Protecting Haudenosaunee Mobility, Autonomy, and Ecosystems

This chapter addresses the depth of Haudenosaunee environmental knowledge that lent itself to the geographic mobility among a full demographic range of village residents as individuals and families fulfilled economic, diplomatic, military, subsistence, and personal needs. Through the middle decades of the eighteenth century, Pennsylvania traders and diplomats encountered and described numerous multinational Indigenous villages along the water arteries of the Susquehanna River and its tributaries. Pennsylvania and New York officials, however, misinterpreted these new and dispersed collections of villages as further evidence of the collapse of long-standing Haudenosaunee settlement patterns of compact communities. Colonial officials failed to realize that Haudenosaunee men and women had long and extensive environmental knowledge of these southern spaces. Rather than the product of conflict, the growth of many new communities located at critical points along water arteries represented a strategy to block settler expansion into ecosystems critical to Indigenous subsistence practices. In addition, the Iroquois Confederacy expanded efforts to open southern homelands to displaced Indigenous nations that suffered settler violence in English colonies in the east and south. These multifaceted and coordinated diplomatic, economic, and environmental strategies allowed The People of the Longhouse to survive in their homelands throughout centuries of settler colonization while their eastern and southern neighbors experienced violent dispossession, sometimes at the hands of Haudenosaunee fighting men.