On Feb 8, 1:21 pm, Zwartendÿk <fredrik.bjo
...@gmail.com> wrote:
> While most Americans may be ignorant of the finer points of royalty,
> this is one field where Europeans like me may have quite ridiculously
> romantic/wrong/wild ideas. I have never been very into the lore of the
> Old West, but I remain absolutely fascinated by the idea that in
> Colonial America, the woods might not just have harboured wild bears,
> cougars and deadly ticks, but also alien, warlike, hostile races. No
> doubt it must have had an impact upon the American psyche. (Think of
> not only Bigfoot, but not at least the American obsession with
> extraterrestrials.... Really, the American obsession that anything
> "could be out there, watching you". BTW a similar theory is that the
> original Finno-Ugric or Sami inhabitants of Scandinavia, who lived in
> huts resembling beaver lodges, gave rise to the tales of
> subterrestrials!)
> I know it must have happened decades before thte birth of Jennie
> Jerome, with her erronous claims of Iroquis descent, but exactly when
> did for example the Native Americans of her native New York State
> become "pacified". (The ones that were not exterminated, of course.)?
> I remain absolutely fascinated by the fact that more or less "wild
> Natives" may have lived on next to the mansions of the Gilded Age. (I
> was absolutely delightfully shocked when I discovered that there are
> still Native Americans remaining not only in placid New England, but
> also in such up-scale places as Nantucket and Martha's Vineyeard!)
> Instead of French farmers destroying McDonald's resturants, I long to
> hear reports of Native Americans in full war paint bursting into a
> grotesque mall built on their tribal lands and just trashing
> everything with their tomahawks.... :-) And painting over all English
> and Spanish signs with Algonquin..... And start hunting the pets of
> NRA members with bows and arrows....
> Disclaimer: I do know that many Native American tribes own and run a
> lot of casinos and as such are fully integrated in the capitalist
> economy. I also realize that while there is quite a lot of sad poverty
> on Indian reservations, many if not most Americans of Native American
> heritage are very integrated in modern US society. (The Sami situation
> in Northern Norway gives me quite a few clues about how complex the
> situation of an aboriginal minority can be.)
> Interestlingly I gather that in modern America it's the Native
> Americans that provide the most significant example of the obsession
> with purity of blood and ancestors that we find in European royalty. I
> mean the regulations that decide how "many parts Native American" you
> have to be in order to be able to be a member of a tribe. (Which has
> an economic side, because of the casinos.)
> Yes, Native Americans really are the mediatized royalty of our times,
> when they build casinos because of their status as mediatized
> sovereign nations and develop Ebenbürtigkeit-like ancestry regulations
> about tribal membership!
> All in all, a subject at least as fascinating as European royalty!
Well, the Iroquois Confederacy was actually a union of 5 different but
culturally and linguistically similar tribes ( the Mohawk, Oneida,
Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca) who formed an alliance sometime in the
1500s. They all resided in the area later known as upstate New York.
Much later, in 1722, a tribe living to the south which had a similar
cultural background, the Tuscarora, also joined the Confederacy, and
moved north into upstate New York.
Throughout the 1600s, although the Iroquois Confederacy occasionally
made war upon the French or English, their main adversaries were the
adjacent Indian tribes. The Iroquois at that time traded mainly with
the Dutch of New Amsterdam, and they attempted to control the fur
trade. In a series of wars in the 1600s (known as the Beaver Wars),
the Iroquois defeated and exterminated the smaller Wenro and Erie
tribes, and dispersed the large Huron tribe. The Hurons were allied
with the French (of New France), and were fur-trade rivals with the
Iroquois. They also warred with the various Algonkian tribes to the
east, and with the Susquehannock tribe to the south. During the 1600s,
the Iroquois greatly expanded their territory. By 1700 they controlled
much of the Great Lakes region, as well as the western parts of the
Middle Atlantic region, driving out the tribes native to these
regions.
By the late 1600s, they had formed an alliance with the British, and
were at war with the French. The French were allied with the northern
Algonkian tribes, traditional enemies of the Iroquois. After the
defeat of the French in the French and Indian War ( the North American
version of the Seven Years War), the Iroquois benefitted from their
British alliance when Britain forbade any further settlements west of
the Appalachian mountains, thus leaving the Iroquois in secure
possession of their lands. During the American Revolution of the late
1700s, the Iroquois Confederacy was divided. The Oneida and Tuscarora
tribes sided with the Americans, while the Mohawk, Seneca, Onandaga,
and Cayuga remained loyal to Britain. During the course of this war,
the Iroquois attacked colonial settlements in the Mohawk Valley
district of New York (part of their native territory). The Americans
retaliated by attacking and destroying many Iroquois villages in
western New York. During the Revolutionary War, the Iroquois lost
control of their earlier conquered Great Lakes and Middle Atlantic
territory. Following the war, many Iroquois fled into Canada, where
the British government settled them on reservations. The remaining New
York Iroquois were also forced onto reservations. I suppose it's at
this point, around the 1780s, that one could consider them to be
'pacified'. Although throughout most of these two centuries of
warfare, the main focus of Iroquois combat was with the adjacent
tribes, rather than with the European settlers.
There are presently several Iroquois reservations in New York state,
and in Ontario, which are internally self-governing, and occasionally
dispute jurisdiction with the state or provincial governments, as well
as with the federal governments. I'm not sure if they operate any
casinos.
