THE MANY LANGUAGES OF INDIAN DIPLOMACY
“Whosoever has any affairs to transact with Indians must know their forms and in some measure comply with them,” said Sir William Johnson. As Britain’s superintendent of Indian affairs in the North, Johnson built his career doing just that.1 Treaty making in colonial America was a learning process for Indians and Europeans alike. Europeans brought their established and elaborate diplomatic protocols for making treaties with other nations in Europe to North America. Indians had equally well-established and elaborate protocols for dealing with other Native nations in North America, and they drew European empires and colonists into their existing systems of diplomacy and exchange. Europeans learned to operate with the languages, rituals, and rhythms of Indian diplomacy as a necessity to doing business in Indian country, but at the same time they introduced their own diplomatic procedures and shifted the balance of power away from Indians. European and Native American traditions and practices melded to produce a new, uniquely American form of cross-cultural diplomacy. But it was never a perfect mix and was replete with opportunities for misunderstanding, deceit, and abuse.
Diplomacy was nothing new in North America. Long before Europeans arrived, Indian people demarcated and maintained territorial borders and negotiated multicultural frontiers.2 Reaching across barriers of language, distance, and culture, they operated and traveled trade networks, built and sustained alliances, conducted foreign policies, and concluded international agreements. They developed rituals of respect and reciprocity that allowed, indeed required, them to resolve conflicts, establish mutual trust, and come together in peace. “Trade & Peace we take to be one thing,” said the Iroquois.3 Dealing with other peoples as trade partners required making alliances and turning strangers who were potential enemies into friends and even relatives. Native peoples extended or replicated kinship (anthropologists call it “fictive kinship”) to include people with whom they were not related by birth or marriage, bringing them into their community by adoption, alliance, and ritual. Forging and renewing relationships of cooperation, coexistence, and kinship with others was essential to survival in the pre-contact multitribal world. It became even more essential in the violent and chaotic world generated by European invasion and colonialism, where war and disease upset balances of power and when alliances offered viable alternatives to endless cycles of bloodshed in escalating competition for diminishing resources. In the seventeenth century, European colonies were fragile and often rendered vulnerable by supply problems. Like Native Americans, the colonists struggled to survive “in a world in which international or cultural isolation could easily lead to extermination,” and like Native Americans—and like European colonists in other parts of the globe—they sought and made intercultural alliances and trade to protect and enhance their positions. European diplomatic encounters with Indians occurred at the edges of a world of multiple Indian-to-Indian social, political, and exchange relationships that fanned out across the continent and brought the newcomers into existing nation-to-nation networks.4 The diplomatic landscape of colonial America was a kaleidoscope of shifting relationships where different Indian communities, nations, and confederacies pursued their own foreign policies, just as European nations, empires, and rival colonies pushed their own agendas. Relations with any one group could affect relations with others.
Few in number at first, and evidently inept in their new environment, the English settlers at Jamestown cannot have seemed much of a threat to the peoples of the powerful Powhatan chiefdom, some thirty tribes extending across most of eastern Virginia. The Indians supplied corn to the colonists and the paramount chief, Powhatan, seems to have tried to incorporate the English into his domain. John Smith, the leader of the colonists, recalled several years later how he was captured by the Indians in December 1607 and saved from execution when Powhatan’s daughter, Pocahontas, threw her body across his “at the minute of my execution.” If (and it’s a big “if”—in Smith’s accounts of his adventures, beautiful women save him from dire peril not once but three times) the events occurred as Smith described them, Pocahontas was most likely performing a prescribed role in a standard ritual by which Powhatan could adopt Smith and make him a werowance, or subordinate chieftain. She continued to play an important role as a mediator between the Powhatans and the English during the rest of her brief life.5
Similar diplomatic misunderstanding occurred in New England where Governor William Bradford of Plymouth Colony and the Wampanoag sachem Massasoit made a treaty of peace and friendship in 1621. Massasoit likely understood the agreement as forming an alliance that would bolster him in a power struggle with the neighboring Narragansetts. The English, on the other hand, regarded the treaty as a formal submission by the Wampanoag sachem to King James and an acknowledgment of English sovereignty.6 The English were quick to proclaim dominance over Indians. At the Treaty of Hartford in 1638 they proclaimed the Pequot tribe extinguished. But Indians balked: Narragansetts asserted their independence from and equality with the New England colonies by “going over their heads” and making “a voluntary and free submission” to King Charles I in 1644, and Indians elsewhere in New England regularly refuted English assertions of sovereignty.7
Early European diplomatic encounters with Indians occurred in areas and eras where Indians held the power. Would-be imperialists had to adjust to local and kinship politics and to make a place for themselves within a network of fluid relationships, held together by various languages, rituals, and patterns of behavior. First the French and then the British had to come to terms with the reality that to succeed in Indian country they must behave as Indians thought friends and allies should, and to conciliate more often than command.8 Indians extended to newcomers from Europe the same metaphors and mechanisms for peace that they employed among themselves. “What happened in the hinterland called colonial North America,” wrote the historian Dorothy Jones, “was the development of a multilateral, multicultural diplomacy unlike the diplomatic tradition of any single participant but partaking of them all.” This hybrid diplomacy combined legal documentation of agreements and ritualized renewals of human relationships. Indian chiefs, perhaps wearing uniform coats, three-cornered hats, and medals given to them by European allies, negotiated with colonial emissaries who had learned to smoke the calumet pipe and speak on beaded wampum belts, while their words were translated by interpreters, who might be white men tattooed, painted, and dressed like the Indians with whom they lived.9
Treaty making for Indians involved extending relationships and establishing sacred obligations, and they went about it all with solemn purpose following time-honored procedures. Edmond Atkin, a Charlestown merchant in the Indian trade who became Britain’s southern Indian superintendent, remarked in his report of 1755 that “in their publick Treaties no People on earth are more open, explicit, and Direct. Nor are they excelled by any in the observance of them.” George Croghan, a trader and Indian agent not known for an overabundance of scruples and principles in his dealings, acknowledged that Indians “to their Honour” never “attempted to dissolve a Contract, justly and plainly, made with them.”10 “It must not be supposed that these treaty conferences were in any sense haphazard in character, in any degree less ceremonious than meetings for a similar purpose between the high contracting parties to European agreements,” the historian Lawrence Wroth wrote many years ago; and Indians who engaged in treaty making compelled Europeans to observe ancient protocols “that reached back through centuries of ceremonial observance.11 These rituals and metaphors held significant symbolism and precise meanings. Indians and Europeans who endeavored to deal with each other across cultural gulfs had to negotiate a collision and confluence of worldviews; consequently, the texts of their treaty conferences “can be deciphered now only with careful scrutiny and an informed appreciation of cross-cultural interaction.”12
Indians generally preferred to hold treaties in their own country and away from disease-infested colonial cities. One of the major architects of the Great Peace at Montreal, a Huron chief known as Kondiaronk (or the Rat), died during an epidemic (probably influenza) at the treaty, and the Iroquois complained that they lost many men every time a delegation went to Philadelphia. “The evil Spirits that Dwell among the White People are against us and kill us,” they said.13 But it was not uncommon to see Indian delegates walking the streets of Quebec, Montreal, Albany, Philadelphia, Williamsburg, Charlestown, St. Augustine, San Antonio, Santa Fe, and other colonial capitals. On occasion, they also traveled to Paris or London, conducting diplomacy in a strange new world, although such visits often constituted “a kind of crude theater, drained of the dialogue and intensity that marked intercultural negotiations in America.”14 When Indian delegates came to town, the host governments wined and dined and tried to impress them with their power and wealth. Creek delegates in Charlestown in July 1763 were treated to a river cruise with musical entertainment.15 Indian visitors to London saw the sights, attended the theater, and visited royal palaces, although the filth and poverty they saw in the streets shocked them as much as the power and wealth impressed them.
Rather than assemble in Indian villages or colonial capitals, however, treaty delegates often met at frontier locations distant from both, which meant that Indian communities and colonial governments might not learn until much later what had transpired at the treaty. Once a treaty council was announced, messengers went to Indian villages, summoning the tribes to attend. It took time for the participants to assemble, especially when delegates came from various and sometimes distant nations. Indians often marked their arrival at the treaty site with a ceremonial entrance. James Thacher, a surgeon with the American army during the Revolution, walking in the woods one morning prior to a conference being attended by two hundred Iroquois men and women, saw them “occupied in dressing and ornamenting themselves for the ceremony; painting their faces, adjusting their hair, putting jewels into their ears, noses, &c.” Several of the young men and girls wore “little bells about their feet, to make a jingle when dancing.” When the proceedings began, the Indians filed in and “arranged themselves, by sitting on the ground in a circle, the men on one side, the women on the other, leaving a vacancy for our commissioners, who were seated on chairs.” In the intervals between talks, the Indians danced around the fire in the center of the circle and, taking each commissioner one at a time by the hand, danced with them around the circle.16
The Iroquois were so influential and played the game of Indian-European diplomacy so well that Iroquois forms, conventions, and terminology pervaded the diplomacy of northeastern North America. At the opening of an Iroquois council, a speaker greeted the participants and metaphorically wiped their eyes, cleansed their ears, and cleared their throats so that they might see, hear, and speak without impediment, a ritual of condolence that dated back to the legendary founding of their league when Deganawidah the Peacemaker assuaged the grief and torment of Hiawatha. The condolence ceremony typically began by greeting messengers “at the wood’s edge,” as they emerged from the forest to the clearing around the village. Then strings of wampum—shells or later glass beads—were presented, with the speaker telling the stories spoken by the wampum, accompanied by songs, to remove past grievances, resentments, and grief. These rituals created or renewed connections of peace and goodwill between the council participants, who put aside bad memories and negative feelings in order to meet with open hearts and minds.17 The condolence ceremony marked the beginning of any Iroquois negotiation with Europeans, and abbreviated versions of the ceremony marked the opening of many councils with other northern Indians, even when no Iroquois were present.18 A condolence council was not a one-time, once-and-for-all affair; in an increasingly volatile world, people met recurrently to settle differences, mend allegiances, and assuage anger and grief. In the Southeast, colonial officials dealing with the Creeks and their neighbors could similarly expect to partake of a ceremonial and purgative black drink before talks got under way.19
European treaty makers had to learn to tolerate such time-consuming indigenous rituals and deliberative processes that involved frequent adjournments. “The Indians adhere so closely to their Tedious Ceremonies that I am sensible you must have had a most fatiguing time of it,” Governor Robert Hunter Morris of Pennsylvania sympathized with William Johnson after one treaty.20 For the Indians, those “tedious ceremonies” sanctified the proceedings and established relationships of trust that were the very “sinews of diplomacy.” Without the proper rituals, “a treaty simply was not a treaty.”21 Peace for Indians meant more than just an absence of conflict or an end to fighting; it was a state of being and a state of mind that carried moral obligations.22
As the anthropologist Raymond DeMallie explains in regards to treaty negotiations on the Great Plains, “If the council as a diplomatic forum was commonly understood by both whites and Indians, the concept of the treaty was not.” For Indians, the council was an end in itself. What mattered was coming together in peace, ritually smoking a pipe, establishing trust, speaking the truth, and exchanging words. Indians generally reached decisions by consensus so all opinions and points of view had to be discussed. “Until that occurred, no decision was made, and once it was reached, no vote was necessary.” For whites, the council and its associated rituals were preliminaries to the real business at hand: drawing up and signing a written treaty. Indians, who “had already sworn themselves to the truth,” regarded signing the treaty as redundant, but they recognized that it was an important ritual for white men.23
European diplomats in Indian country had to deal with systems of government that were quite different from their own centralized and hierarchical structures and which made negotiations tedious and treaties tentative. Colonial powers generally appointed commissioners to treat with the Indians and they expected Indian leaders to make agreements that were binding on their people. Indian orators often spoke on behalf of their people, but representation at treaty councils was fuller and decision making more fluid than Europeans were accustomed to. Governor Cadwallader Colden of New York, writing of the Iroquois in the 1720s, said, “Each Nation is an absolute Republick by its self, govern’d in all Publick Affairs of War and Peace by the Sachems or Old Men, whose Authority and Power is gain’d by and consists wholly in the Opinion the rest of the Nation have of their Wisdom and Integrity. They never execute their Resolutions by Compulsion or Force upon any of their People.”24 A trader named John Long said, “The Iroquois laugh when you talk to them of obedience to kings….Each individual is sovereign in his own mind.”25 Southern Indians felt the same way, according to the trader James Adair: “The power of the chiefs is an empty sound. They can only persuade or dissuade the people,” and everyone “to a man” voiced opinions.26 In such political systems, leaders relied on the power of their words to achieve consensus, not the authority of their office to enforce obedience.
To complicate things further, the Indian delegates who appeared at treaties, and whom colonists courted and cultivated, were often the men who possessed the ritual knowledge and oratorical skills necessary for public speaking rather than the political leaders, who might remain silent while these front men did the talking. “Chief” was a term that embraced a variety of people in a variety of leadership roles. Europeans and Americans “not only misunderstood the origin and exercise of chiefly power but also failed to understand the nuances of how this authority was held, transferred, and wielded differently through Native American societies.” They expected and pressured chiefs to be more authoritarian than their societies allowed, which in many cases undermined consensus and caused divisions. But Indian leaders rarely made decisions on their own and regularly consulted with their constituencies, which meant bringing large numbers of people with them to the treaty grounds or securing the consent of people back in the villages to any agreements they made. Speakers at treaty councils frequently made a point of explaining whom they spoke for and asserting that they acted with the support of the other chiefs, the warriors, and the women.27
Although men typically negotiated and concluded the treaties, women traditionally exercised important diplomatic roles in some Native societies. A Quaker who expressed surprise at seeing an old woman speak in a council near the Susquehanna River in 1706 was told “that some women were wiser than some men, and that they had not done anything for many years without the council of this ancient, grave woman.” Gendered language pervaded the discourse of diplomacy and women served as a metaphor for peaceful intentions throughout the eastern woodlands. The Delawares were often called, and called themselves, “a nation of women” because of the tribe’s historic role as intertribal mediators.28 Women continued to feature in the diplomacy of colonial early America. They signed their names to land deeds and petitions.29 They functioned as peace emissaries and mediators in the Texas borderlands as well as in the northeastern woodlands.30 They accompanied delegations to treaty councils and wove wampum belts. At the treaty grounds, they erected and took down lodges, kept an eye on the children, and cooked food. Sometimes, the women sat on one side of the circle as the treaty talks proceeded and they doubtless exerted more influence on negotiations than the official transcripts of the treaties recorded. In matrilineal societies only women could adopt outsiders as fictive kin—which they did by ritual embrace—establishing bonds of kinship as a prerequisite to engaging in diplomacy.31 And private relationships and intermarriage between Indian women and European men often provided a basis for public and diplomatic relations.32 Often, women had their say back in the villages before the male delegates departed for the treaty grounds or in the evening during breaks in the negotiations. What women said to their husbands or sons did not usually make it into the written records of treaty proceedings but, as the Arapaho chief Little Raven explained at Medicine Lodge, a treaty could not be made without their participation.33
Europeans were troubled by the influence and independence that Indian women displayed in public meetings (as well as in their private lives), and they tried to limit female involvement in political processes. In addition, Europeans were primarily interested in Indians as allies or enemies in war and as partners and customers in the fur and deerskin trades; consequently they expected to deal with men, the warriors and hunters, not women, who were peacemakers and farmers. The Iroquois came to employ “women” as a pejorative term to describe the Delawares as militarily weak and politically powerless.34 Sir William Johnson married Mary or Molly Brant, who became an influential clan mother, and he was well aware of the influence women exercised in Iroquois society. (In 1758, for example, he heeded the entreaties of Mohawk women, and others, not to attend the League council at Onondaga.) But he downplayed the role of women in Iroquois diplomacy and tried to deal exclusively with men (in part, no doubt, to try and reduce the numbers of people running up expenses at treaty councils).35 Iroquois women turned up for a treaty at Johnson Hall in April 1762 despite Sir William’s request that they stay away. The Oneida chief Conoghquieson explained (as if Johnson did not know), “it was always the Custom for them to be present on Such Occasions (being of Much Estimation Amongst Us, in that we proceed from them, and they provide our Warriors with Provisions when they go abroad).”36
Doing business in Indian country involved giving and receiving gifts. The first governor of New France gave presents to the Iroquois, explained a Jesuit priest, “according to the custom of the country, in which the term ‘present’ is called ‘the word,’ in order to make clear that it is the present which speaks more forcibly than the lips.”37 Gifts—in the form of wampum, feathers, medals, items of clothing, knives, ammunition, blankets, tobacco, food, rum, horses on the Plains, and a host of other articles—were essential lubricants of Indian diplomacy, although the objects themselves, and giving and receiving them, often held different meanings for Indians and Europeans. To Indians, gifts signified greetings, generosity, and goodwill; they helped to establish and reaffirm reciprocal relations, and they served to amplify a request, underscore a point, and seal an agreement. Gifts established obligations; hence the importance of generosity as an attribute of leadership in Native societies. Indians requested gifts from their allies, sometimes pleading poverty or hunger, and they expected their allies to request gifts from them: mutual dependence underscored the need for alliance; refusing to give or receive gifts indicated a lack of mutual reliance and potential hostility. Accepting a gift meant accepting the message that accompanied it, the agreement it signified, or the undertaking it symbolized.38
In January 1621 the Narragansett sachem Canonicus sent Governor William Bradford of Plymouth Colony a gift of a snakeskin stuffed full of arrows. Bradford’s interpreter told him it represented a threat and a challenge, and the governor read it to mean that the Narragansetts were the dominant power in the region to which the English had better submit. To accept the gift would have been to acknowledge Narragansett dominance; instead, Bradford added bullets and gunpowder to the snakeskin and sent it back to Canonicus. Canonicus was no more willing to submit than Bradford and “hee would not once touch the powder and shot, or suffer it to stay in his house or Country,” and the snakeskin bundle “at length came whole back againe.”39
Alliances that were not built on the trust of gifts given and received were always fragile and would usually founder. In 1752, Miami Indians sent the governor of Virginia the gift of a scalp and a wampum belt “to confirm what we say and assure you that we will ever continue true Friends and Allies to our Brothers, the English.”40 Sending gifts, especially of tobacco, was a way to open communication, invite people to meet, and “break the ice.” “Sit down with them and command tobacco for them so that they may smoke as is their custom,” Don Tomás Vélez Capuchín advised his successor as governor of New Mexico in 1754 as the best way to receive visiting Comanche chiefs and initiate diplomatic proceedings with them.41
Gifts were given in public council and in private meetings, to assemblages, and to individuals as “marks of distinction.” Sir William Johnson often recognized individual chiefs with medals, laced coats, and hats. After a conference at Fort Johnson in the summer of 1756, he gave departing Onondaga chiefs “a Handsome private Present in cloathing and money and a quantity of Corn for their families who were in great want.”42 Such largesse cemented personal and national alliances, bolstered Johnson’s individual standing among the Iroquois, and strengthened Britain’s position in Indian country at a time of escalating competition with the French. It also allowed Johnson to exert increasing influence in Iroquois politics and chief making.43
Competition with the French also allowed Indians to leverage more and higher-quality presents from the English. Warriors from the Ohio country asked for better weapons during King George’s War (1744–48) because “the French have hard Heads, and … we have nothing strong enough to break them.” At the beginning of the French and Indian War (1754–63), the Oneida chief Scarouady told the English “You think You perfectly well understand the Management of Indian Affairs, but I must tell You that it is not so, and that the French are more politick than you. They never employ an Indian on any Business but they give him fine Cloathes besides other Presents, and this makes the Indians their hearty Friends, and do any Thing for them. If they invite the Indians to Quebec, they all return with laced Cloathes on, and boast of the generous Treatment of the French Governor.”44 Scarouady was not making things up: the French did indulge their Indian allies. The Marquis de Montcalm and the Marquis de Vaudreuil held a conference at Montreal in 1756 with forty Iroquois ambassadors and delegates from other nations to try and secure their neutrality or allegiance against the English. As the conference wound down at the end of December, the Iroquois “asked to remain until the morrow, New Year’s day, because they had been told that on that day the Pale faces kissed each other and that liquor was furnished.” The cost of hosting the Iroquois for an extra day would have been dwarfed by the total expenses for the conference, which were large enough to merit explanation and justification in the record of the conference: “The Ambassadors, their women and children, have been fitted out entire and entertained at the King’s expense from the moment of their arrival to that of their departure. They had also been furnished with supplies and provisions for their journey, and the civil and war chiefs have received special presents. These expenses are unavoidable. The neutrality of those Nations is one of the greatest advantages we could obtain over the English.”45 The invoice of goods given by the English to the Indians at a relatively small “private conference” held at Easton, Pennsylvania, in 1758, a critical point in the contest for Indian allegiance, included some 30 different kinds of cloth, 100 blankets, 5 laced coats, 160 matchcoats, more than 400 shirts, 33 painted looking glasses, 50 pairs of shoes, knives, handkerchiefs, hats, ivory combs, buttons, thread, stockings, handkerchiefs, garters, and tobacco boxes.46 This was nothing compared to the cost of food and gifts for the three thousand Indians who ten years later assembled for three weeks at the Treaty of Fort Stanwix.
Medals constituted a particularly important and common form of distinction. The Spanish, French, and English all presented medals to Indian chiefs (or to designate chiefs) and used them to interfere in tribal politics. The Spaniards recognized three levels of leaders—great medal chiefs, small medal chiefs, and chiefs, usually war captains, who merited the gorgets commonly worn by European officers. (Originally designed as armor to protect the throat, gorgets by the eighteenth century were small crescent-shaped plates primarily designed as ceremonial wear.) A formal presentation of such medals signified allegiance to the nation presenting them and conveyed status on the recipient. For Indians who wore them, the medals and gorget may have signified a pledge of their allegiance to a European ally but they also signified access to the sources of power Europeans represented (trade goods and weapons) and, like shell gorgets, may have carried spiritual power. Choctaws called medals tali hullo, a “sacred piece of stone.” When the British replaced the French after 1763 and Spain took over possession of Louisiana many Choctaw chiefs turned in their French medals and requested replacements, so that colonial recognition of their leadership might continue unbroken.47 When the governor of New Mexico, Juan Bautista de Anza, negotiated peace with the Comanches in 1786 he tried to make Ecueracapa (Leather Shirt or Iron Coat) head chief of all the Comanches (something that would have made little sense to the various independent Comanche bands); to that end, he formally presented him “with his Majesty’s medal” and a complete uniform to better display it.48
Colonial governments frequently complained about the cost of gifts and William Johnson’s rivals, in particular General Jeffery Amherst, the British commander-in-chief, criticized his extravagance. When Britain emerged victorious but facing financial ruin at the end of the French and Indian War, Amherst decided to dispense with the expensive practice of cultivating Indians’ allegiance by giving them gifts. “I Cannot See any Reason for Supplying the Indians with Provisions,” he wrote to Johnson, “for I am Convinced that they will never think of providing for their Families by hunting, if they can Support them by begging Provisions from Us.” Johnson retorted that Amherst’s stinginess would alienate the Indians and compromise the safety of British garrisons in Indian country and he was right. By giving gifts, the British could appease the spirits of warriors who had fallen in the war, demonstrate that they spoke from the heart when they assured Indians of their good intentions, and show that the King of England was prepared to take the place of the French king as a benevolent father. Gifts could restore relationships and turn enemies into friends. Withholding gifts had the opposite effect. Amherst saw his policy of retrenchment as an appropriate response to a changed situation and a financial crisis; Indians saw it as tantamount to a declaration of war.49
Indian diplomacy, of course, involved exchanging words as well as gifts. In societies where leaders persuaded rather than commanded, speakers were renowned for their oratory. A Jesuit missionary named Pierre Biard described the Montagnais in 1616 as “the greatest speech-makers on earth. Nothing is done without speeches.” Fellow Jesuit Paul Le Jeune said, “All the authority of their chief is in his tongue’s end; for he is powerful in so far as he is eloquent.”50
Europeans and Native Americans at the earliest stages of contact employed concrete terms as the easiest means of communication. Translating abstractions was always problematic.51 “Metaphor is largely in use among these Peoples,” wrote Father Le Jeune about the Hurons in 1636. “Unless you accustom yourself to it, you will understand nothing in their councils, where they speak almost entirely in metaphors.”52 Metaphors like “speak with forked tongue” and “bury the hatchet” have entered popular culture as figures of speech, but these now stereotypical expressions do little justice to the image-rich language of Indian orators who planted trees of peace; opened and maintained white paths of peace by removing thorns, clearing obstacles, and keeping them straight; polished chains of friendship to keep them free of rust; wiped away tears; rekindled fires; dispelled clouds; warned against listening to “bad Birds that whistle Evil things in our Ears”; cast weapons into bottomless pits; turned aside anger; softened hard hearts; distinguished between a peace “made from the Teeth outwards” and one that came from the heart; and even, on occasion, asserted dominance over a rival tribe by assuming a second penis!53
Indians conducted diplomacy by the stories they told as well as by the arguments they made and points they negotiated. Orators used storytelling to convey their meanings, to draw listeners into their vision of the world, and “to invoke the imaginative capacity in others to see themselves as connected in a world of human solidarity.”54 They used body language, poise, posture, and gestures for dramatic effect; Father Barthélemy Vimont saw an Iroquois orator employ “a thousand gestures, as if he had collected the waves and caused a calm, from Quebec to the Iroquois country.”55
Canasatego, an Onondaga who figured in many mid-eighteenth-century treaties, was famous for his oratory. He was also famous for his hard drinking and some observers thought him a braggart rather than a statesman, but time and again he impressed with his dignified bearing, his speech making, and his astuteness. Canasatego headed the Iroquois delegation at the Treaty of Lancaster in 1744, where he politely, but with tongue in cheek, declined Virginia’s offer to educate Iroquois children: “we thank you for your Invitation; but our Customs differing from yours, you will be so good as to excuse us,” an answer that, in the longer and more elaborate version Benjamin Franklin printed, became a telling indictment of colonial pretensions to cultural superiority. Canasatego is also famous for advising the individual colonies to follow the model of the Iroquois League and form a union. He did so, coincidentally, on the fourth of July.56
“The conference,” Lawrence Wroth explained, “was not a debate: it consisted in the delivery of set speeches by either side in response to the proposals made by the other at the preceding session. Speaking only after deliberation in tribal council, and expressing the common opinion, the Indian had few ill-considered words to regret when the conference was ended.”57 A speaker delivered his talk, punctuated, in the northeast, by presenting strings of wampum to reinforce his points, and made sure, everywhere, to pause for one or more interpreters to translate his words. The audience sat in silence while he spoke. A speaker from the other side recapitulated what had been said, to ensure that everyone understood, but would not usually respond until his group had had an opportunity to consider and agree on their answer. Composed in advance, like those of their white counterparts, Indian speeches were more often “tribal or band position statements,” rather than spontaneous flights of oratory. Objections or questions were rarely answered when they were raised; more often they were dealt with in later speeches after an opportunity for deliberation.58 The pace was slow, deliberate, and frequently frustrating for time- and cost-conscious Europeans who were anxious to take care of business. Lieutenant Colonel Tench Tilghman, secretary of the Indian commissioners appointed by the Continental Congress to treat with the Six Nations at German Flatts, New York, in the summer of 1775, found that multiple translations and lengthy recapitulations of speeches made for “dull entertainment.”59
Many tribes and confederacies had their own metaphors to describe their alliances and relationships, but it was the Iroquois Chain of Friendship or Covenant Chain that became almost the standard term.60 The Iroquois regarded the Covenant Chain as one of many chains by which they were linked—allied—to other Native and colonial peoples by regularly renewed relationships of friendship and reciprocity; the British preferred to see it as an exclusive alliance between themselves and the Iroquois, through which they also gained access to and exerted influence over other Indian nations. Either way, the Covenant Chain was a multinational alliance in which “no member gave up its sovereignty” and decisions were made by consultation and treaty.61 When the Crown and the New York Assembly cut allowances for Indian affairs after King George’s War, the Mohawk chief Hendrick publicly and symbolically broke the Covenant Chain during a conference in 1753, precipitating a crisis in British-Iroquois relations. With conflict looming against France in the Ohio Valley, the English government could ill afford to alienate the Iroquois and hurried to mend fences, reconstituting the Covenant Chain at the Albany Congress the following year.62
For the Iroquois, diplomatic relations with outsiders involved “an extension of the same principles that governed social relations within Iroquois families and communities.”63 In societies built around kinship, kinship ties were the sinews of diplomacy and kinship terms were more than just a form of address. They constituted a system of establishing the rights and obligations of the parties vis-à-vis one another and they conveyed real messages. Employing the language of Indian diplomacy, Europeans often stood as “fathers” to their Indian “children”; coming from a patriarchal and patrilineal society, they naturally assumed that the father figure represented authority and wisdom in dealing with Indian children. Indians addressed colonial officials as “father,” but the term had rather different connotations in matrilineal societies where the most important adult male in a child’s life was the mother’s brother, not the biological father. Indians who addressed Europeans as fathers expected them to act like indulgent and protective Indian fathers who gave gifts, not orders; who observed rituals, not rules; and who counseled proper conduct instead of invoking paternal authority. Indians would sometimes remind colonial officials that they were their brothers, not their fathers. “Brother” clearly conveyed equal status, but the qualifiers “older” or “younger” brother gave the relationship a slightly different cast. The Mohawks, Onondagas, and Senecas were the elder brothers in the Iroquois League; the Oneidas, Cayugas, and Tuscaroras were younger brothers. The elder brother(s) in a diplomatic relationship might enjoy seniority and greater influence but would also likely have particular obligations to protect the younger brother(s).64 Europeans had not only to learn the meanings of kin metaphors as applied in their own dealings with Indians but they also had to learn that kinship relations often had different meanings in Indian societies and that different nations applied different kin metaphors in dealing with one another. Hendrick Aupaumut, who acted as a Mahican emissary to the western nations, said his people called the Delawares grandfathers; the Shawnees younger brothers; and the Miamis, Ottawas, Ojibwes, and Potawatomis grandchildren. John Norton, an adopted Mohawk of Scots-Cherokee descent, said the Ojibwes called the Delawares grandfathers; the Delawares called the Iroquois and Hurons uncles; and other tribes called the Iroquois and Hurons elder brothers. The Cherokees also called the Delawares grandfathers but called the Iroquois elder brothers. The Creeks and Chickasaws called the Cherokees elder brothers, but the Choctaws called the Cherokees uncles.65
Indians frequently bestowed names and titles on Europeans, titles that often stayed with the office. The Iroquois called the governor of New France Onontio (meaning “Great Mountain,” a translation of the name of the first governor, Chevalier de Montmagny); the governor of Pennsylvania was Onas (meaning feather or quill, their translation of and play on William Penn’s name); the governor of New York was called Corlaer, after Arent van Curler who had negotiated a treaty between the Dutch and the Mohawks in 1643; and the governor of Virginia was Assaraquoa or Assaryquoa, signifying a sword or long knife. The names passed from one governor to the next in the same way that the names of the Iroquois League chiefs were passed down from generation to generation.66 Indians also gave names, sometimes their own, to individual colonists.
Wampum belts and calumet pipes were essential to diplomacy in Indian country. They turned treaties into sacred commitments. Indian messengers running forest trails carrying wampum belts and tribal delegations bearing calumet pipes of peace were more common than war parties on raids. “When a nation is desirous of negotiating a peace they send ambassadors, two or three in number, with a string of wampum denoting their desire,” said Jacob Jemison, a Dartmouth-educated Seneca, in the 1820s; and, as the Delaware chief Teedyuscung explained, “Messengers of Peace pass free amongst all Nations, and should they meet with 10,000 Warriors, they are not hurt by them.” A Moravian missionary, John Heckewelder, maintained that Indians traditionally protected peace messengers and ambassadors as a sacred obligation, and they attributed deviations from the custom to white men who “paid no regard themselves to the sacred character of messengers.”67
In the eastern woodlands, words meant little unless accompanied by wampum. From the Algonquian word wampumpeag, wampum was originally made from shells: white from whelks and purple from quahog shells, supplied primarily from beds along Narragansett Bay and Long Island Sound, and drilled and strung on fiber or thread or woven into rectangular belts. A traveler described Indians making wampum on Staten Island in 1760:
It is made of the clam shell; a shell consisting within of two colors, purple and white, and in form not unlike a thick oyster shell. The process of manufacture is very simple. It is first chipped to a proper size, which is that of a small oblong parallelepiped, then drilled, and afterward ground to a round smooth surface, and polished. The purple wampum is much more valuable than the white, a very small part of the shell being of that color.68
Shells were supplemented and eventually supplanted by glass beads, usually manufactured in Italy and supplied by European traders, but they fulfilled the same functions.
Indians used wampum as gifts, jewelry, and trade items, and it served as currency for a time in coin-poor colonies. Dutch authorities banned the baking and selling of white bread and cakes because the common medium for small-scale exchange in New Netherland was strings of wampum, and Indians, who had greater quantities of wampum than the colonists, were getting better bread than good Christians.69
Other gifts might serve to confirm speeches and demonstrate agreement, but exchanging wampum belts became the standard at treaty conferences.70 European negotiators had to learn “the language of beads” because “Without Wampum Nothing is to be Done.”71 Messages were not credible unless they were accompanied by wampum. In 1707, as the English continued their efforts to recover Eunice Williams, who had been abducted and adopted by Mohawks from Kahnawake in the famous raid on Deerfield, Massachusetts, in 1704, New York’s commissioners of Indian affairs gave a sachem from Canada “three small belts of wampum to Releace mr. williams ye minister of dear feild his Doughter from ye Indians if She be possible to be gotte, for money or Els to give an Indian girle for ye Same.”72 (Despite the appropriate wampum embassy, it did not happen: Eunice Williams married a Mohawk and, apart from fleeting visits to New England, lived at Kahnawake for almost eighty years.)
Without wampum, words might come only from the mouth, not from the heart. Governor William Shirley of Massachusetts gave Penobscot and Norridgwock chiefs a belt of wampum “as a Token of the Sincerity of my Heart, in what I have said to you.” He need not have explained: as a Mohawk told Sir William Johnson, Indians understood that “Our words are of no weight unless accompanyed with Wampum.”73 In other words, if a speaker failed to present wampum, he was “just talking,” perhaps floating a trial balloon or indulging in diplomatic hyperbole or double talk that carried no obligation.74 On a rare occasion when Iroquois delegates at a conference with the governor of New York had no wampum with them, they took pains to reassure him “that what we relate is the truth.”75
Communication that depended on wampum was sometimes delayed by its absence. Prior to the Treaty of Logstown in 1752, the Indian council there sent the commissioners from Virginia a string of wampum “to let them know they were glad to hear of their being on the Road” and to ensure them safe passage. “The Commissioners not having any Wampum strung, without which Answers cou’d not be returned, acquainted the Indians that they wou’d answer their Speeches in the Afternoon.” Once the commissioners reached Logstown and negotiations began, they had their wampum belts strung, ready to do business, and matched the Indians string for string: “That what we have said may have the deeper impression on you & have its full force we present you with this Belt of Wampum.”76
Wampum served as aids to memory and storytelling as well as being ritualized gifts and records of agreements. An Indian speaker would often lay out a batch of wampum strings or belts in front of him and then pick up each belt in turn as he spoke, punctuating each point or paragraph with a wampum string; women who accompanied treaty delegations were kept busy stringing belts for the speakers’ prepared talks. A treaty council at Carlisle, Pennsylvania, in 1753 was delayed, an Indian explained to the waiting audience, because the Indian delegates had “mislaid some Strings, which has put their Speeches into Disorder; these they will rectify, and speak to you in the Afternoon.” It was almost as if the Indians had misplaced the notes for a speech.77 John Heckewelder said that it was customary when a speaker was about halfway through his speech to turn the belt on which he was speaking, “as with us on taking a glance at the pages of a book or pamphlet while reading; and a good speaker will be able to point out the exact place on a belt which is to answer to each particular sentence, the same as we can point out a passage in a book.”78 (See figure 1.1.)
Strings and belts of wampum contained messages, affirmed messages, and emphasized the significance—and truth—of messages.79 Wampum was “a coded remembrancer of sacred traditions and political negotiations.”80 A Dutchman traveling in Mohawk country in 1680 described how Indians employed wampum and collective memory to preserve records of their treaties. Each speaker held a wampum string (or “counter”) until he had made his point; when both sides were satisfied, the wampum was marked and put away; the process was repeated for each point until the whole agreement or contract was reached:
FIGURE 1.1 Nicolas Vincent Isawanhonhi, chief of the Hurons of Lorette. The chief is pictured speaking on a wampum belt he presented to King George IV in England in 1825. Although his clothing is from the nineteenth century, the belt dates back to colonial times. (Library and Archives Canada, C-038948)
Then they add up their counters, representing so many articles and the specific meaning which each signifies. As they can neither read nor write, they are gifted with powerful memory; and as it is done so solemnly, they consider it absolutely unbreakable. And because they cannot leave it to their posterity in written form, after the conclusion of the matter all the children who have the ability to understand and to remember it are called together, and then they are told by their fathers, sachems or chiefs how they entered into such a contract with these parties. Then the markers are counted out to them, showing that the contract consists in so many articles and explaining the significance given to the markers and the story of how it was done. Thus they acquire understanding of each article in particular. Then these children are commanded to remember this treaty and to plant each article in particular in their memory, and they and their children [are commanded] to preserve it faithfully so that they may not become treaty-breakers, which is an abomination to them. Then all these shells or counters are bound together with a string in such a manner, signifying such a treaty or contract with such a nation. After they have been bound together, the bundle is put in a bag and hung up in the house of the sachem or chief where it is carefully preserved.81
In the summer of 1743, Conrad Weiser, a German farmer turned frontier interpreter, traveled to the council seat of the Six Nations at Onondaga, accompanied by John Bartram, a Quaker and botanist from Philadelphia, and a Welsh mapmaker and surveyor named Lewis Evans. Weiser’s mission was to prevent a backcountry skirmish between colonists and an Iroquois hunting party from turning into an all-out war. Weiser first met the Onondaga speaker Canasatego “in the Bushes to have a private Discourse” and “explained my Instructions to him, and show’d him the Wampum.” The council assembled and after “a deal of Ceremonies”—reciting the origins of the Iroquois League, greeting delegates who had traveled from afar, giving thanks for the opportunity to meet—called for Onas (Pennsylvania) and Assaryquoa (Virginia) to speak. Weiser asked Canasatego to speak for him, handing him a belt of wampum to “document” each statement. “Brethren, the united Nations, these Strings of Wampum serve to dispel the Dark Cloud that overshadowed Us for some Time, that the Sun May shine again and we may be able to see one another with Pleasure.” The wampum belts were hung from a horizontal pole set up across the council house about six feet from the ground “that all the council might see them, and here have the matters in remembrance, in confirmation of which they were delivered.” After a meal, the Iroquois delegates responded to each statement Weiser had made, and they presented wampum, string for string, belt for belt: “Brother Assaryquoa, this String of Wampum serves to return you our Thanks for dispelling the dark Cloud that overshadow’d Us from some Time. Let the Sun shine again, let us look upon one another with Pleasure and Joy.” With harmony restored, Weiser and his companions carried away wampum belts “as our tokens of peace and friendship.”82
At the Montreal conference in 1756, the French, Iroquois, and other Indians exchanged numerous wampum belts, which must have been bewildering for anyone not accustomed to this form of communication. A note attached to the account of the conference explained:
These Belts and Strings of wampum are the universal agent among Indians, serving as money, jewelry, ornaments, annals, and for registers; ’tis the bond of nations and individuals; an inviolable and sacred pledge which guarantees messages, promises and treaties. As writing is not in use among them, they make a local memoir by means of these belts, each of which signifies a particular affair, or a circumstance of affairs. The Chiefs of the villages are the depositories of them, and communicate them to the young people, who thus learn the history and engagements of their Nation.83
John Heckewelder said that the chiefs were “very careful in preserving for their own information, and that of future generations, all important deliberations and treaties made at any time between them and other nations.” To ensure that such information passed intact across the generations, they assembled once or twice a year at chosen locations in the woods, laid out all the records of treaties (whether wampum or written), and had a speaker who had been trained in the business recite the contents of the belts one by one. Consequently, Delawares in the 1700s could “relate very minutely” what had passed between William Penn and their forefathers at their first meeting and at every transaction since with the governors of Pennsylvania.84
Color, design, and length symbolized a belt’s content and message. Belts might be of one color or of a combination of purple and white beads strung to form graphic patterns. Straight lines connecting squares or diamonds represented paths or alliances between nations and council fires. White beads represented life, peace, and well-being; purple or “black” beads represented death, war, and mourning.85 Southeastern Indians venerated white wampum beads as tokens of peace and friendship after they adopted wampum during the eighteenth century.86 White feathers served a similar purpose. Staffs with eagle feathers attached were “white wings of peace,” and waving or holding white eagle tail feathers over the head of a visiting diplomat was deemed “the strongest pledge of good faith.”87 A delegation of seven Cherokees in London in 1730 made a treaty and then laid feathers on the table. “This is our way of talking which is the same to us as your letters in the Book are to you,” they explained. “And to you Beloved Men we deliver these feathers in confirmation of all we have said and of our Agreement to your Articles.”88 White deerskins—presented as gifts or sat upon at peace talks—also symbolized peace and friendship.89
At the outbreak of the Revolution, a delegation of northern Indians traveled south to the Cherokee town of Chota in present-day eastern Tennessee. At a meeting in the council house, the Mohawk delegate produced a belt of white and purple wampum and “he supposed there was not a man present that could not read his talk.” The Ottawa delegate produced a white belt with purple figures, indicating the desire to form a lasting friendship between the tribes. The Shawnee delegate offered them a nine-foot wampum belt “strewn with vermilion” as a call to war against the Americans. Cherokee warriors accepted the call by laying hold of the belt.90
Belts often carried more intricate messages. To invoke the memory of the treaty made at Albany in 1754, remind the British of the promises of friendship and support they had made there, and reassert their status as allies, an Onondaga chief at Johnson Hall in 1763 produced a large wampum belt
whereon was wrought in white Wampum the figures of Six Men towards one End, as representing the Six Nations, towards the other End, the figure of Nine men to represent the Nine Governments who assembled at Albany; … between both was a Heart Signifying the Union and friendship then Settled between them. At the Top were the letters G R made of White Wampum, and under that the full length of the Belt was a white line, which they were told was a long board to Serve as a Pillow, whereon their and our Heads were to rest.91
Presenting wampum confirmed and “documented” the words that were spoken. Among the Iroquois, said Jacob Jemison, “the only ceremony attending the conclusion of a peace is the delivery of the wampum belt, which is used to signify their contract.”92 In fact, in negotiations with the governors of New York, Virginia, and Maryland in the seventeenth century, the Iroquois also sang a song “after thar maner being thar method of a new Covenant.” The singing confirmed the agreement and committed the hearers to remember it. As the Mohawk speaker said to the governors, “Let me drive it into you with a song.”93
Taking, or touching, the belt indicated acceptance of the message, and agreement usually entailed a reciprocal gift of wampum to seal the agreement, as it were. Rejecting, returning, or refusing to touch a belt meant the message was not acceptable. Dramatically casting belts aside could convey other messages as well. In 1691, in conference with the governor of New York, the Iroquois said they had rejected as “venomous and detestable” a French wampum belt offering peace “and did spew it out and renounce it … and left the belt upon the ground in the Court house yard.” Three years later, Count Frontenac “kicked away” three Iroquois belts proposing a truce with the English “and by this mark of contempt and haughtiness, indicated to the proudest nation throughout this New World his indifference for peace.” Five years after that, when a sachem at Onondaga asked for five belts sent by the governor of Canada, “one of the Young Indians threw them to the Sachim with an angry countenance”; when the belts did not quite reach him “another Indian most disdainfully kick’d them forward to the Indian that demanded them.” Wyandot, Mississauga, and Ottawa delegates at Fort Duquesne in 1758 each, in turn, kicked back to the French commander a wampum belt inviting them to take up the hatchet.94 Whether or not these offers were actually dismissed with the vehemence described, the meaning of such rejections was clear.
Sir William Johnson mastered the art of wampum diplomacy with the help of good teachers. At a treaty conference at Fort Johnson in 1756, the speaker for the Six Nations “took up a large belt, which the general gave, with an emblem of the six nations joined hand in hand with us,” and addressing Johnson as “Brother Warraghiyagey,” said: “Look with attention on this belt, and remember the solemn and mutual engagements we entered into, when you first took upon you the management of our affairs; be assured, we look upon them as sacred, and shall, on our parts, punctually perform them as long as we are a people.” He then took up another large belt that had been given by the governor of New York years before, asked the English to remember the promises that were made at that time, and promised that the Iroquois would do the same, “though we have no records but our memories.”95
According to John Long, who spent twenty years in Indian country, when Johnson held a treaty with the Indians the wampum belts were generally several rows wide, black (or purple) on each side and white in the middle “to express peace, and that the path between them was fair and open.” In the center of the belt was the figure of a diamond made of white wampum, representing a council fire. Johnson took the belt by one end, while the Indian chief held the other. If the chief had anything to say, he moved his finger along the white streak: if Sir William had anything to communicate, he touched the diamond in the middle. Long explained that “these belts are also the records of former transactions, and, being worked in particular forms, are easily deciphered by the Indians, and referred to in every treaty with the white people. When a string or belt of wampum is returned, it is a proof that the proposed treaty is not accepted and the negotiation is at an end.”96
Wampum spread throughout the eastern woodlands, but the calumet (from the French word for reed), commonly called the peace pipe, became a key artifact of diplomacy from the St. Lawrence Valley, down the Mississippi, and out to the Rocky Mountains. Jacques Marquette, a Jesuit Father, said there was “nothing more mysterious or respected” among Indians than the calumet. “It seems to be the God of peace and of war, the Arbiter of life and death.” Indians used the calumet “to put an end to Their disputes, to strengthen Their alliances, and to speak to Strangers.”97 French and Métis traders contributed to the spread of the calumet and French, English, and American traders and officials “found that learning the ritual language of pipes” was indispensible for conducting business in Indian country.98
Bearers of calumet pipes decorated the stems with feathers of different colors and sometimes with wampum. A British captain, Robert Carver, who spent three years traveling through the Great Lakes and upper Mississippi, described the pipe of peace or calumet as about four feet long; the bowl was made of “red marble” (by which he meant catlinite), and the stem “of a light wood, curiously painted with hieroglyphicks in various colours and adorned with the feathers of the most beautiful birds.” Each nation decorated their pipes in a different way “and they can tell at first sight to what band it belongs. It is used as an introduction to all treaties, and great ceremony attends the use of it on these occasions.”99
Ritually smoking the pipe opened communications, solemnized proceedings, and established friendships; it was a necessary prelude to negotiations and trading relationships. Western Indians at a conference in Albany in 1723 explained to the New York commissioners and the Iroquois in attendance: “When one brother comes to visit an other it is the common practice among us to smoke a pipe in Peace and reveal our Secrets.” They asked “that according to our Custom we may each take a Whiff out of a Calumet Pipe in token of Peace and Friendship”; smoking their calumet pipe, they said, was “a sufficient proof to us of your friendship.”100 Pennsylvania Governor William Denny puffed on a pipe and passed it to the disgruntled Delaware chief Teedyuscung at a council in Philadelphia in 1758 with the words or at least the wishful thinking that “We have found by experience that whatever Nations smoaked out of it two or three hearty Whiffs, the Clouds that were between us always dispersed.”101 Smoking together and pointing the pipe in the four directions, and above and below, was a sacred action that opened the channels of communication and bound the smokers in a collective commitment to speak the truth. The smoke metaphorically carried their words upward and bound the speakers in a covenant with the Great Spirit.102 The calumet was “the symbol of peace,” said John Long, and Indians held it “in such estimation that a violation of any treaty where it has been introduced would, in their opinion, be attended with the greatest misfortunes.”103 Council participants might also retire from negotiations to smoke their pipes and reflect on what had been said and consider their response. In a world of escalating violence and disorder, the calumet made peace, reason, understanding, and trust possible.
The calumet ceremony, in which Indians smoked and danced to welcome newcomers, transformed strangers into kin and enemies into friends; it opened the way for good relations and was a prerequisite for negotiations. When Robert Cavalier, Sieur de La Salle, entered the villages of the Quapaws in Arkansas in 1682, the Indians greeted the Frenchman with a calumet dance, a feast, and an exchange of gifts, to establish ritual ties and to give status within their social system.104 Mesquakie or Fox Indians seem to have taken the calumet ceremony to Abenakis and the Iroquois adopted it in the form of the Eagle Dance.105
Jacob Jemison told Governor Lewis Cass in the 1820s that “No pipes are used among the Six Nations.”106 That may have been the case traditionally but the calumet began to appear in Iroquois diplomacy in the eighteenth century. In the spring of 1710 New York commissioners at Onondaga found three Ottawa emissaries there, singing. “They had long Stone Pipes in their hands & under the Pipes hung Feathers as big as Eagles Wings.” The commissioners filled their pipes and the assembled parties smoked to demonstrate friendship. In 1735, sachems from Kahnawake, who had traveled to Albany to reconcile differences between the Iroquois in Canada and the Six Nations in New York, opened the meeting “by offering the Calumet or Pipe of Peace to all the Commissioners who according to the Indian custom take each a Whif [sic].” At the chiefs’ request, the commissioners sent the pipe to Onondaga to be stored there along with the wampum “as a Memorial to Posterity of this Solemn Treaty.” Twenty years later, the Iroquois seemed well versed in the ritual of the pipe: when Sir William Johnson gave them a large pipe in 1756 “to be a constant memorial of the important advice you have given us, when you are dead and gone, and to smoke out of it, at our public meeting-place, where we jointly and maturely reflect upon our engagements” the Onondaga Red Head assured him, “we shall hang it up in our council-chamber, and make proper use of it upon all occasions.”107
Indians carried calumets as passports guaranteeing safe conduct through other nations’ territories. Nicholas Perrot said the calumet stopped vengeful warriors in their path and compelled them to receive peace delegates who carried it. “It is, in one word, the calumet that has authority to confirm everything, and which renders solemn oaths binding.”108 In 1721, a Chickasaw chief who had traveled all the way from the Mississippi entered the council chamber in Williamsburg in company with some Cherokee chiefs; “they entered singing, according to their Custom; And the Great Man of the Chickasaws carrying in his hand a Calamett of Peace.”109 On their way to the Treaty of Logstown in 1752, the commissioners from Virginia were met by a party of Delawares on horseback about three miles from Shenapin’s town on the Ohio. “The Indians having filled and lighted their long Pipes or Calumets, first smoak’d and then handed them to the Commissioners and others in their Company, who all smoak’d. After the Ceremony had been repeated two or three Times, the Chief of the Indians made a short Speech to welcome the Commissioners, which being answered, they all mounted and the Indians led the Way” to the village.110 When Alejandro O’Reilly arrived as the governor of Spanish Louisiana in 1769, nine Indian chiefs went to New Orleans to smoke and establish peaceful relations. Each chief presented O’Reilly with his burning pipe and held it while the governor smoked, which “His Excellency did as he was not ignorant of its significance.”111
The Oglala Lakota holy man Black Elk explained that when the pipe was smoked, a three-fold peace was established. There was peace between individuals and peace between nations but first and most important was the peace in men’s souls that came with understanding their relationship to the universe and all its Powers; “the others are but a reflection of this.” There could be no peace between nations until there was peace within men’s souls.112
As Europeans and Americans learned the art of wampum and calumet diplomacy, they expected Indians to reciprocate by learning their customs. “We understand that by an ancient Custom observ’d by your Ancestors, the Delivery and Acceptance of the Calumet Pipe are the Ceremonies which render valid, and bind fast your Alliances,” Pennsylvania commissioners told Miamis who had come to Lancaster in 1748. “We must now tell you what our Usages are on these Occasions. The English when they consent to take any Nation into their Alliance, draw up a Compact in Writing, which is faithfully interpreted to the contracting Parties, and when maturely consider’d, and clearly and fully understood by each Side, their assent is declar’d in the most publick Manner, and the Stipulation render’d authentick by sealing the Instrument with Seals, whereupon are engraven their Families Arms, writing their Names, and publishing it as their Act and Deed.” This was how the English ratified treaties and other nations had drawn up documents like this when they first made alliances with the English. The Miamis would be expected to do the same.113
It was not always easy. “I cannot write as you and your beloved Men do,” a Cherokee chief named Skiagusta told Governor Glen of South Carolina in council. “My Toungue is my Pen and my Mouth my Paper. When I look upon Writing I am as if I were blind and in the Dark.”114 Understanding this, Europeans asserted the superiority of writing as a method of recording. “Writing,” Virginian commissioners lectured Iroquois delegates at the Treaty of Lancaster in 1744, “is more certain than your Memory. That is the way the white people have of preserving Transactions of every kind and transmitting them down to their Children’s Children for ever; and all Disputes among them are settled by this faithfull kind of Evidence, and must be the Rule between the Great King and you.”115
Indian people valued the spoken word, the gifts or wampum exchanged, and the oral tradition that preserved memory more than they did the written word by which Europeans recorded history. They assured Europeans that, although they did not commit transactions to writing, “we nevertheless have Methods of transmitting from Father to Son an account of all these things, whereby you will find the Remembrance of them is faithfully preserved.”116 Iroquois delegates assured the governor of Pennsylvania in 1721 that they remembered well the agreements their ancestors had made with William Penn, because “though they cannot write, yet they retain every thing said in their Councils with all the Nations they treat with, and preserve it as carefully in their memories as if it was committed in our method to Writing.”117 Non-Indians frequently were impressed by Indian methods of recall. “It is amazing with what exactness these people recollect all that has been said to them,” marveled Tench Tilghman, in council with the Six Nations. “The speech which we delivered took up nine or ten pages of folio Paper, when they came to answer they did not omit a single head and on most of them repeated our own words, for it is a Custom with them to recapitulate what you have said to them and then give their Answer. They are thorough bred politicians!”118
The distinctions between oral and written culture can be exaggerated.119 Indians inscribed messages, information, and symbols on bark, trees, rocks, and paper, and they recorded information in wampum.120 They recognized writing as a parallel form of record keeping and as a parallel kind of ritual: sometimes they sent a letter along with wampum belts, although the English worried that if the letter fell into French hands they would “make the Indians believe quite the Contrary what the Letter mentions.”121 Indians presumably had similar worries about their belts being misinterpreted to Englishmen who were illiterate in reading wampum. Many Indians acquired an appreciation of the “power of print” and some learned to read and write; they understood that literacy could serve them as a weapon in the fight for cultural and political survival as well as it served the English and Americans as an instrument for dispossession.122
It is often said that the spoken word and oral tradition, and the wampum belts that contained them, were alive, compared to the dry, dead documents of Europeans. But Indians who distrusted writing as “pen and ink witchcraft” did so precisely because they understood that written words had power and life, or at least that documents could take on a life of their own. Indians who signed treaties, affixed their marks, or “touched the pen” usually did so to affirm what they had said or to indicate their agreement to what they had been told the treaty document said. Canasatego referred disparagingly to “the Pen-and-Ink Work that is going on at the Table (pointing to the Secretary)” at Lancaster because Indians knew from experience that written words could come back to bite them.123 Indians sometimes requested, preserved, and referenced duplicate copies of treaties and agreements written by colonial scribes, just as they preserved the wampum belts of other nations they dealt with.124 A delegation of Esopus Indians from the Hudson Valley meeting Sir William Johnson in 1769 brought with them the transcript of a treaty they had made with the governor of New York more than one hundred years before, and which they periodically renewed, although the document was falling to pieces.125
The written records of treaty conferences did not necessarily provide an accurate account of what was said, how it was said, or what was meant. Between the words emanating from a speaker’s mouth and the words appearing on paper, several hands intruded, multiple agendas could exert an influence, errors occurred, and numerous shadings could, and often did, occur.126 Scribes, clerks, and secretaries became regular figures at treaty conferences, producing an invaluable collection of written sources. They also played a significant role in shaping the written record of the conferences. In theory, their job was to preserve in English a verbatim account of multilingual negotiations translated by an interpreter. In practice, that almost never happened. Scribes struggled to keep up, rested their hands, let their attention wander, grew bored, misheard things, ignored asides spoken between individuals, omitted words and phrases, glossed over or condensed lengthy passages, or even put their pens down and sat back while Indian speakers went into lengthy orations or recapitulated earlier speeches. Once the conference was over, scribes sat down to make “fair copies” from their drafts for the official record, initiating another round of editing, in which they “corrected” the minutes; omitted, inserted, and changed words; and altered the tone and shifted the emphasis of conversations, sometimes in the interests of efficiency and style, sometimes with the deliberate intention of giving a particular slant to the proceedings.127 Sometimes, what was left out could be as damaging as what was included. Charles Thomson, a Philadelphia schoolmaster who served as a clerk at the Treaty of Easton in 1758, wrote a tract blaming Indian support for the French on Pennsylvania’s record of unscrupulous treaty practices, but he acknowledged that the paper trail evidencing such practices was thin:
It is true, as the Indians have no Writings, nor Records among them, save their Memories and Belts of Wampum, we can only have Recourse to the Minutes taken, and Records kept, by one Party, nay, oftentimes, by those who, if any advantage was taken of the Indians, must have been concerned in it, and consequently would not care, by minuting every Thing truly, to perpetuate their own Disgrace.128
Indians often found wanting the documentary record of the treaties they had attended. Loron Sauguaarum, a Penobscot who participated in negotiations with the English at the Treaty of Casco Bay in 1727, denounced the written terms of the treaty. “These writings appear to contain things that are not,” he said, and he proceeded to provide an article-by article correction of the record, refuting English assumptions and assertions regarding Indian land, sovereignty, and war guilt. “What I tell you now is the truth,” he concluded. “If, then, any one should produce any writing that makes me speak otherwise, pay no attention to it, for I know not what I am made to say in another language, but I know well what I say in my own.”129
FIGURE 1.2 William Penn’s Treaty with the Indians in November 1683, 1771–72 (oil on canvas) by Benjamin West (1738–1820). Benjamin West’s later idealized painting of William Penn’s Treaty with the Delawares under an elm tree at Shackamaxon in 1683 reflects an earlier era of treaty making and peaceful relations in Pennsylvania. Indian treaties in eighteenth-century Pennsylvania more often seemed to involve fraud and land theft than peace and friendship. (Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia/The Bridgeman Art Library)
The Delaware chief Teedyuscung had plenty of experience with the power of writing and spent much of his life battling the theft by treaty of Delaware lands.130 Between 1630 and 1767, the Delaware, or Lenni Lenape, Indians of New Jersey and Pennsylvania signed nearly eight hundred deeds of land to colonists (see figure 1.2). In 1734, Thomas Penn, son of William, the first governor and proprietor of Pennsylvania, claimed to have found a copy of a deed made in 1686 in which certain Delaware chiefs granted his father and his father’s heirs lands “as far as a man can go in a day and a half,” and from there to the Delaware River and down its course. Thomas Penn and his associates persuaded a number of Delaware chiefs to agree to measuring out the lands. Instead of dispatching a man to walk the woods, the Pennsylvanians cleared a path and sent a relay team of three runners speeding along it. By the time the third runner collapsed in exhaustion at noon on the second day, they had covered about sixty-five miles. This infamous “Walking Purchase” deprived the Delawares of their last lands in the upper Delaware and Lehigh valleys.131 They protested but to no avail and the governor of Pennsylvania called in Canasatego and the Iroquois to help silence their complaints. Teedyuscung was still fuming over it in November 1756 when he met the Pennsylvania authorities in a treaty conference at Easton, at the confluence of the Lehigh and Delaware rivers. Teedyuscung was a formidable presence—Richard Peters described him as “near 50 years old, a Lusty rawboned Man haughty and very desirous of Respect and Command. He can drink 3 quarts or a Gallon of Rum a day without being Drunk”—and not afraid to speak his mind. “The Times are not now as they were in the Days of our Grandfathers,” Teedyuscung said, “then it was Peace, but now War and Distress,” and he presented wampum belts of condolence to remove tears of mourning and heal past wounds. But old wounds still festered. “This very Ground that is under me (striking it with his Foot) was my Land and Inheritance and is taken from me by Fraud,” he declared. Governor William Denny responded that part of the problem was that, in Indian society, memory of land sales sometimes died with those who made the sale, “and as you do not understand Writings and Records, it may be hard for me to satisfy you of the Truth. Though my Predecessors dealt ever so uprigthly.”132
Teedyuscung understood only too well. He knew what consequences a change of words could have. “Somebody must have wrote wrong, and that makes the Land all bloody,” he said.133 He knew English, but he had his own interpreter, John Pumpshire. He was concerned that everything he said and everything that was said to him “be taken down aright; some speak in the Dark; do not let us do so; let all be clear and known. What is the Reason the Governor holds Councils so close in his Hands, and by Candle Light?” The governor insisted that he held his council in the open and had no secrets, but the following year Teedyuscung requested that he be provided with his own clerk to record the minutes of meetings “along with the Governor’s Clerk.” The colonists balked at his request—having Indians read what was written was one thing; involving them in the recording process was another matter—but Teedyuscung got his clerk: the Quaker Charles Thomson, a former schoolteacher who wrote An Enquiry into the Causes of the Alienation of the Delaware and Shawanese Indians and who later became secretary of the Continental Congress.134 George Croghan thought Quaker commissioners must have put Teedyuscung up to it. He objected when Teedyuscung had a speech drawn up in writing “and desired his clerke [sic] to read it off as a lawyer would put in a plea before the bar” and insisted Teedyuscung deliver the speech himself. It was, he reported to Sir William Johnson “very extraordinary and the most unprecedented procedure ever known at an Indian treaty.”135 Indians understood the power of writing but they understood that it lay predominantly in white hands. “We have often seen (and you know it to be true),” Iroquois deputies told William Johnson in 1769, “that the White people by the help of their paper (which we don’t understand) claim Lands from Us very unjustly and carry them off.”136
The written records of treaties covered the public conferences in which statements, and wampum, were presented and considered. They did not usually record meetings “in the bushes” or “the Debates, Arguments and discourses at the private Conferences where the principal Subjects are first Agitated and determined upon.”137 Private meetings between treaty commissioners and Indian leaders sometimes flag shady deals, but working things out in private before agreements were formally concluded in public was standard practice in both Native American and European diplomacy.138
Someone had to translate the exchange of words, wampum belts, gifts, and rituals across cultures. Translation, and the imposition of language that distorted Native meanings and did violence to indigenous worldviews, was central to European colonization and imperialism in the Americas, and it was critical to the process and purpose of treaty making.139 Many Indians learned to speak French, Spanish, and English, of course, but as John Heckewelder observed, “even if an Indian understands English he prefers communicating to a white man through an interpreter.”140 And an interpreter might mishear, misunderstand, misremember, mistranslate, or misrepresent what was said.141
Interpreters obviously played a key role in treaty negotiations. The French sent young boys to live in Indian villages as a way of creating a pool of interpreters. Jacques Cartier in 1541 left boys among the Indians to learn their language; Samuel de Champlain sent boys to the Hurons and Algonquins in 1610–11, and the French continued the practice in Louisiana into the eighteenth century.142 Most interpreters in the seventeenth century were Indians, but despite the fact that more and more Indians learned English, interpreters during the eighteenth century were usually non-Indians: professional interpreters like Conrad Weiser, George Croghan, and Andrew Montour, and agents, missionaries, traders, and captives who had learned Indian languages and Indian ways. A good interpreter had to do more than translate speeches. He, and occasionally she, needed to understand and advise on the protocols of intercultural diplomacy, know the names of the chiefs, have their fingers on the pulse of tribal and intertribal politics, provide guidance on the tone and content of speeches and messages, operate as cultural intermediaries behind the scenes, participate in private meetings, understand the language and handling of wampum belts, edit speeches for fluency and efficiency, and exercise judgment about what not to translate in order to avoid misunderstandings, head off a potential breakdown of the talks, or obscure shady deals from public view.143 “It surely dos [sic] not require any detail of Reasoning to evince how very important the Capacity & Integrity of an Interpreter is to the public,” wrote New York’s secretary of Indian affairs in 1738, although he had serious doubts about the abilities of the current one.144
Conrad Weiser “practically made a career of the Indian business.” Born in Germany in 1696, Weiser settled with his family in southeastern New York. He was adopted by the Mohawks, developed a facility in Iroquoian languages, and became an interpreter. After moving to Pennsylvania, he played a pivotal role as a negotiator and intermediary in tribal relations with the colonial governments of Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia. Weiser understood that effective translation required more than knowing Indian words; it was necessary, he said, “to converse with the Indians and study their Genius.”145 At the Treaty of Lancaster, wrote Witham Marshe, a young Scotsman serving as secretary to the Maryland commissioners, “Our interpreter, Mr. Weiser desired us, whilst we were here, not to talk much of the Indians, nor laugh at their dress, or make any remarks on their behaviour: if we did, it would be very much resented by them, and might cause some differences to arise betwixt the white people and them. Besides,” added Marshe, “most of them understood English, though they will not speak it when they are in treaty.”146 When Weiser died in 1760, Iroquois delegates in council with Pennsylvanians condoled the passing of a great man, who was one half Indian “and one half an Englishman.” They were “at a great Loss, and sit in Darkness, as well as you,” they said, “as since his Death we cannot so well understand one another.”147
Interpreters and cultural mediators did not just operate between two sides with two clearly defined agendas; effective brokers drew on their connections and expertise to negotiate their way through “a kaleidoscope of local and supralocal leaders working at cross-purposes, struggles and alliances among competing interest groups, and tangled family ties” to help produce agreements that everyone could accept as promoting or protecting their interests.148 At the Treaty of Logstown, where the Indians confirmed the earlier deed made at Lancaster, the Virginian commissioners dispatched their interpreter, Andrew Montour, “to confer with his Brethren, the other Sachems, in private, on the Subject, to urge the Necessity of such a Settlement & the great Advantage it wou’d be to them, as to their Trade or their Security.”149 Struggling to make headway building Indian alliances in the Ohio country on the eve of the French and Indian War, a young George Washington regretted not having the benefit of Andrew Montour’s expertise. “Montour would be of singular use to me here at this present, in conversing with the Indians,” he wrote to Virginia Governor Robert Dinwiddie in June 1754: “for want of a better acquaintance with their Customs I am often at a loss how to behave and should be reliev’d from many anxious fear’s [sic] of offending them if Montour was here to assist me.” In fact, Dinwoodie had already sent Montour, armed with wampum belts, to assist Washington in his Indian diplomacy.150
Treaty councils might require teams of interpreters speaking several different languages. Conferences in Albany in the seventeenth century often involved several Iroquoian and Algonquian languages as well as Dutch and English; conferences in Pennsylvania in the eighteenth century might involve Iroquoian and Algonquian and German and English (with Quakers or Moravians acting as mediators).151 In 1748, in order for the Oneida chief Shickellamy to converse with a German visitor, another colonist translated the German’s words into Mahican; a Mahican woman translated into Shawnee for her husband, who then translated into Oneida for Shickellamy. The reply then made its way back along the translation chain.152
Few interpreters could handle more than a couple of languages and the challenges of translating across several languages and across cultures and worldviews taxed even the best of them. Cadwallader Colden knew from his dealings with the Iroquois that “our Interpreters may not have done Justice to the Indian Eloquence.” Indian orators used “many Metaphors in their Discourse, which interpreted by an hesitating Tongue, may appear mean, and strike our Imagination faintly, but under the Pen of a skilful Interpreter may strongly move our Passions by their lively Images.” He had heard Indian speakers move their audience “with much Vivacity and Elocution,” only to have an interpreter “explain the whole by one single Sentence,” satisfied with communicating “the Sense, in as few words as it could be exprest.”153 The areas where translation was difficult most clearly reveal the differences in ideological systems.154
Interpreters could influence the outcome of treaty negotiations and sometimes exerted that influence to help themselves. Some interpreters did well in the Indian business, coming away from treaties with land given by Indians in “grateful recognition” of their services. After Conrad Weiser’s death, Tachendorus (also called John Shickellamy, son of the Oneida chief) called him “one of the greatest thieves in the World for Lands.”155 James Dean, a white boy who grew up at Onoquaga and received a free education at Dartmouth College in the 1770s in return for his skills in Iroquois languages, later used those skills to make a small fortune interpreting at treaties in which the federal and state governments and private land companies separated the Oneidas from millions of acres of land.156 Individuals of mixed heritage and uncertain or multiple identities were well suited to fulfilling the roles of culture broker and translator that were essential on the diplomatic frontiers of early America but they were rarely trusted.
It is easy to assume that while Indians were masters of oratory and the rituals of the council fire, they were babes in the woods when it came to dealing with Europeans on land and politics. Certainly Indians sometimes claimed to be naïve in such matters, but they were quick learners from hard experience. “We know our Lands are now become more valuable,” Canasatego explained in a meeting at Philadelphia in July 1742. “The white People think we do not know their Value; but we are sensible that the Land is everlasting, and the few Goods we receive for it are soon worn out and gone.”157 Men like Teedyuscung and Canasatego regularly called colonial governments on their record in acquiring Indian land, citing chapter and verse. Unwitting colonial representatives might find themselves in trouble if they had not done their homework or if they failed to keep up with Indian diplomats who led them into a maze of intertribal relations or bogged them down in intercolonial controversies and contention over land.
Oratory could conceal bluff and bluster and a treaty council was a good place to elevate a claim by voicing an assertion for the record. So, at the Treaty of Lancaster in 1744, when delegates from Maryland expressed doubts about the validity of Iroquois claims to land within their colony, Canasatego brushed aside any such reservations with “an oratorical barrage”:
Brother, the Governor of Maryland,
When you mentioned the Affair of the Land Yesterday, you went back to old Times, and told us, you had been in Possession of the Province of Maryland above One Hundred Years, but what is a Hundred Years, in Comparison of the Length of Time since our Claim began? Since we came out of the Ground? For we must tell you, that long before a Hundred Years, our Ancestors came out of this vey Ground, and their Children have remained here ever since. You came out of the Ground in a Country that lies beyond the Seas; there you may have a just Claim, but here you must allow us to be your elder Brethren, and the Lands to belong to us long before you knew any thing of them.
Canasatego reinterpreted Iroquois history to suit his purposes. Iroquois claims to aboriginal occupancy of Maryland were dubious at best, but by placing the Iroquois in the position of indigenous inhabitants and relegating the colonists to the status of recent arrivals Canasatego effectively undermined Maryland’s objections.158
But it was not enough to stave off a massive cession of Indian lands. Canasatego and the other Iroquois left Lancaster “well pleased,” believing that they had ceded their claims to the Shenandoah Valley on Virginia’s western border. But Virginia’s original royal charter granted the colony land “from sea to sea.” As the Treaty of Lancaster was written, the Iroquois actually ceded a huge chunk of America, including the Ohio Valley and all the way to the Pacific! In 1747 a group of influential individuals, including two brothers of George Washington, formed the Ohio Company of Virginia to lay claim to lands within the Lancaster cession and the next year the Crown granted them two hundred thousand acres near the headwaters of the Ohio River.159 The English and the French saw the Ohio Valley as the key to controlling the continent and Virginian ambitions and French imperial agendas clashed there, igniting the so-called French and Indian War that became the global conflict known as the Seven Years’ War. Canasatego had good reason to fear pen and ink work.
Treaties that involved land sales also involved different relationships to land and conflicting concepts of occupation and property. Europeans and Americans saw land in economic terms, a commodity to be surveyed and measured, bought and sold; property to be bounded, fenced, and owned. Indians, who “shared a pervasive understanding that a particular place belonged to a particular people only to the extent that the people belonged to the place,” had different notions about how it could be sold and owned, if at all.160 Indians who signed deeds sometimes thought they were sharing the right to use the land, not conveying exclusive ownership. Sometimes they “sold” land and were later shocked to find themselves excluded from it by fences, or treated as trespassers when they returned to old hunting territories; sometimes they sold the same lands several times over. They soon learned that when colonists bought land they insisted they acquired exclusive title once and for all. The Mohawk chief Hendrick clearly understood how the different conceptions of land ownership worked to the disadvantage of the Indians. When Pennsylvanians offered to buy Iroquois lands west of the Susquehanna at the Albany Congress in 1754, Hendrick replied:
We are willing to sell You this Large Tract of Land for your People to live upon, but We desire this may be considered as Part of our Agreement that when We are all dead and gone your Grandchildren may not say to our Grandchildren, that your Forefathers sold the Land to our Forefathers, and therefore be gone off them. This is wrong. Let us be all as Brethren as well after as before of giving you Deeds for Land. After We have sold our Land We in a little time have nothing to shew for it; but it is not so with You, Your Grandchildren will get something from it as long as the World stands; our Grandchildren will have no advantage from it; They will say We were Fools for selling so much Land for so small a matter and curse us.
Colonists may have given lip service to such requests while a land sale was being negotiated but paid scant attention to them after the transaction was completed.161
The Iroquois also famously sold the British on the idea that they exercised dominion over the tribes of the Ohio Valley (the British seized on it to promote their own imperial agenda) and on more than one occasion they sold the British land that belonged to other tribes.162 When they did so at the Treaty of Fort Stanwix, they were indeed cursed “for selling so much Land for so small a matter.”
Where spoken and written words failed, alcohol often proved effective in inducing Indians to relinquish their land. Alcohol was an instrument of market capitalism and colonial control, prevalent in the fur and deerskin trades as a means of stimulating overhunting and devastating in its effects in Indian communities.163 Alcohol lubricated many a land deed and flowed freely at treaty councils. Colonial commissioners and Indian delegates drank rounds of toasts to each other, to colonial governors, to the king. Indians were given wine, rum, punch, and tobacco during adjournments in negotiations. The record of one treaty council, in Philadelphia in 1743, noted simply: “Here the Conversation drop’d; and after another Glass of Wine, the Indians resumed the Discourse.” Indian delegates often negotiated while under the influence and “Wine and other Liquors” were regularly dispensed at the end of conferences “according to the Indian Custom.”164
But Indians and colonists alike knew the dangers of drink. Negotiations sometimes were delayed or disrupted because Indian delegates turned up drunk or hungover.165 Conrad Weiser and George Croghan often dispensed liquor and drank with Indians during negotiations but when many of the Ohio Indians with whom they were negotiating in the summer of 1748 got drunk, they staved an eight-gallon cask belonging to a trader who had “had brought near 30 Gallons of Whiskey to the Town.” Thomas Lord Fairfax, Virginia’s commissioner for dealing with the Iroquois and their allies at Winchester in 1753, gave the Indian delegates five gallons of rum but prohibited local tavern keepers from serving liquor to the Indians while they were in town.166
Indians took their own measures to restrict the liquor trade and to exercise restraint. In 1725–26, Iroquois delegates went to Albany to complain about rum sales and sent the New York commissioners a wampum belt “as a Solemn Token that they desired there might be an Absolute Prohibition of bringing rum in their Country.”167 The delegates at the Treaty of Lancaster in 1744, noted Witham Marshe, “were very sober men … and sundry times refused drinking in a moderate way.” Whenever Indians made treaties or sold land, he said, “they take care to abstain from intoxicating drink, for fear of being over-reached; but when they have finished their business, then some of them will drink without measure.”168 Even the hard-drinking Teedyuscung “earnestly desired that a Stop might be put to the sending excessive Quantitys of Rum Into the Indian Country, and that at Treaties especially particular care might be taken to prevent Indians getting it.”169 Unfortunately, such measured abstinence was not always the case. Plying Indians with alcohol and then getting them to put their marks on deeds of sale was common practice, and many chiefs under the influence acquiesced in treaties that robbed their people of thousands of acres of land. During a conference with William Johnson in 1755, the Oneida speaker Conoghquieson pointed an accusing finger at the trader John Henry Lydius and said: “That man sitting there … is a Devil and has stole our Lands, he takes Indians slyly by the Blanket one at a time, and when they are drunk puts some money in their Bosoms, and perswades them to sign deeds for our lands upon the Susquehanna, which we will not ratify nor suffer to be settled by any means.”170
Once negotiations were finished, the treaty was drawn up (if it had not been drawn up in advance) and signatures affixed. Indian signatures could take a number of forms. Indians who were literate signed their names; more often they made their mark by their name or, as the phrase went on the Plains, “touched the pen.” In many cases in the eastern woodlands, Indians signed by drawing pictographs of their clan totems—bear, beaver, deer, turtle, eagle, hawk—that conveyed individual and collective identity. Sometimes these pictographs appear upside down on the treaty—because the document was slid across the table from a commissioner or scribe for the Indians to sign. Such pictographs might better be understood as the equivalent of wax seals rather than individual signatures on European documents. Just as seals could not be duplicated on the facsimile copies of treaties that were made, so totems were often omitted or imperfectly copied from those drawn on the original document, and they were rarely reproduced on printed copies of treaties. Distortions and removals of totemic signatures frequently obscure the identity and affiliation of Indian signatories.171
After the treaty was signed, presents—often displayed but withheld as an inducement to signing—were distributed, usually to the chiefs who would then redistribute them among their people. The Indians would depart with their payment and the commissioners would leave with their treaty. Then, increasingly, the surveyors and settlers moved in.
After a treaty involving a land transaction, the new boundary lines had to be delineated on the ground as well as on the maps. Those boundaries often ignored and cut across kinship connections and patterns of shared land use between tribes.172 Sometimes, Indians drew their own maps of their country and the territory they ceded. Sometimes they accompanied surveyors as they “marked the land” by etching symbols on rocks and blazing hatchet marks on trees. Sometimes Indians marked the new boundary themselves to warn off trespassers.173 Long before the poet Robert Frost, Indians understood the relationship between good fences and good neighbors, even if whites rarely respected Indian “fences.”
Some treaties involved delivering up people as well as, or instead of, land. Indians often returned captives as peace initiatives and gave captives to forge friendships, cement alliances, and end bloodshed. In 1762 Abenakis gave Sir William Johnson a Panis Indian slave to be sent together with two wampum belts to the Stockbridge Indians to atone for a killing and to make peace. The gift of a captive, notes the historian Brett Rushforth, “even more powerfully than wampum or the calumet, signified the opposite of warfare, the giving rather than the taking of life.” In New France, where Indian slavery was omnipresent, the French quickly adopted such practices and made exchanging captives a key component of their Indian diplomacy.174
As captive taking escalated in the mid-eighteenth century, English colonists increasingly made the return of captives a condition of peace treaties. “You must bring here with you also all the Prisoners you have taken during these Disturbances,” Governor Robert Hunter Morris told Teedyuscung and the Delaware chiefs at the Easton council in July 1756. “I must insist on this, as an Evidence of your Sincerity to make a lasting Peace, for, without it, though Peace may be made from the Teeth outwards, yet while you retain our Flesh and Blood in Slavery, it cannot be expected we can be Friends with you, or that a Peace can come from our Hearts.” But Indians were often reluctant to return captives they had adopted and chiefs had limited ability or desire to compel people to give up relatives. They also balked at the idea that they should return captives before peace was established. “Such an unreasonable demand,” they told the Moravian missionary Christian Frederick Post, “makes us appear as if we wanted brains.” Sometimes returning captives was a relatively straightforward process and Indians handed over people who were only too eager to be liberated. In other cases, captives who had been adopted into Indian communities and had become accustomed to Indian ways of life were reluctant to be freed and their new families were reluctant to let them go. Colonel Henry Bouquet made a peace treaty in 1764 that required the Delawares and Shawnees to turn over all captives taken during the French and Indian War and Pontiac’s War. The Indians complied, reluctantly. They reminded Bouquet that the captives had been “tied to us by Adoption ….We have taken as much care of these Prisoners, as if they were [our] flesh and blood.” They wanted to make sure that Bouquet would treat them “tender, and kindly, which will be a means of inducing them to live contentedly with you.” Many of the captives resisted liberation and regarded their new “freedom” as captivity. The children parted from their Indian families in tears, and even some of the adult captives had to be bound by the English to prevent them from running off and rejoining the Indians.175 In the South, treaties often stipulated that Indians must return runaway slaves who had taken refuge with Indian nations.
Even when treaties were conducted in good faith and resulted in mutually satisfying terms, they were subject to modification or even rejection by people who had not been present when the agreement was made. Indian leaders pointed out, and whites complained, that they lacked authority to make binding commitments for all their people, who had to be convinced before they would accept a treaty. Iroquois delegates at a meeting in Albany in 1714 told the governor of New York that they could not answer his proposals point by point but would convey them to “the ears of our people when we get home to our country and shall make it our business to imprint them into their minds and hearts.”176 In 1756 a delegation of Upper Creeks led by the chief Gun Merchant negotiated and signed a treaty with the English in Charlestown, South Carolina, but when they returned home the Creeks refused to accept it, “thereby reducing the treaty text to worthless paper.” Creek headmen told Governor William Lyttleton that Gun Merchant “has not the Consent of one Man in the Nation.”177
Complaints about inadequate representation reflected how treaty making changed during the colonial era. Initially treaties were forums in which Indians and Europeans met to establish or renew peace, alliance, and trade; settle disputes; and perhaps exchange land for gifts. Increasingly, treaties became almost entirely about land, and for Europeans, as the Treaty of Stanwix would show, sealing the deal was often more important than who was there to seal it.
