Book Review

Canada and the United States

Laurence M. Hauptman. Conspiracy of Interests: Iroquois Dispossession and the Rise of New York State. (The Iroquois and their Neighbours.) Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press. 1999. Pp. xix, 304. $34.95.

What did the early modern French, Dutch, and English have in common? All recognized that they could not establish settlements in the interior of parts of North America unless they created partnerships, of one sort or another, with a group of Native American Indians known collectively as the Iroquois. Composed initially of five distinct nations—the Seneca, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Mohawk—the Iroquois added the Tuscarora as the sixth nation in the early eighteenth century. The land of this confederacy, known as Iroquoia, was centered in modern-day New York state, though their influence could be felt far beyond, as Huron, Delaware, and Catawba communities knew well. During the age when Europeans were gaining greater control over much of eastern North America, the Iroquois remained a powerful force. Even the English, ever arrogant in their treatment of many native nations, felt compelled to create an alliance with the Iroquois, the so-called "covenant chain" whose links had to be maintained (kept polished, to follow the logic of the metaphor) so that misunderstandings between peoples did not escalate into genocidal rage. But despite their potency, the power and land base of the Iroquois shrank over time.	1
Explaining the decline of the Iroquois has proven an enormous challenge for historians, and many have responded with superb works of historical reconstruction. Anyone with even a casual interest in Iroquois history will know important works by such scholars as Richard White, Daniel K. Richter, Francis Jennings, Matthew Dennis, William Nelson Fenton, and Anthony F. C. Wallace. Now Max M. Mintz and Laurence M. Hauptman, each a skilled practioner of the historical craft, have attempted to explain what happened. Their stories, fitting well into the declensionist model of much American Indian history, aim to tell what specifically led to the transformation of the confederacy from rulers of Iroquioa to minority members of a state in a new republic.	2
For Mintz, the crucial event was the Revolutionary War. He is right that the war took a horrendous toll in Iroquoia, especially the devastating 1779 raid of General John Sullivan of the Continental Army, whose soldiers plundered and burned every indigenous community they entered. The war destroyed the Iroquois policy of neutrality that had governed relations in the region before 1763, when the Iroquois played Europeans off against each other. But the Revolution created a new dilemma that vexed the Iroquois, for whom this war of (to use Mintz's words) "Britisher against Britisher was difficult to fathom" (p. 10). Yet however difficult it might have been to comprehend, Mintz's account suggests that what the Iroquois wanted mattered less than what non-Indian generals and soldiers wanted. In the eyes of the Continental Army, the Iroquois—despite the fact many wanted to remain neutral and others sided with the rebels—were enemies whose houses and fields needed to be destroyed.	3
Mintz is at his best describing the day-to-day evolution of the military conflict. He knows how to use available evidence to make telling points, evident when he reports on corpses mouldering on the ground after a battle at Wyoming, Pennsylvania. By the end of his narrative, Mintz has convinced readers that what was at stake was Iroquois control over their own lands. In that struggle, they came up losers. "The Iroquois," Mintz concludes, "found themselves powerless to resist the post-Revolutionary takeover and peopling of their heartland by the new American nation" (p. 183). By taking this stance, Mintz argues that it was military defeat during the Revolution that signalled the moment of final decline for the Iroquois.	. . .