IntroductionSustaining Haudenosaunee Homelands

Indigenous Thanksgiving Addresses recount the cyclical nature of life and the obligations of humans to “live in balance and harmony with each other and all living things,” including other-than human flora, fauna, and water kin. Speakers also give thanks to “our Mother, the Earth” for giving “all that we need for life. She supports our feet as we walk upon her. It gives us joy that she continues to care for us as she has from the beginning of time.” For The People of the Longhouse, or Haudenosaunee, their connections to their homelands and other-than human kin define their identity, sustain their families, and establish a reciprocal relationship of gift-giving, balance, and gratitude necessary for their survival.¹ During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, these vibrant homelands stretched from the lower end of the Mohawk River in the east to beyond the Genesee River in the west and throughout the meandering and extensive Susquehanna River on the south to north of Lake Ontario and the Saint Lawrence River. Haudenosaunee homelands contracted and expanded based on the successes or challenges of various military, diplomatic, economic, and spatial relations with Indigenous and imperial neighbors. By the mid-1770s, Haudenosaunee men, women, and children occupied scores of communities along the alluvial floodplains of rivers and creeks, atop the rolling hills and flatlands above the water arteries, and among the more rugged terrain of higher elevations throughout their homelands.² At Oquaga, along the eastern branch of the Susquehanna River, families formed multinational communities. Mohawk, Oneida, and Tuscarora men constructed homes with squared logs, planked siding, pitched roofs, shingles, stone chimneys, wooden flooring, and glass windows. Families filled these homes with wooden furniture, bedding, curtains, fine clothing, porcelain dishes, pewter utensils, and tea sets. The agricultural labor of women produced thousands of bushels of corn, beans, and squash. Men and women also managed horses, cattle, and poultry, and grew wheat and oats to feed their domestic animals.

Far to the west, in Seneca and Cayuga homelands, men constructed homes of comparable style in similar landscapes along water arteries. Along the western branches of the Susquehanna and Chemung Rivers, and north around numerous lakes, Seneca and Cayuga men combined squared timber with rounded logs in their housing construction. Most homes, but not all, retained a bark roof, central fire pit, and exposed dirt, rather than shingles, stone chimneys, and wooden floors. Seneca and Cayuga women's agricultural labor, like that of their confederate sisters to the east, produced thousands of bushels of corn, beans, and squash. Women's cornfields grew everywhere along the alluvial floodplains, with stalks reaching nearly twenty feet tall and cobs close to eighteen inches long. Women also nurtured numerous fruit orchards of apple, peach, and plum. The size of their orchards ranged from the dozens of apple trees Seneca women maintained at Kendaia to the estimated 1,500 peach trees Cayuga women managed at Chondote. In addition to sustaining long-standing crops and orchards, Haudenosaunee women grew a variety of vegetables in personal gardens, such as cucumbers, watermelon, potato, turnips, peas, and muskmelons. Like their eastern confederates, western residents looked after horses, cattle, and hogs, to name a few of their domestic animals.

By the 1770s, The People of the Longhouse had interacted with French, Dutch, English, and American colonizers for more than a century and a half. The changes to Haudenosaunee housing, agricultural production, and material culture widely visible by the end of the colonial era reflected the creative adaptations of men and women to enhance and to sustain their daily lives by blending long-standing settlement patterns and subsistence practices with new colonial settlement templates. For example, although Seneca and Cayuga homes incorporated European materials and design into new structures, many retained the central fire pit and storage space of the longhouses of previous generations. Throughout Haudenosaunee homelands, new crop varieties supplemented, but did not replace, the three sisters of corn, beans, and squash. Domestic animals provided families with essential protein when hunting resources declined or proved more elusive. In addition, as imported cloth became more abundantly available and inexpensive, Haudenosaunee men and women from eastern and western villages developed a fashion style that paired European-manufactured clothing with deer-skin leggings.

This book highlights the innovative strategies of Haudenosaunee men and women to retain their culture, sovereignty, and control of their homelands through more than seven generations of unprecedented social and environmental change that followed European contact and the settler invasion. Europeans, for example, carried pathogens to which Indigenous bodies had no immunities. European weaponry contributed to more violent and more deadly warfare. Together, these epidemics and this violence produced unparalleled Indigenous demographic collapse. More transformative, Europeans offered a competing worldview of the human place in nature. Europeans viewed an Indigenous landscape filled with other-than human beings of flora and fauna as an abundance of raw materials, such as furs, hides, fish, and timber, waiting to be commodified for an expanding European and global market. Europeans worked to bring Indigenous men and women, their other-than human kin, and Indigenous homelands into competing imperial projects of economic growth, military power, and settler expansion. Through repeated market interactions with Europeans, Indigenous men and women participated in the emerging fur-trade economy when they exchanged their other-than human kin, particularly beaver, for desired and prestigious manufactured trade goods.³

The People of the Longhouse managed the unprecedented challenges that contact and trade produced with survival strategies that involved adaptation, flexibility, diplomacy, and manipulation. Haudenosaunee men and women, for example, quickly and aggressively incorporated articles of European manufacture into their daily lives, but they did so as a purposeful strategy to fulfill conventional social and cultural needs, not as a sign of cultural loss or deterioration. They used new trade items and alliances with Indigenous and imperial neighbors to enhance their lives and to pursue goals and practices specific to their communities. In doing so, The People of the Longhouse produced a distinctively new material culture and new land use practices that incorporated features of the colonial settlement template into long-standing subsistence and settlement patterns. After nearly two centuries of contact, Haudenosaunee men and women lived in a hybrid Indigenous-European landscape, but this landscape remained an unmistakably Haudenosaunee space.

The pages that follow also explore the environmental changes humans and other-than human beings experienced in the wake of sustained European contact and settler invasion. As imperial competitors worked to pull Indigenous men and women, their homelands, and the plants and animals of those geographic spaces into the global market economy, their efforts irreversibly transformed the natural environment. The fur-trade economy functioned to sever Indigenous relationships and responsibilities to human and other-than human kin predicated on balance, gift-giving, and reciprocity because it distorted Indigenous responsibilities to and interactions with fur-bearing animals. In addition, participation in a market economy based on commodity exchange challenged long-standing social and economic relationships within and between Indigenous communities. Growing colonial populations, settler expansion, and imperial terraforming also threatened Indigenous communities, food sovereignty, and water management, particularly when imperial competition, violence, and warfare targeted the homes of Haudenosaunee families and the agricultural fields of Haudenosaunee women. Engagement in market exchanges, therefore, had the potential to alter daily living patterns, prompt new land use practices, and modify social and gender relations within the family and the community. Any internal, day-to-day changes, in turn, influenced external relations with Indigenous and European neighbors. As growing colonial populations and settler expansion pressed against the periphery of Haudenosaunee homelands and threatened critical subsistence ecosystems, The People of the Longhouse developed new strategies to control the scale and scope of European intrusion into their homelands.

By the last decades of the sixteenth century, Haudenosaunee men and women began to acquire items of European manufacture, particularly small metal goods, such as knives and kettles. Men and women followed established Indigenous trade paths to reach the mouth of the Saint Lawrence River where they engaged directly with Europeans at fishing camps around the Gulf of Saint Lawrence and Newfoundland or procured items through Indigenous intermediaries. During the first generations of exchange, men and women often altered imported items to meet personal material needs and tastes. Many Indigenous men and women, for example, repurposed copper kettles, a mainstay of European trading stock, as sharp objects for scraping or piercing or as decorations for clothing. Once the French established a permanent settlement at Québec in 1606, and the Dutch at Fort Orange after 1614, Haudenosaunee men accelerated their acquisition of European manufactured goods, particularly guns. But men and women proved to be just as eager for less dramatic items like kettles, utensils, knives, axes, and hatchets that they seamlessly incorporated into their daily lives. Men and women, for example, increasingly chopped wood with metal axes and processed animal meat and hides with knives and hatchets. Women used metal hoes in their agricultural fields and stored provisions and cooked in brass or copper kettles. Men fished with iron awls. These new manufactured goods reduced the labor demands on men and women to fashion similar objects from bone, stone, wood, and clay materials. The new metal trade goods, however, did not fundamentally alter the social and cultural fabric of Haudenosaunee homes and villages because men and women continued with their longstanding subsistence labor and gendered responsibilities. In addition, men and women engaged in new market exchanges for European manufactured goods when prices and availability of desired products met the expectations of Indigenous customers. Haudenosaunee men and women, for example, relayed their preferences for desired items to European fur traders. If traders did not offer the correct goods, or charged prices deemed too high, Haudenosaunee men and women withheld their furs until they found the items they wanted at exchange rates acceptable to their labor investment.⁴

The geographic expanse of Haudenosaunee homelands west of the Hudson River and south of the Saint Lawrence River offered access to multiple and competing European trade partners as well as to unique opportunities to accommodate, incorporate, control, or manipulate those imperial neighbors. During the seventeenth century, Jesuit missionaries as well as French and English militaries, diplomats, and traders occasionally traveled to or lived in Haudenosaunee villages. These visits, however, were both brief and intermittent, and most intercultural contact occurred when Haudenosaunee men and women traveled to colonial centers. By the 1750s, British and French forts near strategic transportation passes along the Great Lakes as well as settler expansion up the Mohawk River facilitated more frequent economic and cultural exchange. Haudenosaunee leaders, young men, senior matrons, and young women, however, continuously adapted to the market's opportunities and demands to maximize individual and community benefits. More important, The People of the Longhouse incorporated aspects of the settlement template of colonial neighbors to serve their housing and subsistence needs and to maintain their connection and access to homelands.

Much of the source material for the early contact and early colonial period originates in the colonized archive of the records and journals of European missionaries, diplomats, traders, travelers, and colonial or military officials. These sources outline key elements of Indigenous daily activity and subtle forms of change over time. But each of these sources also suffers from significant shortfalls because chroniclers provided reports for specific purposes and audiences and ignored or omitted critical information. When colonial officials recorded diplomatic conferences with Indigenous nations, for example, they logged some of the speeches, complaints, concerns, and promises of leaders. But the transcripts rarely described the body language or fluctuations in the tone of the speaker. Colonial recorders also misunderstood the presence of women at conferences or their contributions to the words of the speaker. Finally, the multitude of languages spoken, and necessary translations, led to errors and omissions. When Europeans ignored crucial features of Indigenous diplomacy and communication, they failed to record information deemed unimportant and misrepresented events and speeches. Consequently, their documentary record offers an incomplete and flawed snapshot of Indigenous thoughts and responses to a period of rapid imperial and colonial expansion into their homelands.⁵

Other colonized archival sources, like European-produced maps and archaeological data, provide vital information on changing Haudenosaunee community locations and arrangements, space usage, subsistence practices, material culture, and the natural environment that the documentary record of missionaries, militaries, colonial traders, and government officials fails to capture. For example, Samuel de Champlain, the French navigator, explorer, geographer, cartographer, soldier, and diplomat, gained firsthand knowledge of the eastern Great Lakes, as he traveled widely to the north and west of the Saint Lawrence River in the early 1600s. More than most explorers, Champlain was a skilled and observant cartographer who produced accurate maps of the Acadian and New England coast. Much of his cartographic information away from the coastline, however, relied heavily, and in most cases exclusively, on unacknowledged Indigenous assistance. Indigenous guides escorted Europeans into the interior of the continent and provided intimate geographic knowledge about landscapes and peoples the “explorers” never encountered. As early as 1603, Champlain solicited sketches from multiple Indigenous groups, namely Wendat and Odawa peoples, regarding spatial representations of the environment hundreds of miles upriver from present-day Montreal. He also relied extensively on these informants for much of his geographic and ethnographic intelligence about the North American interior. Important geographic features, such as Lake Erie, Niagara Falls, and Lake Ontario later appeared in Champlain's 1612 map of New France, even though no Europeans had traveled west of Lake Ontario to any of these places (figure 1). As a result, the European colonizer's understanding of the land, its natural resources, and its inhabitants depended heavily on the details of Indigenous informants and how Europeans chose to interpret and portray that information on their maps. When Europeans misrepresented environmental features, such as the oversized Lake Erie on Champlain's 1612 map, these errors were repeated for decades on later maps, both because of the prohibitive cost incurred to make revisions in production and the lack of personal knowledge required to correct the distorted geographic space.⁶

FIGURE 1. Samuel de Champlain, Carte geographique de la Nouvelle France (1612). Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library.

Europeans used their maps to claim sovereignty over spaces and peoples. By mapping the interior of the continent, Europeans intended to turn a landscape unknown to them, or the terra incognita, into a known space of the terra cognita. The English and French located Indigenous villages and important water systems based on Indigenous geographic knowledge, not their own experiences or understandings. European mapmakers then used text and its placement to implement their imperial agenda. They frequently mislabeled Indigenous villages to emphasize their relationships with distant nations and to minimize the reach and influence of their imperial competitors. French and English cartographers also commonly “erased” Indigenous nations by leaving them off the map altogether. From the European perspective, these omissions illustrated vacuums in human habitation and empty spaces that called for and justified settler expansion. Although European maps are a construct of the settler power and Europeans employed them to transform the terra incognita into the terra cognita, their maps underscore European misunderstandings and ignorance of Indigenous environmental spaces and homelands and, therefore, highlight Indigenous sovereignty. When the perspective is turned to the standpoint of The People of the Longhouse, European maps reflect the ability of Haudenosaunee leaders, young men, senior matrons, and young women to block settler encroachment into the ecosystems critical to their subsistence practices and to control the scale and scope of settler intrusion into their homelands.⁷

In addition to inverting the standpoint of the settler power to counter the view of the colonized documentary record, this book incorporates Native American and Indigenous studies’ approaches and methodologies to deconstruct colonial narratives and further decolonize the European source material. In doing so, this book suggests new ways to conceptualize colonial encounters and center Indigenous knowledge. Haudenosaunee forms of mapmaking, for example, illustrate and record spatial relations with Indigenous neighbors and cultural foundations of The People of the Longhouse. Wampum strings and belts made from quahog shells carry nonwritten diplomatic agreements and traditional knowledge. Community speakers repeat the oral record documented in the strings and belts in ceremonies and before opening new business with outsiders. This oral and cultural work reminds listeners of the history of the string or belt, transmitting knowledge both generationally and to the audience. Imperial and colonial officials accepted the veracity of the oral record of Indigenous speakers when they participated in the exchange of belts and strings and recorded the speaker's words that conveyed the histories embedded and carried through the wampum. The oral record also underscores Haudenosaunee connections to the land and outlines strategies for sustaining The People of the Longhouse. As a non-Indigenous scholar, this study benefits from the wealth of research and scholarship by Native American and Indigenous studies scholars who have shared their expertise and experience on Indigenous environmental knowledge, including food sovereignty, water management, and interactions between humans and other-than human kin.⁸

This book opens with the first recorded Dutch visit to eastern Haudenosaunee villages. Chapter 1 combines the written record of Harmen Meyndertsz van den Bogaert with archaeological evidence, Indigenous maps, and Haudenosaunee traditional knowledge to provide an overview of Haudenosaunee homelands. It explores the connection of The People of the Longhouse to their land and examines how men and women lived within and altered their surrounding environment for subsistence survival. The People of the Longhouse practiced mixed subsistence strategies that varied with the seasons and organized their communities around extensive longhouses filled with matrilineal kin. As chapter 1 demonstrates, both cultural features underscored the critical role of women to the structure and survival of the community. The People of the Longhouse embraced their long-standing social and cultural practices of flexibility and consensus to confront the challenges of sustained European contact.

As imperial competitors, including the Dutch, French, and English, extended their fur-trade networks along water arteries, chapter 2 examines the acquisition of manufactured goods that enhanced the lives of Haudenosaunee men and women, reduced the labor demands of their subsistence practices, protected their communities, and overwhelmed their enemies. The acceleration of these exchanges, however, brought unintended consequences as epidemic diseases and more violent forms of warfare produced dramatic population losses, thousands of displaced refugees, and village dispersals. Chapter 2 argues that Haudenosaunee men and women creatively managed these transformations and used new trade goods, particularly weapons, to counter population losses and to expand their homelands. Communities adopted and emplaced defeated enemies and survivors into matrilineages and homelands. Men and women also projected their mobility and established new villages in distant hunting spaces. Despite the significant challenges The People of the Longhouse faced in the seventeenth century, they sustained their settlement patterns and subsistence practices and incorporated items of European manufacture to maximize personal and community benefits.

Chapter 3 focuses on the final decades of the seventeenth century when the Beaver Wars came to Haudenosaunee homelands. Between 1687 and 1696, the French and their Indigenous allies from the Saint Lawrence River Valley and the upper Great Lakes mounted a series of invasions that targeted and destroyed multiple Haudenosaunee communities and food stores. Only Cayuga villages escaped attack. A decade of epidemics and extreme weather conditions in the 1690s further diminished agricultural productivity. Although the documentary and archaeological record demonstrated consistency in Haudenosaunee settlement patterns throughout the seventeenth century, the destruction of villages in the final phase of the Beaver Wars precipitated significant changes to settlement patterns. Indian Affairs officials from Albany needed compact and densely populated Haudenosaunee villages to protect their isolated and exposed colonial settlements. Instead, New York officials now found Haudenosaunee communities in disarray and lamented a new settlement pattern of smaller homes scattered across the landscape. Observing a Haudenosaunee standpoint, however, reveals that The People of the Longhouse did not share the declensionist view of their imperial neighbors. On the contrary, the last decades of the seventeenth century underscored Haudenosaunee freedom of movement and geographic mobility as well as a continued commitment to the gendered division of labor in mixed subsistence practices that varied with the seasons. Most important, as the century entered its final decade, Haudenosaunee leaders developed a new response to the imperial competition for Indigenous trade partners and shifted from warfare to diplomacy to engage in the market economy. Their diplomatic efforts culminated in the Grand Settlement of 1701 that ended the decades of violence of the seventeenth century and inaugurated more than four decades of relative peace throughout the Great Lakes. Notably, the emphasis on peaceful trade enhanced the status of Haudenosaunee leaders and villages. Indigenous men and women who allied with New France but wanted access to the cheaper trade goods at Albany needed permission to travel through Haudenosaunee homelands and received shelter and food from Haudenosaunee hosts. These privileges and services came at costs that enhanced the prestige of village leaders and residents throughout Haudenosaunee homelands.

As Haudenosaunee diplomats negotiated an end to decades of warfare on multiple fronts, they also maneuvered to increase access to trade markets, Indigenous customers, and valuable hunting lands to their north and west. Chapter 4, therefore, pivots from the violence and trauma that characterized spatial relations at the end of the seventeenth century to center on the economic partnerships community leaders explored and exploited with multiple imperial and colonial competitors. As a result, chapter 4 underlines how Haudenosaunee leaders and community members manipulated imperial and colonial neighbors to maximize benefits for their communities and to protect their homelands. In the decades of peace and open trade that followed the Grand Settlement of 1701, village leaders jockeyed for access to manufactured goods and invited European traders to establish posts in their homelands. The French and English attempted to portray this foothold into Haudenosaunee homelands on maps as an expansion of their imperial control into Indigenous spaces. French and English maps, however, fully reflected Haudenosaunee sovereignty over their homelands as their communities became the final destination of European trade goods and Indigenous customers from the Great Lakes. The People of the Longhouse also constructed new villages in distant regions and opened their homelands to displaced Iroquoian kin who faced settler violence in other colonial spaces. These strategies represented a coordinated response to slow English settler expansion into eastern homelands, particularly up the Mohawk River.

The long peace that followed the Grand Settlement of 1701 also coincided with settler expansion into William Penn's land grant in the lower Susquehanna River Valley. Traders in Pennsylvania offered another market for Indigenous customers, but settler expansion from the south threatened ecosystems critical to Haudenosaunee subsistence practices. Pennsylvania traders, diplomats, and missionaries traversed the Susquehanna River Valley, slowly extending their reach into Haudenosaunee homelands. Chapter 5 illuminates the depth of Haudenosaunee environmental knowledge that lent itself to this geographic mobility among a full demographic range of village residents as individuals and families fulfilled economic, diplomatic, military, subsistence, and personal needs. Through the middle decades of the eighteenth century, Pennsylvania traders and diplomats encountered and described numerous multinational Indigenous villages along the water arteries of the Susquehanna River and its tributaries. Pennsylvania and New York officials, however, misinterpreted these new and dispersed collections of villages as further evidence of the collapse of long-standing Haudenosaunee settlement patterns of compact communities. They mistakenly believed that the high number of Haudenosaunee families in the Susquehanna River Valley reflected community discord in their main villages to the north. Colonial officials failed to realize that Haudenosaunee men and women had long and extensive environmental knowledge of these southern spaces. Rather than the product of conflict, the growth of many new communities located at critical points along water arteries represented a strategy to block settler expansion into ecosystems critical to Indigenous subsistence practices. In addition, the Iroquois Confederacy expanded efforts to open southern homelands to displaced Indigenous nations that suffered settler violence in English colonies in the east and south. These multifaceted and coordinated diplomatic, economic, and environmental strategies allowed The People of the Longhouse to survive in their homelands throughout centuries of settler colonization while their eastern and southern neighbors experienced violent dispossession, sometimes at the hands of Haudenosaunee fighting men.

As the long peace that followed the Grand Settlement of 1701 began to fray in the 1740s, chapter 6 examines the responses of Haudenosaunee men, women, and village leaders to the challenges of imperial warfare, settler expansion, and environmental crises. The return of warfare, for example, reduced opportunities to acquire desired goods through peaceful fur-trade exchanges. More important, advancing troops, settlers, and imperial terraforming altered, trampled, invaded, and destroyed environments and landscapes, including other-than human kin critical to the subsistence practices of Indigenous men and women. Nonetheless, The People of the Longhouse adapted to changes in the market and the decline of the fur trade. They exploited personal connections with colonial neighbors and exchanged their physical labor to earn cash wages. Access to cash allowed men and women to purchase the items they wanted and needed regardless of their ability to provide furs. As imperial warfare intensified in the 1750s and 1760s, fighting-age men leveraged their military skills, and village leaders reminded officials of the loyalty of their communities to gain cash, clothing, weapons, provisions, and protection. Although Sir William Johnson, the British superintendent of Indian Affairs after 1755, tried to reign in exorbitant expenses during the Seven Years’ War, Haudenosaunee fighting men continued to demand payment and security for their families. In addition, Haudenosaunee fighters preferred service as military auxiliaries for the British and gathered intelligence, protected supply wagons, and served as guides. But they hesitated to engage in combat. In addition, men followed their own leaders and returned home when it suited them. Residents in western villages faced less pressure to provide fighting men because of their distance from the theaters of war. Nonetheless, Seneca leaders and war captains reminded the British of their military power and gained desired goods in exchange for their neutrality.

Chapter 7 examines Haudenosaunee settlement patterns, subsistence practices, and survivance strategies into the late colonial period. As communities slowly recovered from the impact of imperial warfare between the French and the English, imperial terraforming, and settler expansion after the 1750s, the rapidly growing American colonial population increasingly threatened Haudenosaunee land use practices. Haudenosaunee men and women, however, continued to use their access to new technologies and material goods to sustain and enhance their lives. Men and women also courted, exploited, and manipulated colonial patrons to fulfill the needs and goals of their families and communities. The American Revolution, however, marked a watershed moment as the American military specifically targeted the productive and reproductive labor of women and used warfare to sever the connections of Haudenosaunee men and women from their homelands. Despite the genocidal military campaigns that destroyed every aspect of Haudenosaunee settlement, subsistence, and land use practices, Haudenosaunee survivors returned to their homelands to rebuild their homes, to plant their fields, and to renew their reciprocal relationships with the land.

The chapters that follow center Haudenosaunee agency to highlight the actions and strategies of individuals and leaders to use colonial exchanges and relationships to enhance their lives, to prioritize and pursue their goals and social practices, and to protect their homelands. The emphasis on Haudenosaunee agency is not an attempt to ignore, marginalize, or deny tremendous trauma and suffering that resulted from repeated acts of colonial violence, imperial terraforming, and incessant processes of settler migration. The theoretical framework of settler colonialism outlines the continuum from European contact, invasion, and expansion to severing Indigenous connections to homelands and dissolving Indigenous societies. The value of land lay at the root of the settler colonizers’ motives to relocate because it provided a livelihood and because it was out of reach for the masses of landless European emigrants. Imperial terraforming and settler expansion, aided by microbes and military technology, threatened other-than human kin of flora, fauna, and water that sustained Haudenosaunee men, women, and children. Although colonizers fancied the day when they could realize their goals of Indigenous removal and settler occupation of Haudenosaunee homelands, the period before the 1780s reflected aspirational settler colonialism rather than an ability to implement it. Even after General George Washington ordered the Continental Army to annihilate every Indigenous home and agricultural field the troops encountered during the American Revolution, survivors of these multiple and genocidal campaigns in eastern, central, western, and southern villages returned to their homelands to rebuild their communities and lives. As The People of the Longhouse repeatedly demonstrated, settler colonial attempts to dispossess them from their homelands was never a foregone conclusion, nor was it a short story with a quick end.⁹