The Divided Ground: Upper Canada, New York, and the Iroquois Six Nations, 1783-1815

Abstract

In recent years, historians have paid increasing attention to and as fluid sites of both national formation and local contestation. At their peripheries, nations and empires assert their power and define their identity with no certainty of success. Nation-making and border-making are inseparably intertwined. Nations and empires, however, often reap defiance from peoples uneasily bisected by the imposed boundaries. This process of border-making (and border-defiance) has been especially tangled in the Americas where empires and republics projected their ambitions onto a geography occupied and defined by Indians. Imperial or national visions ran up against the tangled complexities of interdependent peoples, both native and invader. Indeed, the contest of rival Euro-American regimes presented risky opportunities for native peoples to play-off the rivals to preserve native autonomy and enhance their circumstances.1 In a recent essay, Jeremy Adelman and Stephen Aron advance a helpful distinction between borderlands and borders. They argue that, in North American history, native peoples tried to prolong broad and porous borderlands, but eventually became confined within the borders of consolidated regimes imposed by invading Euro-Americans. This paper examines the transition of one borderland-the land of the Iroquois Indians-into two bordered lands: the State of New York in the American republic and the province of Upper Canada in the British empire.2 At Paris in 1783, British and American negotiators concluded the War of the American Revolution, recognizing the independence of the United States while reserving the Canadian provinces to the British empire. American independence and Canadian dependence required a new boundary between the young republic and the lingering empire. The negotiators ran boundary through the Great Lakes and the rivers between them, including, most significantly, the thirty-six-mile-long Niagara River emptied Lake Erie into Lake Ontario. Long a critical juncture for overland movement east-and-west, as well as water transport north-and-south, the Niagara River assumed a contradictory new role as an international boundary. A natural place of communication, passage, and mixing became redefined as a place of separation and distinction. Or, so it seemed, on paper to negotiators in distant Paris and their superiors in London and Philadelphia.3 Along the Niagara River, the Iroquois Six Nations clung to their position as autonomous keepers of a perpetual and open-ended borderland, a place of exchange and interdependence. Recognizing their own weakness in numbers and technology, the natives sought renewed strength in their geographic and political position between the Americans and the By exploiting the lingering rivalry between the republic and the empire, the Iroquois Six Nations hoped to remain intermediate and autonomous rather than divided and absorbed by the rivals. The natives conceived of their borderland as porous at both ends to the reception of information and trade goods and for the free movement of their people. In 1790 the Six Nations spokesman Red Jacket explained to the Americans, that we may pass from one to the other unmolested... we wish to be under the protection of the thirteen States as well as of the British. A year later, he reminded the Americans, [we] do not give ourselves entirely up to them [the British], nor lean altogether upon you. We mean to stand upright as we live between both. As gatekeepers of a borderland, the Six Nations enjoyed a leverage would be lost if divided and confined by an artificial border defined as a precise geographic line where two Euro-American powers met and asserted control over all inhabitants within their respective bounds.4 Before the American Revolution, the six Iroquoian nations sustained a loose confederation of villages located south of Lake Ontario and east of Lake Erie, within the territory claimed by the colony of New York. …