Confronting Imperial Expansion

This chapter assesses how Haudenosaunee leaders and community members manipulated imperial and colonial neighbors to maximize benefits for their communities and to protect their homelands. In the decades of peace and open trade that followed the Grand Settlement of 1701, village leaders jockeyed for access to manufactured goods and invited European traders to establish posts in their homelands. The French and English attempted to portray this foothold into Haudenosaunee homelands on maps as an expansion of their imperial control into Indigenous spaces. French and English maps, however, fully reflected Haudenosaunee sovereignty over their homelands as their communities became the final destination of European trade goods and Indigenous customers from the Great Lakes. The People of the Longhouse also constructed new villages in distant regions and opened their homelands to displaced Iroquoian kin who faced settler violence in other colonial spaces. These strategies represented a coordinated response to slow English settler expansion into eastern homelands, particularly up the Mohawk River.