Forest Diplomacy

Nicolas W. Proctor

Description

Forest Diplomacy draws students into the colonial frontier, where Pennsylvania settlers and the Delaware Indians, or Lenape, are engaged in a vicious and destructive war. Using sources—including previous treaties, firsthand accounts of the war, Quaker epistles advocating pacifism, and various Iroquois and Lenape cultural texts—students engage in a treaty council to bring peace back to the frontier.

Sujets

• Histoire
• Colonial Period
• United States
• History
• US

Informations

• Publié par: The University of North Carolina Press
• Date de parution: 01 juillet 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781469672380
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

FOREST DIPLOMACY
REACTING TO THE PAST is an award-winning series of immersive role-playing games that actively engage students in their own learning. Students assume the roles of historical characters and practice critical thinking, primary source analysis, and argument, both written and spoken. Reacting games are flexible enough to be used across the curriculum, from first-year general education classes and discussion sections of lecture classes to capstone experiences, intersession courses, and honors programs.
Reacting to the Past was originally developed under the auspices of Barnard College and is sustained by the Reacting Consortium of colleges and universities. The Consortium hosts a regular series of conferences and events to support faculty and administrators.
Note to instructors: Before beginning the game you must download the Gamemaster s Materials, including an instructor s guide containing a detailed schedule of class sessions, role sheets for students, and handouts.
To download this essential resource, visit https://reactingconsortium.org/games , click on the page for this title, then click Instructors Guide.
FOREST DIPLOMACY
Cultures in Conflict on the Pennsylvania Frontier, 1757
Nicolas W. Proctor

The University of North Carolina Press Chapel Hill
2022 The University of North Carolina Press
All rights reserved
The University of North Carolina Press has been a member of the Green Press Initiative since 2003.
Cover illustration: Constantino Brumidi, William Penn and the Indians . 1880. Wikimedia Commons.
ISBN 978-1-4696-7073-7 (pbk.: alk. paper)
ISBN 978-1-4696-7238-0 (e-book)
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
NICOLAS W. PROCTOR is professor of history at Simpson College. He received his Ph.D. in U.S. history from Emory University and is the author of Bathed in Blood: Hunting and Mastery in the Old South . He is also the chair of the Reacting to the Past editorial board, and the author of Reacting games on the Seven Years War on the Pennsylvania frontier, the Chicago Democratic Convention of 1968, Reconstruction in New Orleans, and the art of the Paris Exposition Universelle of 1889, as well as a handbook for Reacting game designers.
CONTENTS
PART 1: INTRODUCTION
Brief Overview of the Game
Prelude
Treaty Council
Coda
Prologue: Three Roads to Easton
A Len p Seeking Justice
A Commissioner Seeking Peace
A Quaker Pariah
How to React
Game Setup
Game Play
Game Requirements
PART 2: HISTORICAL BACKGROUND
Chronology
The Foundations of Forest Diplomacy
The Iroquois League
The Delaware
The Quakers
Growth of Pennsylvania
The Covenant Chain
Walking Purchase of 1737
King George s War and the Treaty of Lancaster
The Ohio Valley and Fort Duquesne
The Albany Conference and Washington s Defeat
War in the Borderlands
Panic and Appropriations
Quaker Idealism
War in Earnest
Recent Military Events
A Chance for Peace
Military Forces
PART 3: THE GAME
Major Issues for Debate
Diplomacy
Indian Politics
Making War
Accommodation
Pennsylvania Politics
Rules and Procedures
Objectives and Victory Conditions
Follow the Protocols
Talks In the Bushes
Proper Seating
Wampum
Memory Aids
Shout Yo-Heh!
Gift Giving
Patronage and Other Side Deals
Basic Outline of the Game
Prologue
Game Session 1: Prelude
Game Sessions 2-4: Treaty Council
Game Session 5: Coda
Debriefing
Assignments and Grading
Speeches
Written Assignments
Counterfactuals
PART 4: ROLES AND FACTIONS
Indian Faction
Iroquois League
Interpreters
Pennsylvanians
Proprietary Faction
Assembly Faction
Independents
PART 5: CORE TEXTS
Treaties
Philadelphia Treaty of 1742
Treaty of Lancaster, 1744
Carlisle Treaty of 1753
Supplemental Documents
John Heckwelder, The Coming of Miquon
David Zeisberger, Delawares and the Allegheny River Valley
John Woolman, Epistle from the Society of Friends, 1755
William Smith, A Brief State of the Province of Pennsylvania , 1755
Deliberations of the Governors Council, 1756
John Armstrong s Account of the Kittanning Fight, 1756
John Cox, Testimony of an Escaped Prisoner, 1756
Great Law of the Iroquois League
Selected Bibliography
Acknowledgments
APPENDICES
Delaware as Women
Teedyuscung s Raid

PART 1: INTRODUCTION
BRIEF OVERVIEW OF THE GAME
Forest Diplomacy begins as the European settlers in colonial Pennsylvania and the Delaware Indians (or Len p ) are engaged in a vicious and destructive war. This conflict will eventually merge with the global mid-eighteenth century struggle between Britain and France known in Europe as the Seven Years War and in the United States as the French and Indian War. The focus of the game is a treaty council in 1757, which seeks to end the conflict on the frontier. Before the game begins, players will explore the historical context, previous treaties, firsthand accounts of the war, controversies over Quaker pacifism, and various Iroquois and Delaware cultural texts. Once the game begins players will negotiate with one another in an attempt to hammer out a broadly acceptable treaty. After the game ends, there is an opportunity for debriefing and reflection. The game itself is divided into three distinct phases.
Prelude
Players divide into three groups: Interpreters, Pennsylvanians, and Indians. The latter two groups meet separately from one another, but Interpreters may shuttle back and forth. This gives players an opportunity to identify with their assigned cultures. It also allows distrust and suspicion to fester.
Treaty Council
Players reunite when formal treaty deliberations begin. The structure of these meetings is dictated by the traditional rituals of eastern woodland Indian diplomacy, which are intended to create a dispassionate space in the midst of the blood-thirstiness of war. Understanding the attendant cultural conventions becomes an essential element in peacemaking, which can be difficult given the divineness of issues like scalping, the liquor trade, captive taking, cultural assimilation, and the seizure of land.
Coda
When negotiations conclude, players must attempt to uphold whatever agreements they forged in the Treaty Council. If the treaty remains disagreeable to a significant number of participants, it will collapse amid renewed violence. However, if enough participants can be convinced that the treaty represents a just peace then it will stand.
PROLOGUE: THREE ROADS TO EASTON
A Len p Seeking Justice
The path you follow is a familiar one. You have walked it many times before.
You were born in your people s ancestral homeland in the Delaware River valley, but when you were a boy, the women of your village made a momentous decision: it was time to leave. Your entire village crossed the Kittochtinny Hills and settled on the banks of the Susquehanna River in the town of Shamokin, which sheltered a variety of people who had been displaced by the whites.
The site of the colonial era settlement of Shamokin is now the city of Sunbury, Pennsylvania.
This meant that in addition to your own kin, you grew up among people who considered themselves Conoy, Shawnee, Nanticoke, and Mahican. In time, intermarriage, adoption, familiarity, and political necessity began to meld many of these peoples together into a collection of peoples who came to be known as the Delawares.
There were also those who held themselves apart. Foremost among them were those who belonged to the peoples of the Iroquois League: the Haudenosaunee. In time, the whites followed you across the hills. A handful of white traders made their homes in Shamokin. Some of these men were good, but many were filled with greed and deceitfulness. You decided that you would not trade with them.
After you became an accomplished hunter, you and some friends followed the path back across the Kittochtinnes with a pack of deerskins and beaver pelts. You traded them with white men near the rising village of Easton for metal tools, cloth, liquor, powder, and lead. The land where you were born was changing before your eyes. You watched as the whites broke the land to their will, clearing trees, piling stones into walls, and gouging the earth in long strips with their cattle and their plows.
During this visit, some white men spoke about their god. They promised great rewards for those who wore white men s uncomfortable shoes, ate their food, and lived in their cold, damp houses. Some listened and stayed with the whites, but you were unimpressed and returned to Shamokin.
Soon, white families started building farms nearby. Their hogs rooted in your fields. They scared the deer away. They plied your people with liquor and insisted that they owned the land they farmed because they had bought it from powerful whites- the Proprietors -who lived far away across the ocean in England. These Proprietors were the sons of William Penn. You remembered him as a friend of Indians, but you did not know his sons. No one seemed to know the sons.
These claims of ownership confused you, so you asked a white trader how these Proprietors had come to own the land, land that, you pointed out, you had lived on for most of your life. He answered simply: they bought it from the Iroquois.
Everyone knew that the nations of the Haudenosaunee considered your people (and all of the other peoples who lived in Shamokin) their subordinates, but you did not understand how this arrogant presumption extended to the sale and ownership of land. Some Iroquois lived in Shamokin, but they were in the minority. From time to time their war parties descended the Susquehanna River from the Iroquois lands to the north. They passed through Shamokin on their journey to make war on southern peoples like the Catawbas and Cherokee, but they never farmed the land and rarely hunted in its forests. The authority of the league seemed distant and indistinct. There was an Iroquois chief named Shickellamy who observed the happenings in Sham