica.20 One anonymous broadside produced near the time of the visit presented a love story between one of the Haudenosaunee men and an English beauty and refigured the diplomatic visit as the supplication of a lover. It presented the English woman as a civilizing, Christianizing

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influence for an Indigenous man who was both ready and willing to be converted. Like Pocahontas, the Four Kings were depicted as both foreign and capable of being integrated because of their royalty. “With a humble low submission / Mixt with a courteous mein / Noble they were all received / In bold Britain’s royal court.”21 Without clearly estab­ lished racial lines, the English broadside imagined the Mohawk men within the context of English nobility and hierarchy. The English author imagined “the youngest of those kings . . . His great heart captivated” by the sight of a young noblewoman walking in St. James Park, “her angel beauty bright.” Struck by her beauty, which was presented in the same breath as “a glance of Britain’s glory / Build­ ings, troops and many things,” the Mohawk man enlisted an English friend to take a ring to the young woman. The English author linked the self-evident attraction of “Britain’s glory” to the seductive appeal of a young woman. The imagined Mohawk lamented, “O this total burn­ ing fever / Gives me little hope of life / If so that I cannot have her / For my love and lawful wife.” Consumed by love, overwhelmed with the woman’s (and England’s) grandeur and beauty, the Indian King’s nobil­ ity restrained his lower, baser passions. Love brought him to beg the woman’s consent in marriage in parallel with the official diplomatic purpose of the visit to secure English political alliance and an Anglican missionary. In response to the declaration of love, the English woman demanded Christian conversion as a requirement for the political-affectionate bond of marriage. Said the charming lady fair Tho I pity this disaster . . . He’s a Heathen by profession, I a Christian bred and born. Was he king of many nations Crowns and royal dignity, And I born of mean relations, You may tell him that from me . . . Nor will ever wed a Heathen, For the richest Indian store . . . Amongst Christians mild and kind, . . . is more than all the treasure Can be had with Heathens wild. Although sympathetic to the Indian declaration of love (and politi­ cal fidelity), the woman (and England) remained unable to form a

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87

permanent bond with a “heathen,” no matter how noble. Fortunately, Christian conversion trumped cultural wildness, and the imagined Indian King was ready and willing to convert. As a messenger informed the lady, He [the youngest Mohawk] and all the rest were telling How well they lik’d this place And declared themselves right willing To receive the light of grace . . . Spare his life, and save his soul, Since it lies within your power Either to destroy or save. Having once been exposed to the glory of England and the beautiful young woman, the Indian King would surely expire from grief without a permanent bond. Already willing to convert, his lack of Christian­ ity proved no obstacle, the young woman’s only reservation discarded when she told the messenger, Tell your master this from me Let him, let him first be turned From his gross Idolatry. If he will become a Christian, Live up to the truth reveal’d, I will make him grant the question, Or before will never yield. . . . With this answer pray commend me To your master yet unknown. Although the broadside ambiguously ended there without a clear tie of marriage, it was full of potential with the racial other who was pre­ sented as a perfectly acceptable husband, head of household, and pos­ sible English paternalist—if only he would convert to Christianity.22 Laden with the symbolism of English marriage, the ballad suggested that the Haudenosaunee might be a fit husband or protector for young English colonies against French threats if only they could be properly “married” to English interests. The first step toward marriage was Christian conversion. The ballad left the union of Haudenosaunee and English ambiguous and unful­ filled, but the diplomatic goals of the 1710 mission were consummated with royal gifts of silver and soldiers. Fort Hunter was established in 1711 near the Mohawk town of Tiononderoge as little more than a blockhouse with a handful of English soldiers. The chapel was outfitted

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with an Anglican chaplain and a silver crucifix and candlesticks to establish the Gospel among the Mohawk. In some ways, English and Haudenosaunee intentions for the fruition of the 1710 mission aligned perfectly. Since the Haudenosaunee negotiated the 1701 Grand Settle­ ment with New York and New France that promised European recogni­ tion of Haudenosaunee neutrality and diplomatic independence, the 1710 mission demonstrated Haudenosaunee ability to direct AngloHaudenosaunee diplomacy. In the wake of Queen Anne’s War, which capped more than a century of English-French hostilities, Fort Hunter established an English invest­ ment in the safety of Mohawk homes. As a diplomatic gift within Haude­ nosaunee protocol, it lent weight to English promises made in the 1713 Treaty of Utrecht to end English-French hostilities, which had spilled over into Haudenosaunee territories even after the 1701 Grand Settle­ ment. Queen Anne’s donation of silver and clothing to the Mohawk congregation of Tiononderoge reciprocated Haudenosaunee diplomatic overtures within the context of a gift economy that recognized the equal­ ity of both participants. In forming the Covenant Chain alliance after the English takeover of New York from the Dutch, the English had promised to abide by the agreement of the Two Row treaty in which settlers and Haudenosaunee recognized one another as brothers on equal footing. Mutual incomprehensibility was not the problem. In 1710, Mohawk and English diplomats shared the goal of politically integrating the other, and it was from this foundation that later conflicts would arise. For much of the eighteenth century, this mutual Anglo-Haudenosaunee interest was leavened with enough accommodation for both sides to keep alive belief in an eventual mutually satisfactory settlement. For the Haudenosaunee, this settlement included the incorporation of Euro­ pean goods and centers of trade into seasonal subsistence rounds and patterns of use. For the English, it meant the conversion and incorpora­ tion of a friendly, civil, and spiritually key Indigenous nation. The Five Nations would be successful in their conversion of European goods; the English would face only ambivalent and partial success in their attempts to convert the Haudenosaunee.

Sewed so as to Fit Haudenosaunee domestication and incorporation of European goods is most visible in the patterns of what they did—and did not—buy from

SHIRTS POWDERED RED

Table 3.1

89

Indigenous travel to Albany by nation, 1697–1724

LAURENTIAN

Men 15 Women 8 Total 23

MOHAWK

SENECA

ONEIDA

ONONDAGA

CAYUGA

MAHICAN OTHER TOTAL

73 52 125

21 32 53

10 4 14

11 3 14

25 8 33

43 26 69

11 3 14

209 136 345

Source: Wendell, Waterman, and Michelson, To Do Justice to Him and Myself.

traders. The account book of Albany trader Evert Wendell records the variety and quantity of goods purchased by Haudenosaunee consumers between 1697 and 1724, with customers from all of the Five Nations as well as Laurentian Haudenosaunee and Mahicans (see table 3.1). The purchases of Wendell’s customers also show the divergence of Haudenosaunee purchasing patterns from standards of European civility. They purchased some individual items that, in a European context, could be used to signify different registers of authority, political legitimacy, and civility. The Wendell account book suggests that early eighteenthcentury Haudenosaunee consumers purchased items to fit within their own social registers. Buying patterns differed between nations of the Haudenosaunee and changed over time, revealing political differences within the Confederacy and change over time in how Haudenosaunee people negotiated entanglement with settler neighbors.23

Average Number of goods per person

Object

Nation

Figure 3.3.

Average number of goods purchased per person by women, 1697–1724.

Source: Wendell, Waterman, and Michelson, To Do Justice to Him and Myself.

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Average Number of goods per person

Object

Nation

Figure 3.4.

Average number of goods purchased per person by men, 1697–1724.

Source: Wendell, Waterman, and Michelson, To Do Justice to Him and Myself.

The Mohawk and what Wendell called “Canadian” Indians commanded the greatest purchasing power and consequently made a greater number of purchases per person, as shown in figures 3.3 and 3.4. These “Canadian” Indians were likely Mohawk or other Haudenosaunee who had relocated to multi-national settlements in New France, hereafter referred to as Laurentian Haudenosaunee. The Mohawk especially purchased shirts with much greater frequency than other groups, but their purchases of tailored coats lagged behind Laurentian Haudenosaunee. The Mohawk are typically considered in the scholarship to have been the League’s primary diplomats and the most “British-leaning” of all the nations.24 The Mohawk preference for cloth yardage and blankets over tailored coats suggests the continuance of traditional unshaped clothing like matchcoats, wrapped skirts, and breechclouts.25 This remixture of markers of civility and savagery confounded European attempts to tie the signifier of European clothing to the signified value of civilized restraint. Indigenous consumers’ tastes required careful attention from European traders. In 1714, Pennsylvania councilor James Logan made an order for strouds with “black in ye red,” or a black edge on a red ground, ahead of a treaty council. He cautioned his agent that “a regard must be had not only to the Cloth and Colour but also to the list [selvage] about which the Indians are Curious [exacting].”26 When placing orders for fabric destined for Indigenous consumers, European traders

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91

were careful to specify woolens with specific combinations of colored grounds and woven or dyed edges, or printed cottons with dark or light grounds to suit local tastes. The Indigenous demand for woolens with a dyed ground and an undyed edge was so specific and so distinct from European and colonial tastes that knowledge of it reached English textile workers with only an indistinct idea of the market they produced for. Yorkshire cloth finisher John Brearley noted, among other get-rich-quick schemes, that “all pieces tht go into America are save listed,” a dying technique that colored the body of the cloth but left the edge uncolored. This style was in high demand by many Indigenous consumers but not among British or European buyers. Brearley had little idea of who might buy these fabrics or even how to make them, but he was aware that they were in high demand and that fabrics for the American market had to be woven, dyed, and finished differently than those destined for European markets.27 Indigenous tastes shaped European production both in Europe and in colonial settlements. Over time, Haudenosaunee consumers bought more and more ready-to-wear garments as European traders began to cater more to their tastes in both materials and construction. Figure 3.5 shows the shift in Haudenosaunee purchases to ready-to-wear clothing such as shirts, coats, stockings, and blankets.28 In the late seventeenth 1697–1724 100%

90%

90%

80%

80%

70%

70%

60%

60%

50%

50%

40%

40%

30%

30%

20%

20%

10% 0%

Figure 3.5.

other

alcohol

blankets

fabric

Average

Mahican

Onondaga

Nation powder & lead

Laurentian

Nation Item

Oneida

Cayuga

0%

Seneca

Average

Mahican

Schgaticoke

Unknown

Onondaga

Seneca

Oneida

Mohawk

10% Mohawk

% of Total Purchases

1679–1690 100%

ready to wear

Categories of goods as a percent of total purchases, 1679–90 and 1697–1724.

Source: “Account Book of an Unidentified Dutch Trader,” Rockefeller Archives Center; Wendell, Waterman, and Michelson, To Do Justice to Him and Myself.

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century, Haudenosaunee consumers spent half or more of their avail­ able resources on alcohol, gunpowder, lead, and knives, or “other” pur­ chases like beads, kettles, foodstuffs, and looking glasses. Although every Indigenous group spent more on ready-to-wear clothing than on raw cloth, a still significant 15 to 20 percent of available peltry went to purchase fabric for unshaped garments. The Mohawk led among Haudenosaunee customers, spending more than 60 percent of the value of goods they brought to trade on ready-to-wear items like coats, shirts, and leggings. Osissijenejo’s purchase of a shirt was somewhat exceptional for Onondaga buyers at the time; most Onondaga people only spent 20 percent of their peltry on ready-to-wear items. By the turn of the eighteenth century, both alcohol and cloth yard­ age became much less significant portions of total Haudenosaunee purchases. Ready-to-wear items like shirts and leggings took on greater significance to Haudenosaunee consumers after the turn of the cen­ tury, a rather encouraging development from the standpoint of mis­ sionaries interested in cultivating civility. Osissijenejo’s 1690 purchase of a linen shirt came at a cultural turning point for both Haudeno­ saunee consumers and European observers. Haudenosaunee consum­ ers began to outsource some labor to settler seamstresses by buying clothing rather than cloth, and Europeans ascribed those purchases with political meaning and held out hopes for Christian conversion. Some markers of the restrained European body did not catch on with Haudenosaunee consumers; the total number of hats and shoes Wendell sold in thirty years numbered in the single digits. In Haudenosaunee eyes, hats, hard soled shoes, and breeches were indelibly European, while in European eyes, they were essential markers of adult masculin­ ity. These important symbolic constructions came into conflict when European men were taken prisoner by Haudenosaunee groups.29 One of the most frequently remarked aspects of male captives’ transition from European settler to Haudenosaunee adoptee was the stripping away of clothing, particularly shoes and hats. Captive among the Oneida in 1691, Jesuit Father Peter Milet’s “girdle was taken off, another took my hat, a third took away my soutane, and a fourth my shirt. In fine others pulled off my stockings, and took away my shoes. They left me only my breeches, and even they were demanded by some men of importance.”30 Milet’s undressing stripped away his ecclesiastical garments, but hats and shoes were similarly taken from laymen as well. When Frederick Schermerhorn was taken by the Mohawk during the American Revolution, “they cruelly took away the boy’s shoes, which

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93

as it happens were a new pair, and his hat, which was a good one, giv­ ing him instead of his shoes an old pair of moccasins, but left his head without a covering during the whole of the dismal journey.”31 Freegift Patchin, also taken captive during the Revolution, explained that his and other men’s hats were taken because “they looked rather too marshal for prisoners.”32 Captive European women remarked on the replacement of shoes and other clothing, but not on the loss of such a strongly gendered item as men’s hats. These complaints were frequently repeated in settler men’s captivity narratives. Not only were key pieces of clothing stripped and replaced, but the hat, as an essential part of European masculine identity, was removed without Haudenosaunee substitution. Haudenosaunee men wore hats in diplomatic contexts, but they stripped European men of their hats during the process of incorporation into Haudenosaunee communities.33 The association of hats and shoes with the sphere of diplomacy and its attendant nego­ tiations and compromises made hats and hard soled shoes barriers to captives’ integration in domestic homeland spaces. Other European items underwent their own process of Haudeno­ saunee domestication after purchase. The white linen shirt, the most foundational sign of the civilized body for Europeans, became a dis­ turbing signifier of the instability of material signs of civility. Haude­ nosaunee customers bought more shirts than any other item from Wendell, more than blankets, stockings, raw cloth, or tailored coats.34 However, Seneca customers purchased few shirts in comparison to Mohawk or other Haudenosaunee customers, who purchased many more on average. One Mohawk man, Ashareiake, traveled to Albany from the Laurentian town of Kahnawà:ke to buy shirts, a blanket, and a coat. Distance has been used to explain this difference in Seneca and Mohawk buying patterns. The assumption in academic Iroquois stud­ ies has long been that as the nation located close to traders at Albany, the Mohawk used European goods earlier and more frequently than their Haudenosaunee cousins in other nations.35 As the example of Ashareiake shows, some customers traveled great distances that others were not willing to travel for similar items. Seneca customers were just as likely as the more eastern Mohawks to buy some items, such as tailored coats (see figure 3.4). About one-third of both Mohawk and Seneca buyers bought tailored European style coats. One Mohawk man, Caenoseedeckhae, even bought a coat that Wendell himself was wearing at the time for double the normal price. Half of all Wendell’s Seneca customers bought blankets or ready-made

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leggings, items of clothing that were not worn by settlers, and that Wendell paid seamstresses to make specifically for Indigenous custom­ ers. Seneca and Laurentian Haudenosaunee people like Ashareiake had much greater access to French traders than did more eastern groups of the Confederacy. They were able to seek out the best quality goods from both French and English centers of trade. After the 1722 construction of the British outpost Oswego on the shore of Oniatarí:io (Lake Ontario), they also had a closer British trade post than Albany. At the establishment of Oswego, Six Nations hodiyanéshų’ requested that New York hold the prices at Oswego as cheap as at Albany. New York Governor William Burnet protested that prices at Oswego would necessarily be higher because of the “conve­ niency for those that are not able to walk hither” to Albany.36 The high prices at Oswego combined with the available quality might have sent more Seneca buyers to French Niagara for their shirt purchases. For personal wear, English consumers overwhelmingly bought imported French linen up to the eve of the Seven Years’ War, when British government tariffs and the rising quality of imported Irish linen encour­ aged domestic purchases.37 That the Seneca and Laurentian Haudeno­ saunee purchased so few shirts from Wendell suggests that Indigenous and European consumers shared a similar assessment of French and English linen manufacture. For Mohawk buyers nearer to Albany, the quality of shirts available from Wendell and others may have been an acceptable tradeoff for the relatively short distance traveled. Individuals across the Six Nations made their shopping choices based on a balance of convenience, price, quality, and their communities’ preferences in color and style. Haudenosaunee consumers may have shared their assessment of quality with European consumers, but they did not value the use of those goods for the same reasons. When Jesuit Father Joseph Poncet was adopted among the Mohawk in 1653, he was given stockings, moc­ casins, a blanket, and “as soon as I had been made a relative of my house . . . I was also presented with an old and very greasy shirt,” with the impli­ cation it had been worn before, probably by the family member Pon­ cet in whose place he was adopted.38 A slightly scandalized Pouchot observed of Haudenosaunee shirts that “they keep them on until they are either worn out or rotten. When they first acquire them, they wear them white, after which they rub them with vermillion. They are then red for some time until they become black from use.”39 Witham Marshe, a commissioner for Maryland at the 1744 Treaty of Lancaster,

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95

was chided by noted diplomat Conrad Weiser. Marshe was told “not to talk much of the Indians, nor laugh at their dress, or make any remarks on their behaviour; if we did it would be very much resented by them, and might cause some differences to arise betwixt the white people and them. Besides, most of them understood English, though they will not speak it when they are in treaty.”40 Weiser’s warning made the politics of clothing explicit. The admon­ ishment helped keep Marshe from giving offense to the Haudenosaunee diplomats, since he took their shirts, “as black as the Scotchman made the Jamaicans when he wrote in his letter they were as black as that blot,” as a sign of their desperate and laughable poverty.41 By the early eighteenth century, clean white linen had become a sign of gentility, civility, and respectability in both England and France. On a practical level, white laundry implied the wearer’s ability to avoid dirty physical work, access to the labor of a laundress, and the wealth to frequently replace soiled clothing. Whiteness was also symbolically linked to both the whiteness of spiritual purity and to the emerging hierarchies of skin color, leading many European writers to associate shirts made black with dirtiness, poverty, and barbarity.42 In the Haudenosaunee context, blackened shirts did not signify dirty living, and many Haudenosaunee consumers colored their shirts before wearing them the first time. Noted (false) Indian captive Peter Williamson wrote that “the better sort have shirts of the finest Linen they can get, and to those some wear Ruffles; but these they never put on till they have painted them of various colors, which they get from the Pecone Root, and Bark of Trees, and never pull them off to wash, but wear them, till they fall in Pieces.”43 Williamson was probably not actually taken captive by any Indigenous group, as he asserted in his memoir where this description appears. However, like many elements of his narrative, his descriptions of Indigenous dress and shirt paint­ ing drew on popular narratives of captivity to borrow authenticity. His description of Indigenous people painting their shirts after purchase reflected wider early American perceptions of Indigenous remixtures of the familiar linen shirt. Shirts were not the only item that underwent a transformation after purchase. Wendell and other British and French traders sold readymade “stockings” in large numbers. These were not the knitted stock­ ings worn by Europeans, referred to as worsted stockings or stockings of yarn in contemporary descriptions, but rather “a pair of leggins, or Indian stockings . . . sewed so as to fit the leg, leaving a border of two

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inches, projecting from the outside and extending to the instep.”44 Wendell, Robert Sanders, and other Albany-area traders noted frequent small payments to white widows and other women for unspecified sew­ ing, suggesting that these ready-made leggings were made specifically for the Indian trade.45 Many of these ready-made items made for Indigenous customers underwent considerable modification before being worn. Onondaga and other Haudenosaunee women like Osissijenejo put their needles to use on ready-made leggings that they “tastily bound with ribands, edged with beads of various colours; and frequently on their moccasons and their leggins, small tufts of deer’s hair, dyed red and confined in small pieces of tin, rattling as they walked.”46 Notes made by twentiethcentury avocational and professional archaeologists of Seneca burials documented large quantities of white seed beads, like those used to decorate leggings, across the legs and ankles of men, women, and chil­ dren for the first time at a town site occupied between 1710 and 1745.47 Even as Seneca people bought more ready-to-wear clothing from settler merchants, this purchased clothing was not only made specifically for the Haudenosaunee market but also modified after purchase. These beads and ribbons paralleled earlier decorative norms, such as embroi­ dery of leather with dyed porcupine quills. Some Indigenous people also cut the feet from knitted stockings and wore them as leggings, or used caps and the feet of knit stockings as pouches for tobacco and other small items. These decorative items were part of a broader elaboration in Haude­ nosaunee decorative work after the price drops of the late seventeenth century. Osissijenejo’s purchase of a shirt minimized her labor in providing basic garments for her family and herself, allowing her to spend more time on increasingly elaborate decorative items. After the turn of the eighteenth century, fingerwoven and twined items made by Haudenosaunee women with European materials, including beads and dyed yarns, grew increasingly elaborate in their construction and surface decoration.48 The increased availability of European blankets and increased competition between European suppliers after the estab­ lishment of Niagara and Oswego may also account for the increased decoration of Indigenously made items. Fingerweaving is a technique indigenous to the Americas that creates bands of various widths by creating a broad, multi-stranded braid. The time and labor saved by purchasing cloth are visible in items Haudenosaunee women created. Before contact, Haudenosaunee and other Indigenous women throughout

0.0 0.5

1.0

1.5

2.5

3.0

4.0

4.5

5.0

H

5.5

6.0

D

F

6.5

7.0

7.5

8.0

8.5

G 1715–1745 Townley Reed/New Ganechstage H 1740–1779 Fall Brook I 1740–1779 Honeoye

Median Threads/cmA

3.5

B

D 1676–1687 Boughton Hill/Ganondagan E 1676–1687 Rochester Junction F 1710–1745 Huntoon

2.0

A

E

C

G

I

Source: Visualization by the author, based on analysis of the Seneca archaeology collection at the Rochester Museum and Science Center, Rochester, New York.

Median threads per centimeter of fingerwoven fragments. Bubble size indicates the range of deviation from the median at each site.

A 1646–1654 Steele B 1655–1675 Marsh C 1656–1675 Dann

Site

0

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

Figure 3.6.

Median Threads/cmB

0

2

4

6

8

10

12

1.5

2.0

2.5 3.5 4.0

B

5.0

G

5.5

A

6.0

F

6.5

Median Threads/cmA

4.5

C

H

E 1656–1675 Dann F 1676–1687 Boughton Hill/Ganondagan G 1676–1687 Rochester Junction H 1710–1745 Huntoon

3.0

E

D

J

7.5

8.0

8.5

9.0

9.5 10.0 10.5

I

I 1715–1745 Townley Reed/New Ganechstage J 1740–1779 Fall Brook

7.0

Source: Visualization by the author, based on analysis of the Seneca archaeology collection at the Rochester Museum and Science Center, Rochester, New York.

Median threads per centimeter of twined fragments. Bubble size indicates the range of deviation from the median at each site.

Site A 1626–1645 Warren B 1641–1655 Powerhouse C 1646–1654 Steele D 1655–1675 Marsh

0.0 0.5 1.0

Figure 3.7.

Median Threads/cmB

SHIRTS POWDERED RED

99

the Americas created textiles of plant and animal fibers with twined and fingerwoven structures. Fingerwoven fabrics are large, flat braids of many threads, with each thread cycled in and out of use as both warp and weft. Twined fabrics consist of many stable warp threads, similar to loom-woven fabrics, but in a twined fabric the weft is a pair of threads twisted (or twined) around each warp. After the introduction of cloth and woolen yarns, Haudenosaunee women incorporated these new materials into twined and fingerwo­ ven fabrics alongside Indigenous plant and animal fibers. They used imported yarn to elaborate on existing Indigenous weaving techniques from the seventeenth century into the twenty-first century. Together with imported beads, the combination of technique and material cre­ ated a visual vocabulary that did not previously exist and that continues to flourish in the present. Dutch and French merchants sold narrow, one and two-color woven bands out of Albany and Montreal beginning in the seventeenth century, but fingerweaving has persisted into the twenty-first century. European materials replaced plant materials, but this merely shifted the labor burden of the production of raw materi­ als to European workers and allowed Haudenosaunee women to spend more time on decorative work. Purchasing beads and multicolored yarns from traders like Wendell, and outsourcing basic clothing pro­ duction opened new design possibilities for Haudenosaunee women to elaborate on existing decorative traditions.49 Few twined and fingerwoven fabrics survive from the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries, but those that do show an increase in the number of threads per centimeter, width, and decoration, as shown in figures 3.6 and 3.7. These fabric fragments were woven by Haudenosaunee women and over the course of the seventeenth century began incorporating beads and multiple colors of dyed woolen and other threads. In addi­ tion to increased decoration, an increase in the number of threads per centimeter indicates more time spent on more complicated weaving. Correlated with the increased quality of loom woven fabrics found at these sites, the increased complexity of Indigenously woven fabrics sug­ gests that the outsourcing of basic garment creation allowed Haude­ nosaunee women to spend more time on decorative objects. The fur trade allowed women like Osissijenejo to purchase only those items like leggings that fit within their existing clothing needs. The time freed by that purchase also allowed them to reallocate their labor to more intricate decorative work.

February March April

Laurentian

May

Indigenous women’s travel to Albany by nation, 1697–1724.

Average

January

Source: Wendell, Waterman, and Michelson, To Do Justice to Him and Myself.

0%

5%

10%

15%

20%

25%

30%

35%

Figure 3.8.

Percent of all visits made

June

Nation

July

Month

August September October

Mohawk

November December

Seneca

Average Laurentian Mohawk Seneca Average Laurentian Mohawk Seneca Average Laurentian Mohawk Seneca Average Laurentian Mohawk Seneca Average Laurentian Mohawk Seneca Average Laurentian Mohawk Seneca Average Laurentian Mohawk Seneca Average Laurentian Mohawk Seneca Average Laurentian Mohawk Seneca Average Laurentian Mohawk Seneca Average Laurentian Mohawk Seneca Average Laurentian Mohawk Seneca

February March April

Laurentian

May

Indigenous men’s travel to Albany by nation, 1697–1724.

Average

January

Source: Wendell, Waterman, and Michelson, To Do Justice to Him and Myself.

0%

5%

10%

15%

20%

25%

30%

35%

Figure 3.9.

Percent of all visits made

Average Laurentian Mohawk Seneca Average Laurentian Mohawk Seneca Average Laurentian Mohawk Seneca Average Laurentian Mohawk Seneca

June

Nation

July

Month

Average Laurentian Mohawk Seneca Average Laurentian Mohawk Seneca Average Laurentian Mohawk Seneca Average Laurentian Mohawk Seneca

August

Mohawk

September October November December

Seneca

Average Laurentian Mohawk Seneca Average Laurentian Mohawk Seneca Average Laurentian Mohawk Seneca Average Laurentian Mohawk Seneca

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In addition to domesticating trade goods, Haudenosaunee com­ munities integrated trade with settlers into the rhythm of Indigenous politics and yearly cycles as shown in figure 3.8 and 3.9. As in the seven­ teenth century, travel for trade depended first on safe travel, and wom­ en’s travel greatly impacted European traders. Each year, a quarter to more than 60 percent of all Wendell’s Haudenosaunee customers were women. The only exception was 1700, the year before the formal ces­ sation of hostilities between French Canada and the Haudenosaunee negotiated in the 1701 Grand Settlement, when Wendell had fewer Indigenous customers overall. Only 15 percent of all customers in 1700 were Haudenosaunee women. When travel for trade was safe, Haudenosaunee consumers traveled to Albany following gendered seasonal subsistence rounds. The number of visits Wendell received was calculated by the number of individuals divided by gender and nation. Individuals with who Wendell recorded trades on multiple dates within the same month were only counted once. The number of visits per month was divided by the total of vis­ its made throughout the year to determine the frequency of travel by group. For example, more than 30 percent of Seneca men and women made their purchases in the month of July. In addition, a note of cau­ tion: travel is displayed here as a percent of all visits to give the reader a better comparison across groups like the Mohawk with more than one hundred people and the Oneida with only fourteen. This is also somewhat misleading. Wendell recorded trades with only eight indi­ vidual Laurentian Haudenosaunee women, so the massive difference in percent of visits between January and June is a difference of only one individual. The larger groups of Seneca and Mohawk travelers are more representative. The fluctuations in monthly travel Wendell recorded show both gendered and national differences in seasonal travel. Haudenosaunee women traveled to Albany almost as often as their male countrymen, even during agricultural seasons. Women’s travel to Albany peaked dur­ ing the middle of the agricultural season, in the months between plant­ ing and harvest that were used for gathering. Men’s travel also followed a seasonal round, with fewer trips during the spring trapping and fall hunting seasons. Seneca women and men, located furthest from Albany of all the Haudenosaunee except the Laurentian communities, preferred to travel the great distance during the summer months. The Mohawk and other Haudenosaunee groups, located closer to Albany, made more visits throughout the year. Rather than reshaping Haudenosaunee

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103

cycles of work and travel, European trade was incorporated into the seasonal round of gathering, agriculture, and hunting. Travel and clothing items also helped Haudenosaunee families main­ tain kinship ties across long distances, even when the participants in the exchange did not travel themselves. Eunice Williams was taken cap­ tive at age seven by Kahnawà:ke Mohawk raiders in the 1704 attack on Deerfield, Massachusetts, and was transformed through adoption by a Catholic Mohawk into Marguerite Kanenstenhawi.50 During her captiv­ ity, Eunice was transformed into an exchange good by her natal family when her father and Robert Livingston offered “Onnogharichson [the] Sachim [chief ] of Canada” wampum, money, or an indentured Indig­ enous girl in exchange for the then ten-year-old Eunice’s return.51 Much to her natal family’s dismay, Eunice rejected the overtures to return to New England throughout her life. She returned temporarily after she was a grown matron with children of her own and offered her brother symbolic ties of adoption. At age sixteen in 1712, Eunice married Kahnawà:ke Mohawk FrançoisXavier Arosen, and they did not visit Eunice’s siblings in Massachusetts until 1741 when Eunice was forty-five. Together, they made four visits to Eunice’s family, and Arosen visited his brother-in-law, Reverend Stephen Williams, alone at least once. When Arosen traveled to Massachusetts alone in 1750, he brought a beaded fingerwoven belt, a quill decorated bullet pouch, a shell gorget, and other clothing items to Eunice’s older brother Stephen.52 These items were part of Kahnawà:ke Haudenosaunee men’s daily clothing, an offering of symbolic reclothing similar to the process of reclothing adopted captives. Eunice or another female fam­ ily member probably made the items and sent them with Arosen, even though the maker herself was not able to travel at that time. Much like the reclothing of captives and adoptees, Eunice offered gifts of clothing to create family bonds between herself and her brother. Eunice used a combination of purchased goods and Indigenous materials to maintain her ties to her natal family. The yarn and beads used for the belt she sent her brother were available at Kahnawà:ke only through French traders, and the quilled tobacco pouch used leather decorated with indigenous dyes and techniques. This example illus­ trates ties maintained between a Haudenosaunee and a settler family. However, Arosen’s seemingly frequent travel between Five Nations and Laurentian Haudenosaunee communities suggests that Haudeno­ saunee men like Arosen viewed such long distance gift giving as a regu­ lar part of their family life.

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Another seventeenth-century anonymous description suggests that gifts of clothing tied Haudenosaunee families together across both time and distance. One anonymous seventeenth-century French writer observed that “when it happens that someone of considerable impor­ tance in a village has died . . . an assembly is constituted from the other villages who, all by common agreement, furnish some wampum or even some clothing or furs, in the place, to those who are appointed to go and mourn for the deceased.”53 This clothing both served to transmit the presence of those who could not travel to distant funerals and trav­ eled with the dead. Clothing a representative of the community vis­ ibly and metaphorically took the community to distant funerals, and the deceased were sometimes buried with others’ clothing. Evert Wen­ dell noted that eleven customers made purchases from him as gifts for others; nine of these were men. Many of these were gifts for wives, moth­ ers, and children, but others were more ambiguous; for example, Caa­ heghtsiedawee bought “stockings for a boy.”54 With Haudenosaunee settlements throughout the Saint Lawrence Valley, the Ohio country,

Figure 3.10. Wendell Account Book Network, 1697–1724. Men are shown as white dots, while women are shown as black dots. Dot size indicates number of connections.

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105

and the Susquehanna Valley as well as what is today New York, these gifts of clothing may have served to maintain national ties across dis­ tance even as they cemented family and clan ties and served as remind­ ers of loved ones. Visualized as a network in figure 3.10, these connections between Wendell’s customers suggest the shape of relationships between Haude­ nosaunee people that were visible to traders like Wendell.55 This net­ work visualization displays connections between people that Wendell documented. Wendell tracked many of his customers by their relation­ ships with one another; he differentiated one Mohawk woman named Catrin from another by noting that the first was the sister of a woman named Watcaroo and married to Saquanakaij. He later noted that Catrin escorted several unnamed women (a practice of introducing new customers to traders and vouching for their creditworthiness). Wendell also noted that Saquanakaij asked another man to buy a shirt for him, and sent his unnamed mother to pay down his debts to Wendell. Wen­ dell’s record of these relationships may have been based on how his Haudenosaunee customers identified themselves to him as enmeshed in a relational network of belonging.56 Few of these Indigenous people were recorded in any other documentary sources, so the view of their social ties within their own communities was limited to what Wendell observed himself or was told about. As a record of gifts and exchanges between Indigenous people through the intermediary of Wendell, the ties documented in this network were both economic and familial. They offer a rare and important window on how Indigenous people integrated trade with settlers into their own communities. Wendell’s recording of these economic and kinship ties was in ten­ sion with his perception of Indigenous women as peripheral to their male relations. This was especially true in the case of women whom Wendell did not name except to define them by their relationships with others. Even as Wendell rhetorically erased these Indigenous women’s social individuality, his interactions with them continually emphasized their influence within their networks. Wendell maintained separate accounts for husbands and wives, and some of his largest and longestrunning accounts were with women, even women who he identified only by their relation to their husbands. Despite Wendell’s rhetori­ cal erasure of some of his female customers, his accounts nonetheless reveal parity between the influence of Indigenous women and men. Wendell’s limited perspective in Albany was filtered through his limited view of his Indigenous customers’ lives and filtered through his own

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rhetorical erasure of women’s separate identities. Even so, there was no substantial difference in this network between the visibility of women’s influence and the visibility of men’s influence. Most significantly, as connectors between tribal subcommunities within the main network, otherwise nameless women appeared as influential ties holding the net­ work together. These women tied together individuals from different nations through economic and kinship ties.57 Wendell preferred to deal with Haudenosaunee women under their husbands’ accounts, and often started accounts for women under their husbands’ names only to move them to their own accounts later. They became economically unavoidable for him as they made more purchases, guaranteed the debts of others, and brought new custom­ ers to trade with him. Wendell’s view of Haudenosaunee social connec­ tions was, however, quite sparse, reflecting his and other Europeans’ limited ability to view the ties within Haudenosaunee communities. Without white settlements in Haudenosaunee territories, Wendell and other traders dealing with Haudenosaunee customers had no options for collecting debts or observing social connections. Wendell’s Haude­ nosaunee customers lived anywhere from fifty to three hundred miles from him and usually only came to trade once per year. Haudenosaunee women were both pervasive and poorly glimpsed in the economic and social ties Wendell and other Europeans saw and recorded. Haudenosaunee consumers had access to the full range of Atlantic goods from European traders but selectively chose elements to incor­ porate into a specifically Haudenosaunee sartorial mode. The hybrid dress of European and Indigenous male diplomats sought to create a blended sartorial language. The clothing choices Haudenosaunee peo­ ple made for their daily wear reflected an Indigenous identity that was connected to but not subsumed by settler and Atlantic world markets. European traders and manufacturers as far away as Europe responded to Indigenous demands with fabrics and garments made specifically to Indigenous tastes, and Haudenosaunee consumers further shaped these goods to their own communities’ sartorial needs. The time saved by outsourcing the creation of basic garments like shirts and leggings allowed Haudenosaunee women to further embellish Indigenous decorative traditions with beaded surface decoration and increasingly elaborate fingerwoven and twined clothing items. They created an Indigenous whole from both European and Indigenous parts. Indig­ enous families used these items to maintain kinship ties even over long distances and incorporated trade with settlers into seasonal subsistence

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rounds. Europeans were only able to glimpse the connections main­ tained by this travel from their position on the frontiers of Haudeno­ saunee territories. Haudenosaunee women were nonetheless central to both the purchases that brought European goods into Haudenosaunee territories and the social connections by which Europeans understood their trade.

What Will the Latter Be? Haudenosaunee use of European material culture and the ability to surveil and change Haudenosaunee clothing was a central concern for British colonial officials who were anxious securely control their Haudenosaunee allies. In the British imagination, potential Haude­ nosaunee subjects like the Four Kings were willing, able, and eager to convert materially and spiritually. This conversion was both necessary and imperative to ensure a friendly buffer against the threat of Catholic New France. On the ground in the newly acquired colony of New York, however, conversion of multiple Indigenous nations that were neither interested in nor compelled to convert was anything but easy. Nomi­ nally civil British subjects like the residents of Albany were themselves barriers to the conversion process, calling into question the stability of civility itself. In British religious geopolitics, New York was a shield for the more densely settled British colonies of New England from French Catholic incursions out of Canada. As an English royal colony after 1683, New York assumed a more prominent role in the administration and pro­ tection of British political and military interests in North America.58 In 1699, New York governor Richard Coote, Earl of Bellomont, wrote to the Board of Trade that New York “by its situation . . . ought to be looked upon as the capital Province or the Citadel to all the others; for secure but this, and you secure all the English Colonies, not only against the French, but also against any insurrections.”59 The English concern with Haudenosaunee civility and conversion was not only religious but political at the highest levels. On the heels of the 1710 Four Kings visit, New York governor Robert Hunter appealed to the Anglican Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (SPG) for a missionary to the Haude­ nosaunee. Hunter stressed the intersection of Christianity, civility, and English language learning. “It is high time to think of missionaries for that purpose,” Hunter chided the society in 1711. “If they [the Haude­ nosaunee] be not enjoynd to teach our language to ye younger sort,

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I have for my owne part but slender hopes of success answerable to so good a design, for upon my own certain knowledge—our scotch high­ landers who keep to their antient language, habit and customs, have little more of Xtianity besides the name than they had in St Columb’s days.”60 The comparison of unconverted Indigenous people and barely converted Scottish Highlanders was not an idle one.61 Only three years before, James Stuart, son of the deposed James II, had staged an abor­ tive invasion of Scotland with the support of the French monarchy, Catholic Highlanders, and Presbyterian Scots opposed to the 1707 Act of Union that brought together Scotland and England under the Brit­ ish Crown.62 The invasion was repulsed before troops landed, but it threatened to land more than five thousand French soldiers on Scot­ tish shores. The aborted attack brought together the threat of French Catholic existential threat, Scottish Catholic barbarity, and dissolution of the unpopular 1707 union of Scotland and England. By pointing to the restive and, in English eyes, barely Christian highland Scottish on the heels of the Four Kings visit, Hunter suggested that the partially converted Haudenosaunee might never be incorporated as British sub­ jects. He raised the specter that the Haudenosaunee might pose an exis­ tential threat to British interests like the Scottish Jacobites with their “antient language, habit and customs.” Haudenosaunee indifference to British material civility and conver­ sion, their political neutrality, and their traffic with the French took on a sinister cast.63 When William Burnet assumed the governorship in 1720, he asked the New York Assembly if they would “suffer the Province to lye open to the first attempt the French shall think fit to make against it.” He accused the assembly of waiting “patiently and [to] see them advancing every day further into our country, building trading houses in the main passes belonging to it, seducing numbers of our indians to live among them . . . and spreading false and scandal­ ous reports among the Five Nations in order to draw them from their allegiance to the Crown of Great Britain.”64 Burnet pushed for greater government involvement in the otherwise Albany-centric fur trade. Burnet attempted to make the Albany-Montreal trade illegal and established first a log blockhouse and palisade and later a stone fort at Oswego. In practice, this was only enforceable in Albany. Mohawk and other Haudenosaunee traders continued to move unimpeded through their own territories and did not regard their free movement through their own territories as illegal. In 1724, Burnet argued that “all proper methods should be provided for that may encourage the Five

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Nations to remain firm to us and to prevent the unwearied endeavors the French use to seduce them,” including the expansion of Oswego and a firm stand against French expansion of Niagara.65 Burnet lacked the jurisdiction to actually curtail Haudenosaunee movement in their own territories. Burnet believed that the establishment and expansion of Oswego would help advance the cause of English civility and Anglican conver­ sion, but the actual landscape of New York religious politics was more complicated than Burnet would have liked. As a former Dutch colony, New York continued to harbor British subjects of Dutch heritage whose own theological and commercial interests were at times at odds with British imperial interests. Even New York’s unruly, supposedly English population did not always serve as good examples of English civility. Anglican minister William Andrews despaired of the influence coarse soldiers’ language had on the Mohawk surrounding Fort Hunter; oth­ ers derided the crass commercial interests and vulgarity of Albany as corrosive to missionization efforts. As Dutch Labadist Jasper Danckerts noted derisively of Albany in 1680, “if these be the persons who are to make Christians of the hea­ then, what will the latter be?”66 Frustratingly from the British imperial point of view, European settlers at the edges of Haudenosaunee terri­ tories often fell short of civilized restraint themselves, and Indigenous people were keen ethnographers of their new neighbors. As Governor Bellomont complained to the Lords of Trade in 1700, the English sol­ diers garrisoned at Albany were “in that shamefull and miserable con­ dition for the want of cloaths that the like was never seen, in so much that those parts of ‘em which modesty forbids me to name, are expos’d to view, the women forced to lay their hands on their eyes as often as they pass by ’em. This sad condition of the Soldiers, does us great hurt with the Indians . . . and they being a very observing people, measure the greatness of our King, and the conduct of affairs, by the shamefull ill plight of the Soldiers.”67 Bellomont’s dismay at the state of the Albany garrison was palpable. He had been appointed governor by King William III expressly for the purpose of more tightly controlling the Crown colonies of New York, Massachusetts Bay, and New Hampshire. The state of the Albany gar­ rison suggested little control over even basic affairs, let alone the colo­ nies that bore the brunt of French attacks. Worse still, some “crafty old Sachems [hodiyanéshų’]” of the Haudenosaunee poked at Bellomont’s insecurities when they asked if he “thought ’em such fooles as to believe

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our King could protect ’em from the French, when he was not able to keep his Soldiers in a condition, as those in Canada are kept.”68 These hodiyanéshų’ held up a mirror of Bellomont’s anxieties the same year they outmaneuvered him and negotiated the Grand Settlement that ensured Haudenosaunee neutrality between English and French hos­ tilities.69 Materially and politically, Haudenosaunee leaders rejected the very idea of English dominance. British colonial officials hoped that education and individual Haudenosaunee converts would help speed Haudenosaunee national conversion. The first Anglican missionary to the Mohawk, Thomas Bar­ clay, was sent by the SPG as chaplain to the fort at Albany, as minister to the first English-speaking church in Albany, and as a missionary to the Mohawk. Barclay arrived in Albany in 1708, just as the Anglican church turned toward evangelism and the millenarianist position that man’s action in converting the world was required to bring about the Sec­ ond Coming of Christ. The Anglican Society enjoyed wide support in England and the English colonies among the high-ranking church, business, and government officials and missionized among the Mohawk for the entirety of the eighteenth century.70 The Mohawk mission has even been memorialized in the official history of the SPG as one of the society’s most successful, with a supposed one-third of the Mohawk population at Tiononderoge professing Anglican membership in the early decades of the eighteenth century.71 Barclay’s efforts to convert the Mohawk did not amount to much, in large part because he spent most of his time in Albany and did not travel to Mohawk towns. He was replaced with William Andrews, who was employed solely to missionize the Mohawk from Fort Hunter after the 1710 visit of the Four Kings. Reports from Andrews’s first years of mission vacillated between highs and lows. In two years, he reported that he baptized over one hundred people, or 20 percent of the Mohawk population.72 However, Andrews remained gloomy about the state of the congregation he had been entrusted with. “Most of the adult indians are already baptized, some by priests from can­ ada [and] others by dutch ministers, but those baptised by the former, I am afraid are but little the better for it . . . they [Jesuits] would baptize any that offered themselves, whether qualified or no and took no man­ ner of care to instruct them before or after.”73 The Mohawk congrega­ tion at Fort Hunter continued to practice a hybrid Christianity and blended elements of Catholic, Dutch Reformed, Anglican, and Indig­ enous practices. In Andrews’s strictly anti-Catholic Anglican practice,

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such cross-denominational conversion was hardly any conversion at all.74 Despite the colonizing intentions of Andrews and British officials, Mohawk congregants chose what elements of Anglican practice they wished to incorporate into their lives and directed the shape of spiritual practice in their communities. Andrews was even more ambivalent about the possibilities of con­ version and education. He was frustrated by “ye very smell of ym . . . so yt their can be but little pleasure to be taken in living among ye indi­ ans,” but unable to press for many changes in his Mohawk congregants’ behavior.75 Andrews rejected the focus on English language teaching before religious conversion that his sponsor the SPG, his predecessor Barclay, and Governor Burnet emphasized. Andrews argued that “the best way will be to keep them to their own language for it has been observed that those that speak english are the worst because it gives them opportunity of conversing the more with the english .  .  . and so to learn their vices . . . There are not above 3 or 4 of them in this nation can speak english, and that very brokenly and I wish they were out for they are some of the worst among them.”76 Andrews advocated for separate civility for the Mohawk and ascribed the bad behavior of English-speaking Haudenosaunee to the poor influence of the English and Dutch soldiers stationed at Fort Hunter. Unlike the fort’s patron and namesake, Governor Hunter, Andrews viewed English language proficiency as a danger to conversion and civility because of the presence of uncivil settlers. Andrews argued that Haudenosaunee materiality ought to be brought in line with English mores as a prelude to conversion but not integrated into the settler population. Andrews viewed the settlers as so poorly advanced in their own civility as to be a danger to the civility of the Indigenous people he sought to convert, a view that would be echoed by nineteenth-century missionaries. In Andrews’s view, the Haudenosaunee might be politi­ cally equivalent to other British subjects but not necessarily identical. Four years later, Andrews apologized to his sponsors in the SPG for his lack of success in teaching English among the Mohawk. In 1715, “I began to teach an indian lad english with his owne language but I was forcd to desist other ways he would not learned at all, lately again I offered to teach two or three girls, who can read pretty well in their owne tongue, but they would not learn.” Andrews’s performance of dis­ appointment was part of his deflection of the SPG’s insistence on send­ ing English catechisms and prayer books for the use of the Mohawk congregation. Andrews urged the printing of Mohawk translations and

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insisted that his Mohawk congregants had little interest in learning English. “They are utterly averse to ye learning any other language but their owne, I believe here is not one indian yt understands five words of english for all we have lived by ym so long.”77 Andrews’s demurral toed the official line of the Church of England that Indigenous languages and habitations were unsuitable for true Christian conversion.78 “I have often told ye indians of the great advantage of learning and yt they had now a fair opportunity put into their hands by the good society . . . yt I hoped they would not be so unwise to loose it by slighting and neglect­ ing it . . . and so be without one of the best means of promoting and settling ye true religion among themselves and posterity whereby alone they could be saved.”79 Although attractive for spiritual and political reasons, the en masse civil and religious conversion of the Mohawk people ran afoul of Haudenosaunee indifference and English expecta­ tions. As Andrews’s ambivalence and backtracking in the face of official church pressure shows, the needs of a mission on the edge of a messy, intercultural frontier did not always mesh with the demands of the sponsor. In measuring the English as potential allies, much less an imperial, colonialist power, the Haudenosaunee found English settlements want­ ing. Unable to clothe their own people, the English struggled to proj­ ect a compelling image of themselves into Haudenosaunee territories. Haudenosaunee families integrated European goods into daily perfor­ mances of self and community creation. They did so in ways incon­ sistent with European performances of civility and, more important, consistent with continuities of Haudenosaunee mores, labor arrange­ ments, and community relations. White shirts, manufactured cloth, and tailored clothing signaled restraint and incorporation into civi­ lized hierarchies within the context of European material symbolism. Within the context of Haudenosaunee refashioning, these items were used to reject European political domination. The increasing avail­ ability, quality, and price of fabric allowed Haudenosaunee women to articulate a new range of decorative visual expression in the creation of beaded and colored fingerweaving. This further underscored the insuf­ ficiency of material change to cause cultural change. As the eighteenth century progressed, this sartorial and economic independence loomed ever larger as a concern for both British and French colonial officials.

C ha p ter 4

Women’s Cross-Cultural Exchange in the Mid-Eighteenth Century

In the spring of 1742, a Kahnawà:ke Mohawk woman named Agnese visited Montreal and loaded her pack basket with dried beaver pelts. She hid the pelts in her basket under bags of corn and other small purchases. As she left town, she passed other Indigenous people bringing in their winter-trapped furs to sell from the pays d’en haut, or western and northern territories. Agnese also passed the watchful guards of the Compaigne d’Occident, the monop­ oly exporter of beaver out of New France, who Agnese’s business part­ ner was paying her to circumvent.1 Once out of Montreal, Agnese went home to Kahnawà:ke, or as her French neighbors called it, Sault Saint Louis. In Kahnawà:ke, Agnese deposited the beaver pelts with her business partner, the French Cana­ dian Marie-Magdalene Desauniers, who ran a discreet and illegal busi­ ness with her sisters Marguerite and Marie-Anne. The three sisters ran an import-export firm much like the more public ones run by their father, brother, uncle, and male cousins. Their brother Pierre Desauni­ ers was a prominent and respected marchand in Quebec. The Demoiselles Desauniers (as Marie-Magdalene, Marguerite, and Marie-Anne were known) specialized in discretion and conducted business from their home in the Mohawk community of Kahnawà:ke. At forty-one, thirtyeight, and thirty-three, respectively, Marie-Magdalene, Marguerite, and 113

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Marie-Anne had never married. In 1742 they were at the height of their economic and social power. They had been in the business of buying and selling in Kahnawà:ke for more than fifteen years since youngest sister Marie-Anne was sixteen and eldest sister Marie-Magdalene was twenty-four.2 Ostensibly, they bought wild ginseng from Indigenous neighbors who gathered it in the woods, and then the sisters supposedly sold the ginseng for export to Europe and China.3 In reality, the Desauni­ ers bought castor sec (dry beaver pelts) and sold them at a premium to the south, in British Albany. The Desauniers’ residence and connec­ tions in Kahnawà:ke were essential to their business. In the settlement of roughly twelve hundred Haudenosaunee, Wendats, and a handful of French, Agnese and the Demoiselles Desauniers attended the mis­ sion church together, where Mass was celebrated by Jesuits Father JeanBaptiste Tournois and Father Luc-François Nau.4 This shared religious connection may have been how Agnese and the Desauniers came to do business in the first place. Late in the spring of 1742, Agnese and her family prepared for a trip south once Agnese and others had carried a sufficient number of dried beaver pelts discreetly out of Montreal to Kahnawà:ke. Their trip was scheduled around their seasonal subsistence needs, timed for when the weather was warmer, and the summer crops were safely sown. They packed their canoes full of the tightly bound beaver pelt bales collected over the preceding months. Marie-Magdalene or one of her sisters care­ fully weighed and tallied the packs of beaver pelts the same as any legiti­ mate marchand and wrote a letter to her factor in Albany for Agnese to carry. The letter thanked the Desauniers’ Albany factor for his previous shipment of goods, requested quality scarlet cloth in exchange for the current shipment, and included a list of the packs and their weights for the reference of the Albany factor who was going to receive the packs.5 Agnese took the letter and the packs of beaver south via Kaniá:tare tsi kahnhokà:ronte (Richelieu River), bypassing the sixteen-mile por­ tage past Fort Chambly and the French soldiers who were posted there to surveil the passing traffic.6 Downriver, where Kaniá:tare tsi kahnhokà:ronte opened up into Kaniatarakwà:ronte (or Lac Cham­ plain) at Fort Sainte Anne on Isle La Motte, Agnese’s party stashed some of their packs of furs. They passed the fort carrying only a few packs. They carried few enough to plausibly pass for only the product of their hunt, which the French Canadian government would not inter­ fere with for fear of disturbing diplomatic relations with Kahnawà:ke

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and other Indigenous communities. After passing the fort, Agnese’s party stashed their first load of furs, circled back, and retrieved the previously cached packs. Then they repeated the process. The French soldiers at Sainte Anne, either genuinely or willfully, mistook them as a new group of Indians each time they passed.7 Further south at Fort Saint-Frédéric, where Kaniatarakwà:ronte nar­ rowed on the way to Kaniá:taro’kte (Lac du Saint Sacrement and later Lake George), part of the group disembarked with the furs and portaged them out of sight of the fort while the rest paddled by in empty canoes.8 Once past the French forts, at the southern terminus of Kaniá:taro’kte, the party had an eleven-mile portage to Ka’nón:no (Hudson’s River). Before reaching Ka’nón:no, the party had to avoid the upstart stockade at Fort Lydius. The little blockhouse had been set up by a rival of the Demoiselles Desauniers, Johannes Hendricus Lydius. After the Desau­ niers drove Lydius out of Montreal several years earlier, he set up down river expressly for the purpose of intercepting south-bound Indigenous trading parties like Agnese’s with their profitable cargoes and persuad­ ing them to trade with him instead of the Albany factors.9 With the journey to Albany finally accomplished, Agnese and her party landed their canoes on the banks of Ka’nón:no in the north end of Albany and passed the homes of some of the most prominent trad­ ing and political families of the city as they made their way to the Pearl Street home of Robert Sanders.10 As the scion of one of Albany’s oldest families, Sanders had parlayed his father’s and grandfather’s diplo­ matic and business connections into substantial legal and illegal busi­ ness success. Sanders supplied fur traders in both Albany and Montreal, buying indirectly from his Montreal connections through couriers like Agnese. Sanders traded via secret cargoes and letters addressed to code names, in case his illegal business ever came to light and endangered his and his French contacts’ legitimate businesses. Like the Desauniers, Sanders relied on discretion for his Canadian trade. Both French and English officials condemned the Montreal-Albany trade in the belief that its participants were disloyal and its effects dangerous to the cause of the empire. The profits of Sanders’s Montreal trade helped propel him to the mayorship of Albany, where he became one of the officials who were charged with preventing the Albany-Montreal trade even while he engaged in it.11 Sanders might have had harsh words for Agnese when the packs were opened. The bound packs of furs measured in correctly at the weights Marie-Magdalene Desauniers promised in her letter, but once

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opened, the pack spilled out sand and included several pelts that had been soaked in water to make up the weight of the pelts Agnese had taken from the pack in addition to her usual commission.12 Despite his annoyance, Sanders entrusted Agnese with several lengths of red cloth, lace, calicos, and other consumer goods, all to be taken north via the same route the furs had come down, along with his letter for the Dem­ oiselles Desauniers.13 Sanders and the Desauniers had no choice but to rely on Agnese and other self-interested Indigenous intermediaries. These European traders were dependent on Indigenous intermediaries for the lucrative intercolonial trade because they lacked other options to courier the illicit shipments. After trading on their accounts with Sanders or other traders in Albany, Agnese and her party returned to Kahnawà:ke. They completed the trip with a visit to the Desauniers to hand off their cargo of cloth and letters, and plan another journey for later that summer. In the early part of the eighteenth century, Agnese’s journey was com­ mon, if nominally illegal under the laws of New France and New York, and facilitated by women’s daily cross-cultural connections. Agnese and other Mohawk traders continued to make these journeys because French and English law did not apply to them. French and English law especially did not apply in moving through Haudenosaunee territories, and traders like the Desauniers and Sanders depended on connections with Haudenosaunee traders. Many of these connections were made within the mixed religious communities that both British and French officials hoped would convert Haudenosaunee individuals and secure Haudenosaunee nations as allies in the contest for control of the North American continent. During the long peace after the 1701 Great Peace of Montreal and the 1713 Treaty of Utrecht, the intercolonial trade and the mundane connections that made it possible were seen as sub­ versive and potentially dangerous by both French and British imperial officials. As tensions between Britain and France increased in the 1740s, the intercolonial trade and the quotidian connections it relied on were increasingly seen as suspect and threatening by imperial officials. On both sides of the Kaniatarowanénhne, women like Agnese and the Demoiselles Desauniers as well as some lower status white men like the Desauniers’ rival Lydius were pushed out of the trade. At the same time, prominent white men like Sanders and later rival William Johnson were able to parlay their illegal trade into a professionalization of Indian diplomacy. This professionalization relied on women’s cross-cultural

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connections without acknowledging them. For Haudenosaunee com­ munities, the intercolonial trade fit into a far older and broader tradi­ tion of wide-ranging movement. Indigenous women like Agnese moved between Albany and Montreal as part of a seasonal subsistence round that maintained kinship and community ties between Six Nations and Laurentian Haudenosaunee communities. Haudenosaunee women used their connections to European women like the Demoiselles Desau­ niers to build beneficial ties to settler colonial communities without inviting settler colonial control of their communities.

Independence and Even Rebellion When the Demoiselles Desauniers took up residence in Kahnawà:ke in 1725, they had only ever known peace between New France and the Haudenosaunee, and peace between New France and the British North American colonies for their entire adult lives. Eldest sister MarieMagdalene was born in 1701, the year the Five Nations made paral­ lel treaties with New France, New York, and a number of Great Lakes Indigenous nations in an arrangement that asserted Haudenosaunee freedom of travel through a vast swath of the northeast.14 These treaties signed at Montreal and Albany were perceived by French and British officials both as ensuring Haudenosaunee neutrality in intercolonial conflicts. To Haudenosaunee leaders, these treaties put an end to French raids into Haudenosaunee territories that had made travel unsafe. They also committed British officials to protect the safety of Haudenosaunee travel in upper Canada and the Great Lakes from French harassment, part of what the French called the pays d’en haut and perceived as under French imperial control.15 The disjuncture in these perceptions— neutrality versus freedom of travel—increased tensions between Haude­ nosaunee communities and both the British and the French colonies over the course of the eighteenth century as Haudenosaunee freedom of travel became seen as inherently dangerous to British and French colonial interests. Younger sisters Marguerite and Marie-Anne were born in 1704 and 1709, at the height of la deuxième guerre intercoloniale, or Queen Anne’s War, between Britain and France and fought in their colonial posses­ sions. During the second intercolonial war, French imperial officials intended to use New France as a wedge against the expanding English colonies to the south in order to bar further British expansion into the more profitable West Indies and French-allied Spanish Mexico.16 Over

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the course of the war, French-allied Laurentian Haudenosaunee and other Indigenous groups took several hundred English settlers captive. Some of these adoptees, like Eunice Williams, decided to stay with their adoptive Indigenous families and later moved between French and English colonies in their subversive intercolonial trade. The 1713 Peace of Utrecht settled the second intercolonial war just as Eunice and Marie-Magdalene entered adulthood, creating a period of relative peace and safe travel in the northeast. The Desauniers used this period of peace to set up their discreet import-export firm, while Agnese took advantage of settled intercolo­ nial relations to visit her Five Nations kin and conduct her business. To the south, near Albany, Dutch trader Anna Peek was pregnant with her first child when she began selling cloth and rum to her Mohawk neigh­ bors. They attended the same Anglican church as Peek and maintained relations with their Catholic relations to the north like Agnese. These women’s cross-cultural connections and the illicit intercolonial trade their connections facilitated lasted almost a lifetime, until the Demoi­ selles Desauniers and Anna Peek were in their forties and Eunice and Agnese were Kahnawà:ke matrons in their late fifties at the outbreak of the Seven Years’ War. Women like Agnese, Eunice Williams, the Desauniers, and Peek all used this long peace to establish and maintain long distance intercolo­ nial ties facilitated by their intercultural ties closer to home. This move­ ment was looked on with both distrust and hope by French and British colonial officials. Hope, because many French and British officials still believed that the full conversion and integration of Haudenosaunee individuals and communities on European terms was possible. They believed that the daily entanglements of trade, worship, and contact between neighbors would facilitate that conversion. Distrust, because Haudenosaunee communities remained resolutely disinterested in European attempts at cultural hegemony. Haudenosaunee neutrality after the Grand Settlement of 1701 represented a possible military threat to both their British allies and former French enemies.17 For Brit­ ish officials, Haudenosaunee knowledge of ethnic unrest among nomi­ nal British subjects in New York increased the specter of this threat. French Canadian officials considered the Mohawk and other Indig­ enous people settled in the Kaniatarowanénhne valley to be domicilié, denoting settled or otherwise belonging to French Canada. For both British and French officials, long-standing kinship ties maintained by frequent seasonal travel between domicilié Laurentian Haudenosaunee

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communities and Six Nations communities bordering New York pro­ vided worrisome proof that intra-Haudenosaunee ties superseded European alliances.18 Kahnawà:ke as a community symbolized many of these imperial anxieties from both the British and French perspectives. Mohawk and Oneida Catholic converts established Kenta:ke on the south bank of Kaniatarowanénhne in 1667.19 This multiethnic and intercultural com­ munity expanded to include French, Onondagas, Wendats, and adopted captives. The families who resettled there were drawn by a combination of religion, fertile farming, and the lucrative transfer of furs between Montreal across the river and Albany to the south. The French and Indigenous communities remained separated, building their homes on opposite sides of the Jesuit church, and in 1676 the Indigenous com­ munity migrated upriver to a new settlement of Kahnawà:ke, named for the Teionontatátie settlement of Caughnawaga.20 Kahnawà:ke and its relations with other Haudenosaunee commu­ nities have long been viewed as a product of factionalism and intraHaudenosaunee conflict.21 Kahnawà:ke Mohawks and Confederacy Mohawks maintained tense relations, sometimes entering opposing sides of a conflict alongside settler allies while avoiding direct conflict with one another and other Haudenosaunee communities.22 Both British and French officials believed, or wished to believe, that the Kahnawà:ke and other Laurentian Haudenosaunee had “deserted the Five Nations”23 and attached themselves firmly to French interests, but Kahnawà:ke Mohawks and Confederacy Mohawks still considered themselves kin throughout the eighteenth century.24 Spouses occasionally resided with one in a Confederacy settlement and one in a Laurentian community.25 Confederacy Mohawks “look on the Caughnawagas as part of them­ selves.”26 They demurred British requests to join attacks against their northern kin because “the French Indians and the Indians of the Six Nations are sprang of one blood. They have made alliances and Mar­ riages with each other . . . all of them some Relation or another living at Cachnawage so that they could not go to War against one another.”27 French officials blamed this connection on the trade between New France and New York that Mohawks facilitated. In 1741 when French governor Charles de la Boische, Marquis de Beauharnois complained that “Almost all the people of the Sault . . . have English hearts, as the Indians express it,” and “for this I can blame only their Missionaries and the Misses Desauniers, who make them trade with New-York.”28 In their diplomatic interactions, Laurentian Haudenosaunee communities

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emphasized their neutrality between British and French interests and their connection to League kin. At the outbreak of la troisième guerre intercoloniale or King George’s War in 1744, a delegation of Kahnawà:ke Mohawks to Albany stated that they were “were Inclined to keep the [covenant] of Neutrality formerly agreed on between them this Govt & the 6 Nations & that the same friendly intercourse might be kept up between them as in time of Peace.”29 Maintaining familial connections and travel between Mohawk Valley and Laurentian Haudenosaunee set­ tlements was thus part of the broader maintenance of Haudenosaunee neutrality and freedom of movement after 1701. French officials viewed the Laurentian Haudenosaunee of Kahnawà:ke and later Kanasetake, Oswegatchie, and Akwesasne as an integral part of the defense of New France, on par with Fort Saint-Jean and Fort Chambly in the Champlain-Richelieu Valley.30 As imperial tensions between France and Britain came to a head in 1754, French governor Michel-Ange Duquesne de Menneville, Marquis Duquesne hoped that the Laurentian Haudenosaunee communities would “form a barrier which will protect the government of Montreal against all incursions.”31 Kahnawà:ke’s geographic position along the St. Lawrence and on the southern route to Albany made it ideal for both trade and military protection—or incursion. For their part, Kahnawà:ke Mohawks pursued their own interests by maintaining ties with Confederacy kin and diplomatic and economic ties with English and Dutch traders.32 Intercolonial trade, whether legal in the eyes of settler authorities or not, was widespread throughout North America. For Haudenosaunee and other Indigenous people, this trade was an exercise in economic and territorial sovereignty. This trade and the sovereignty that made it possible took on particular political and diplomatic significance in the delicate balance of Haudenosaunee­ French-British relations.33 In 1727, New York provincial councilor Cad­ wallader Colden wrote in his History of the Five Indian Nations that the Mohawk at Kahnawà:ke “live chiefly by carrying & that if the trade were stopt they could not live.”34 An agent of the French Compagnie du Cas­ tor, which held the monopoly on exporting furs out of New France, fretted that the domicilié “carry away contraband beaver every day for the French” like the Desauniers.35 Both British and French officials under­ stood the intercolonial trade to be an integral part of Kahnawà:ke’s existence and tread carefully because of it. Economically and diplomatically, the Kahnawà:ke Mohawk benefit­ ted by playing New France and New York off against one another to

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ensure that settler traders met particular material needs. One of the principal articles of trade was sturdy red wool cloth, supplied by the English as strouds and the French as eclaritine.36 French authorities attempted to curb the southern trade by issuing licenses to French trad­ ers and forbidding the export of any furs except via Montreal to France, with penalties ranging from the lash to hard labor in the King’s galleys after 1716.37 Indigenous residents of Kahnawà:ke and other mission set­ tlements were immune to prosecution under these laws, because French officials feared that the enforcement of French judicial jurisdiction on the Laurentian communities would cause conflict, or worse, drive the Indigenous residents back to British-allied Confederacy settlements.38 Further complicating the French trade, in 1720, New York made sell­ ing goods for the Indian trade to New France illegal at a particularly inconvenient time for French traders. In 1722, an outbreak of plague hampered the eclaritine trade at Montpelier, France, increasing Haude­ nosaunee demand for English strouds when French supply could not meet demand.39 The same year, the Albany Commissioners of Indian Affairs lamented that “the greatest Fortunes have been got & are at this time getting by the Canada Trade which is a proof what supplies we give to the French, which increases & extends their Indian Interest, for which they wisely pay us in the Canada Trade.”40 The Albany Com­ missioners occupied a precarious place: made up of merchants who relied on the Indian trade, they were tasked with both protecting and regulating the illegal trade, which enriched many of them.41 In 1725, Albany traders John Groesback and Dirk Schuyler estimated that some 80 percent of New York furs were obtained via trade from New France.42 Groesback and Schuyler were perhaps a bit optimistic in their estimate of the trade. Evert Wendell, whose account book documented his trade with Confederacy and Laurentian Haudenosaunee customers from 1695 to 1726, obtained only 5 percent of all his furs and 16 percent of his beaver from “Canadian” Indians or Laurentian Haudenosaunee.43 Whatever its extent, the Albany-Montreal cloth trade brought Indian diplomacy into back rooms and domestic spaces. In 1714, at the end of la deuxième guerre intercoloniale, a young Frenchman found two pieces of English strouds in his rented room in Montreal. He had rented the room from widow Marie-Anne de la Marque, also known as widow de la Pipardière. Widow de la Pipardière came from a family with exten­ sive fur trade contacts, and apparently supported her fifteen children with the proceeds of her illegal trade. Once the contraband fabric was seized by the colony’s intendant, the case grew ever more complicated;

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a Kahnawà:ke Mohawk man named Thomas Laguerrier claimed the two pieces of cloth found in widow de la Pipardière’s house as his property.44 Pipardière may have bribed Laguerrier, who was immune to French prosecution, to take responsibility for the cloth. If Laguerrier took responsibility, widow de la Pipardière could both avoid punish­ ment and later recover the expensive contraband cloth. Or the cloth may have legitimately belonged to Laguerrier as part of his commission for transporting furs or a previous purchase on credit.45 Lanoullier de Boisclerc, the agent of the Compagnie du Castor, was most successful in pursuing prosecutions against French and English smugglers like widow de la Pipardière from 1715 to 1717. The expan­ sion of these prosecutions suggests that French Canadian officials were more invested in policing the Albany-Montreal trade in the wake of the previous war. Boisclerc accused Pipardière’s son of traveling to Albany with smuggled furs. This escalated the accusation of not only receiving smuggled goods but actively engaging in the trade.46 Boisclerc wrote about his concerns of the large and sprawling trade and fret­ ted that Kahnawà:ke Mohawks carried away his employer’s furs to the English every day. When the matter came to the attention of Claude de Ramezay, acting governor of the colony, either Ramezay or Boisclerc identified Laguerrier as a chief at Kahnawà:ke.47 There is little indi­ cation from other records that Thomas Laguerrier was a hoyá:neh. However, Ramezay’s belief that Laguerrier was a leader suggests the complicated politics of actually enforcing a ban on trade carried out by Indigenous allies the French had little actual control over. Pipardière herself escalated the situation even further by accusing Governor Ramezay, his son, and his sister-in-law of a convoluted scheme of murder against her son. Widow de la Pipardière’s wild accusations suggest the seriousness of the threat to her livelihood represented by the prosecution for illegal trading.48 Pipardière may have lost the two pieces of cloth which were confiscated, but in the midst of the prosecu­ tion, she was granted permission to marry Alphonse de Tonty, com­ mandant at Pontchartrain. Once resettled at Pontchartrain, Pipardière went on to engage further in questionably legal trade with Indigenous people and serve as godmother at Indigenous children’s baptisms.49 Her illicit business ties may have facilitated her religious ties and vice versa. French women like Pipardière were an integral part of the illicit trade, and connections between French and Indigenous women were the threads that tied the trade together. When the young Desauniers sisters established their home and business at Kahnawà:ke in 1726,

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Catherine Dagneau was also entering the contraband trade. Like the Desauniers, Dagneau was born to one of the most prominent fur trad­ ing families of Montreal. Dagneau inherited her husband Louis Maray de la Chauvignerie’s fur trade business after his 1725 death when she was thirty-one.50 For the next five years, Dagneau worked closely with sometimes-rival, sometimes-partner Dutch New Yorker John Henry Lydius. Lydius was an outsider allowed to work in New France by vir­ tue of his supposed Catholic conversion. By 1730, Lydius had become enough of a competitor that Dagneau set out to remove him from the Quebec illegal trade. As Dagneau set out to document Lydius’s ille­ gal trade for the purpose of ousting him, she also obliquely revealed a network of female knowledge and trade connections in the AlbanyMontreal trade. Dagneau kept a journal of illegal dealings she witnessed from fall 1729 to fall 1730. In this journal, she hoped to implicate her rival Lydius and his connections and ultimately secured his prosecution and expulsion from New France in September 1730. Dagneau’s reporting implicated herself and the Desauniers in addition to Lydius, but French authorities declined to take action against any of the women. French officials were aware of all four women’s illicit dealings as early as Dag­ neau’s report in 1730 if not earlier, but initially declined to prosecute them as Lydius was prosecuted. Lydius, significantly, was of Dutch and English origin with an Algonquian Metis wife. The Desauniers and the widows Dagneau and de la Pipardière were not marginal women. They were connected by marriage and birth to some of the colony’s most prominent marchands as well as the Mohawk leadership at Kahnawà:ke. Despite their familial connections, they were also women without a male head of household. This may have made their illicit trade both easier to overlook as inconsequentially domestic, but also may have even­ tually made them more vulnerable to prosecution. Lydius, as a suppos­ edly converted Dutch outsider from a rival English colony, lacked any of these women’s protections from birth or marriage. His Indigenous wife was not a member of the domicilié communities that Canadian offi­ cials feared offending. Lydius was ultimately expelled from New France for violating a 1727 edict that barred foreigners from trading in the colony and barred fur exports outside the colony, based on evidence brought by Dagneau.51 Lydius was sent to France first rather than back to New York on the recommendation of Governor Beauharnois and Intendant Gilles Hocquart for fear of the intelligence of Montreal that Lydius could carry back to the English.52

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In reporting on Lydius’s dealings, Dagneau recorded her observa­ tions of illegal trade around Montreal and Kahnawà:ke, both intimate and detailed because of her involvement in the trade. In June of 1730, Dagneau wrote that an Indigenous woman named Theresse told her seven canoes had left Kahnawà:ke for Albany and Oswego, carrying ten packets of beaver per canoe.53 Theresse reported to Dagneau that these canoes returned from the English outposts with printed cotton, shirts, and strouds.54 The Desauniers, resident at Kahnawà:ke since 1725, were the only French traders at the settlement. Dagneau’s oblique report suggests the quotidian connections between French and Indigenous women, the importance of Indigenous women like Theresse in circulat­ ing news and knowledge of the trade to French habitants, and the sheer volume of trade the Desauniers handled—more than a thousand beaver pelts in a single trip. A contemporary note appended to Dagneau’s jour­ nal after it entered official French records speculated that Dagneau was responsible for hundreds of bales of beaver and hundreds of pieces of English woolens changing hands.55 Despite evidence of the large num­ ber of furs Dageanu and the Desauniers shipped south with Mohawk intermediaries, Dagneau engaged in the trade until her death in 1750 at age fifty-six without facing prosecution. The Desauniers weathered a decade of suspicion and attempted prosecutions before facing the consequences. During times of peace, the Albany-Montreal trade was not so threat­ ening to imperial interests as to warrant a disruption to the delicate balance of diplomatic relations with domicilié Haudenosaunee commu­ nities. As Dagneau finished her journal in the fall of 1730, Intendant Hocquart, who presided over the highest court in New France and was responsible for enforcing the King’s edict against trading with New York, attempted to curb the Albany-Montreal trade. He did so by seiz­ ing the goods of Abenaki traders and chastising the leaders of domicilié communities. Notably, he only reported seizures of Abenaki and other Algonquian groups’ goods and cautioned that French troops would need to be stationed in the settlements to police the trade by fear alone.56 Stationing troops in New France was notoriously expensive. Hocquart’s recommendation for troops was coupled with the advice that domicilié Indians would always carry on the trade so long as prices at Albany were better. As tensions between England and France escalated in the 1740s, French officials perceived the illegal trade as ever larger and more dan­ gerous, and increased prosecutions of French settlers who engaged in

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the trade. Preventing domicilié Haudenosaunee from engaging in the trade was nearly impossible because they found the quality of French eclaritines lacking and could not be prevented from traveling as they wished or subjected to French law.57 The French solution, therefore, was to curb the trade where it could be controlled, with French merchants who engaged in the trade via Indigenous couriers. French colonial officials faced difficulty in this task in no small part due to resistance from domicilié Indians and the Jesuits. In the fall of 1740, Hocquart first attempted to remove the Desauniers from Kahnawà:ke. Hocquart asked permission of Governor Beauharnois to visit Kahnawà:ke and search the Desauniers’ shop for evidence of illicit beaver trade to New York. Hocquart cautioned that the matter would have to be handled delicately because of the trade’s consequence to the Indigenous inhabitants. The Jesuit chaplain at Kahnawà:ke, Father Pierre de Lauzon, gave Hocquart his assurances that the Desauniers did not engage in foreign trade, despite accusations that the sisters handled upwards of two thousand livres worth of beaver a year—with the aid of the Jesuits, Hocquart suspected.58 At 1737 prices, this may have equaled one to two thousand individual pelts bought from dozens or hundreds of Indigenous hunters.59 Hocquart eventually declined to pursue the matter of the Desauniers further that fall because he feared turning the Indigenous residents of Kahnawà:ke against the French and toward the British.60 When Jacques-Pierre Taffanel de La Jonquière arrived as governor of Canada in 1749, within a month he faced the difficult task of sup­ plying Kahnawà:ke with the high-quality, low-priced red cloth they required. The Mohawk at Kahnawà:ke declined La Jonquière’s request to stop their trade with the English, explaining that they would con­ tinue the trade until French cloth became as cheap as it had been before the recently concluded troisième guerre intercoloniale.61 In 1751, the Kahnawà:ke Mohawk told La Jonquière they would rather be dead than deprived of English goods and refused to name the French fac­ tors who facilitated the Montreal side of the trade. La Jonquière resorted to heavy-handed policing of the French habitants by searching their boats and homes and prosecuting French residents caught with English goods.62 After twenty years of avoiding prosecution, the Desauniers’ luck and connections ran out. In the spring of 1750, two Mohawk hodiyanéshų at Kahnawà:ke gave testimony against the Desauniers, and another hoyá:neh joined in the accusations the next month.63 In the relative

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peace between the 1748 end of King George’s War and the 1754 start of the Seven Years’ War, the Desauniers may have seemed less neces­ sary to leaders at Kahnawà:ke whose people regularly traveled south. On the strength of the hodiyanéshų’s testimony, La Jonquière accused the Desauniers of inciting the Kahnawà:ke Mohawk to “independence, even rebellion,” and summarily ordered them out of Kahnawà:ke.64 Given only four days to vacate what had been their home for most of their adult lives, the sisters did not go quietly. La Jonquière succeeded in finally ousting them from the illegal trade. The Desauniers were removed because they had lost some connections in the Compagnie des Indies and the legitimate merchants of Montreal and because the hodiyanéshų’ at Kahnawà:ke testified against them. Despite this, the Desauniers were still able to muster support from Ramezay, the inten­ dant’s office, legitimate merchants of Montreal, the King’s Attorney at Montreal, and several Jesuits (some of whom were themselves again implicated in the accusations against the Desauniers).65 Ultimately the Desauniers were ordered out of Kahnawà:ke despite their protests,66 and spent the remainder of their days in France, where they established a business in La Rochelle.67 The widow Dagneau, the widow Pipardière, and Indigenous women like Agnese and Theresse formed the social connections which tied the illegal trade together. The Desauniers used their connections to the Jesuit church at Kahnawà:ke to lend legitimate cover to their trade and perhaps facilitate social con­ nections to Indigenous women who conveyed news and goods. It was also not a coincidence that the women in New France who most notably came under scrutiny in the trade were unmarried or widows. Women of all ranks traded and did business in New France,68 but unmarried and widowed women who leveraged their family and domestic connec­ tions to conduct business were seen as more disruptive. This disrup­ tion might have been tolerated in times of peace when French officials prioritized not disrupting diplomatic relations. Shifting imperial ten­ sions proved dangerous even for women like the Desauniers, who had previously weathered scrutiny.

All One People Further south, near Albany, a similar pattern of official tolerance and restriction of women’s trade and cross-cultural connections played out. Much like the French, British imperial officials hoped that domestic connections between British subjects and Haudenosaunee allies might

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one day produce converted Haudenosaunee subjects. British imperial ambitions for their Haudenosaunee allies and neighbors were a nebu­ lous set of desires and fears informed by long-standing religious and political tensions with Catholic France. This shared font of racial, religious, economic, and military ambivalences created a patchwork of overlapping and sometimes competing British projects intended to convert, control, or profit from Haudenosaunee lands and bodies. Brit­ ish colonial officials mostly sought to secure the Six Nations’ economic, military, and political allegiance through diplomatic persuasion, but just as often were influenced by their religious ambitions and fears or personal economic interest. British settlers were more often influenced by their economic interest or religious goals, but couched their aims in political language in order to gain support through official channels. Mundane cross-cultural economic, religious, and social ties fueled British hopes for Haudenosaunee integration as British subjects. This intersection of diplomacy, religion, and trade was especially visible in the Teionontatátie valley settlements of Tiononderoge and Fort Hunter. On the frontier of Mohawk and British contact, entangle­ ment between Haudenosaunee, British, Scots, Irish, German, Dutch, and African neighbors both smoothed and complicated political rela­ tions.69 The 1711 construction of Queen Anne’s Chapel at Fort Hunter was one such point of contact and complexity. The construction of the fort and its chapel was intended to serve many goals for the Haude­ nosaunee and New York colonial leaders who requested it, the British metropolitan officials who funded it, and the Haudenosaunee and set­ tler congregants who attended it. Peter Schuyler, mayor of Albany, and the Four Indian Kings had traveled to London in 1710 to more firmly tie British imperial interests to the defense of New York and Indigenous communities against French incursion.70 Queen Anne funded the con­ struction of a fort and a chapel within its walls, hoping to build on previously spotty Dutch and Anglican conversion efforts among the Mohawk and prevent further Catholic conversions by French Jesuits.71 For the Anglican Mohawks at Tiononderoge and the nearby Dutch, English, Scots, Irish, and Palatine German settlers and enslaved Afri­ cans who attended service and baptized their children at Queen Anne’s Chapel, the spiritual community both bound their entangled commu­ nities together and reinforced ethnic and racial distinctions within this mixed congregation. After the construction of the chapel, services were held sporadically by ministers based in Schenectady and Albany, who recorded equally

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sporadic baptisms and marriages.72 The communities surrounding Fort Hunter which attended service and baptized their children at Queen Anne’s Chapel were mixed and varied, and practiced baptism and spon­ sorship in different ways. The Mohawk community of Tiononderoge, where most of the Haudenosaunee Fort Hunter congregants lived, had a long history of mixed material culture in which European goods were used and reworked to fit Indigenous contexts. Tiononderoge and other Haudenosaunee communities also had a long history of the hybrid practice of Christianity that blended Mohawk, Catholic, and Protes­ tant elements.73 As a result of a long-disputed land purchase, Dutch and English residents of Albany settled near Fort Hunter and brought enslaved Africans with them.74 In addition to these groups, in 1710 New York governor Robert Hunter sponsored the settlement of thousands of Palatine German refugees in the pine barrens of the Mohawk and Hudson Valleys in a scheme to make naval stores for the Royal Navy and provide refuge for Protestants displaced by war in Europe.75 When the pitch scheme turned sour, delegations of Palatines established friendly relations with Mohawks and settled instead on fertile farmland along Ioskóhare (Schoharie Creek), angering Dutch and English elites in Albany and Governor Hunter, all of whom had begun speculating on the land along the Ioskóhare despite Mohawk objections.76 By 1753, the Pala­ tines and Mohawks petitioned the New York governor together to make an allowance for the Palatines to remain on the land they had settled. The petition argued that “we are on[e] church and we will not part. We are grown up together and we intend to live our lifetime together as Brothers.”77 After 1718, Ulster Scots and Protestant Irish settled in the area as well, including one Johnson, who arrived in 1738 to admin­ ister land his uncle had bought in the area and began parlaying the location into profitable trade with his Mohawk neighbors.78 In addi­ tion, some Mahicans moved into the area seeking agricultural work with European landowners or as indentured servants.79 The valley of the Ioskóhare became a cosmopolitan landscape where varied ethnic groups defined themselves in relation to one another. In this mixed landscape, people from two Indigenous nations with different relations to settler communities, European ethnic groups at odds with one another, and enslaved Africans all attended church and had their children baptized at Queen Anne’s Chapel. The prominence of Peek, an illiterate Dutch woman, as an intercultural go-between, as well as Mohawk women’s roles as connectors in the context of baptismal

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sponsorships suggest that in Haudenosaunee territories, women’s cross-cultural trade defined the social borders of their communities in ways elided by the model of male intercultural brokers or Indigenous women’s fur trade intermarriages.80 Distinct from the creation of mari­ tal kinship ties as in the Great Lakes and midcontinent, these kinship ties of godparentage within the context of Anglican baptism reinforced Haudenosaunee creation of kinship ties. Godparentage mirrored the Haudenosaunee diplomatic metaphor of family creation through adop­ tion on the scale of the household rather than the nation.81 The congregation at Fort Hunter grouped together in two large clusters, with Mohawk families on one side and settler families on the other, bridged by Peek and her Mohawk and settler contacts.82 Peek and her husband Joseph Clement witnessed the Anglican baptisms of four Indigenous children between 1735 and 1740, including two children of Mohawk interpreter Michael Montour, and the Clements’ adult chil­ dren, Mary, Elizabeth, John, and Lewis sponsored Mahican children.83 The Clements shared godparentage ties with Johnson soon after John­ son’s arrival in New York in 1738, when they all witnessed the baptism of the son of Powel and Elizabeth, who were enslaved by Johnson. Two years later, Peek sponsored Johnson’s daughter Ann by his common-law wife Catherine Weisenberg in 1740.84 The Clements were established traders in the area where Johnson sought to establish his business, and establishing kinship ties with them may have helped Johnson establish his own business. The ties between the Johnson and Clements families soured soon after. In 1743, someone anonymously accused Johnson of selling liquor to Mohawk customers and illegally trading with the French. Johnson was served with a summons by the Albany Commissioners for Indian Affairs “To make oath of the full Quantity of Strowds or other Cloaths Rum or other distilled Liquors you have Sent Carried or transported for Sale to the Indians or french.”85 Johnson’s trading expeditions into Haudenosaunee territories and his establishment of a store at his home near Fort Hunter had ruffled the feathers of established Albany traders, who were also the Commissioners for Indian Affairs. Johnson, himself not impartial, wrote bitterly that the Commission­ ers’ “Soul and Blood are money.”86 The accusation against Johnson may have even come from the Clements themselves, as established traders who wanted to make trouble for upstart rival Johnson. Accusations of liquor selling were common among rival traders and may have some­ times even been close to the truth. As early as 1720, almost twenty

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years before Johnson arrived in New York, Mohawk hoyá:neh Hendrick accused Clement and three others of selling rum to Indians “so plenti­ fully as if it were water out of a fountain.”87 Johnson, who later became one of Hendrick’s close allies, leveled the same accusation against the Clements throughout the 1740s and 1750s. The Desauniers leveled accusations of liquor selling against their rival Lydius, and Johnson regularly accused business and diplomatic rivals of selling alcohol to Indians even as he himself carried on a brisk liquor trade and served alcohol to Indigenous diplomatic guests.88 Johnson eventually obtained a 1748 order from New York governor George Clinton that the Clements were to cease selling rum to Indi­ ans and the English soldiers stationed at Fort Hunter. An acrimonious exchange of letters between Johnson and Clement about the ban fol­ lowed.89 In 1751 Johnson complained that the Clements continued to keep a tavern “within twenty yards” of Johnson’s house.90 It is unclear if the Mohawk and Mahican families for whom the Clements stood as godparents were also customers at their tavern. The Clements’ tavern brought them into contact with the many contentious ethnic communi­ ties at Fort Hunter. Their eldest son Jacobus, born around the time the Clements began selling rum and seventeen when they stood as godpar­ ents for a Mohawk child for the first time, went on to become a trader and Mohawk translator himself.91 His family’s connections with their Mohawk neighbors were sustained over a long period. Peek’s prominence as a sponsor at Fort Hunter is suggestive of her wider role in the Fort Hunter community despite Johnson’s unflat­ tering views of her. Peek and Clement were the only people with connections to both the Haudenosaunee and settler portions of the congregation, and Peek appeared much more frequently as a baptis­ mal sponsor than did her husband Joseph. Although Peek’s visibility in the Fort Hunter network of relations was unique, her role as a female intermediary who blended business and fictive kinship was not. Earlier in the century, Wendell’s younger sister Hester maintained a separate account book of trade with Indigenous customers by the time she was fifteen, and their mother Ariaantje maintained separate accounts with multiple Indigenous women and men.92 In New France, women like the Desauniers traded along a spectrum of legality with Indigenous families whose children they sponsored for baptism.93 Ariaantje Wen­ dell and her sister also sponsored multiple Haudenosaunee children in the Dutch Reformed Church, suggesting an overlap between women who participated in intercultural trade and women who created crosscultural fictive kinship ties via baptism.94

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When Johnson first arrived in New York as a twenty-three-year-old proxy for his uncle Peter Warren, he quickly established an indepen­ dent trade with nearby Mohawk, which soured Johnson’s relations with both established Albany traders and his uncle.95 Johnson also had his own daily cross-cultural interactions, but his record keeping and myth making have shaped his legacy. Johnson positioned himself as an intercultural diplomat to the Mohawk and other Indigenous groups, and by the Seven Years’ War, nearly 10 percent of his reported expenses per month were for stationary, ferrying messages, and other communica­ tion expenses.96 This vigorous self-promotion first secured him a lucra­ tive contract to supply the trade at Oswego, then saw him appointed the “Colonel of the Six Nations” in 1746, and finally secured him a baronetcy and the position of British Superintendent of Indian Affairs in 1756.

And under One King As tensions escalated between Britain and France in the years leading to the Seven Years’ War, the movement of women like Agnese and the connections of women like Peek became ever more worrisome to British imperial officials. Among these was the rising Johnson, who used con­ cerns about these women’s intercultural connections to consolidate his own bureaucratic power. Women like Peek helped tie several Mohawk families to the British Anglican congregation at Fort Hunter, but dur­ ing the Seven Years’ War, Dutch residents of New York came under sus­ picion from the anxious British military hierarchy. In late 1756, a Dutch-heritage officer of the New York colonial militia went hunting with an Onondaga acquaintance, a fairly common interac­ tion. The Onondaga man’s knowledge of ethnic tensions within colonial New York proved unsettling enough for the officer to report to Johnson. “The Indian knowing him to be of Dutch extract, began to speak words reflecting on the English, and told Schuyler [the officer], it would be good that the Albany people or Dutch with the Indians should join and drive the English out of the country. Schuyler says he was surprised to hear the fellow talk in that manner, and turning to him said, we are all one people and under one King.”97 Colonel Thomas Butler commented darkly in 1757, “if any troubles should arise between the Six Nations and us, it will in great manner or entirely be owing to bad, ignorant people of a different extraction from the English, that makes themselves too buisy telling idle stories. I fear we have too many of those, who speak the indian tongue more or less, and don’t consider the consequence of saying, we

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are Dutch and they are English.”98 Statements like this revealed Brit­ ish anxiety that the European residents of New York and the Haudeno­ saunee were not, in fact, “all one people and under one King.” By the 1750s British officials were also increasingly suspicious of the loyalties of the Palatines, small tenant farmers who frequently sided with their Haudenosaunee landlords in disputes against wealth­ ier Dutch and British land speculators.99 In early 1757, the Earl of Loudoun, Commander-in-Chief of British forces in North America, reported that the Palatines had sent a message to the governor of New France via an Oneida messenger. Loudoun highlighted what he saw as the dangers of the free Haudenosaunee movement through their own territories—and across European-demarcated borders. Supposedly a group of prominent Palatine settlers had written to the French gover­ nor of New France “that as they looked upon themselves to be in danger as well as the Six Nations they were determined to live or die by them, and therefore begged the protection of the French.”100 Both the Onei­ das and Palatines claimed to know nothing of the letter. Rumors of Palatine disloyalty flew nonetheless. An English officer wrote to John­ son that he had heard rumors of the Palatines writing “to desire the french not to do them any hurt, as they were no more white people, but oneidas [sic] and that their blood was mixed with the indians.”101 Given such tensions even among supposed British subjects, the Albany-Montreal fur trade was not only illicit in British eyes but trea­ sonous. Before the outbreak of hostilities with New France in 1754, the movement of Haudenosaunee traders between Indigenous com­ munities along the Kaniatarowanénhne and Teionontatátie merely aggravated British officials. After the outbreak of the Seven Years’ War, Haudenosaunee trade with New France represented a possible avenue for the nominally neutral Six Nations to be seduced away from neutral­ ity or British alliance. It also represented a route by which the Palatine and Dutch residents of Albany could enrich themselves by arming Brit­ ain’s French enemies. The importance of New York and the Haudenosaunee-facilitated fur trade to British imperial finances did nothing to sweeten British offi­ cial attitudes toward the problem.102 During the first quarter of the eighteenth century, New York relied on fur exports for a third of its total export revenues, and fur remained a significant portion of the colony’s exports for the duration of British rule, with beaver making up the majority of fur returns.103 As in the seventeenth century, beaver exports out of New York were largely determined by Haudenosaunee

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Figure 4.1. Value of beaver (shown by the black line) exported from New York in British pounds sterling on the London market, 1700–1773.

Beaver exports in Pounds Sterling

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trade. Haudenosaunee interest and ability to travel to Albany remained a primary determining factor in the colony’s economic health. Due to fluctuations in the price of beaver on the London market and the secret nature of the Albany-Montreal trade that brought Canadian furs down to be exported out of New York, the eighteenth-century New York beaver exports cannot be as strongly tied to changes in Haude­ nosaunee concerns as the seventeenth-century exports.104 Eighteenthcentury exports out of New York were trapped from a larger geographic area. The trade involved more Indigenous groups, and beaver pelts were not valued the same per pelt year after year, meaning the rough vol­ ume of beaver exports out of New York did not correlate as strongly with Haudenosaunee purchasing power as in the seventeenth century. Haudenosaunee individuals facilitated the Albany-Montreal trade and trapped far outside the bounds of New York, Upper and Lower Can­ ada. They also received diplomatic gifts and pelts in trade from west­ ern Indigenous groups who moved through their territories to trade at British centers, including settlements in New York and Pennsylvania. Although the total New York exports cannot be ascribed to Haudeno­ saunee actions alone, the overall volume of the trade can give a rough idea of Haudenosaunee involvement in the fur trade during this period. Rather than decreasing sharply from seventeenth-century returns, eighteenth-century exports maintained the moderate levels of the late seventeenth century, decreasing gradually, punctuated by periods of conflict. Like seventeenth-century exports, beaver exports in the eigh­ teenth century saw a great deal of volatility due to geopolitical conflicts as shown in figure 4.1. The periods of lowest or zero exports from New York correlated with Queen Anne’s War (1702–1713), King George’s War (1744–1748), and The Seven Years’ War (1754–1763), and epidem­ ics in Haudenosaunee communities. During these wars of imperial succession, Great Britain and France vied for control of the American continent and other overseas holdings. Exports out of New York plum­ meted in part due to the dangers of shipping for British Americans and in part due to the dangers of travel for Haudenosaunee hunters, consumers, and couriers like Agnese. As in the seventeenth century, European conflicts spilled over into Haudenosaunee territories and prevented safe travel, and Indigenous conflicts diverted hunters and traders to war. Haudenosaunee conflicts with the Catawbas, Cherokees, and other southern Indigenous and set­ tler groups in the Chesapeake throughout the late 1720s and early 1730s greatly affected the New York trade by drawing Haudenosaunee men to war rather than sending them to hunt and trap.105 Outbreaks of epidemic

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disease in Haudenosaunee territories during peaceful years further affected the Atlantic market. New York remained dependent on Haude­ nosaunee trappers and traders for its export revenue. Conditions within Haudenosaunee territories continued to determine Haudenosaunee participation in the trade, and British officials very much resented it. British officials also resented Haudenosaunee trade with French Canada and Albany’s trade with “French Indians” or Laurentian Haude­ nosaunee. New York provincial councilor and historian Cadwallader Colden gave voice to British anxieties surrounding the trade when he wrote to Governor William Burnet that “it is well known how valuable the Fur Trade of America is, but likewise as to the safety of all the Brit­ ish Colonies in North America.”106 The Indian trade and the safety of British North America were inextricably linked, with Haudenosaunee ability to trade freely and Albany traders’ professed neutrality at the heart of the problem for British officials. To Colden, writing in 1724 during a period of peace between New France and the British colonies, the solution was to woo Indian allies to the British with favorable trade terms. “It cannot therefore be denied that it is only necessary for the Traders of New York to apply themselves heartily to this Trade in order to bring it wholly into their own hands for in every thing besides diligence & Industry and enduring fatigues the English have much the advantage of the French and all the Indians will certainly buy where they can at the cheapest rate.”107 However, dur­ ing times of active hostilities, this diplomatically inflected trade was viewed as less beneficial to imperial interests. In 1744, New York gover­ nor Clinton complained soon after taking office that traders in Albany “hope as Dutchmen to have continued a neutrality with the French Indians as they did last war” despite the outbreak of King George’s War that year.108 Clinton unsuccessfully sought to enforce a ban on the Canadian trade carried out under Dutch neutrality.109 British officials believed the French to be unable to conduct Indian diplomacy without British manufactures,110 a belief perpetuated by Indigenous insistence on free movement across fictive Europeandefined borders. In 1757, Johnson complained bitterly of Laurentian Haudenosaunee and other Indigenous groups who moved through Haudenosaunee territories with “furs, in order to sell to our people for wampum and silverworks, two articles, which the French formerly supplied themselves with from Albany, the one essential for carrying on all Indian negotiations, and the other an article much required amongst the Indians. As the old road to Albany is now obstructed by our forts, I suppose the French are endeavoring to open a supply for

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their necessities by the way of this river.”111 Although distasteful at the best of times, during times of war, the interest of Dutch, Palatine, and Indigenous individuals to profit from the British inability to regulate the Indigenous movement took on a more sinister cast in Johnson’s eyes. In the same letter, Johnson warned, “there is one Ury Weaver a German who lives at Burnets Field, and who I have abundant Reason to believe a very bad man. An Indian has reported, this fellow sent a quan­ tity of wampum last fall to Canada by an Indian in the French interest and I am under no doubt, but if in his power, he will eagerly catch at this French trade.”112 Like Peek and Clement, Weaver lived near Haude­ nosaunee communities and engaged in frequent small-scale trade with his neighbors. Johnson seized on the intersection of trade and diplo­ macy to shore up his own position and elbow out rivals. Small-time trade tolerated during peacetime quickly took on a treasonous cast to British officials convinced of the connection between their economic, political, and military interests in Indian affairs. The presence of French-allied Haudenosaunee groups at Kahnawà:ke and Akwasasne near Montreal, and their continued contact with other Haudenosaunee communities and Dutch and German traders at Albany, did nothing to allay British fears of inter-Haudenosaunee trade. Domestic connections like Peek’s and the Desauniers’ were feared because they could seduce away what little support there could be had from the Six Nations. As the largest military power on the east­ ern seaboard other than the British Army, and considerably more capa­ ble on North American terrain, the thought of the main body of the Six Nations being seduced into the French sphere of influence as had the Laurentian Haudenosaunee sent shivers through British official correspondence. Writing of the Kahnawà:ke Mohawk, New York Indian agent Peter Wraxall lamented in 1755, “they are fugitives from the 6 nations whom the French policy and priesthood have debauched from us, aided by our former negligence and ill management in Indian affairs.” Wraxall feared the damage caused by the free movement of the Kahnawà:ke Mohawk, who “fight us with our own guns.” He blamed the Dutch at Albany, who had “but one maxim of conduct—that private profit is the highest and only motive of action.”113 Unable to control nominally British subjects or borders unrecognized by Indigenous people, British government officials contemplated the very real possibility that Haude­ nosaunee self-interest could determine global political and religious control.

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These economic tensions fed British fear and suspicion of the Six Nations once hostilities broke open with New France in 1754. Despite the Six Nations’ neutrality for most of the war and occasional fighting alongside British regular and colonial militia forces, British military officials remained suspicious of the Six Nations. In 1757, John Camp­ bell, Earl of Loudoun and Commander-in-Chief, wrote to Johnson that the Mohawk and Oneida were “wavering in their good intentions towards us . . . they must either be friends or foes.” Loudoun doubted even more the goodwill of the Seneca and British ability to do any­ thing about them should they turn hostile; Seneca territories were “indeed at present too far removed from us to be come at” should they decide to side with the French. Haudenosaunee mobility in the AlbanyMontreal trade and what British officials perceived as improper friendli­ ness between Indigenous people and unruly Dutch and German subjects also fueled these fears. Loudoun warned Johnson to “keep a watchful eye on the Germans and Dutch that you suspect from the informations you have received of carrying on a treasonable correspondence with the Enemy, by means of the Indians.”114 The prosaic daily interactions that smoothed the way for trade and underlay diplomatic ties created a great deal of anxiety for imperial officials tasked with bringing order out of the unruly mess of prosaic daily interactions. European efforts at religious conversion created connections between European and Haudenosaunee women that those women then used to facilitate illicit cross-border, inter-imperial trade. This trade depended in large part on women’s connections, both between Laurentian Haudenosaunee and other Haudenosaunee women and between Euro­ pean and Haudenosaunee women. In both New France and New York, shared religious spaces facilitated cross-cultural economic contacts. The illicit trade enriched European men in New France and New York. The trade and the connections between women which it relied on were increasingly viewed as subversive and dangerous as tensions between France and England escalated in the 1740s. The perceived danger of these connections fueled the professionalization and formalization of Indian diplomacy by both the British and the French. Haudenosaunee women remained vital to intercultural diplomacy because Europeans could not displace them without angering their Indigenous allies. As a consequence, British efforts to remake Haudenosaunee communities and people came to focus on remaking women’s labor and roles in their communities.

C ha p te r 5

Gender, Race, and Civility in Eighteenth-Century Education

In August 1761, after the French surrender of Canada and at the peak of British imperial power on the North American continent, three teenage boys went away to school. Between fifteen and eighteen years old, the boys left Mohawk country headed southeast, each riding a horse and “prepared to return in haste, if there should be occasion.”1 Joseph, Negyes, and Center followed the Ka’nón:no (Hudson River) part of the way south, walking rather than paddling on account of the horses. The land flattened as they passed Hartford, Connecticut, but gave way to gently rolling hills more remi­ niscent of Mohawk country as they approached the hamlet of Lebanon Crank from the north. The rolling terrain may have felt familiar, but the corn fields of Mohawk country had few of Lebanon’s sheep and cattle herds that supported the white settlements of the surround­ ing area, the eastern coastal cities, and the plantations of the British Caribbean. Approaching Lebanon Crank, Joseph, Negyes, and Center found their destination on a low hill, the highest point on the town green. Other than sheep grazed overnight on the green, they passed little except quiet homes and livestock. Later during their stay in Lebanon Crank, they would get acquainted (too well, their teacher thought) with

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the village taverns and (not well enough) with the Congregationalist church that dominated the green. Joseph spoke English, Center and Negyes spoke none, and Leba­ non Crank’s Connecticut Congregationalists did not speak Mohawk. Town residents probably guessed their destination from their clothing, if nothing else—Negyes and Center arrived bare-legged wearing little more than shirts and breechcloths, and Joseph was only a little more clothed with leggings over his bare legs (which even so left his upper thighs still shockingly exposed).2 Although they traveled a further distance to get there than most, the first Haudenosaunee students to enroll at Eleazar Wheelock’s school were not so surprising to the white residents of Lebanon Crank after a few years of seeing other Indigenous students come and go. Other than its relative prominence of place on the green, Joseph, Negyes, and Center probably found nothing remarkable about their des­ tination. It was a clapboard house with two stories and two chimneys like many they had passed, and not so terribly different than the ones they had seen in Albany or the stone house Joseph’s sister Molly and her husband lived in. An enslaved Black man worked the fields stretching away from the house, and an enslaved Black woman milked a cow and hung laundry between the house and its barn. The house was thronged with white, Black, and Indigenous children and young adults, an artifi­ cial and slightly distorted semblance of the extended family longhouses Joseph, Negyes, and Center had been raised in. Another building sat slightly apart from the house and outbuildings. Wide as a longhouse but low and short, it sat downhill of the house, outside the domestic scope but within clear observation of the house and village church. This was the school the boys had been sent to enroll in. Moor’s Indian Charity School, run by New Light Congregationalist minister Eleazar Wheelock, was intended to be the center of a sweep­ ing effort to transform Haudenosaunee territories into a bulwark of British, Christian evangelism and reform of the North American continent. Moor’s was just one of several British American efforts to educate Indigenous people in Christianity and material civility in the mid-eighteenth century. Wheelock’s efforts to educate Indigenous missionaries revealed both the central importance of converting the Haudenosaunee to British imperial imaginings and the reliance of white masculinity on both free and enslaved women’s labor. The founding and transformation of Moor’s from Indian boarding school to Dartmouth

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College represented the progression of British American imaginings of Indians, and especially the Haudenosaunee, from potential partners in the British empire to inherently incompatible others.

Command of All the Natives of North America British efforts to educate Indigenous people in Christianity and civil­ ity had a long history in New England, with efforts renewed after the evangelical revival or Great Awakening of the mid-eighteenth cen­ tury.3 In the tense years following King George’s War (1744–48), New England ministers, donors, and governments turned to the possibil­ ity of converting Haudenosaunee nations. They hoped that the Six Nations would be a buffer against the repeated attacks by the French and their Catholic Indian allies that had wracked English communities and stolen away children like Eunice Williams over the course of the preceding century (see map in figure 5.1). Wheelock’s Indian Charity School was not the only New England school established to convert the Haudenosaunee, but it was the most financially stable and longest lasting. During the upheaval of King George’s War, minister John Sergeant established a school at Stockbridge, Massachusetts, for the education of the local Stockbridge Mahicans. Sergeant also invited the enrollment of Mohawk, Oneida, and Tuscarora children as well. Unlike previous efforts in New England that focused on the conversion of coastal New England Indigenous groups, the school at Stockbridge was intended to “open the way for the Propagation of Chris­ tianity to the remotest Tribes” by educating Haudenosaunee students. Sergeant may have been inspired in part by his correspondence with the Anglican Henry Barclay at Fort Hunter. Sergeant wrote in support of Barclay to the Boston Commissioners of Indian Affairs when Barclay appealed for funds to support a school for the Mohawk at Fort Hunter. Barclay was optimistic about his twenty to thirty Mohawk pupils, and might have inspired Sergeant’s ambitions after Barclay left Fort Hunter to be named rector of Trinity Church in New York City.4 A contemporary history of Sergeant’s mission published by Sam­ uel Hopkins in 1753 argued that the Mohawk “have in great measure the command of all the natives of North America. The French have therefore used their utmost endeavors all along to engage them in their interest; and by their missionaries, who are constantly among them, they have drawn off many of them to settle at Canada . . . from whom, in time of war with the French, the British provinces in North America,

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especially the Massachusetts and New Hampshire, suffer much.” Ser­ geant’s school at Stockbridge was intended to be a response to what many British saw as successful French mission efforts that drew away the neutral Haudenosaunee and converted them into hostile Catholic raiders. The Mohawk, therefore, presented both a threat and an oppor­ tunity to British Christians like Sergeant and later Wheelock. They believed the Mohawk were in “command of all the natives of North America.”5 Given this supposed control, British Christians believed that Mohawk conversion by the French could give way in domino effect to French control of the continent. Conversely, Mohawk conversion by Congregationalists like Sergeant was hoped to turn the tide on nearly six decades of war with New France. New Englanders hoped the Haude­ nosaunee could conclusively protect the vulnerable colonies in a way that English military efforts to date had been unable to. Sergeant passed away in 1749, but his successor, the famous revivalist Jonathan Edwards, continued his efforts. Edwards traveled to Albany in 1751 to meet with representatives of the Mohawk and the Oneida. To support the Haudenosaunee education efforts, a London-based mis­ sionary society, the New England Company, granted Edwards’s school £200. Between July 1751 and February 1753, somewhere between twenty and ninety Mohawk, Oneida, and Tuscarora people of all ages took up residence in Stockbridge, including families who traveled with their children who enrolled at Stockbridge.6 The school ultimately col­ lapsed within two years due to conflict between Sergeant’s widow and Edwards, who accused the widow Sergeant of appropriating school funds for her own use and neglecting her duties as mistress of the girls’ school.7 Haudenosaunee parents began withdrawing their children less than a year after Edwards’s 1751 visit to Albany. By early 1753 there were no more Haudenosaunee students enrolled, and the school crumbled. Even if the school had weathered the infighting, Haudenosaunee stu­ dents and their families from the outset defied Sergeant and Edwards’s plans for conversion and pursued their own goals. Sergeant’s origi­ nal plan for the boarding school was to remove Indigenous children from the influence of their parents to “change their whole Habit of thinking and acting; and raise them, as far as possible into the Condi­ tion of a civil industrious and polish’d People.”8 A later history of the school asserted that noted Mohawk hoyá:neh Hendrick Theyanoguin accompanied his family to the school. If true, this suggests that Haudenosaunee families viewed the school at Stockbridge not as a sin­ gular experience for their children but as a diplomatic affair for the

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community and family. The families’ willingness to relocate along with their children put Haudenosaunee mobility through colonial spaces to use in pursuit of literacy and language acquisition. It also maintained family and community ties in contradiction to the goals of educators like Sergeant and Edwards. This mobility would prove a frustration to future educators as well. As the Stockbridge school collapsed in 1753, Edwards attempted to make arrangements for the education of the few remaining students. He wrote to friend and colleague Eleazar Wheelock to ask him to take two of the Stockbridge students. By that time Wheelock had started his own Indian boarding school with similar goals, which initially enrolled two Mohegan students.9 Wheelock had established a grammar school for white students in 1734 to supplement his income as a minister. As the conflict in the Ohio country came to a head in the summer of 1754, Wheelock expanded the school with the addition of Mohegans John Pumshire and Jacob Wooley in December and solicited funds from local noteworthy Colonel Joshua Moor to support further expansion.10 Conceived under the looming shadow of renewed war with New France, Moor’s Indian Charity School was founded explicitly in response to the conflict over the Ohio country. In a pamphlet pub­ lished in 1763 to solicit further funds from donors in Britain, Whee­ lock wrote that “if one half [the money] which has been, for so many Years past expended in building Forts, manning and supporting them, had been prudently laid out in supporting faithful Missionaries, and Schoolmasters among them the instructed and civilized Party would have been a far better Defense than all our expensive Fortresses, and prevented the laying waste so many Towns and Villages.”11 Wheelock further argued that Sergeant’s mission at Stockbridge had the direct result of reducing Indian attacks in Massachusetts during the late war. Written to a British audience weary of nearly a decade of war in Europe and abroad, and the heavy tax burden that went with it, the pamphlet helped Wheelock’s former pupil Samson Occom solicited more than £12,000 sterling on a fundraising trip in Britain.12 Wheelock expressed the frustrations of many British and New Englanders with the expen­ sive and ineffective frontier forts, arguing that Sergeant’s earlier efforts had halted incursions from the Kahnawà:ke Mohawk and other Frenchallied Indigenous groups. To Wheelock and others, the conversion of the Haudenosaunee had vast geopolitical ramifications, as well as spiritual ones. Writing to the commissioner of the New England Company to solicit further funds in

Haudenosaunee territories and selected settlements circa 1750.

Source: Map by the author after MacLeitch, Imperial Entanglements, 49 and Preston, Texture of Contact, 17. See glossary for sources of place names.

Figure 5.1.

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1756, Wheelock put it more succinctly. God had permitted “the Sav­ ages from year to year to make Such Ravages, and Spoil of us,” and a school could bind the Six Nations to British interests both culturally and spiritually. Wheelock promised to put an end to the war in New England.13 Although he rarely referred to any of the Six Nations by name, either in reference to students or in pamphlets or letters detailing his progress and mission, Wheelock wrote incessantly of “the western nations,” a term that he used exclusively to denote the Haudenosaunee until 1770, when he began to use the term for other nations to the west of the Seneca as well as the Haudenosaunee.14 After 1761, when the first Haudenosaunee students arrived, Six Nations students comprised at least one-quarter of the twelve to thirty students in attendance. Haude­ nosaunee enrollments reached a high point of twelve students out of thirty-one in 1765, or about 40 percent of students in attendance.15 Although Haudenosaunee attendance was never high in absolute num­ bers, as a relative proportion of all students in attendance, Haudeno­ saunee students made up the single largest group at the school. Wheelock’s efforts took on much larger geopolitical significance than they might otherwise have because of the moment of British reevaluation of the American continent during the upheaval of the Seven Years’ War. As Sergeant and Wheelock’s letters indicate, British American anxiety over the military power of the Haudenosaunee and their ability to rally coalitions of other Indigenous groups escalated in the years leading up to the Seven Years’ War.16 They viewed the nomi­ nally converted but materially unchanged Six Nations Haudenosaunee as no different from their Catholic and French-allied kin the Lauren­ tian Haudenosaunee. Like British and French officials earlier in the century, these missionaries viewed the Haudenosaunee as vulnerable to being seduced away, and fundamentally savage, if still possible to redeem. As the nearest and most present military power in eastern North America, Haudenosaunee military and diplomatic neutrality represented a lingering challenge to British imperial authority on the continent. Whether or not the Haudenosaunee could or would have mounted an offensive against the British colonies did not matter to these anxieties. British American concerns lingered on the possibil­ ity rather than the probability that the Haudenosaunee would remain unconverted, uncivil, and ultimately hostile toward British settlement of the continent.17 What British Americans viewed as Haudenosaunee partial material conversion only served as evidence of their recalcitrance and tenacious hold on their sovereign lands.

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Massachusetts particularly invested in efforts to convert the Haude­ nosaunee. The Massachusetts General Assembly provided tuition, room, and board for as many Haudenosaunee students as Wheelock could recruit, but only for Haudenosaunee students. The General Assembly explicitly refused to fund Indigenous students drawn from coastal New England Indigenous communities and did not provide funding for Wheelock’s efforts at all until the first Mohawk students arrived in 1761.18 As the subject of frequent incursions from New France and still fearful of Indian attacks during and after the Seven Years’ War, Mas­ sachusetts had an interest in creating and maintaining a friendly and politically malleable Indigenous buffer of the Six Nations Haudeno­ saunee. Like many British, they viewed material conversion as the key to religious and political conversion. Wheelock’s efforts were supported largely through charity, but fun­ draising efforts were at times rocky. Some correspondents argued that sending English schoolmasters would be cheaper than boarding Indig­ enous students, and more efficient besides. “If the Design is to Edu­ cate only a few that shall be qualified to be missionaries, schoolmasters etc—we apprehend Indians will not be so proper for these purposes as persons selected from among the English.”19 Others, including the Massachusetts General Assembly, later complained of the cost of board­ ing students. They argued that Wheelock spent more on teaching one Indigenous boy to speak English than it would cost to send two white scholars to college. The fear of Indian savagery that made Wheelock’s conversion attempts imperative likewise made Indian charity efforts suspect. According to one (possibly apocryphal) account, a church col­ lection plate passed for the support of the school in 1763 came back with only a bullet and gunflint, part of the broader increase in racial tensions that the Seven Years’ War had exacerbated or left unresolved.20 When Wheelock appealed to Lord Dartmouth for funding in 1766, he made the military and diplomatic benefits of Haudenosaunee edu­ cation explicit. “The nations will not make war with us while their chil­ dren, and especially the children of their chiefs are with us. They can’t resist the evidence we hereby give them of the sincerity of our inten­ tions towards them. They know their sons are made better by being with us.”21 Wheelock intended Haudenosaunee education to be both a carrot and a stick. The students were to tie the British and Haudeno­ saunee together culturally, but also serve as hostages against Haude­ nosaunee involvement in Indian conflicts like the recently concluded Pontiac’s War. Much like earlier French efforts that traded the education

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of hodiyanéshų’s daughters at the Ursuline convent for missionaries’ safe passage through Haudenosaunee territories, Wheelock sought to use the education of hodiyanéshų’s sons as a shield against future attack in more ways than one.

The Method of Conducting This School By the time Wheelock’s first Haudenosaunee students, Joseph, Center, and Negyes arrived in August 1761, the school had expanded consid­ erably from its beginnings as a supplement to Wheelock’s ministerial salary. At times in the early days, white tuition-paying students out­ numbered Indigenous students. When one such student David McClure arrived in 1764, “the objects which presented were a number of Indian and English youth playing on the spacious green before Mr. Wheelock’s house and the School House.”22 By design, the school and students’ daily routines revolved around the domestic space of the Wheelock home. Like Sergeant, Wheelock located the school in Connecticut away from Indigenous students’ families. He did so in order to remove students from “the pernicious influence of Indian examples,”23 where young Indigenous men could be introduced to the habits and modes of civilized life. The curriculum originally revolved around Greek, Hebrew, Latin, arithmetic, and prayer. The method of conducting this school has been .  .  . they are obliged to be clean and decently dressed and be ready to attend Prayers before Sunrise in the Fall and Winter and at 6 o clock in the Summer. A portion of Scripture is read by several of the Seniors of them . . . After Prayers and a short Time for their Diver­ sion, the School begins with Prayer about 9 and ends at 12 and again at 2 and ends at 5 o clock with Prayer. . . . Afterwards they apply to their studies etc They attend the public worship and have a pew devoted to their Use in the house of God.24 The “pew devoted to their Use” for the Indigenous boys was located in the church’s gallery, while the handful of Indigenous girls who later attended were seated on the ground floor to the rear of the women’s side.25 Although integrated into the life of the church and required to attend, the Indigenous students were visibly set apart even as they were brought into the space of the congregation. Religion and prayer struc­ tured their day, both within the domestic space of the Wheelock home and the schoolhouse supervised by Wheelock himself or a hired white

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schoolmaster. Wheelock’s main critique of the long-standing French Catholic missions was that he believed the French priests and convents had never attempted to change Indian modes of subsistence or gen­ dered labor. At Moor’s, Wheelock believed that the space the body inhabited determined the soul’s readiness for conversion. It was, therefore, essen­ tial to convert students materially as well as spiritually. The women of Wheelock’s household were vital to this most basic first step toward conversion, just as they had been at the Ursuline convent school. The school’s first benefactor Colonel Moor provided “two Acres of Pas­ turing, a small House and Shop,” and Wheelock’s second wife Mary Brinsmead Wheelock provided food, lodging, washing, and clothing.26 McClure fondly remembered that the “qualifications of a missionary were thought necessary, such as to lodge hard, and live on plain and wholesome fare. We reposed on Straw Beds in Bunks and generally dined on a boiled dish and an Indian pudding” made by Mrs. Wheelock or other women in the household.27 Occom’s Montauk brother-in-law David Fowler, who attended Wheelock’s school and later went on mis­ sion to Oneida country, wrote that he missed “Mrs. Wheelock’s Bread and Milk, little sweet Cake and good boild Meat.”28 The domestic space in which the students lodged was intended to prepare them for life as missionaries. This preparation depended on the domestic labor of Mary Whee­ lock, her daughters, and other women in the household to provide food and reproductive labor. The domestic labor of the Wheelock house­ hold was substantial. At the height of the school’s enrollments in 1764, when McClure arrived, thirty white and Indigenous students attended school and many of them, including the hired schoolmaster, boarded with the Wheelocks. In 1755, Eleazar Wheelock’s two eldest daughters by his first marriage, Theodora and Ruth, were young wives with their own households to supervise by the time students arrived. This left their stepmother Mary to run a household with five of her own chil­ dren still at home, or seven when her stepsons Ralph and Eleazar were home from college or mission work. The older girls, Mary and Abigail, were thirteen and ten in 1761 when the first Haudenosaunee students arrived, while Mary’s youngest child James was barely walking. Mary Wheelock had full hands and long days. She might have hired local white women and girls to assist her, Mary, and Abigail with the house­ hold labor, but Wheelock’s otherwise copious financial records only rarely recorded it.

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The work of materially converting Indigenous students was added to the labor of this growing household. The initial transformation from “savage” to scholar was one of women’s work. As with captives who were integrated into Indigenous communities and an earlier gen­ eration of students at the Ursuline convent school, the material work of conversion was women’s work. When students arrived at school, they were introduced to “Decency and Cleanliness” in the form of a bath and a clean suit of clothes, all the products of women’s labor car­ rying water and sewing clothes in the household.29 Some students, like Center, grew ill after arriving and needed nursing. Mary and Abigail probably learned household management by assisting their mother with at least some of this work. Wheelock kept a careful tally of the household work provided to students and recorded the cost of laun­ dering, cooking, cleaning, and care provided by his wife and daugh­ ters to later charge against donations.30 At five shillings per week, the cost of each student’s board, washing, and lodging cost more than double the two shillings per week for tuition, with the making and mending of clothing extra besides.31 This bare and careful account­ ing of the worth of Mary Wheelock and other women’s labor makes clear that hiring free women to assist with the reproductive labor of the household would have added to the already high expenses of the school. As the school grew, the Wheelock family purchased enslaved women and men to help with the expanding labor burden of more bodies in the household. Indigenous students began to receive their training in the gendered labor of English civility from enslaved men and women. When the first Haudenosaunee student arrived in 1761, the Wheelock household included four enslaved men Ishmael, Fortune, Sippy, and Brister. In 1762, as the school grew and the Wheelock family prepared for the arrival of yet more students, the Wheelocks purchased Exeter, Cloe, and their three-year-old son Hercules, who was later taught to read in the school alongside white and Indigenous students at least to age five.32 Cloe herself rarely appeared by name in Wheelock’s papers, but Wheelock noted that his wife and the women of his household were frequently overwhelmed with the task of cooking and laundering. Wheelock asked the Massachusetts Assembly for additional fund­ ing for the expense of boarding, laundering, and providing medical care for so many boys. Indeed, women’s work was at the heart of the school’s operation. The daily routines descended into chaos when

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Mary Wheelock took sick, and the majority of the household work fell to the already overburdened Cloe.33 The boys who boarded with the Wheelocks were supposedly prepared for the rough conditions of missionary work in Indian communities. They were supported by the substantial work of white and enslaved Black women whose daily domestic labor was essential to the running of the school. The discon­ nect between expectations for the gendered reproductive labor pro­ vided in the Wheelock household and what young missionaries faced in the field would later prove to be one of the major stumbling blocks in Wheelock’s vision. Indigenous boys were likewise intended to learn agriculture, and this also depended on enslaved labor. “Mr. Wheelock thought it nec­ essary that his pupils, designed for missionaries, should be initiated in the practical knowledge of husbandry, accordingly we sometimes went into the field and worked a little while,” McClure recalled.34 Stu­ dents were educated as farmers by enslaved Black men, and the boys of Moor’s Charity School worked alongside the enslaved Ishmael, For­ tune, Sippy, Brister, and Exeter on Wheelock’s property, where they learned some skilled work like horseshoeing from the enslaved men.35 McClure remembered this work fondly with a bit of self-deprecation. He recalled it fondly because he was excused from it—McClure was dismissed from field labor because he “scarcely knew the difference of a plow from a harrow,” and instead was put to work copying letters for Wheelock.36 Indigenous students remembered this work less fondly. Delaware alumnus Hezekiah Calvin accused Wheelock of “us[ing] ye Indians very hard in keeping of them to work, & not allowing them a proper Privelidge in ye School.” Some students had “been kept on close to work, as if they were your Slaves.” Delaware and other Algonquian communi­ ties traditionally practiced female-led agriculture, but over the course of the eighteenth century many of these communities had begun to shift to male-led plow agriculture. For male Haudenosaunee students, the required agricultural work may have been especially distasteful because it required them to reject the cultural and spiritual significance of women’s agricultural labor that extended all the way back to the creation story.37 Many of them simply refused Wheelock’s agricultural education by going hunting or walking in the woods around Lebanon when they were supposed to be working the fields. Calvin also accused Wheelock of taking advantage of students by providing for them poorly, giving them “Diot and Cloath them with

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That that’s mean.” When Calvin’s fiancée Mary “ask’d for a small piece of Cloth to make a pr of Slippers,” Wheelock rebuffed her, tell­ ing her “twas too good for Indians.”38 In Wheelock’s account books, cloth purchased for students’ clothing was most commonly described as “coarse,” generally materials such as osnabrigs, dowlass, and cheap cotton calicoes. These were the sort of fabrics used by English house­ holders to clothe enslaved people and servants, while the Wheelock family wore more expensive silks, linens, and worsted wools.39 Calvin’s was not the only accusation. For years, rumors circulated widely in New England that Wheelock used the school to enrich himself. Calvin accused Wheelock of selling coffee, flour, sugar, and cloth donated for students’ use, supplying students with cheaper goods, and pocketing the difference. Others accused Wheelock of putting students to work on his land for his own benefit, a practice that Wheelock documented in his accounts. Wheelock defended this practice. He argued that he carefully kept track of “work done for my Assistance by the members of ye male School” as “honestly credit[ing]” the school for work done by students as part of their education and offset the cost of their board.40 Whee­ lock wrote to rival Anglican missionary Samuel Johnson that charges against him of “making gain to myself by their Labour it is wholly Groundless.” While Wheelock admitted he had “often taken one and another out of the School to Labour for me,” the farm work did not interfere with their schoolwork. Wheelock argued it was beneficial because the Indigenous boys were “so separated from their Compan­ ions as to be obliged to talk English (which I find they are loath to do so long as they have Interpreters always at hand).”41 Farm work along­ side enslaved men was part of a conscious tactic to isolate the boys from their peers and enforce both the use of English and the learning of English gendered labor. At Moor’s Indian Charity School, students were supposed to be trained as yeoman farmers and prepared for the rough conditions they would encounter as missionaries. This preparation was invisibly underpinned by Mary’s and Cloe’s labor within the household, and the labor of Ishmael, Fortune, Sippy, Brister, and Exeter outside it. In church and in the classroom, Indigenous students received their educa­ tion in religion and civility from Wheelock and a white schoolmaster. In the material performance of civility, they received education from enslaved Black men and white and Black women. Labor arrangements at Moor’s symbolically aligned education and religion with whiteness

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and manual labor with Blackness despite Wheelock’s insistence that both were vital for the complete conversion of Haudenosaunee people to British subjects.

One Nation at Variance with Each Other In addition to hierarchies of race, students also navigated national hier­ archies. The school was intended for the conversion of the Haudeno­ saunee, but Wheelock’s Algonquian alumni more readily took to the call of teacher, preacher, and missionary. These Algonquian alumni have been more extensively studied as the models of success in early Indian education.42 Wheelock later lamented what he saw as his Haude­ nosaunee students’ failures to become ministers and teachers, but they arrived with distinct expectations and little interest or inclination for cultural or religious conversion. Haudenosaunee students arrived at older ages than their Algonquian peers and they were more mobile. Similar to the familial diplomacy of Sergeant’s Haudenosaunee stu­ dents at Stockbridge, Wheelock’s Haudenosaunee students approached their schooling as more of a cultural reconnaissance than an oppor­ tunity for conversion. Their experiences at Wheelock’s Indian Charity School show the importance of strong community ties in maintaining Indigenous sovereignty and identity in Anglo-American educational settings.43 Wheelock found success as he defined it with several of his Algon­ quian students, who arrived familiar with English schooling and had few options besides menial day labor to return to in their home com­ munities. He lamented his Haudenosaunee students, who arrived with a clear set of goals formed by the military and diplomatic aims of their own communities. Their short terms at the school and the lack of preachers and teachers among them have led to an absence of schol­ arship on them in the history of early Indian education.44 Their ages, greater mobility, and maintenance of ties to their home communities during their time at school suggest that Haudenosaunee students and their families never intended their schooling at Moor’s to be a con­ version experience. Wheelock began with Algonquian students for the express purpose of sending them among the Haudenosaunee, and viewed Algonquian education as instrumental to his larger goal of mis­ sionizing the Haudenosaunee. The coastal New England Indigenous communities that provided Wheelock his Algonquian students faced a cycle of land loss, poverty, debt, and indenture that did not characterize

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Haudenosaunee relations to European and American markets until after the American Revolution. Wheelock and his contemporaries intended different goals for Algonquian and Haudenosaunee students, and those students’ expe­ riences at school were shaped by their national origins.45 Algonquian students from communities in New England had more ready poten­ tial as missionaries, as they arrived literate and familiar with English schooling. According to Wheelock, Haudenosaunee students often arrived knowing only “4 or 5 letters in the Alphabet . . . nor could they Speak a word of English.”46 Wheelock intended to educate his scholars in Greek translation and Latin rhetoric. Teaching students who did not understand English and who thought (or pretended to think) “that a wineglass [was] as strong as a handrake [a farm implement]” greatly impeded progress. The Algonquian students typically arrived in Lebanon around age ten, having attended mission schools in their home communities, worked as day laborers, or begun apprenticeships. Haudenosaunee stu­ dents arrived much older and with little to no experience of formal English schooling.47 Sir William Johnson’s son Great William arrived at age fourteen with a group that included one Mohawk student who “appeared to be near thirty years old, and three more to have arrived near the age of manhood—after I had cloathed them decently, they soon began to discover the indian temper, grew impatient of order and government in the school . . . not well satisfied with what was done for them, a disposition to make unfriendly remarks upon any omissions in any respect, which could be construed as evidential of, in any measure, a want of kindness and care for them.”48 Although most of the Algon­ quian students arrived as children and attended through their early teens, Haudenosaunee students arrived as adults or nearly so within their own communities. Locating the school in Lebanon (besides being conveniently close to where Wheelock already owned a house and farm and received a sal­ ary as the town’s minister) was intended to facilitate students’ cultural and religious conversion. Lebanon was close enough to Haudenosaunee territories to draw students, but far enough that their relations would not be able to easily visit or take them from school. The school’s loca­ tion discouraged younger Algonquian children from traveling home. However, Haudenosaunee students were old enough to assert their own mobility and independence, as evidenced by Joseph, Negyes, and Cen­ ter’s unsupervised travel to and from school.

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Due in part to their ages, Algonquian students were typically escorted to the school by a white or Indigenous adult missionary. Haudenosaunee students arrived in small groups on their own and just as frequently left on their own. Joseph, Center, and Negyes were already in their late teens, and had already fought in the French and Indian War, and when Center fell sick, he and Negyes simply left.49 Joseph stayed at school for a few more months, but when he began receiving letters from his sister Molly about increasing tensions in 1762, he left without asking permission from Wheelock, much to the minister’s dismay.50 Joseph’s sudden departure from school did not go unnoticed outside of Lebanon and fueled rumors that he had left because the Mohawk were planning to assist the French in overrun­ ning New England, a public relations disaster that damaged Whee­ lock’s funding efforts for years.51 This movement of letters between Haudenosaunee territories and Connecticut paralleled the greater physical mobility of Haudenosaunee students. Some Algonquian students rebelled by visiting taverns or chaf­ ing against Wheelock’s paternalism in their letters, but Haudenosaunee students often simply refused Wheelock’s authority. Haudenosaunee students either did not go to the tavern or were not caught; instead, they expressed their disinterest in Wheelock’s curriculum through their movement outside Wheelock’s supervision. Haudenosaunee stu­ dents, especially older male students, “shew’d a great inclination to be hunting and rambling in the woods,” which necessitated a new round of donations to install a bell that would be audible for more than a mile from the school.52 This failed to solve the problem, with the noon recess being shortened first to a half-hour and students later required to take their midday meal with the family to prevent rambling during the school day.53 Wheelock’s desire for a school bell attempted to project colonial control beyond the classroom and town green with the sound of time. In other colonial spaces, the sound of time regulated education, work, and worship, and subordinated traditional daily practice to the tone of a bell.54 Projecting sound and regulating the expression of noise extends authoritarian control much farther than visible symbols of power; sound follows the listener and extends into spaces that can­ not be physically controlled.55 In Lebanon, Wheelock attempted to regulate the movement of Indigenous bodies across the colonized landscape with the sound of time as well. His failure to cease Haudeno­ saunee movement while successfully controlling Algonquian students’

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movements reveal the limits of colonialist power even on colonized landscapes. After the arrival of Haudenosaunee boys at the school, Wheelock was confronted with the limitations of his power to con­ trol Indigenous students. This was a limitation he had not previously encountered because Algonquian students lacked the options of their Haudenosaunee peers. Much like Wheelock’s intentions in removing Indigenous students from their homes to an established British community, sending the girls away to separate homes for their domestic education further enforced their immersion in British culture. The spaces Wheelock sought to create for his students were intended to shape the sort of gendered skills they were to acquire and regulate their behaviors. The position of the school itself, which was midway between the church where Wheelock preached and the domestic sphere of the house and barnyard, put it under the supervision of spaces controlled by Whee­ lock. Its location made it visible to the town green and placed it just outside the more feminine domestic space of the house and racialized work areas of the barnyard. Like the racial hierarchy of labor at the school, this placement separated the education of the mind from the education of the body.56 The spaces students occupied in Lebanon were intended to form nested layers of control, with girls occupying the most-controlled domestic area of the home. Boys moved between the domestic space of the Wheelock home, the tightly regulated schoolroom, the super­ vised but less strictly controlled farm areas, and the environs of the town that were governed by unspoken British cultural expectations. Older Haudenosaunee boys moved freely between all of these areas and the totally unsupervised woods and fields surrounding Lebanon, while girls of all nations and younger Algonquian students were confined to more supervised areas. Although located in the same long-established British settlement, Indigenous students experienced different colonial landscapes depending on their gender, age, and national origin. Wheelock wrote that Great William was “too proud and litigious to consist with the Health and well being” of the school, and another Mohawk student was “so lifted up with his having been in the Wars, and sent to Hell one or two of the poor Savages with his own hand, that [Wheelock’s] House was scarecely good enough for him to live in, or any of the School honorable enough to speak to him.”57 Much closer to adulthood and perhaps aware of their greater options after return­ ing home, many of the Haudenosaunee students may have viewed their

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time at the school as more of a cultural exchange program to acquire diplomatic skills than as the immersive and transformative experience Wheelock intended. An immersive language learning program more directly served Haudenosaunee diplomatic and political goals. Euro­ pean language acquisition, coupled with an insistence on Indigenous language use and the employment of translators, was one of the many ways Indigenous groups shaped diplomatic encounters during this period.58 Immersion in British habits of dress, eating, and living also served Haudenosaunee goals by providing students cultural fluency. It pro­ vided a fluency in British norms and an understanding of the types of changes that British missionaries, land speculators, and government officials wanted to push on Haudenosaunee communities. Alumnus Thayendanegea Joseph Brant would later in his life be noted for the skill with which he passed between British, Haudenosaunee, and hybrid registers of dress and social performance. Brant displayed a detailed knowledge of British American colonialist intentions during and after the Revolutionary War period.59 This reverse ethnography, in which Haudenosaunee people made a detailed study of European colonialism in order to limit its reach, would prove invaluable in preserving Haude­ nosaunee lands and cultures a generation later. Algonquian students remained at school from an early age to adult­ hood, but no Haudenosaunee student stayed more than two years, and most left after less than a year.60 This suggests that their communities and families saw some value in sending them for an immersive cultural experience but not the full course of study and conversion that Whee­ lock envisioned for them. Despite this, Wheelock maintained his goal of Haudenosaunee conversion, and in 1764 somewhat disingenuously wrote to Sir William Johnson that he thought more Haudenosaunee students would improve the school. Despite his difficulties with Great William and other Mohawk students, Wheelock told Johnson that “the Boys I have from your parts behave very well, better than any I have had from any other Quarter, and it seems to me they are really a much bet­ ter Breed.”61 Wheelock hoped for Algonquian and Haudenosaunee students to form preacher-translator pairs, but tribal lines at the school remained distinct. This was perhaps due to students’ different goals and expecta­ tions for their education. Intertribal tensions at the school sometimes ran vey high, aggravated by tensions with white students as well. In September 1765, while Wheelock was away on church business, Great

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William, fifteen, and Mohegan student Joseph Johnson, fourteen, came to blows with Wheelock’s eleven-year-old son John encouraging them. Before the physical fight, Joseph called William an “Indian Devil” and a “spekkle face white eye,” referring to William’s father Sir William John­ son and his Mohawk mother.62 As a result of Joseph and William’s fight, “one nation seem’d to be at variance with each other.” Another Mohegan student “was inraiged among the rest, put on his new coat and . . . threatned to go home.” Even after Great William and Joseph were physically pulled apart, they con­ tinued the fight into the Wheelock house, tearing each other’s shirts and waistcoats and inciting other fights. “Little William [a Mohawk] said that David [a Montauk] would fight with him in the house, and they began to go at it in Cyder Mill, and would have gone on had” they not been separated. The school was intended to promote mutual under­ standing and prepare Algonquian students for a life of mission work among the Haudenosaunee, but the sudden explosion of these tensions between so many students (at least six were involved in fights—only thirty students were in attendance at the time) suggests that many had long harbored inter-tribal resentments.63 Nascent racial tensions with Lebanon’s white community may have been at play as well. Later in the winter of 1765, Montauk student David Fowler, who would later teach school and preach among the Oneida, was injured during a fight while sledding with some of Leba­ non’s English boys.64 Wheelock also hinted obliquely at fights between Indigenous students and English residents at the town’s tavern. This was part of his proscription against Indigenous students visiting tav­ erns, even though they were allowed to drink both beer and rum within the household. Less violently, Great William and Wheelock’s eldest son Ralph came into conflict over their conflicting understandings of class, race, and rank. Ralph occasionally represented his father at diplomatic meet­ ings and supervised missionaries in the field, and when he prepared to leave home once, he ordered William to saddle his horse. William, the son of Sir William Johnson and of an age with Ralph, refused to saddle the horse on the grounds that he was the son of a gentleman. When Ralph asked if William even knew what a gentleman was, Wil­ liam replied that “A gentleman is a person who keeps race-horses and drinks Madeira wine; and that is what neither you nor your father do. Therefore saddle the horse yourself.”65 Ralph Wheelock perceived race as the most salient factor in the household’s hierarchy, but William

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tartly pointed out the vast class difference he perceived between his own family and the Wheelocks.

My Folks Are Poor and Nasty Wheelock’s Indigenous and white alumni left school for mission work in Haudenosaunee communities but often found themselves woefully unprepared. The gendered and racialized labor hierarchies of the Whee­ lock household prepared them with certain expectations for material civility as prerequisites for spiritual conversion. Alone in a Haudeno­ saunee community that did not share those material expectations, the young missionaries often found themselves in danger of “rustica­ tion.”66 The experience of Wheelock’s alumni once they were out on their missions underlined the fragility of English civil masculinity and its dependence on enslaved and women’s reproductive labor. For Haudenosaunee communities, both hosting a schoolmaster and sending students away to Moor’s was a political and diplomatic action. When Occom and his brother-in-law David Fowler arrived at Oneida in the summer of 1761 to solicit students, the Oneida and Tus­ carora hodiyanéshų’ they met with allowed them to establish a school in Oneida territory, on the condition that liquor was prohibited. The hodiyanéshų’ further stipulated that the school must recognize their “desire to be protected on our Lands, that none may molest or encroach upon us.” This was a clear warning that the school could not be used as a toehold for settler encroachment. The hodiyanéshų’ recognized this agreement with a wampum belt to “bind us fast together in per­ petual Love and Friendship.”67 Occom and Fowler did not know it, but the terms the Tuscarora and Oneida required echoed the agreement of the Two Row treaty and the Covenant Chain. Occom and Fowler, and by extension future teachers at the Oneida country school, agreed to be bound forever by Haudenosaunee diplomatic protocols and to not interfere in internal Oneida and Tuscarora decisions. The warning against encroaching on Oneida lands was an important one. When Wheelock’s associate Rev. Jacob Johnson later spoke at Fort Stanwix in 1768, it created a rift between Oneida leaders and Wheelock. Johnson and white alumnus of Moor’s David Avery appeared at the Stanwix treaty conference at Wheelock’s behest. They attended without invitation or permission from William Johnson or any Haudenosaunee leaders and attempted to interfere in the business of the treaty. Jacob Johnson tried to push for a land grant for the relocation of Moor’s to

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Haudenosaunee territories and attempted to enrich himself by arguing on behalf of land speculators the Susquehanna Company, in which he was an investor.68 Johnson’s interference created such a rift that Oneida parents removed their students from Wheelock’s school and damaged relations between Wheelock and Sir William Johnson.69 Much like the exchange of hostage students and priests in the seventeenth century, the exchange of missionary teachers and students was seen by Oneida leaders as part of a broader diplomatic agreement to respect Haudeno­ saunee territories. Once allowed to teach in Haudenosaunee communities, Wheelock’s alumni faced different conditions than they expected, despite their preparations “to lodge hard, and live on plain and wholesome fare.”70 At Oneida, Occom and Fowler lived in a separate home together for a time, where Occom feared a return of his rheumatic arthritis after “lying upon the wet ground.”71 Later, Fowler, white alumnus Samuel Kirkland, and Indigenous alumni Joseph Johnson and Nathan Clap likewise lived together in a separate home which Kirkland found unbearable. Kirkland complained that “I can’t willingly endure this smoke and crowd another winter, if it can possibly be avoided—I find to my sorrow and loss yt a smokey house grows no better by use—of ye two rather worse.”72 When McClure joined the household, he wrote to Wheelock that “we live something dirty, for want of House necessar­ ies.”73 Although the Oneida had built separate quarters for Wheelock’s male alumni during their mission work, the missionaries found the conditions nearly unbearable for the lack of female domestic labor. Nor did the alumni find conditions any better when they lodged with Haudenosaunee families, often because of the presence of Haude­ nosaunee women. When Fowler was on mission alone to the Mohawk, he complained that “I live like a dog here, my Folks are poor and nasty, I eat with Dogs, for they eat and drink out of the same as I do .  .  . I have no table to write upon.”74 Despite being lodged in the home of a family with many resident women, Fowler complained of the animal­ istic housekeeping and lack of material comforts that he had come to expect for his work. The work of women in the Wheelock household had been nearly invisible except when fondly remembered for Indian pudding; what Wheelock’s alumni saw as the uncivilized reproductive labor of Haudenosaunee women was impossible to ignore. Fowler com­ plained that the Mohawk women he lodged with were “nasty as Hogs: their Cloaths are black and greasy as my shoes. Their Hands are dirty as my Feet, but they cleanse them by kneading Bread . . . I am oblig’d

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to eat whatsoever they give me for fear they will be displeased with me: after this Month I shall try to clean some of them. For I must move along by Degrees, if they once get out with me it is all over with me.”75 Fowler’s disdain for the Mohawk women he lodged with was combined with a grudging acknowledgment of their power in the household. Without them, his work would be stalled, and completely finished if they found him unacceptable. Fowler found the situation so unten­ able that he resolved to have a house built and move out on his own. Fowler’s distaste for the Mohawk women he lodged with did not extend to the men. Despite Fowler’s gendered disgust, he formed fictive kin­ ship ties with Haudenosaunee men during his mission work. He called the boys he taught “my Children” and one of the men in his household “my Father,” but notably did not form intimate connections with the women he lodged with and depended on.76 Paralleling the filial rela­ tionships between Wheelock and the alumni of Moor’s, Fowler saw his relationships with Haudenosaunee families primarily through a patri­ archal lens. Haudenosaunee families, for their part, may also have viewed the young missionaries through the lens of fictive kinship, but in ways that conflicted with the missionaries’ patriarchal framework. McClure, when he briefly set up a school at Oneida, formed a fictive kinship tie but seemed not to recognize its significance. McClure “experienced much respect and kindness from the Indians and particularly from the aged Widow of the late Sachem of the Onoida [sic], who adopted me for her son and desired me to call her Mother.”77 Possibly a goyá:neh, this woman’s adoption of McClure may have been intended to formalize his place in her household and the reciprocal duties between McClure and the family he lodged with. McClure’s bemusement suggests that he did not fully understand the arrangement or its significance. At least some of the schoolteachers were viewed analogously to adopted captives, and were integrated into Haudenosaunee communities and homes through ties of fictive kinship to women. Unlike McClure’s adoption by an older Oneida widow, Wheelock’s alumni perceived intimate ties with young Haudenosaunee women to be actively dangerous to the mission. Kirkland ascribed Mohegan Joseph Johnson’s fall from grace in part to his relationship with a young Oneida woman Kirkland called a “strumpet.” Long-term or temporary relation­ ships between Haudenosaunee women and non-Haudenosaunee men were not unusual in the eighteenth century, and any resulting children were regarded as part of their mother’s matrilineal clans. The Oneida

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woman involved with Johnson might have understood their relation­ ship to be potentially long-term, with the possibility of integrating Johnson into her mother’s longhouse, or to be the kind of short-term relationship between young people that was common before marriage. Kirkland and other Wheelock alumni understood the relationship to be something much more sinister. When Johnson abandoned his mis­ sion work, Kirkland cautioned Wheelock against sending further Indig­ enous missionaries “until there is good evidence to believe ye Indian Devil and evil spirit is gone out of him.” Kirkland believed Johnson had been “actually in ye Devils service.” Kirkland believed that Johnson’s intemperate behavior, including drinking Kirkland’s wine, pawning furniture, wasting food, running up debts, and Johnson’s relationship with the Oneida woman was evidence of the devil’s work. Kirkland wrote that Johnson and another Wheelock alumnus, Mashpee Nathan Clap, were “weary wh ye form of yt old fashiond Thing calld puritanic Rel­ ign [and] turn’d pagan for about a week—painted, sung—danc’d—drank and whor’d it, wh some of the savage Indians he cou’d find.” In a scath­ ing indictment, Kirkland reported that Johnson “given much to pride and vainglory bo’t a number of trinkets to please his refin’d curiousity and adorn his strumpet.”78 Kirkland caustically rebuked the relation­ ship, sarcastically comparing Johnson to a refined gentleman of taste, with his cross-cultural relationship among the greatest of his sins. Only seventeen at the time of his mission in Oneida country, John­ son had been a student and boarder in Wheelock’s home since he was seven. He had only spent one season as an assistant teacher before tak­ ing charge of his own school of five students at Oneida, with Kirk­ land supervising as a minister to the Oneida community.79 Johnson was more flexible than Kirkland and Wheelock’s other white alumni in some ways, as when he accompanied his students hunting “as all my scholars will go.”80 After Johnson’s fall from grace, he begged Whee­ lock’s forgiveness for having “Indulged myself in Brutish Ease whilst in the wilderness . . . which was Occasioned by the temptation of the Devil.”81 Both Kirkland and Johnson positioned the unnamed Oneida woman as doing the devil’s work, having pulled Johnson astray from his mission to the Indian vices of hunting, drinking, and dancing. Nearly all of Wheelock’s Indigenous alumni disappointed him, though none so dramatically as Johnson. Much of this disappointment stemmed not from the failures of Wheelock’s alumni themselves, but from the disconnect between Wheelock’s expectations and the reali­ ties of teaching in Haudenosaunee communities.82 Unlike Moor’s in

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Connecticut, Haudenosaunee students living in their own communi­ ties had far greater freedom of movement, where they came and went at their own and their parents’ discretion. Some schoolteachers, like John­ son, moved with them in seasonal patterns, while others railed against it. When Lenape alumnus Hezekiah Calvin taught (or attempted to teach) Mohawk students at Fort Hunter, he was frustrated by the par­ ents’ combined disinterest in education and Mohawk labor patterns. “The Indians were very loth to send their Children, for what reason I know not, I went to the Indians day after Day to get some of their Chil­ dren to School, but all this signified nothing, the Indians would make excuses that they had work for them to do, so that they could not send them yet, but they would send them Tomorrow, & so on.”83 In part, students were absent because of the seasonal character of Haudenosaunee living and working patterns, especially after the poor growing season of 1765. Fowler wrote that he had difficulties keeping his students at school because “they are always roving about from Place to Place to get some thing to live upon. Provision is very scarce with them.”84 Even in better years, “their Vagrant manner of life calls off the largest of the School perpetually to hunt and get necessaries to subsist upon.”85 The need to support themselves also pulled away Wheelock’s alumni to do their own hunting, farming, and purchasing or begging of provisions from nearby British military outposts. This created mutual frustrations for the schoolteachers who saw their students as truant and Haudenosaunee communities who saw their schoolteachers as inconstant. These frustrations extended into the classroom as well. Fowler wrote that he “never saw Children exceed these in learning,” when he taught at Oneida in 1765.86 When David Avery, a white alumnus, taught in the same community three years later, he was more ambivalent. Fowler reported his students’ rapid progress through their spelling books, and Wheelock, in turn, printed Fowler’s letters in pamphlets used for fund­ raising. Avery revealed the limits of Wheelock’s ambitions and Fowler’s pedagogy when he wrote that “It hurts me very much that they can’t understand what they read.”87 Like most schools at the time, students at Moor’s were taught reading by rote memorization, and used these methods when they went to teach in Haudenosaunee communities.88 Most of the Haudenosaunee students at Moor’s seemed to have learned to speak, read, and write at least some English during their studies, but language formed a significant barrier between Wheelock’s alumni and their Haudenosaunee students. When McClure taught

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among the Oneida, he was “agreeably sirpriz’d at the proficancy of the Scholers, their unwearied Labour in Study, & the good Order, Sobriety & Reverence.” And yet, he wrote that “I am put to a great deal of Diffi­ culty in School in not having their Language so that I might talk to the Scholers.”89 McClure noted that he could only make limited progress in proselytizing and teaching because of the language barriers. Many of Wheelock’s alumni who worked as ministers and schoolteachers com­ plained of the expense of hiring translators to do their work. Most disappointing of all for Wheelock were his Haudenosaunee alumni, who he hoped would be best positioned to bridge the lan­ guage barrier and navigate cultural differences. Between 1754 and the school’s move to New Hampshire in 1770, Moor’s enrolled sixty-one students, nineteen of whom were Haudenosaunee.90 Only five of these acted as teachers or interpreters for subsequent schools, and then only briefly. Mohawk alumni Abraham Major, Abraham Minor, Peter, Moses, and John taught at Canajoharie and Onaquaga, where they successively held classes with ten to fifteen Mohawk and Oneida stu­ dents. In this, the gap between British colonial ambitions and British ability to impose those ambitions in Haudenosaunee territories was revealed. Despite Wheelock’s sweeping ambitions, his Haudenosaunee, Algonquian, and white alumni taught relatively few students in Haude­ nosaunee communities and perhaps alienated more. During the brief period he kept school, Abraham Minor was roundly criticized by white alumnus Theophilus Chamberlin for his failure to punish his Oneida students adequately or demand routine attendance.91 All the Mohawk alumni were ranked as ushers or junior teachers, and “there was less dignity in this office, but they did the same service as their superiors.”92 More directly than their Algonquian counterparts, the Haudenosaunee alumni were to be supervised by both senior teachers and white mis­ sionaries. This may have had to do with their age. All five were approved as ushers at a younger age than most, perhaps to help speed the mission by sending interpreters. In part, it may have been to try to prevent what ultimately happened; the prompt reintegration of the Haudenosaunee alumni back into their home communities. When white alumnus and missionary Theophilius Chamberlin visited Canajoharie in 1765, he reported to Wheelock his frustration that “the Boys here are so much off of the Notion of being Subject to your Orders that I can do nothing with them.” Over the winter of 1765, none of the five Mohawk teachers held school. They

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told Chamberlin they had family duties to attend to, or simply avoided meeting him. Chamberlin wrote to Wheelock that he had “tried the force of every Motive I could think of to alter their Minds but as yet can prevail Nothing. I have mentioned your Expectations and their obliga­ tions in gratitude to answer them.” This did not persuade the Mohawk alumni to keep school or act as interpreters for the many white and Algonquian missionaries and schoolteachers who required one. In the end, all five of the Mohawk alumni accepted “the Consequences of their Staying here, their growing ra[g]ged, living like Indians, danger of being undone &c.”93 Unlike Fowler, the five Mohawk alumni willingly returned to “living like Indians” in their natal communities. Wheelock’s hopes for sending missionaries and schoolteachers to Haudenosaunee territories faced the considerable obstacle of a lack of proper female domestic labor. Fowler nearly despaired of continuing his work when he wrote that his “food is now not fit for any Man, that has been used to have his Victuals drest clean.”94 The missionar­ ies viewed Haudenosaunee women as more of a hindrance than a help. The Oneida widow who adopted McClure extended assistance that the missionaries did not understand or acknowledge. Fowler viewed the Mohawk women he lodged with as animalistic and antagonistic, and the Oneida woman Joseph Johnson took up with caused him to aban­ don his mission work. McClure complained of their bachelor condi­ tions but anticipated an easy solution. “We live something dirty, for want of House necessaries, and also for want of knowledge to use those we have, yet I hope we shall live a little cleaner, and that very soon by the help of David’s fifth Ribb.”95 In other words, McClure believed that many of the missionaries’ problems would be solved by the arrival of a properly educated wife for Fowler.

She Kept House for Her Miss Wheelock began enrolling Indigenous girls—though never white girls— to be trained as wives and helpmeets for his male students. Male mis­ sionaries needed wives so they might not be forced into rustication and integration into Indigenous communities when on their mission work. Wheelock set out to educate Indigenous girls “in order to accom­ pany these Boys, when they shall have Occasion for such Assistance in the Business of their Mission.”96 Indigenous girls were given a half-day of instruction in reading and writing per week; the majority of their education happened by apprenticeship in the homes and dairies of

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Connecticut.97 Indigenous girls were needed on mission “for the pur­ pose that these Boy[s] may not be under absolute necessity to turn Sav­ age in this manner of living for want of those who can do the female part for them when they shall be aboard on the business of their Mis­ sions and out of reach of the English.”98 Indigenous girls were necessary not only for the basic functioning and maintenance of mission work in the field, but also to teach other Indigenous women in the communities in that their missions were to be rooted. Converted alumnae were to teach other Indigenous women “a more rational and decent manner of living than that which they are in and thereby in time remedy and remove that great and hitherto insuperable difficulty so constantly complained of by all our mission­ aries among them, as the great impediment in the way to the success of their mission viz their continual rambling about.”99 Male Indigenous missionaries were to be responsible for the religious and agricultural education of Indian communities. Their properly educated Indigenous wives were supposed to change the material space of Indigenous homes and encourage gendered domestic fixity. Throughout the late 1750s, the total number of students enrolled at any one time remained in the single digits. Enrollments began to climb in the early 1760s as Wheelock more aggressively courted donors, added Indigenous female students, and added tuition-paying white male students. White girls were never enrolled at Moor’s Charity School. Wheelock harshly rebuffed the advances of one Mashpee stu­ dent toward a white maid in his household.100 The only known relation­ ship between an Indigenous student and an English girl resulted in the boy’s dismissal in disgrace, in a turn of events unlike the 1710 imag­ ined romance between an English beauty and a Haudenosaunee king. When Lenape student Jacob Wooley left Moor’s to attend Princeton in preparation for ordination as a minister, he started a relationship with a British girl in New Jersey. The interracial affair resulted in his Princeton friends shunning him and his instructors dismissing him. After being informed “how pernicious such Intrigues were to College Exercises, (to justify his Friends in trying to break ym up),” Jacob left university.101 He reportedly fell into a depression and died of pneu­ monia a few months later—a cautionary tale Wheelock told about the consequences of interracial relationships. White male students at Moor’s were never encouraged to marry the Indigenous alumnae the way Indigenous boys were, and those white alumni who married formed unions with white women.

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The first two female Indigenous students, Amy Johnson and Sarah Wyoggs of Mohegan, initially boarded with the Wheelock family along­ side the boys in 1760.102 They probably worked alongside Cloe in dairy­ ing, sewing, laundering, and cooking with Mary Wheelock supervising. In 1761, the school’s enrollment grew, and Sarah and another Mohe­ gan student Hannah Nonesuch proved difficult to control. Wheelock settled on the solution of having the Indigenous girls not only taught by local women, but also having them reside with local families whose mistresses were skilled housewives. After several incidents where Sarah and Hannah were caught at the tavern and made to confess to dancing (perhaps with white boys), the girls were isolated from the boys in much the same way Wheelock had first attempted to isolate all Indigenous students from the “pernicious influences” of their families and com­ munities.103 Amy, Sarah, Hannah, and another Mohegan girl, Miriam, were sent to families resident in Lebanon, Windham, and Hartford, Connecticut. Amy and Miriam were sent to the Hartford homes of Dan­ iel and Elizabeth Bull and a widowed Mrs. West “about 20 rod from” one another “so yt ye Ladys were together.”104 Sarah and Hannah were sent to the home of David and Mary Huntington, an older couple in Windham. Beyond Wheelock’s plans for them to learn housekeeping, it is unclear how the girls were actually treated in these homes. White New England girls at the time typically spent a few years in domestic ser­ vice in the homes of relatives or neighbors to learn housekeeping and earn a little money.105 Indigenous girls from the southern New England Algonquian communities most of Wheelock’s students grew up in were often indentured in white households at an early age with little hope of ever establishing their own households. Wheelock may have viewed boarding out the Indigenous girls in keeping with the framework for white girls’ domestic education, but the girls may have viewed it in the context of indentureship. The families who boarded the girls may have taken them on with the understanding that the girls would provide domestic labor. Wheelock paid the families a nominal sum to board the girls, and the three homes where the girls boarded were older couples with grown children. The Bulls were in their fifties with two grown children, the Huntingtons in their sixties with six grown children, and the widowed Mrs. West probably lived alone.106 With no other children in the household, the Bulls, Huntingtons, and Mrs. West had fewer household responsibili­ ties, but also less domestic assistance for the heavy work of cleaning,

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cooking, and laundry. They may have taken on the task of boarding the Indigenous girls in exchange for their labor. Wheelock reported that Amy had “made surprising proficiency in learning since she came last Spring. She then scarsley know her letters (and indeed is more back­ ward in reading than in other parts of her learning) will now write con­ sidingly well, she kept house for her Miss when she was gone on abroad near a fortnight did it well, understands tending a dary and has lately flowerd her a pocket.”107 Amy’s experience with the Bulls suggests that Haudenosaunee and other Indigenous girls learned the necessary skills of dairying and housekeeping as well as decorative embroidery. Their exact status within the household may have been unclear even to them and the families with whom they lived. Of the twelve Indigenous girls who attended Moor’s, only one Mohe­ gan, Hannah Nonesuch, married a male alumnus. The four Haudeno­ saunee girls who attended during the life of the school—Susannah, Katherine, Mary, and Margaret—were all called away from school by their families with little explanation to Wheelock. Much like the male Haudenosaunee alumni, they quickly reintegrated into their home communities. Hannah’s 1766 marriage to Fowler was much anticipated not only by David, but also by the other male Wheelock alumni with whom Fowler lived in Oneida country. Hannah herself may have been more ambivalent. At about nineteen years old, Hannah assumed sole responsibility for a household in Oneida country that included her new husband David, his brother Jacob, white alumni Samuel Kirkland and Theophilus Chamberlin, Indigenous alumni of her acquaintance Joseph Johnson and Moses, and an unnamed male Oneida interpreter.108 Although she may have expected to take responsibility for running her husband’s household at marriage, her new household included seven adult men who would require cooking, cleaning, and laundry without assisting in it themselves. Nearly as soon as she arrived in September 1766, Hannah became pregnant and worked to maintain the household of eight through morning sickness and the “small turns of illness which Women of her Condition are apt to have.”109 Haudenosaunee women at the time lived in households with other adult women, including women past menopause who attended childbirth. Mohegan women in the com­ munity Hannah grew up in lived near female relatives who exchanged household labor with one another; so did the white women of New England, from whom Hannah received her household training. Han­ nah did not have any such support and the period of her pregnancy

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was a difficult one. Vermin destroyed Oneida crops in the summer of 1766, immediately before her arrival. Hannah’s husband David traveled frequently that fall and winter of her pregnancy to fetch provisions, leaving her alone to provide for the other men in their household. Corn worms again afflicted Oneida crops in the spring of 1767, just prior to her delivery. Samuel Kirkland bitterly complained of the smokey, crowded house she kept, and that “Flour and Milk with a few Eels has been my living” during the lean summer of 1767 when Hannah was first heavily pregnant and then nursing a newborn.110 The household of male missionaries had eagerly anticipated the relief that Hannah’s domestic labor was meant to provide, but at least some among them grew annoyed with the physical realities of her reproduc­ tive labor. It is difficult to tell how much connection Hannah had with the Oneida women she was sent to help convert and educate. When she went into labor prematurely in June 1767, her husband David was away fetching provisions. Kirkland “called for Women’s Help” to deliver a healthy baby boy, but Kirkland was silent on any detail of Hannah’s relationship with the Oneida women who assisted in her most intimate travail.111 Haudenosaunee women were usually assisted in childbirth by their aunts, sisters, onahgí:weh, and other women past menopause. Hannah spoke no Oneida and Kirkland, the most fluent member of her household, spoke little and disdained Hannah’s poor housekeeping during her recovery. By September 1767, Whee­ lock reported that Hannah was “not well content with ye hardships of ye Wilderness.”112 Soon after, Hannah, David, and their three-month-old baby departed for David’s parents’ home on Long Island.113 Some of Wheelock’s male alumni, like Kirkland, continued to work in Haudenosaunee territories through the 1790s, but Hannah was the first and last alumna to attempt the work. Her experience suggests that the expectations were too high and the workload too heavy. Male alumni like Kirkland and McClure assumed that women’s work was a communal good and only noticed when it was insufficient. Earlier French education efforts had embed­ ded Haudenosaunee girls in a female-dominated fictive household, with the goal of sending them back into the world as married women in their natal communities. Wheelock’s school embedded Indigenous girls like Hannah in racialized hierarchies of indentureship, with the goal of sending them into unfamiliar communities with little support. The two programs shared many goals and methods in their visions of

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converted Haudenosaunee communities, but differed significantly in their understanding of women’s labor and relationships.

Having Lost Those Qualities which Rendered Them Useful to Us As alumni working in Haudenosaunee territories faced mounting dif­ ficulties, Wheelock’s ambitions to convert the Haudenosaunee also ran afoul of the primary British liaison with the Six Nations, British Superintendent of Indian Affairs Sir William Johnson. Wheelock and Johnson’s plans for the incorporation of the Haudenosaunee into Brit­ ish America represented competing British visions of Indian political compatibility, complicated not least of all by Haudenosaunee disinter­ est in being British subjects. Johnson objected to Wheelock’s methods, goals, and religious affiliation. In his capacity as Superintendent of Indian Affairs, married to a Mohawk woman and resident among the Mohawk, to Wheelock Johnson represented the key to converting the Six Nations as well as a possible source of royal funding. Although John­ son sent his own son William and his young brother-in-law Joseph Brant to Wheelock’s school, and often offered Wheelock’s alumni financial assistance during their mission work, Johnson expressed deep reserva­ tions for Wheelock’s plans for large-scale material conversion. Writing to Daniel Burton, the secretary for the Anglican Society for Propagating the Gospel, Johnson expressed concern that Wheelock aimed to recreate in Haudenosaunee territories the kind of dispossessed colonialism per­ vasive in New England. “Many of these schemes which had their birth in N England have soon appeared calculated with a view to forming settlements so obnoxious to the Indians who have repeatedly declared their aversion to those who acted on such interested principles. . . . those brought up under the care of dissenting ministers become a gloomy race, and lose all their abilities for hunting etc spending their time in idleness and hanging upon the inhabitants for a wretched subsistence having lost those qualities which rendered them useful to us.”114 John­ son pointed to the Christian Indigenous communities of New England as evidence that Wheelock’s brand of Christian conversion was incom­ patible with the continued existence of economically and politically sovereign Indigenous nations. The economic and military power of the Six Nations was the basis of Johnson’s power even without the looming threat of New France after the surrender of Canada. Johnson had a per­ sonal stake in finding methods to convert the Haudenosaunee politically

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but not materially, as he believed the tribes of New England had been converted.115 Like many Haudenosaunee parents and students, Johnson may have seen English literacy as useful, but the complete transforma­ tion that Wheelock intended was a threat to Johnson’s status as a power broker. Johnson financed the construction of Anglican churches and sup­ ported Anglican preachers near Mohawk communities, but these min­ isters primarily preached to mixed English and German congregations like the one at Fort Hunter. Christian conversion of Indigenous people was not itself a problem in Johnson’s view. The particular type Whee­ lock advocated, with its attendant changes in material culture, ran counter to Johnson’s—and the British government’s—larger geopoliti­ cal goals for their Haudenosaunee allies. In 1770, as Johnson’s support for Wheelock reached a low ebb, Anglican churchman Charles Inglis wrote that Johnson was “a zealous Churchman” who supported the conversion efforts of the Anglican Society for the Propagation for the Gospel.116 The lingering specter of French Catholic influence and cos­ mological crisis gave Inglis’ warning to the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel a slightly panicked tone, decrying Wheelock’s mission as a danger to Crown and Church. Inglis wrote that “It is of the utmost consequence to the colonies to secure their [the Six Nations’] friendship and attach them to our interest.” He warned that Wheelock’s alumni were spread throughout Haudenosaunee territories and that Wheelock’s plan was “by no means favorable to government . . . It is too contracted, injudiciously formed and inadequate to the design of Christianizing the Indians, to say no worse. Yet it serves the ends of the dissenters well enough, to make a bus­ tle and will gain credit if no better scheme is set on foot.”117 Like Whee­ lock and Sergeant, Inglis pointed to successful French Catholic efforts even in 1770, after the British conquest of New France and incorpora­ tion of British Canada. To Inglis, Wheelock’s alumni presented their own dangers, if only in their numbers and their willingness to settle in Haudenosaunee communities. Anglican missionaries, Inglis was sure, would be more welcomed, but only if they could displace Wheelock’s Congregationalist alumni with their dissenting and “injudicious” goals. The tumult of the American Revolution would ultimately upset these plans. As the Anglican Society for the Propagation of the Gospel intensified its counter efforts in the 1770s, Johnson switched his sup­ port from the radically dissenting Congregationalist Wheelock and his pupils to the state-supported (and state-supporting) Society.

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Haudenosaunee students and their families also gradually turned away from Wheelock. The exact number of students in schools estab­ lished by Wheelock’s alumni in Haudenosaunee communities is unclear. Indeed, it was often unclear to both schoolmasters and Whee­ lock himself, as attendance fluctuated with the seasons and the com­ munities’ political inclinations. By the eve of the American Revolution, Wheelock’s alumni ran at least five separate schools in Haudenosaunee communities, with reported enrollments typically between ten and thirty students.118 These schools increasingly provoked critique from Haudenosaunee leaders. At the peak of the school’s enrollments in Haudenosaunee territories, a Seneca leader accused one of Wheelock’s white alumni, Samuel Kirkland, of attempting to make slaves of the Haudenosaunee through religion. Seneca speaker Onghwandekha warned that Haudenosaunee men would be reduced to feminine forms of labor if they converted to Kirk­ land and Wheelock’s form of Christianity. He pointed to enslaved peo­ ple and Indigenous New England as evidence of British colonialism. Onghwandekha asked, “how many remnants of tribes to the East are so reduced, that they pound sticks to make brooms, to buy a loaf of Bread or it may be a shirt. . . . This will be the condition of our children in a short time if we change or renounce our religion for that of the white people. . . . We shall be sunk so low as to hoe corn and squashes in the field, chop wood, stoop down and milk cows like negroes among the Dutch people.”119 Speaking to an audience of Haudenosaunee men, the Seneca speaker clearly outlined the low status of gendered and racialized manual labor among the English. He highlighted the connec­ tions between the adoption of Kirkland’s form of religious conversion and the reorientation of Haudenosaunee systems of labor it entailed. Loss of land and either day work or forced labor on land owned by whites, Onghwandekha argued, would entrap Haudenosaunee commu­ nities in a cycle of debt and dependence like dispossessed New England Natives or enslaved Africans. The Haudenosaunee were aware that conversion to the system of individual male land ownership, material civility, and day labor that British and later American officials advocated would mean loss of con­ trol and connection to the lands that had always formed the basis of their military and political power. Haudenosaunee cultural entangle­ ment with their European neighbors and purchases of manufactured cloth and clothing gave settlers hope for the political and cultural incor­ poration of Haudenosaunee individuals. It also gave Haudenosaunee

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communities an intimate view of the process of colonialism and eco­ nomic dependence in other Indigenous communities, as well as Euro­ pean hierarchies of race and slavery. By pointing to enslaved Africans and disenfranchised New England Indigenous groups, Onghwandekha articulated an explicit understanding of the intersection between land ownership, material civility, and the Black-white racial binary in early America. For many years, Wheelock sought to relocate closer to Haudenosaunee communities, but the perceived failures of his students and other stum­ bling blocks eventually redirected his efforts. As early as 1762, Wheelock attempted to secure land for the school near Albany or in the Hudson Valley, and by 1768 received a promise from the mayor and Corporation of Albany to help financially support the school if he did so.120 Wil­ liam Johnson, however, opposed moving the school closer to Haude­ nosaunee communities, or closer to any Indigenous communities at all. When Wheelock sought to relocate to the Susquehanna Valley in 1762, Johnson cautioned that “whilst the Indians remain in their pres­ ent Sentiments it will be highly improper to attempt any Settlement in their Country as they are greatly disgusted at the great Thirst which we all seem to shew for their Lands” and that any settlement “may prove fatal to those who should attempt to Establish themselves thereon.”121 Wheelock nevertheless persisted, and the next spring petitioned John­ son’s superior General Jeffrey Amherst for a thousand acres along the Susquehanna but failed to secure a grant of land.122 Lacking support from Johnson and increasingly disappointed with his Haudenosaunee students, Wheelock moved the school to New Hampshire and redi­ rected his efforts to training white missionaries at what would become Dartmouth College.123 British anxieties about Haudenosaunee economic and military loyalty fueled projects like Sergeant’s and Wheelock’s, projects that sought to incorporate Haudenosaunee people as British subjects with­ out incorporating Haudenosaunee sovereign nations. When Wheelock courted donors with descriptions of his Haudenosaunee students “so prittily ingaged in their studies,” he tapped into British optimism that Haudenosaunee individuals could be converted and made British polit­ ical subjects if only they were taught to perform civility correctly, as well as fears that the Haudenosaunee could represent a serious threat to British imperial dominance if not properly tied to British inter­ ests.124 The project revealed deep anxieties about the reproduction of

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whiteness and the delicacy of civil English masculinity. In the process of being made fit to become British political subjects alongside white men, Indigenous students received their education in manual labor alongside enslaved men and women. If, for British imperial officials and concerned citizens such as Whee­ lock, the Haudenosaunee represented the key to British control of east­ ern North America, enslaved Black and female labor was the unspoken foundation of the attempt to recreate British civility in new territory. As with their engagement of Atlantic markets, Haudenosaunee communi­ ties and individuals remained largely uninterested in British ambitions and instead used British colonial projects like Wheelock’s for their own goals. The importance of this Haudenosaunee ethnography of colo­ nialist methods would come to the fore during the American Revolu­ tion, as the Six Nations confronted Americans determined to remake the cultural landscape of Haudenosaunee territories and willing to use force to do so.

C ha p ter 6

Erasure and Violence against Women in the American Revolution

Konwatsi’tsiaenni Molly Brant kept a spa­ cious, well-appointed stone house at Canajoharie after her husband’s death in 1774. Noted for her beauty and elegance throughout British North America, she hosted Haudenosaunee and British diplomats at her table while wearing silver hair plates, fine English rings, woolen leg­ gings, and imported silk mantuas. In his will, William Johnson called Molly his “prudent & faithfull Housekeeper” and the mother of eight of his children. Molly’s activities during their marriage and after John­ son’s death showed her to be a diplomat in her own right. During their marriage, Molly oversaw Mount Johnson’s enslaved people, servants, cooks, gardeners, and bookkeeping.1 She also maintained her connec­ tions with Indigenous and settler diplomats, including other Haude­ nosaunee matrons. Her Mohawk family’s diplomatic connections had helped her late husband rise to prominence as the British Superin­ tendent for Indian Affairs during the Seven Years’ War, and after his death she continued to facilitate British-Haudenosaunee diplomacy.2 In 1779, her late husband’s protege Daniel Claus cautioned the recently appointed British governor of Quebec Frederick Haldimand to heed her advice in relations with Britain’s Haudenosaunee allies, noting that “one word from her is more taken notice of by the Five Nations than a thousand from any white man without exception.”3 173

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In many ways, Molly and her younger brother Joseph represented the best of British hopes for their Haudenosaunee allies if the full material, political, and spiritual conversion could not be hoped for. Literate, nominally Christian, and willing to facilitate cross-cultural diplomacy, Brant signaled both her willingness to perform certain aspects of Anglo feminine civility while retaining her influence in Haudenosaunee communities. The Brants’ literacy, political promi­ nence, and close familial ties with Johnson made Molly and Joseph Brant exceptional at times among their Mohawk kin, but materi­ ally they shared much in common with their Mohawk family. Molly Brant’s Canajoharie home, with its blended material culture, typified many Mohawk women’s homes in the decades leading to the Ameri­ can Revolution. These women positioned their families alongside but not part of the English, Dutch, and Palatine families with whom they worshiped, worked, and traded. This blended civility also made Molly Brant and other Mohawk women like her political targets in the fall of 1777, when the local Con­ tinental Committee of Safety ransacked Mohawk homes at Canajoha­ rie. In doing so, they targeted the consumer symbols of civility that formed the basis of Mohawk claims to land ownership and political legitimacy. Like many other Loyalists, Molly Brant and other Mohawk women who fled their Canajoharie homes in the wake of the 1777 raid lost property, livestock, and personal effects. In Canajoharie, the thefts were both personal and political. Besides stealing livestock and occupy­ ing homes, German Palatine neighbors like Committee of Safety leader Peter Dygert took personal effects from Mohawk homes and distributed them to their families. After the raid, neighbors saw Dygert’s wife and daughter wearing Molly Brant’s fine imported mantuas and jewelry. The thefts at once removed the clothing and jewelry from Brant’s use in claiming English-style feminine respectability, and asserted recently emigrated Palatinate refugee families as more appropriate owners and consumers of those symbols. Relations between Haudenosaunee and newly declared American neighbors had been tense since the early days of the Revolution. These attacks against Haudenosaunee women’s property signaled a shift in perceptions of Haudenosaunee women by their American neighbors that would eventually lead to attacks against Haudeno­ saunee women’s bodies as well. The very consumer similarity that had tied together British and Haudenosaunee communities in the

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years leading to the Revolution made Haudenosaunee women and their property targets for political violence during the Revolution. This was part of American efforts to establish the new nation’s politi­ cal legitimacy by attempting to deny the political legitimacy of neu­ tral and British-allied Indigenous nations. In the twenty years that followed the raid on Molly Brant’s home, American diplomats were forced to acknowledge their need for Haudenosaunee assistance in negotiating with the Western Confederacy in the Ohio Valley after the close of the Revolution. In order to make Haudenosaunee diplomats politically legible on American terms to facilitate both western Indian diplomacy and land sales in western New York, American diplomats refused to acknowledge even the presence of Haudenosaunee women. American diplomats attempted to erase the role of women in Haude­ nosaunee governance after political violence during the Revolution failed to do so. American attacks on Haudenosaunee women stemmed from pro­ found anxieties about Haudenosaunee military and economic power that lasted into the nineteenth century. Attacks against women and their property during the Revolution and attempts to erase Haude­ nosaunee women from political and diplomatic spaces after the war grew from American unease with Haudenosaunee women’s politi­ cal and economic power in their own communities. Haudenosaunee women’s economic power and consequent political influence made them targets for political violence during the Revolutionary era. In the postwar years, Haudenosaunee attempts to secure their remaining lands through treaties like the 1794 Treaty of Canandaigua directly threatened the utopianist possibilities Americans wished to project on seized Haudenosaunee land (see figure 6.1). In earlier times, Brit­ ish government officials had held out hope for the conversion of Indigenous nations for inclusion in the expanding British imperial sphere. Over the course of the Revolutionary War, Americans took the increasingly hostile stance that Indigenous nations were a barrier to the removal of Indigenous individuals. By the end of the war, Ameri­ cans viewed the replacement of Indigenous people and seizure of their territories as the most attractive alternative to the slower diplomatic tactics of spiritual and material conversion employed by the British. Postindependence American hostility toward Haudenosaunee sover­ eignty grew out of the violent intimacies of war and fear of Haudeno­ saunee women’s power.

Haudenosaunee territories and selected settlements circa 1770, including communities attacked during the 1779 Sullivan Campaign.

Source: Map by the author after MacLeitch, Imperial Entanglements, 176 and Preston, Texture of Contact, 17. See glossary for sources of place names.

Figure 6.1.

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Silver Hairplates and Pewter Candlesticks Haudenosaunee women’s economic power in their communities made them targets for political violence during the American Revolution. In the years leading up to the war, Haudenosaunee and settler commu­ nities grew ever more closely entangled. They were entangled both in their daily lives and in the material goods that at once distinguished each community and tied them together. This entanglement brought Haudenosaunee and settler neighbors into close daily contact, inti­ mately aware of the differences between them in a political landscape still dominated by Haudenosaunee diplomatic norms. Navigating pres­ sure to sell land, conflicts with American squatters who encroached on their territories, and changing economic realities, many eastern Haudenosaunee communities engaged in blended economic strate­ gies. Haudenosaunee communities pursued both hunting and market agriculture, while purchasing manufactured goods and using them in ways congruent with distinctly Haudenosaunee cultural norms.4 As in earlier times, Haudenosaunee women were central in making the eco­ nomic decisions that culturally distinguished their families from white neighbors. This combination of economic entanglement and cultural distinction made Haudenosaunee women targets for political violence with the outbreak of conflict. The loss claims made by American-allied Oneidas and Tuscaroras after the war provides a snapshot of economically entangled Haudeno­ saunee communities in the early years of the Revolution.5 About onethird of the eighty-nine claimants were women. They submitted claims either on their behalf or on behalf of deceased fathers or husbands, showing Haudenosaunee women’s continued roles as head of house­ hold through 1780 when the claims were made. Oneida and Tuscarora veterans filed claims for lost milk cows, horses, and hogs, as well as the loss of copper tea kettles, pewter dishes and teapots, looking glasses, porcelain tea cups and saucers, silver candlesticks and teaspoons, and Anglican prayer books, items that would have been familiar in any of their English, Dutch, or Palatine neighbors’ homes.6 Half of all Oneida households, including those headed by women, claimed horses lost during the war.7 In loss claims submitted after the war by British-allied Mohawks who fled to British-held Niagara and La Chien, shown in table 6.1, male and female headed households owned horses, cows, and sheep at nearly identical rates, but female headed households owned pigs at much higher rates than male headed households.8 Mohawk

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Table 6.1 Percent of British-allied Mohawk households claiming lost livestock in 1785 HORSES

COWS

PIGS

SHEEP

TOTAL HOUSEHOLDS

Female-headed households

57%

71%

36%

14%

14

Male-headed household

60%

56%

14%

14%

43

All households

60%

60%

19%

14%

57

Source: “Effects and Possessions left behind in 1777 by the Mohawk at La Chine,” in Sir Frederick Haldimand, 24:299–305; “War Losses of Real & Personal Estate as Valued in the Year 1775 Claimed Mohawk at Niagara,” in Sir Frederick Haldimand, 24:307–20; Guldenzopf, “The Colonial Transformation of Mohawk Iroquois Society,” 195–208.

households without women claimed no livestock other than horses, suggesting that for the 60 percent of Mohawk families who adopted domesticated animals, their care and ownership were under the pur­ view of women’s agricultural work. Oneida and Tuscarora families also made claims for items familiar from the fur trade or treaty gifts. These included stroud blankets, ani­ mal traps, lengths of ribbon, wampum, silver brooches and hair plates, axes, brass kettles, and Indigenous clothing, manufactured goods that were produced solely for the “Indian trade.” These items were lost or damaged when American-allied Oneida and Tuscarora fled homes of the frame, log, and bark construction, including some bark longhouse­ style homes with glass windows and metal door hardware. Families who lived in framed homes reported the loss of trade goods like strouds and traps alongside prayerbooks and candlesticks. Families who lived in traditional style bark homes reported the loss of milk basins, pewter dishes, and tea sets. This mixture of goods reflected communities in which purchased consumer goods that denoted civility and sensibil­ ity in settler households blended with more typically Native items and settings.9 There was no bright dividing line for Revolutionary-era Haudenosaunee communities between traditional and European mate­ rial culture because Haudenosaunee families integrated the world of Atlantic consumer goods into a Haudenosaunee cultural framework. In account books dated 1758–63 and 1768–75, settler trader Jelles Fonda documented his brisk trade at Fort Hunter where Anna Peek and Joseph Clement had earlier sold rum and cloth. As had been the case earlier in the century, Fonda’s Haudenosaunee customers had access to the same range of Atlantic consumer goods as their English, Palatine, and Dutch neighbors.10 The majority of Fonda’s 106 recorded Haude­ nosaunee customers were Mohawk. They also included Onondagas,

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Oneidas, Cayugas, and Senecas, even during the early years of the Revo­ lution when Fonda served as a Continental Army officer. Haudeno­ saunee consumers at Fort Hunter made most of their payments with New York currency or work for credit rather than furs, much like their white neighbors. Those who paid in kind exchanged corn, peas, and wood ash (used to make soap or fertilize fields). Haudenosaunee cus­ tomers also performed some day labor, including delivering wagonloads of goods, sewing moccasins, and “going in search of ” runaway enslaved people in exchange for credit to their accounts. Although the majority of payments in kind were made with com­ modities other than fur, peltry still made up most of the value of pay­ ments in kind to Fonda in the late eighteenth century as shown in table 6.2. Other payments include cash, silver, wampum, day labor, and pawned goods such as blankets, traps, and guns. Most payments were made in cash, and the table below only lists cases where credit was extended. Numerically, more credit accounts were paid down with agricultural products, but their combined value was less than the value of the smaller number of payments made with furs or cash. Haude­ nosaunee consumers in the vicinity of Albany and Fort Hunter had overwhelmingly moved toward a cash economy, and women’s labor may have taken on additional significance in this context. Fur and hunting remained the basis of Haudenosaunee purchasing power, but women’s agricultural products like corn, peas, and ash had become a much more important component of Haudenosaunee exchanges.11 In cases where Fonda noted how his Haudenosaunee customers earned the cash they paid their debts with, the work aligned with Haudenosaunee gender roles. Women sold agricultural products to other merchants, while men sold timber and repaired fences. Unlike the methods used to pay their debts, the items Haudeno­ saunee consumers purchased from Fonda displayed deliberate cultural Table 6.2 Jelles Fonda credit payments, 1758–1763 and 1768–1775, in New York pounds Total payments made on credit

£308.6.8

Credit payments made with furs

£104.12.4

34%

Credit payments made with agricultural products

£41.8.0

13%

Other payments including cash and pawned goods

£162.6.4

52%

£0.6.8