A Longhouse Fragmented

Brian Joseph Gilley

Description

A Longhouse Fragmented is a historic ethnography of the Ohio Iroquois and, in particular, of the people known as the Seneca of Sandusky during the early nineteenth century. Using contemporary social theory and interdisciplinary methodologies, Brian Joseph Gilley tells the social history of the Native peoples of Ohio before and during the sociopolitical buildup to removal. As culturally, geographically, and socially displaced Iroquois, the Sandusky Iroquois were fragmented away from American historiographical constructions of Iroquois social history by the American Indian academic establishment. This fragmentation makes the early cultural history of the Ohio Iroquois an ideal foil through which to consider how normalized interpretations of social history come to appear real and have real effects for the subject societies well into the twentieth century. These stories are intended to begin an overdue conversation about the effects of a unified Iroquois history congealed around highly specific categories of knowledge.
List of Illustrations
Preface
Introduction

1. Plant-Based Sandusky Histories

2. Community Maintenance and Midwinter at Sandusky

3. Representation and Autonomy

4. Displacing the Longhouse

5. Refusing Fragmentation

Abbreviations Used in Notes
Notes
Works Cited
Index

Sujets

• USA
• United States of America
• 19th century
• Local history
• Midwestern United States
• Indigenous peoples
• History of the Americas
• Anthropology
• États-Unis

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 05 décembre 2013
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781438449418
• Langue: English

Extrait

A L ONGHOUSE F RAGMENTED
A L ONGHOUSE F RAGMENTED
Ohio Iroquois Autonomy in the Nineteenth Century
B RIAN J OSEPH G ILLEY
S TATE U NIVERSITY OF N EW Y ORK P RESS
Published by
S TATE U NIVERSITY OF N EW Y ORK P RESS , A LBANY
© 2014 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY www.sunypress.edu
Production, Laurie Searl Marketing, Anne M. Valentine
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Gilley, Brian Joseph, 1972–
A longhouse fragmented : Ohio Iroquois autonomy in the nineteenth century / Brian Joseph Gilley.
pages cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4384-4939-5 (hardcover : alk. paper)
1. Iroquois Indians—Ohio—History—19th century. 2. Iroquois Indians—Ohio—Politics and government. 3. Iroquois Indians—Ohio—Social life and customs. I. Title.
E99.I7G52 2014
977.1004'9755—dc23
2013003398
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
C ONTENTS
L IST OF I LLUSTRATIONS
P REFACE
I NTRODUCTION
C HAPTER O NE Place-Based Sandusky Histories
C HAPTER T WO Community Maintenance and Midwinter at Sandusky
C HAPTER T HREE Representation and Autonomy
C HAPTER F OUR Displacing the Longhouse
C HAPTER F IVE Refusing Fragmentation
A BBREVIATIONS U SED IN N OTES
N OTES
W ORKS C ITED
I NDEX
I LLUSTRATIONS
Figure 1.1 Sandusky Region Settlements and Reserves. Source: Brian J. Gilley and Mary Connors
Figure 4.1. Good Hunter, a Warrior. Date: 1872. Artist: George Catlin. Collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Oil on canvas. Size: 21 ⅛ × 16½ in.
Figure 4.2. Hard Hickory, an Amiable Man . Date: 1872. Artist: George Catlin. Collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Oil on canvas. Size: 21 ⅛ × 16½ in.
Figure 5.1 Neosho Sub-Agency. Source: Brian J. Gilley and Mary Connors
P REFACE
At the Fiftieth Annual Conference on Iroquois Research in 1995, I found myself among some of the most important people in Native North American anthropology, archaeology, and history. Students with direct intellectual lineages to Franz Boas mingled with fledgling scholars and graduate students such as me. Fortunately, Laurence Hauptman had taken me under his wing, and he ushered me to meet various Iroquois scholars. Unlike the other graduate students, I was encouraged to sit at the dinner table with William Fenton, Floyd Lounsbury, Elisabeth Tooker, and William Sturtevant as well as the equally well-known generation of Iroquois scholars after them. I got to share a six-pack with Dean Snow and Bill Sturtevant in the dormitory of the Rennselaerville Institute, where the conference was held. Only now do I realize how fortunate I was to have access to such outstanding scholars for an entire weekend and how frequently I embarrassed myself with my naiveté and overconfidence in the importance of my own research. I presented a paper on the Seneca-Cayuga of Oklahoma and sought the consultation of Drs. Sturtevant and Tooker, who were among the few living scholars to have conducted ethnohistorical and ethnographic research with the Seneca-Cayuga. During my audience with Sturtevant and Tooker, they summarized what they had written about the community and gave me advice on where to look for documents. However, the spark for my research project came in the last few minutes of our conversation when Sturtevant said, to my best recollection, “Those Western people are not Iroquois as we think of the Six Nations. They have kinship, a longhouse, but they’re not actually Iroquois.” Throughout the weekend of papers and celebrations in honor of the fiftieth conference, a particular idea about what is Iroquois and what qualifies as legitimate Iroquois research began to emerge.
Over the years I visited Sturtevant at the Smithsonian a few times and talked about the Seneca-Cayuga and other displaced Iroquois. I had the chance to talk with Fenton and Tooker about the project a few years after the conference as well. In all instances, the scholars I encountered wanted to understand more about the peoples to the west who count their cultural and historical origins among the Six Nations, but they were unwilling to put them socially, culturally, or politically on equal footing. In the course of the research leading to the publication of this book, I have become acutely aware of the ways in which Iroquois studies has invested in a kind of hegemonic control of “Iroquois,” “Six Nations,” and the content of those cultures. I am not implying a grand academic conspiracy meant to prevent new scholarship or the development of the field. Rather, I only experienced encouragement from these founding scholars. At the same time, after I completed the research on the Seneca of Sandusky, of whom the Oklahoma Seneca-Cayuga are descendent, I encountered numerous obstacles to publishing the work. Certainly my initial critiques of Iroquois studies reflected the immaturity of my scholarship, but the ethnohistorical evidence supported the probability of Iroquois studies’ unfortunate dismissal of the Western peoples. Reviewer critiques of my submissions to journals outright dismissed the possibility of an “authentic” Iroquois society in the Ohio Valley in the nineteenth century. Their argument against my interpretation was twofold: first, the Ohio Territory peoples were not engaged with the settler state as a nation or a “league”; and second, their movement west in the eighteenth century displaced them from the metaphorical longhouse that extended across New York. There was a clear interest in solidifying what could be called Iroquois despite the influence of exceptional scholarly works such as Richard White’s The Middle Ground and Michael McConnell’s A Country Between, which provide an alternative interpretation for the sociopolitical relevance of the Western Iroquois and Algonquian peoples. Discouraged by the reception of my ethnohistorical work, I abandoned the Seneca of Sandusky project for over a decade until reading the introduction to Jon Parmenter’s The Edge of the Woods , which was ironically the subtitle for the fiftieth anniversary Iroquois conference I first attended. 1
Parmenter eloquently and meticulously presents many of the issues that have long bothered scholars of Native America about Iroquois studies, such as its provincialism and unwillingness to incorporate itself into broader conceptualizations of native studies. The arguments in The Edge of the Woods center on the Iroquois sociopolitical tendency to use transitional spaces as socially restorative and as catalysts for cultural change while emphasizing continuity with the basic values of the Longhouse. Parmenter does something no other scholar has done—he links the fundamental values of the Deganawidah Epic, which is the conceptual foundation for the League, to actual everyday ways of being Iroquois. Additionally, he uses the Deganawidah Epic as a critique of an academically produced, geographically sedentary Iroquois and the ways academics place spatial boundaries on the sociopolitical history of the Six Nations. Some of my critiques of Iroquois studies mirror those of Parmenter; at the same time, I seek to make an argument explicitly linking a temporal and geographic Iroquois exceptionalism. In doing so, I hope to disentangle the analytical usefulness of our most fundamental knowledge about the Iroquois from the inherent limitations of Iroquois particularism. I use the history of the Ohio Iroquois, specifically the people known as the Sandusky Seneca, to understand how cultural logics are spatially mobile and temporally durable. Thus the arguments and evidence presented here will seek to show how a small group of Iroquois, the people known as the Sandusky Seneca, continued to make use of the fundamental logics of the Longhouse despite occupying a different geographic space than their Six Nations relatives.
Examining this problem requires illustrating both the logic of the Longhouse and that of Iroquois studies. Both converge at various moments in the actual history of Iroquois peoples and at crucial moments in academic knowledge production. As scholars can draw a line of continuity from precontact proto-Iroquois societies to the present community practices of twenty-first-century Iroquois, we can also map a continuity of settler logics from protoethnographic colonial accounts to Lewis Henry Morgan and well into the theoretically sophisticated works published today. Likewise we can draw a line of continuity between the sociopolitical foundations of Iroquois culture to the people who would come to be known as the Seneca of Sandusky and later the Seneca-Cayuga of Oklahoma.
Revisiting this topic is also motivated by a Seneca-Cayuga woman I met through my ethnographic research on Two-Spirit people. When I met Jennifer (a pseudonym) about ten years ago, she was in her early twenties and had recently taken one of my Cherokee friends and ethnographic consultants as a brother through adoption. During my time of seeing her on a regular basis, she spoke about the ceremonies at Turkey Ford, the ceremonial grounds established by the Seneca of Sandusky after removal to the C