We are starting
to hear a proper assessment of the first nations experience and perhaps recover
much of value at the same time. The developed lifeway had worked and it
continued to work as it transitioned against settle resistance into modernism. You never forget what works just because a
new tool is added or new income.
What does
happen is that the lifeway strengthens and adapts to new pressures.
What was
difficult was the steady and rapid expansion of settler culture which was a superior
adaptation to the local biome inasmuch as it allowed a denser more productive
life way to take hold. That meant a
galloping increase in overall population which has rarely been seen ever let
alone documented. Thus failure to
actually adopt the same regime partially resisted by settler chauvinism simply
led to demographic failure which is a sustainable trend to this day and will
continue.
As I have posted before, the fate of all minority
populations is genetic absorption and astonishingly quickly. We just lack the proper perspective.
Sustainable
practices of the Iroquois revealed
Every longhouse hearth – every reworked
brass kettle and fractured deer bone unearthed by Cornell archaeologist Kurt
Jordan and his student diggers in 18th century Haudenosaunee (Iroquois)
villages – tells a very different story.
At one time, mainstream scholars of
pre-Revolutionary War Iroquoia saw the disease-diminished and war-weakened
“people of the longhouse” fumbling through an epoch of social turmoil and
decline.
Jordan, his colleagues and their
archaeological evidence just might be changing history. “I see an active, engaged,
re-energized people building a reasonably sustainable, localized economy in the
face of tremendous pressure from European empires and Native rivals,” says
Jordan, associate professor of anthropology and American Indian studies.
For those who snoozed through American
history – and the part about the Iroquois Confederacy from the mid-1600s
through the American Revolution in particular – this certainly was a time of
change. Fewer Iroquois (63 percent of Mohawks had died in a 1634 epidemic)
incorporated other Northeastern Indians into their domain and increasingly
lived in smaller, scattered communities many days’ travel from the
centuries-old, upstate New York core. But they did much more than just hold on,
Jordan emphasizes.
“The core territory continued to be
occupied, even as satellites budded off to more distant areas,” he says. Their
new settlements in Ohio, Pennsylvania and areas of Canada were “colonies,” he
argued in an American Anthropologist journal article, “Postcolumbian Iroquois
Satellite Communities and Processes of Indigenous Autonomy,” last year.
By incorporating non-Iroquois people, the
Haudenosaunee “managed to keep populations reasonably constant, or even
increase them, during a period when Iroquois agriculture was extremely
productive,” he says. The “dispersal” other scholars saw as a sign of the
Confederacy’s dissolution was, to Jordan, pragmatic adaptation to changing
times.
As he wrote in his 2008 book, “The Seneca
Restoration, 1715-1754,” dispersal can no longer be seen “as the passive
response of a people buffeted by the upheavals of engagement with Europeans,
but instead must be regarded as an instance of active opportunism where
Iroquois people took advantage of a hard-won neutrality to improve their daily
lives.”
Senecas figure prominently in Jordan’s
mostly upbeat narrative because their territory is where his most revealing
digs have been. The Townley-Read site, the mid-1700s home to several hundred
Seneca agriculturalists, is located near Geneva, N.Y. Summer after summer,
Jordan has led archaeological excavations, educating college-age Native
Americans (with scholarships through Cornell’s American Indian Program) alongside
nonnative students.
Objects Senecas left behind are open to
interpretation. That brass imported from Europe, for example, once was taken as
evidence that traditional cultures were eroding and that Iroquois were becoming
“acculturated” and dependent on European trade goods. “Brass kettles were
reshaped into Native forms,” Jordan notes.
“The commonplace nature of kettles indicates
that Senecas had enough trading power to get regular access to materials they
could adapt to their needs.” And all that deer bone, broken open to get at
nutritious marrow and fat during late-winter months? Some scholars called that
“desperation” by a stressed-out population; Jordan says marrow and grease
harvesting was a well-planned tactic, yielding a storable dietary resource used
until seasonal supplies rebounded.
Life for the Haudenosaunee became
significantly more difficult during and after the Revolutionary War. Crops and
villages were burned, and their people were confined to small reservations by
dubious land deals. Jordan thinks everyone today, even those who vehemently
oppose Native American land claims, should know what was:
Maybe not a golden age for the people of
the longhouse and certainly not Camelot, but a remarkable time of sustainable
autonomy and resilience. “Uncritical reliance on this narrative of
decline,” he says, “has both perpetuated errors of fact and damaged relations
among contemporary Native Americans, scholars and the general public.” Anyone
who doubts that, Jordan says, is welcome to grab a trowel and join the dig.
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