Abstract
On a 13-day ‘epic canoe trip’ members of the Haudenosaunee nations and other Native peoples paddled side-by-side with their non-Indigenous friends and supporters down the Hudson River, from Albany to New York City in July–August 2013. Approaching the George Washington Bridge, the participants raised their paddles in a potent salute, signalling a sense of connection, hopefulness and their political intent (Figure 6). Part of the ‘Two Row Wampum Renewal Campaign’, the canoe trip was a symbolic enactment of what is known as the Tawagonshi Treaty, or, in the Iroquoian oral tradition, the Two Row Wampum Treaty (or Guswenta Treaty). This was a trade agreement said to have been struck in 1613 between the Dutch and the Haudenosaunee (the Iroquois confederacy of Seneca, Cayuga, Onondaga, Oneida and Mohawk peoples) on the Hudson River in Mohawk territory.1
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Notes
At this time, the confederacy comprised the Five Nations; it was not until 1722 that the Tuscarora people joined, forming the Six Nations, as it is known today. See Daniel K. Richter, Ordeal of the Longhouse: The Peoples of the Iroquois League in the Era of European Colonization (Williamsburg: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), 1.
Gwendolen Cates, Guswenta: Renewing the Two Row Wampum, 2013, motion picture.
Paul Otto, ‘Wampum, Tawagonshi, and the Two Row Belt’, Journal of Early American History 3 (2013): 110.
Otto, ‘Wampum’, 112. Also see Lynn Ceci, ‘Tracing Wampum’s Origins: Shell Bead Evidence from Archaeological Sites in Western and Coastal New York’, in Proceedings of the 1986 Shell Bead Conference, Selected Papers, ed. Charles F. Hayes III and Lynn Ceci (Rochester, NY: Rochester Museum and Science Center, 1989).
Otto, ‘Wampum’, 110. See also Harrie Hermkens, Jan Noordegraaf and Nicoline van der Sijsc, ‘The Tawagonshi Tale: Can Linguistic Analysis Prove the Tawagonshi Treaty to be a Forgery?’ Journal of Early American History 3 (2013): 9–42.
The treaty was signed by 50 sachems and war chiefs representing the Grand Council of the Six Nations of the Iroquois (Haudenosaunee) Confederacy and Timothy Pickering, official agent of President George Washington. G. Peter Jemison and Anna M. Schein, eds., Treaty of Canadaigua 1794: 200 Years of Treaty Relations between the Iroquois Confederacy and the United States (Santa Fe: Clear Light Publishers, 2000).
Charles T. Gehring and William A. Starna, ‘Revisiting the Fake Tawagonshi Treaty of 1613’, New York History 93.1 (2012): 95–101.
See also Charles T. Gehring, William A. Starna and William N. Fenton, ‘The Tawagonshi Treaty of 1613: The Final Chapter’, New York History 68.4 (1987): 373–93.
Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2003), xix.
Martha Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 32–3.
For a discussion of Arnold van Gennups’s work, see Marvin Carlson, Performance: A Critical Introduction, 2nd edn. (New York and London: Routledge, 1996, 2004), 16–17.
N. Jaye Frederickson and Sandra Gibb, The Covenant Chain: Indian Ceremonial and Trade Silver (Ottawa: National Museum of Canada, 1980), 11.
Bruce Elliot Johansen and Barbara Alice Mann, eds., Encyclopedia of the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois Confederacy) (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2000), 70;
Mary Lou Lustig, The Imperial Executive in America: Sir Edmund Andros, 1637–1714 (Cranbury, NJ: Rosemont Publishing and Printing Corp, 2002), 96;
J. R. Miller, Compact, Contract, Covenant: Aboriginal Treaty-Making in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009), 50.
Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires and Republicans in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1851 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 52.
Donna Merwick, The Shame and the Sorrow: Dutch-Amerindian Encounters in New Netherland (Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia Press, 2006), 47, 48.
For a detailed account, see Evan Healeli, ‘Kieft’s War and the Cultures of Violence in Colonial America’, in Lethal Imagination: Violence and Brutality in American History, ed. Michael A. Bellesiles (New York and London: New York University Press, 1999), 19.
Herbert C. Kralt, The Lenape: Archaeology, History, and Ethnography (Newark: New Jersey Historical Society, 1986), 223.
Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (New York: Routledge, 2004), 108.
Alan Taylor, American Colonies: The Settling of North America (New York: Penguin Books, 2001), 261.
Taylor, American Colonies; Richard Aquila, The Iroquois Restoration: Iroquois Diplomacy on the Colonial Frontier, 1701–1754 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1983).
Ivy Schweitzer, Perfecting Friendship: Politics and Affiliation in Early American Literature (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 47.
See Jemison and Schein, Treaty of Canandaigua; Laurence M. Hauptman, Conspiracy of Interests: Iroquois Dispossession and the Rise of New York State (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2001).
Francis Paul Prucha, Indian Peace Medals in American History (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1977);
John W. Adams, ‘Peace Medals of George III’, in The Medal in America, Volume 2, ed. Alan M. Stahl (New York: American Numismatic Society, 1997).
Melvill Allan Jamieson, Medals Awarded to North American Indian Chiefs 1714–1922 and to Loyal African and Other Chiefs in Various Territories within the British Empire (London: Spink and Son, 1936). See also Prucha, Indian Peace Medals.
Klaus Lubbers, ‘Strategies of Appropriating the West: The Evidence of Indian Peace Medals’, American Art 8.3/4 (1994): 79.
Adam Smith is generally credited with these ideas of stadial progress, a model of the age of hunters, pastoralists, agriculture and commerce, where these stages came to be understood as distinct, hierarchical and successive modes of production. Importantly, these are conceptualized in a progressive, teleological fashion, figuring European society as the highest ‘stage’. The coalescence of ideas of the entitlement to own the land that one tills expounded by John Locke’s (1623–1704) Two Treatises of Government, along with ideas of political economy driven by the rapid changes of the industrial revolution, were also important factors in the creation of particular philosophical views of colonists. See Ronald Lindley Meek, Smith, Marx and After: Ten Essays in the Development of Economic Thought (London: Chapman and Hall, 1977), 23, 29;
James Tully, An Approach to Political Philosophy: Locke in Contexts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), chap. 5.
Joy A. Bilharz, Senecas and Kinzua Dam: Forced Relocation through Two Generations (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998), 10.
Robert W. Venables, ‘Canandaigua (1794): Past and Present’, in Enduring Legacies: Native American Treaties and Contemporary Controversies, ed. Bruce Elliott Johansen (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2004), 46.
David E. Wilkins and Heidi Kiiwetinepinesiik, American Indian Politics and the American Political System, 3rd edn. (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2011), 110.
See Saliha Belmessous on this translation of Indigenous claims, and her argument that European responses in fact become counter claims. Saliha Belmessous, ‘Introduction: The Problem of Indigenous Claim Making in Colonial History’, in Native Claims: Indigenous Law against Empire, 1500–1920, ed. Saliha Belmessous (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012).
On ‘perfect settler sovereignty’, see Lisa Ford, Settler Sovereignty: Jurisdiction and Indigenous People in America and Australia 1788–1836 (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2010).
Ravi de Costa, A Higher Authority: Indigenous Transnationalism and Australia (Sydney: UNSW Press, 2006).
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© 2016 Penelope Edmonds
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Edmonds, P. (2016). ‘Polishing the chain of friendship’: Two Row Wampum Renewal Celebrations and Matters of History. In: Settler Colonialism and (Re)conciliation. Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137304544_2
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