[R-G] Two fine books on the Iroquois [reviews by Salter and Dowd]

[Hunter Gray]

Notes by Hunterbear:

This involves the Iroquois nations of the Confederacy:  Mohawk, Seneca,
Onondaga, Oneida, Cayuga, and Tuscarora.

I've made an increasing number of posts on the extremely significant
Iroquois land claims  in New York State -- as the pace of these cases of
many years standing now picks up very significantly.

I think it's quite safe to say that many non-Indian people [and some Indians
as well]  who are generally concerned with social justice issues -- and
sensitive to those -- know  really little or nothing of Native claims cases.
Here are two very good background books on the Iroquois / New York and
environs situation.  Each is done by Laurence M. Hauptman [SUNY, New Palz]
and published by Syracuse University Press -- and they both do very fine
work in this area.  [My Iroquois library is large and includes many of
Hauptman's works and much indeed -- from several authors -- published by
Syracuse.]

The first book is The Iroquois Struggle for Survival:  World War II to Red
Power.  At the request of Choice -- the journal of the American Library
Congress -- I reviewed this [under my former name of J.R. Salter, Jr.]   And
I gave it very high marks indeed.  Here is my review, just as it appeared in
Choice.  You'll note I also cite two other excellent background works.

My review of The Iroquois Struggle for Survival is then followed by Gregory
Dowd's [Notre Dame] review of Hauptman's  Conspiracy of Interests: Iroquois
Dispossession and the Rise of New York State, Syracuse, 1999.
==============================================

Hunterbear review:  [This book is still in print.]

CHOICE  September, 1986  American Library Association

Hauptman, Laurence M. The Iroquois Struggle for Survival:  World War II to
Red Power.  Syracuse, 1986.  328 p  ill maps bibl index 85-22306.  $37.50
ISBN 0-8156-2349-6; 50.95 pa  ISBN 0-8156-2350-X. E 99.  CIP

An excellent book in all respects.  Historically, the nations that make up
the Iroquois Confederacy have, in both the U.S. and Canada, amply
demonstrated the commitment to tribe, culture, and land characterizing the
Native American position generally -- and also to militant activism in
pursuit of social justice.  In the last dozen years, however, much more
media and scholarly  attention has been given Great Plains tribes, e.g.,
Wounded Knee. In this work, Hauptman thoroughly covers ground important not
only to the Iroquois but to other Indians, academics, and the concerned
public.  Using several perspectives -- anthropological / sociological,
historical, political, and legal -- he deals in detail with major issues
initiated by the Anglo world and resisted by the Iroquois, e.g., Kinzua Dam,
Saint Lawrence Seaway, Tuscarora Reservoir.  Hauptman depicts, in
fascinating fashion, many personalities, Iroquois and other.  Internal
conflicts within the ranks of the Iroquois themselves are handled
sensitively and well.  The book treats events to the early 1970s, providing
the groundwork for an understanding of current Iroquois campaigns
exemplified by the major land claims cases now pending in New York State.
Full notes and bibliography.  This work is a major complement to and
continuation of the themes presented in such classics as Edmund Wilson's
Apologies to the Iroquois [1960] and Barbara Graymont's Fighting Tuscarora:
The Autobiography of  Chief Clinton Rickard [1973]. Public and academic
libraries at all levels.

J.R. Salter, Jr., University of North Dakota  [Hunter Gray / Hunterbear]

 ==================================================================

Gregory Dowd's Review:


"Conspiracy of Interests: Iroquois Dispossession and the Rise of New York
State"
By Laurence M. Hauptman, Syracuse University Press, 1999, 304 pp.

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
---- "Hauptman writes clearly and energetically - and if the argument is
often
repetitive, it's partly because he makes his case with abundant evidence. It
is
an argument that should be taken seriously by anyone who believes that
property
taken illegally from hated minorities should be restored to the victims'
families and descendants."

---- "Francis Jennings once observed that paying close attention to Indians
upsets conventional interpretations of American history. Any reader with a
conventional sense of the antebellum North's moral superiority over the
South,
or of the antebellum Northern elite's benevolence in the face of a ruthless
white man's democracy, should find this an upsetting book."
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

BOOK REVIEW:  [Culturefront Online -- New York Council for the Humanities]
Friends, Enemies, and the Empire State
By Gregory E. Dowd

In most general histories of the United States, "Indian removal," the policy
of
sending Indian nations from the East to reservations across the Mississippi
River, is associated with the Old South, and especially with that great
frontier Democrat, Andrew Jackson. By contrast, upstate New York in the
antebellum era is often regarded as the early republic's laboratory for
benevolence, reform, and progress. One can find a kind of progress, but
little
benevolence, in Laurence Hauptman's detailed history of New York State's
"removal" and "concentration" of two Iroquois nations during the period
between
the American Revolution and the Civil War.

Hauptman's is not the story of a white man's frontier democracy gone
land-wild; it is, instead, an indictment of New York's early elite. He names
names, he presses charges, and he sustains a simple argument - though one
that
must have taken enormous work and a sophisticated knowledge of the sources.
(Not surprising, really, given that Hauptman, who teaches at SUNY New Paltz,
is
the author or editor of a dozen previous books on Native Americans.)
Powerful
men, representing powerful interests in the roads and canals that did so
much
to make New York the Empire State, systematically dispossessed the Oneida
and
the Seneca nations of their vast inheritance. To drive home the point that
influential men were the guilty parties, Hauptman lavishes his pages with
their
faces, where they scrutinize the reader as if from a prisoner's dock. These
men
came from the ranks of New York's leading families and patriots. They
carried
names like Schuyler, Ellicot, Jay, Fulton, De Witt, Van Rensselaer,
Livingston,
Clinton, Van Buren, Kirkland, Benson, Ogden, and Porter. They came from all
parties: Federalist, Jeffersonian Republican, Democratic, and Whig; they
were
Congregationalists, Presbyterians, even Hicksite Quakers. They had
overlapping
interests in the development of canals, cities, and colleges. And they acted
illegally, Hauptman insists, in clear violation both of constitutional
provisions and federal statutes that made diplomacy with Indian nations a
matter of federal, not state, authority. Federal officials were aware of the
violations, but did little more than lob an occasional warning at New York's
"nefarious" developers (to quote one of their favorite epithets).

Hauptman's contribution is to tie Indian dispossession firmly to the
"transportation revolution" and to the rhetoric of national defense. Most of
the book is a clear, lively, even passionate narrative of the activities of
entrepreneurial cliques and the harm they did to Indians. Yet Hauptman also
demonstrates that Indian dispossession was integral to the transportation
revolution, a movement that occupies a major place in antebellum American
history and in which the Erie Canal and the rise of Buffalo play important
roles. Since land-jobbing and Indian dispossession usually went hand in
hand,
this argument may not seem surprising; yet never has the case been made so
pungently, and never has it been so clearly linked to the growth of the
canals.
His discussion of the rhetoric of national defense is just as striking. As
powerful New Yorkers advanced the development of their state between the
1780s
and the 1820s, they argued that the nation's security required American
control
of the Great Lakes, which in turn depended on American access to the lakes
from
the Atlantic. A "vast conspiracy of interlocking interests . . . took
advantage of the real fears caused by New York State's proximity to the
enemy,
British Canada, to generate calls for Indian removal." Hauptman boldly
suggests
that the rhetoric has modern counterparts, such as the "cold war arguments
of
the 1950s made by Robert Moses in [his] advocacy of the Tuscarora Reservoir
and
the St. Lawrence Seaway projects."

While relentlessly pursuing his criminals, Hauptman pays less attention to
their victims. He does explain how the Oneidas developed a deliberate (if
ultimately fruitless) strategy to cope with their powerful neighbors: they
played the part of "good Indians," allying themselves with the colonists
even
before the Revolution.(Continuing to cooperate with the United States, such
Christian Oneidas as Good Peter and Skenadoah pursued this strategy into the
1790s, but it failed "miserably.") But Hauptman's real interest is in the
moral
failure and even criminality of the Oneidas' friends among the citizenry.

The missionary Samuel Kirkland was one of those "friends." He attended six
illegal treaty signings and thereby "gave a sense of moral legitimacy to
these
outright frauds." His family interests, including his cherished
Hamilton-Oneida
Academy (now Hamilton College), depended upon the largesse of men like
Oliver
Phelps, a "major land speculator." Another treacherous friend of the Oneidas
was their Revolutionary War ally Philip Schuyler, "perhaps the most powerful
New Yorker of the 1790s." As Hauptman is quick to point out, Schuyler was
less
self-interested than he was interested in the development of New York State,
yet he regularly defied federal law "at a cost to his faithful allies, the
Oneidas." More than anyone else, Schuyler was responsible for appropriating
the
Oneida's land for New York's canal network.

The dispossession of the Oneidas takes up the first part of Hauptman's book,
and that of the Senecas takes up the second. New York's transportation
interests, determined to turn "the village of Buffalo into . . . [a] great
transshipment center," would not be denied the Buffalo Creek Seneca's
strategic
location. These Senecas had been enemies of the United States before and
during
the Revolution, and the role of the "good Indian" did not come easily to
them.
As Hauptman shows, their political factionalism - which derived partly from
religious differences introduced by Christian missions - also rendered them
vulnerable to manipulation.

Ironies highlight the Seneca and Oneida losses. The first boat to enter the
Erie Canal was named the Seneca Chief. The most famous Seneca of the Civil
War
era, Ely S. Parker - who was present in a blue uniform when Robert E. Lee
surrendered at Appomattox Court House and later became the first Native
American to serve as head of the Bureau of Indian Affairs - had a previous
career among Anglo-Americans as a deputy engineer for the New York State
Board
of Canal Commissioners. Finally, in a modern irony, Hauptman points out that
while the Iroquois survived in New York and have, at the end of the
twentieth
century, achieved an obvious dynamism, "the great cities created during the
transportation revolution [Utica, Syracuse, Rochester, and Buffalo] have
rapidly declined."

Hauptman writes clearly and energetically - and if the argument is often
repetitive, it's partly because he makes his case with abundant evidence. It
is
an argument that should be taken seriously by anyone who believes that
property
taken illegally from hated minorities should be restored to the victims'
families and descendants. Historians who view antebellum upstate New York as
a
progressive center of benevolent reform should also review the unsavory
history
that we find in these pages. Francis Jennings once observed that paying
close
attention to Indians upsets conventional interpretations of American
history.
Any reader with a conventional sense of the antebellum North's moral
superiority over the South, or of the antebellum Northern elite's
benevolence
in the face of a ruthless white man's democracy, should find this an
upsetting
book.


---- Gregory E. Dowd is associate professor of history at the University of
Notre Dame and the author of A Spirited Resistance: The North American
Indian
Struggle for Unity, 1745-1815 (Johns Hopkins, 1999).

Conspiracy of Interests: Iroquois Dispossession and the Rise of New York
State
Laurence M. Hauptman, Syracuse University Press, 1999, 304 pp., $34.95
http://sumweb.syr.edu/su_press/

Paperback - April 2001, $13.97
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/search-handle-form/ref=pd_ir_sr_h/102-7986
085-6338505

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