The Storied Landscape of Iroquoia: History, Conquest, and Memory in the Native Northeast

Abstract

According to Chad L. Anderson, “Humans create an imagined landscape to correspond with the physical one” (8). In The Storied Landscape of Iroquoia, Anderson examines the imagined landscape of Iroquoia, the ancestral homelands of the Haudenosaunee, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. As Anderson argues in his first chapter, Euro-Americans had little influence over Iroquoia’s “built and natural landscape” before the American Revolution (1). These visitors relied on Haudenosaunee informants to glimpse how Iroquoia’s landscape “connected the Haudenosaunee to their myths, history, and identities” (44). After the war destroyed much of Iroquoia’s built landscape and opened the region to settlers, white Americans created a physical and imagined landscape of their own in Iroquoia. For the remainder of the book, Anderson successfully argues that this imagined landscape appropriated Iroquoia’s Haudenosaunee past while denying the Haudenosaunee a place in Iroquoia’s future.Anderson shows that settlers used Iroquoia’s built and natural landscape to tell stories that glorified US expansion. After the war, Americans built their farms on the ruins of Haudenosaunee towns and fields. According to Anderson, this destruction helped settlers ignore evidence of Haudenosaunee agriculture and imagine the Haudenosaunee “as hunters, doomed to extinction” (71). Their belief that the Haudenosaunee were “doomed” was bolstered by new ideas about extinction, which Americans learned by exterminating local predatory mammals and investigating mammoth fossils. As white settlers gained a foothold in Iroquoia, they also produced local legends, often connected to landmarks, in which “Indians appeared as foils for heroic frontiersmen to battle” (109). Anderson traces the evolving legends of two monuments, the Painted Post—where Americans falsely claimed a Haudenosaunee leader was buried—and Queen Ester’s Bloody Rock, where Americans alleged that Haudenosaunee people massacred settlers. These stories acknowledged a Haudenosaunee past in Iroquoia, but they were inaccurate “celebrations of white settler victory,” according to Anderson (109).Once Americans saw the Haudenosaunee as antithetical to progress, they began to deny that Haudenosaunee ancestors built Iroquoia’s most visible landmarks. During the colonial period, some Euro-Americans thought the Haudenosaunee oversaw an extensive empire, but their descendants “denied a possible future of Native Americans on the new ‘civilized’ landscape of America” (116). It was in this context, Anderson argues, that Americans came to believe ancient Europeans or another extinct civilization created Iroquoia’s mounds. One such American was the prophet Joseph Smith, who wrote the Book of Mormon from his home in Iroquoia. Smith claimed that Iroquoia’s mounds were built by the Nephites, an ancient Christian civilization conquered by the Lamanites, the supposed ancestors of the Haudenosaunee. According to Anderson, although Smith’s Book of Mormon denied that Haudenosaunee ancestors built mounds, its “alleged Indian history proved essential to its believability” (177). Consequently, Anderson argues, “Mormonism could not have emerged at another time or place other than the early American republic’s newly conquered Native American homelands” (177).According to Anderson, white Americans dominated public discussions on Iroquoia during the early republic, but Haudenosaunee people also participated. In the fourth chapter, Anderson examines Tuscarora historian David Cusick’s work on Iroquoia’s landmarks and their origins, which American intellectuals dismissed while promoting their own improbable theories. I wondered what stories other nineteenth-century Haudenosaunee people—many of whom remained in Iroquoia despite being dispossessed of much of their territory—told about this region’s built and natural landscape. Nonetheless, Anderson convincingly shows the myriad ways white Americans and a few Haudenosaunees contributed to an imagined landscape of Iroquoia during the early republic. Thus The Storied Landscape of Iroquoia is an important read for those interested in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century myth making and public memory of North America’s Indigenous people and their homelands.