Reviewed by: The Susquehannocks: New Perspectives on Settlement and Cultural Identity ed. by Paul A. Raber Andrew Newman (bio) The Susquehannocks: New Perspectives on Settlement and Cultural Identity paul a. raber, ed. Pennsylvania State University Press, 2019 200 pp. The Susquehannocks were an Iroquoian people who, before and during the colonial era, inhabited the Susquehanna River watershed. The chronology, distribution, and extent of their settlements within this region, spanning present-day New York and Pennsylvania and the upper reaches of Chesapeake Bay, are research questions addressed by this edited volume. For readers of Early American Literature who are involved in Native American and Indigenous Studies, the Susquehannocks may have been just beyond the periphery of our field of inquiry, as neighbors of the Powhatan Confederacy, the Haudenosaunee, or the Delawares. A single passage in John Smith's account of his 1608 expedition from Jamestown, in his Generall Historie (1624), recounts his encounter with the "Sasquesahanocks," a "gyant-like people" (cited by Becker 160). They appear less explicitly in French, Swedish, and Dutch colonial accounts. Tragically, they have really only drawn the attention of early Americanist historians and literary scholars at their apparent moment of extinction in 1763, when the Paxton Boys infamously massacred the last "remnant community" (Raber 4) of Susquehannocks near Conestoga. So there is no present-day Susquehannock community that non-Native scholars might consult, collaborate with, and perhaps be accountable to. In the introduction to this volume, published in the Recent Research in Pennsylvania Archaeology series for which he is also the series editor, Paul Raber notes that given the dearth of sources, "exploration of the Susquehannocks has been left largely to archaeologists" (4). He suggests that in light of the unreliability of these textual records, it is perhaps better that way: he mentions a French Jesuit account from 1647 that presents what he demonstrates to be an impossibly high count of warriors for a Susquehannock village, concluding: "We are better off depending on archaeological evidence rather than putting much stock in rare documentary sources of dubious veracity" (5). The basis for this dismissal also illustrates how the questions that archaeologists bring to textual sources may be of little interest to literary scholars, and vice versa. Similarly, colonialist literary [End Page 612] scholars would find little of value to our own inquiries in the contributors' analyses of pottery sherds—their primary medium—and human bones. Nevertheless, although I am for the most part unqualified to evaluate the validity of their findings, I found The Susquehannocks to be illuminating as a sort of case study of a highly specialized community of inquiry. The Susquehannocks positions itself as an update on the twentiethcentury body of scholarship, whose summation was Barry Kent's Susquehanna's Indians (Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, 1984). Accordingly, it announces a departure from the "culture history" model that characterized that era. As I understand it, this approach infers a group cultural identity on the basis of archaeological remains. In this case, pottery styles—"the fuel of culture history," according to April M. Beisaw (81)—may tell the story of the emergence of a "proto-Susquehannock" people, with ancestors in common with the northern Iroquois in the Upper Susquehanna River Valley, their migration and settlement in the Lower Susquehanna River Valley, their contacts with other Native American peoples and with colonists, and their demise during the colonial era. Some of the contributions depart more markedly from this model than others. The first of three parts in the volume is devoted to the first phase in this history, the sixteenth-century transition from the Upper to Lower Susquehanna Valley and perhaps from "Proto-" to "Susquehannock." In chapter 1, Jasmine Gollup points to the central research question of whether "the tribe left New York as culturally recognized Susquehannocks or if they formed their group identity during their journey south" (20). However, she demonstrates that this determination is complicated by a reassessment of the materials, insofar as the classification of the pottery is more indeterminate and inclusive than previous researchers have suggested. She therefore challenges the "idea of a monolithic Susquehannock culture reflected by a unique, identifiable, and culturally delineated set of materials" (21). Nevertheless, the subsequent chapter...
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Jul 16, 2021
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