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After the Mourning Wars: The Iroquois as Allies in Colonial North American Campaigns, 1676–1760
Jon Parmenter
| INVOLVEMENT as allies in imperial conflicts from 1676 to 1760 represented a revolutionary change in Iroquoian approaches to warfare. Mourning wars, which arose from a cultural mandate to replace deceased relatives and involved far-ranging, often large-scale raids on rival native nations to procure captives to either adopt or ritually torture and execute, typified pre- and early contact era Iroquois military history. Supplying not only captives but also plunder in the form of pelts and trade goods and an avenue for young men to gain military experience and honors, these campaigns continued through the 1750s. Yet increasingly after 1676, allied military activities represented a more significant Iroquoian engagement with intensifying Anglo-French imperial rivalry on the borders of their homelands and yielded a new repertoire of social, political, and military benefits. |
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Research on Iroquois military history has emphasized the seventeenth- century mourning wars (see Historiographical Note, 77–82). Scholarship on the participation of Iroquois warriors as allies in intercolonial conflicts from 1676 to 1760, though voluminous, has downplayed Iroquois capacities, contending that the Iroquois League was unable to cope militarily, socially, or politically with the changes brought about by the rise of the Anglo-French struggle for empire during the final two decades of the seventeenth century. This period ostensibly marked the end of the "useful functions" of the "mourning-war" complex and the beginning of an era in which warfare became a "dangerously dysfunctional" practice for Iroquois societies. This interpretation is in keeping with the long-standing view that the ultimate costs of native peoples' involvement in colonial North American wars outweighed any substantial gains. Yet in overlooking the dramatic adjustments to warfare evident in allied Iroquois military activity after 1676, this line of argument underestimates Iroquois agency in their contest with settler colonialism in colonial North America.1 |
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Analysis of Iroquois allied military activities addresses larger questions of Iroquoian social, political, and cultural history during the late colonial era and reveals the degree to which Iroquoian values and interests transcended the rivalries and boundaries imperial powers attempted to impose on them. Though actively involved in colonial North American campaigns from 1676 to 1760, the Iroquois developed an ethic of mutual nonaggression between warriors allied to competing colonial armies. By drastically limiting Iroquois-on-Iroquois violence in these conflicts, the Iroquois curtailed the "fratricidal disputes" that temporarily troubled late-seventeenth-century Iroquoia. They greatly minimized the effect of intercolonial warfare on their population base yet also preserved their reputation among colonists and other native groups as fearsome antagonists and exerted a profound shaping influence on the course of conflicts in northeastern North America. Their value as the eyes and ears of European military forces in North America elicited substantial amounts of money and matériel from competing colonial powers who actively courted their assistance and viewed the presence or absence of Iroquois allies as a zero-sum game (Table I). Additionally, working with European armies gave the Iroquois important information about regional political and military events and trends, which allowed them to calibrate the Iroquois League's neutrality policy after 1701 and assured recognition for Iroquois concerns at the diplomatic bargaining table through the 1760 conquest of Canada.2
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