Down the Warpath to the Cedars: Indians' First Battles in the Revolution by Mark R. Anderson

Abstract

Reviewed by: Down the Warpath to the Cedars: Indians' First Battles in the Revolution by Mark R. Anderson Loren Michael Mortimer (bio) Down the Warpath to the Cedars: Indians' First Battles in the Revolution mark r. anderson University of Oklahoma Press, 2021 306 pp. At the outbreak of the American Revolutionary War in 1775, the Continental Army prepared to invade Canada, and the British military government took concurrent measures to defend the province. Patriot and Loyalist leaders alike recognized the strategic importance of the Indigenous confederation known as the Seven Nations of Canada. Composed of eight sovereign Native American towns along the upper St. Lawrence River, these multiethnic communities guarded key river confluences connecting Canada to the rebellious Anglo-American settler colonies to the south. In the military contest for Canada, the Seven Nations could tip the balance of power in favor of the Patriots or the Crown. Likewise, the Seven Nations feared the despoliation of their lands amid the crossfire of a civil [End Page 599] war within the British Empire. As historian Mark R. Anderson shows in Down the Warpath to the Cedars, the Seven Nations proved decisive in the defeat of the Continental Army at the Battle of the Cedars in late May 1776. Although historians on both sides of the US-Canada border have largely overlooked or intentionally disremembered the significance of the Cedars, Anderson offers a timely intervention recovering histories of Indigenous autonomy and racialized violence during the American Revolution, as well as the affair's aftermaths in Native American council houses, Patriot assemblies, and imperial corridors of power. In the summer of 1775, the Seven Nations of Canada had thrived in proximity to European settler population centers along the St. Lawrence River for more than a century. Although the Seven Nations had intimately entangled connections of trade and kinship with the Haudenosaunee Six Nations Iroquois, it remained a politically autonomous Indigenous polity. The Seven Nations traced their origins to Catholic converts who relocated to Francophone mission communities during the late seventeenth century. Between 1701 and 1754, these mission towns gradually coalesced into a confederation rooted in shared connections to the St. Lawrence River, Catholicism, extended family networks, and mutual defense. Although steadfast allies to the French before 1759, each constituent community maintained their sovereignty and distinctive cultures. The Seven Nations Council convened at Kahnawake, the largest town with a decidedly Mohawk-Iroquois demographic composition. But this diverse confederation included Hurons from Wendake, the Wabanaki peoples from Odanak and Wolinâk, Mohawks and Nipissings from Kanesatake, Mohawks from Akwesasne, and Oneidas and Onondagas from Oswegatchie. With careful attention to multidimensional Indigenous politics at the confederation, village, and factional levels, Anderson argues that Native Americans created a "strategic environment" at the Battle of the Cedars that aligns with Ojibwe historian Michael Witgen's concept of an "infinity of nations" (1). Indeed, the framework of an "infinity of nations" proves apposite for this study, particularly as political affiliations remained fluid for colonists and Indigenous peoples alike during the early phases of the conflict. Despite the military invasion of their homelands during the American Revolution, the Seven Nations of Canada largely avoided the internecine warfare and dispossession endured by larger and better-known Indigenous polities like the Six Nations Haudenosaunee. Yet the author notes that in "contrast to the reasonably well developed Six Nations Revolutionary War [End Page 600] narrative, the Seven Nations of Canada lack significant historical treatment for the era. The Cedars and its 1775 precedents clearly reveal the complexity of Laurentian Indian politics" (155). While Anderson observed that the Seven Nations "were far from a unified polity" (4), Native American emphasis on local autonomy and factional consensus within councils rendered their confederation no more or less united than the Six Nations or the ad hoc Patriot delegations at the Continental Congress during the summer of 1775. Given Patriot sentiments among Anglo-American colonists in Montreal as well as disaffection with British rule by factions within the Seven Nations, Canada's participation in the rebellion remained an open political question for British officials, Loyalists, Patriots, and Native Americans alike. To make sense of an ethnic and political milieu that defied nationality or a strictly Patriot vs...