ConclusionThe Built Environment of the Haudenosaunee Homeland

In September 1753, William Johnson traveled deep into Haudenosaunee homelands to hold a conference with New York's Covenant Chain allies. As the imperial contest for control of the interior of North America intensified between France and Great Britain, Johnson upbraided Haudenosaunee village leaders for allowing community members to relocate north near French settlements along the Saint Lawrence River and for permitting French advancement into the contested Ohio Country south of the Great Lakes. Haudenosaunee leaders, along with male and female attendees, engaged in a collective discussion of Johnson's speech and then appointed Red Head, an Onondaga headman, to deliver their response. Red Head reassured Johnson that Haudenosaunee leaders would do all in their power to convince kin to return to their former communities. But Red Head explained, “we did not conceive we had done so much Amiss in going thither [New France], when we Observed that you White People pray, and we have no nearer Place to learn to Pray, and have our Children Baptized, then [sic] that.” After denying any Haudenosaunee collusion in French incursions into the Ohio Country, Red Head remarked: “We don’t know what you Christians French and English together intend we are so hemm’d in by both, that we have hardly a Hunting place left.” Reflecting the concerns of men and women throughout Haudenosaunee villages, Red Head worried that “in a little while, if we find a Bear in a Tree, there will immediately Appear an Owner for the Land to Challenge the Property, and hinder us from killing it which is our livelihood, we are so Perplexed, between both, that we hardly know what to say or to think.”¹

Red Head's statements were only one in a series of specific and vocal Haudenosaunee responses to settler expansion throughout generations of sustained European contact. As in earlier responses to advancing markets and settlements, Red Head emphasized Indigenous mobility as individuals, families, or other specific groups traveled widely for subsistence, religious, economic, military, or personal reasons. This mobility required an intimate knowledge of vast geographic expanses of human and other-than human beings, including water arteries, hunting territories, communities of friend and foe, and ecosystems attractive to animals and productive for agriculture. Most important, Red Head's statements demonstrated an acute awareness of the challenges westward-expanding colonial settlements and European intrusions posed to Haudenosaunee mixed subsistence practices and autonomy. Haudenosaunee men and women exploited multiple aspects of their local and distant homelands for hunting, fishing, gathering, and agricultural production. When choosing a village site, women carefully examined the agricultural potential of a space and weighed village security concerns as they considered the natural defenses of a particular topography. Before 1700, Haudenosaunee families repeatedly located villages atop high hills or peninsulas surrounded by steep ravines and near water arteries for communication, travel, trade, and subsistence. Men and women fulfilled subsistence responsibilities far beyond the perimeter of their villages. As The People of the Longhouse confronted market and settler expansion, individuals and leaders developed innovative responses to retain their autonomy and the freedom to hunt, fish, travel, and trade throughout their homeland and beyond, and thwarted European attempts to restrict or control that movement.²

The expansion of the market economy, and the settlers who followed in its wake, posed significant challenges to long-standing Haudenosaunee settlement patterns, subsistence practices, social relations within villages, and relations with Indigenous and European neighbors. Early contact with European traders, missionaries, and diplomats exposed Indigenous communities to new and deadly pathogens that devastated populations. European-manufactured goods transformed the way Indigenous men and women caught, grew, prepared, consumed, and stored their food. European colonizers and the market economy introduced new crop varieties and domestic animals as well as new modes of farming and settlement templates. Engagement in the market economy also pulled Haudenosaunee men and women into a cultural system that rewarded individual achievement and stressed the accumulation of private property. These new values threatened long-standing Haudenosaunee social relationships based on gift-giving and reciprocity. Hereditary village leaders, young men, and women, however, enhanced their lives and maximized benefits for their communities and families through successful market exchanges. Men and women, for example, purchased metal knives, hatchets, axes, and hoes to increase efficiency in their subsistence labor. Women preferred brass or copper kettles over their wood and clay counterparts to reduce the labor demands of fashioning the products themselves. Men also increasingly incorporated nails when building new structures. More important, when exposure to new European diseases devastated Indigenous populations, Haudenosaunee fighting men replenished their kinship losses and mitigated family and community grief with an increase in mourning war raids. The raids produced nearly continuous intertribal warfare and resulted in the forced displacement and absorption of hundreds of captives. But young men eagerly engaged in market exchanges and accelerated their acquisition of the superior weaponry needed to protect their communities and to succeed in mourning war campaigns. Consequently, incorporation into the expanding fur-trade economy precipitated social changes for men and women that ranged from devastating population losses and nearly continuous, more violent, warfare to more quotidian changes in housing construction and daily subsistence practices.

Despite the dramatic seventeenth-century social disruptions, The People of the Longhouse sustained their settlement patterns and subsistence strategies. Residents who survived the epidemics and warfare coalesced to create new kinship networks that included emplaced refugees and adopted captives. Reconstituted lineages consciously preserved traditions as multiple families resided in extensive matrilineal longhouses. Survivors maximized the natural defenses of homelands and located their villages in the highlands above the Mohawk and Seneca River Valleys. In addition, residents retained mixed-subsistence economies that fluctuated with the seasons and relocated their villages every ten to twenty years as housing, security, population, and fuel demands required.

By the end of the seventeenth century, however, the extensive longhouses that sheltered numerous and extensive matrilineal families had become increasingly difficult to sustain. Between 1687 and 1696, the French and their Indigenous allies demonstrated the technological superiority of French weapons and hundreds of troops when they invaded Haudenosaunee homelands and razed multiple communities. These military defeats compounded the problems of population losses from disease and warfare, market demands of the fur trade, and settler expansion. When men rebuilt their communities, many shifted from the compact arrangement of extensive longhouses and protective palisades or relocated to new environmental spaces. Their new settlement pattern, however, did not signal the collapse of community organization, structure, or social relations. On the contrary, new settlement patterns, especially smaller housing structures dispersed over the landscape, represented a creative response to the realities of European weaponry and reduced populations. More important, men and women retained their geographic mobility for trade, subsistence, and personal reasons.

Haudenosaunee leaders also responded to the destructive decades of warfare with a new emphasis on peace and diplomacy with Indigenous and European neighbors to the north and west. As Haudenosaunee diplomats negotiated the Grand Settlement of 1701, they promised neutrality in future imperial conflicts, secured an end to major mourning war campaigns with western enemies, and renewed trade prospects with New France. The shift in strategy from warfare, forced adoption, and displacement of defeated enemies, to diplomacy and peaceful trade enhanced Haudenosaunee prestige among western Natives who sought access to English markets in Albany. Leaders in Seneca and Cayuga communities, for example, began to invite former adversaries to travel through their territory for trade and gained trade goods and diplomatic tribute in exchange for shelter and safe passage. Eastern Haudenosaunee leaders and village residents also exploited their role as hosts to western travelers heading to Albany. Additionally, Haudenosaunee leaders manipulated English colonial officials who depended on them to develop economic ties to Indigenous nations in the west.

The Grand Settlement of 1701 inaugurated more than forty years of peace between The People of the Longhouse, western nations, the French, and the English. The French and English, however, still competed aggressively for Indigenous trade partners and worked tirelessly to gain control of the territory between their colonial frontiers. Haudenosaunee leaders capitalized on this competition by inviting Europeans and their trade posts into their homelands and making Haudenosaunee villages the final destination for western travelers and European-manufactured goods. Village leaders needed dependable access to trade goods for redistribution and to maintain community prestige. As a result, they hoped to become the primary beneficiaries as the locus of diplomatic and economic activity shifted to Haudenosaunee communities.

Haudenosaunee men and women also creatively adapted to the imperial competition for Indigenous trade partners and territory with a settlement strategy that both exploited new economic opportunities and protected ecosystems critical to their mixed-subsistence practices. When Albany traders, for example, failed to provide blankets, cloth, and powder at reasonable rates, Haudenosaunee men and women explored trade options farther south into the Susquehanna River Valley. Aware that traders portended colonial advancement, families filtered into the Alleghany and Susquehanna River Valleys to block settler expansion and European access to these environmental spaces. Some new Haudenosaunee villages reflected a transition from seasonal acquisition sites to permanent communities, whereas others represented multinational collaboration as migrating families and displaced nations flowed into the area. Located along key water arteries and travel routes, the villages offered access to multiple and competing colonial and imperial trade partners, abundant hunting and fishing resources, excellent agricultural production, and rich gathering spaces along alluvial floodplains.

Although Haudenosaunee men and women adapted to the expanding market economy with new settlement patterns, their long-standing mixed-subsistence economies held firm. Men and women continued to hunt and fish; gather seasonal fruits, tubers, and nuts; and engage in small- and large-scale agricultural production. Men and women also incorporated European crop varieties and domestic animals through trade networks or that accompanied settlers and imperial expansion. The new food sources provided greater dietary variety and alternative options when normal agriculture failed as well as replacement protein from reduced subsistence hunting. The proximity of domestic animals to housing structures often brought cattle, sheep, pigs, and chickens under the care of women and children. This gendered division of labor for domestic animals allowed men to shift their subsistence labor from hunting for food to hunting exclusively for pelts for the market. Additionally, men and women both participated in the nonsubsistence trade item of ginseng during its brief boom in the late 1740s to early 1750s. As a result, the seasonal mixed-subsistence economy continued to feed Haudenosaunee villages.

Although competition for fur-trade partners during years of peace offered opportunities for men and women to engage in the market economy, the escalation of imperial warfare after 1744 severely restricted avenues to market exchanges. Periods of warfare, however, permitted Haudenosaunee men to leverage their military skills, service, and geographic knowledge to gain material goods and personal prestige. During the Seven Years’ War, for example, men exploited their value to the British military effort to demand higher returns for service. They increasingly insisted on and received cash wages, bounties, and commissions as well as promises that the British would provision and protect their families during their absence. Women also offered their loyalty to the British military effort and earned cash payments for producing products necessary for battle. For men who withheld assistance, they found avenues to trade goods, cash, prestige, provisions, and protection closed. The British superintendent of Indian Affairs, Sir William Johnson, delivered presents and cash wages personally and directly to men. Johnson's gift-giving performance disrupted gendered and hierarchical social relationships within Haudenosaunee communities based on reciprocity in an effort to weaken the clout of women and hereditary village leaders.

When men engaged in extensive military pursuits, they failed to fulfill their subsistence responsibilities of hunting and fishing. Their absence also increased demands on women's agricultural production and accelerated the adoption of domestic animals, particularly in eastern Haudenosaunee communities where settler expansion pressed against the dispersed settlement patterns of Mohawk families. Several environmental factors complicated subsistence economies during the 1750s and 1760s. Epidemics, for example, prevented women from planting fields at the appropriate time, dry summers and early frosts wilted crops before harvest, and agricultural pests ravaged immature stalks. As consecutive years of crop failures precipitated severe hunger and starvation, families increasingly needed access to cash to purchase the provisions and trade goods that their subsistence labor and interrupted engagement in a fur-trade economy struggled to provide. Cash offered a short-term solution to subsistence needs, but years of imperial warfare and the shift to a cash economy further eroded the balance in the gendered division of labor vital to the mixed-subsistence economy.

In the aftermath of their Seven Years’ War, many Americans viewed Haudenosaunee homelands as their reward for military victory. By 1770, colonial settlements had thoroughly engulfed Mohawk villages along the Mohawk River and Schoharie Creek and encroached on Oneida and upper Susquehanna Valley communities. Growing colonial populations, expanding settler communities, and imperial terraforming radically altered the Indigenous landscape. When colonists clear-cut vast tracts of woodland, for example, they created an environment less inviting to game animals. When marching armies and colonists altered water levels on rivers to improve travel, they flooded fishing stations upriver and dried out others downriver. New agricultural pests often accompanied colonial crops and could devastate entire fields of corn. As a result, Mohawk men and women shifted from their heavy reliance on extensive agricultural production for subsistence. Instead, many men and women adopted the model of their colonial neighbors with domesticated animals, grains for an export market, grasses for their domestic animals, and subsistence agriculture enclosed in family gardens or inaccessible to cattle, horses, and especially pigs.

Throughout the generations of sustained European contact, Haudenosaunee men and women creatively and continuously adapted to the challenges that new trade items, new traders, and settler expansion produced. In eastern Haudenosaunee communities, for example, men constructed their homes with hewn timber or planks, shingled roofs, stone chimneys, cellars, wooden floors, and glass windows, and they developed a settlement pattern that centered around the single-family home. Even in distant western Seneca and Cayuga communities, men increasingly used hewn timber or planks over sapling posts. Western communities, however, retained important elements of the extensive longhouse where, for example, the ends of their homes provided storage space and the central fire pit remained the most prominent feature. Men and women consistently used new trade items and market opportunities to enhance their lives and to fulfill personal and community needs. Hereditary village leaders maneuvered to bring European trade posts into their territory to maximize benefits for themselves and their followers and to enhance personal and community prestige among Indigenous and colonial neighbors. Most important, leaders and individuals responded to threats of settler expansion into their homelands with an innovative strategy that protected Haudenosaunee access to critical subsistence environments with Indigenous occupation of those spaces.

Successful engagement and participation in the market, however, rewarded individual achievement, stressed the accumulation of private property, and opened the door for an uneven distribution of wealth. In this system of class stratification, personal status and power rested on material wealth, property, and access to powerful colonial allies, and not family lineage through powerful matrons. New elites also adopted many aspects of colonial culture, such as herds of domestic animals; cultivated fields of grasses and wheat for an export economy; attire modeled after colonial fashion; and homes stocked with furniture, feather beds, and porcelain kitchenware. New elites, however, continued to fulfill the long-standing Haudenosaunee ethic of gift-giving and reciprocity because they exploited their economic position to extend material and security benefits to their families and communities.

As the market economy filtered into Haudenosaunee communities and colonizers pressed against and then into their homelands, men and women repeatedly adapted to their changing social, political, economic, and natural environment to create a Haudenosaunee landscape that incorporated aspects of the colonial settlement template but remained distinctly Indigenous. The market, for example, precipitated a new settlement template of smaller houses dispersed over the landscape. The new settlement practice, although very different from the extensive longhouses filled with matrilineal kin in compact communities, allowed residents to protect access to critical environmental resources, blocked colonial settlement into important ecosystems, retained mobility for men and women, and opened economic opportunities with multiple trade partners. As colonial settlements followed in the market's wake, however, they precipitated environmental changes that challenged the Haudenosaunee seasonal mixed-subsistence economy. In response to these challenges, residents throughout the Haudenosaunee homeland adopted domestic animals and incorporated European crop varieties. Women, however, continued to produce the three sisters of corn, beans, and squash, and to gather resources from nearby forests and planted orchards.

In addition, the market altered the daily dress of Haudenosaunee men and women as they incorporated European-manufactured clothing. Haudenosaunee elites fashioned themselves to reflect their economic and social standing to a colonial and Indigenous audience. War leaders, for example, donned clothing different from the men they led. Women sewed silver broaches and other decorative and valuable European items to their clothing for visual and audible appeal. Men and women, however, also created a distinct fashion in which men combined linen shirts with leather leggings and women draped blankets over European-manufactured clothing. Consequently, this Indigenous-European landscape remained a distinctly Haudenosaunee space that reflected the range of adaptation, flexibility, diplomacy, and manipulation of Haudenosaunee leaders and individuals to confront the challenges of market and settler expansion.