At the wood's edge: Iroquois foreign relations, 1727-1768.

摘要

This dissertation is a study of the much-mentioned, but poorly-understood neutrality policy of the Six Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy during the middle decades of the eighteenth-century. Neutrality represented the key to the Six Nations' diplomacy between competing European empires in northeastern North America from 1727 to 1768. The dissertation offers a revision of prevailing scholarly opinion which regards the Iroquois as an increasingly divided, weakened, and irrelevant people over the course of the eighteenth-century by showing how the Iroquois preserved broad consensus on the idea of balanced diplomatic neutrality in their relations with the British and the French through their intelligent management of factional politics, and through their ability and willingness to settle migrant communities in Canadian Catholic mission villages and in the Ohio Valley.; The Iroquois experienced marked internal population growth between 1727 and 1768. This made local-level village politics more complex, owing to the difficulty of establishing the consensual agreement necessary for political action among an increasingly heterogeneous village population. Migration to Canada and to the Ohio Valley allowed for discrete segments of Iroquois population to fission off from these large communities, leaving behind smaller, more homogenous villages, in which consensual decisions were more easily reached. Migration enabled Iroquois individuals who disagreed on matters of a local nature to move away from one another and follow their own path. Yet the migrant Iroquois (the Kahnawakes, Kanehsatakes, and Mingos), remained in contact with their kin in Confederacy towns, supplying the Confederacy leadership with valuable intelligence and preserving broad consensus on neutrality throughout all Iroquois communities. The flexibility conferred by migration, and by commitment to an official policy of neutrality preserved a position of independence for the Iroquois Confederacy in the diplomatic theater of northeastern North America until the eve of the American Revolution.