The Storied Landscape of Iroquoia: History, Conquest, and Memory in the Native Northeast by Chad L. Anderson

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Storied Landscape of Iroquoia: History, Conquest, and Memory in the Native Northeast by Chad L. Anderson David L. Preston The Storied Landscape of Iroquoia: History, Conquest, and Memory in the Native Northeast. By Chad L. Anderson. Borderlands and Transcultural Studies. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2020. 288 pages. Cloth, ebook, pdf. John Mitchell's 1755 Map of the British and French Dominions in North America was so comprehensive and expansive that it remained influential in imperial boundary making for decades to come.1 As a summary view of the British imperial imagination, it drew upon previous cartographic work and expressed Britain's territorial claims to North America from the Mississippi to Newfoundland. Along the crest of the Appalachian Mountains, Mitchell engraved the word Iroquois in letters that stretched from Virginia's frontier northeast toward Montreal and the Saint Lawrence Valley. The Haudenosaunee, as the Six Nations or Iroquois are more accurately known, figured prominently in British imperial ambitions in North America, as they maintained a powerful and independent Indigenous confederation in the eighteenth-century Northeast. Mitchell's rendering captured the eighteenth-century British fiction that their Six Nations allies controlled those designated lands, based upon an equally fictional Haudenosaunee claim of having won them by right of conquest. As Chad L. Anderson makes clear, Iroquoia was a "storied landscape" that remained central in British and American imaginations, even after triumphant revolutionaries had expanded into that region and destroyed much of the Indigenous landscape in the years following the American Revolution. Anderson's The Storied Landscape of Iroquoia traces how early Americans both erased and appropriated the Native past as they imagined the new republic. Ignoring clear evidence of Haudenosaunee towns and agriculture, Americans increasingly portrayed Natives as forest fixtures rather than as skilled and settled farmers. They justified Native dispossession by arguing that American improvements and "progress" would lead to the "inevitable" decline of Native peoples. Echoing familiar themes of classic works by Anthony F. C. Wallace, Laurence M. Hauptman, and Alan Taylor, [End Page 389] the book's greatest value is in how well it captures contested European and American perceptions of the Haudenosaunee past and their meanings for the early republic.2 But in contrast to those authors, who deeply explored Haudenosaunee experiences and perspectives, Anderson focuses almost exclusively on European or American views of the Iroquoian landscape and past.3 Making a compelling case that a close examination of colonizers' ideologies is warranted, Anderson's central contribution is to trace the evolution of Americans' attitudes about the Haudenosaunee lands and landscape, past and present, as they "struggled over the meaning of conquest" (15). Unfolding like a series of focused journal essays, the book first explores the Haudenosaunee world and landscape in the mid-eighteenth century and argues that the "American Revolution marked the turning point in their ability to define the nature of settlement" (11). Anderson underscores that the Haudenosaunee were settlers with ineffable connections to their homelands. Haudenosaunee territories framed by the Saint Lawrence, Champlain, Mohawk, Susquehanna, and Ohio Valleys constituted a built and natural landscape brimming with historical, mythic, and spiritual meanings for the Haudenosaunee. On the eve of the American Revolution, the Haudenosaunee population of around nine thousand prospered in distinct towns and settlements with abundant agriculture. Anderson describes Haudenosaunee lands prior to the revolution as "relatively unknown to outsiders" (8), but his use of "relatively" misses a long and complicated interaction between Haudenosaunee and Euro-American settlers who had competed for land and resources since the early years of the eighteenth century. He claims, for example, that "Europeans did not permanently settle in the lands of the Haudenosaunee prior to the American Revolution" (19) but does not take into account scholarly literature examining how Palatine, Scottish, Dutch, and other European families had been permanently settled—in many cases cheek by jowl—alongside Oneida and Mohawk communities beginning in the 1720s.4 [End Page 390] Indeed, in the early years of the Mohawk Valley's settlement, Europeans initially requested permission of the Haudenosaunee owners to establish their farms. Similarly, French Canadian habitants lived intermixed with Haudenosaunee communities in the Saint Lawrence Valley (an area of Iroquoia that the book...