Book Reviews

Chainbreaker: The Revolutionary War Memoirs of Governor Blacksnake as told to Benjamin Williams (American Indian Lives) by Chainbreaker (Author), Thomas S. Abler (Editor, Introduction)

Book Description

One of the earliest memoirs by an American Indian, Chainbreaker presents the recollections of a Seneca chief, also known as Governor Blacksnake. A fighter in the American Revolution who lived more than a century, Chainbreaker told his story as an old man in the 1840s to a fellow Seneca, Benjamin Williams, who translated it and committed it to paper. Epic in scale and yet intensely personal, Chainbreaker’s story provides a rare Native view of warfare and diplomacy during a crucial period in American history. His account is only fully available in this edition, featuring extensive commentary by Thomas S. Abler.



Cornplanter: Chief Warrior of the Allegany Senecas (The Iroquois and Their Neighbors) by Thomas S. Abler
Book Description
A rare chronicle of the life of the Seneca Chief Warrior who guided his people through a time of historic crisis.

The era following the American War of Independence was one of enormous conflict for the Allegany Senecas. As the most influential Seneca leader of his time, Cornplanter led his people in war and along an often troubled path to peace. This incisive biography traces his rise to prominence as a Seneca military leader during the American Revolution and his later diplomatic success in negotiations with the Federal government. The book also explores Cornplanter's dealings with other Native American councils and with his own people. It explains how Senecas faced heavy pressure to sell their lands, and how they concurrently embraced a reformed and revitalized Iroquois religion, as inspired by Cornplanter's visionary half-brother, Handsome Lake.

Thomas S. Abler skillfully weaves together previously discordant strands of the Chief Warrior's life into a concise, animated, and enlightening portrait. Even as Cornplanter examines a critical period in American history, it gives us a multidimensional knowledge of politics and diplomacy from the Seneca point of view.



The Scratch of a Pen: 1763 and the Transformation of North America by Colin G. Calloway

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Dartmouth historian Calloway (author of the outstanding One Vast Winter Count: The Native American West Before Lewis and Clark) tells a spellbinding tale of a year in American history. In 1763, with the peace treaty that ended the French and Indian War, France and Spain handed over all the territory east of the Mississippi, as well as Canada, to the British. In this one stroke, settlers both on the East Coast and on the frontier came under British rule. Calloway's enthralling chronicle follows the lives of settlers, Indians and immigrants as this new British rule affected them. He demonstrates convincingly that the seeds of the American Revolution were planted in 1763, as a near-bankrupt Britain began to impose heavy "taxation without representation." The year brought bloody skirmishes between Indians, who were being pushed off more of their lands, and settlers; Calloway also narrates the expulsion of Acadians from Nova Scotia and their resettlement in Louisiana. This first-rate cultural history, part of Oxford's Pivotal Moments in American History series, reveals that the events of 1763 changed not only the political geography of a nation but also its cultural geography, as various groups moved from one part of the country to another. B&w illus., maps. (Apr.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
In North America in 1763, people were on the move, some under compulsion, some under their own volition, many under arms. The ensuing cultural and political collisions are Calloway's theme as he surveys the consequences of the French and Indian War. A historian of American Indian history, Calloway ably delivers on his introductory promise to explain how the war's territorial transfers impacted countless people. Immediately objecting to their abandonment, in their perception, by the French and accurate in their belief that the victorious British came to conquer, the Indians of the Ohio country raised the tomahawk in Pontiac's War. The war heralded that adjustments to the new imperium would be required of every ethnic group: the southern Indian tribes; British settlers surging over the Appalachians; the French inhabitants of Canada, Illinois, and Louisiana; and the Spanish colonists of East and West Florida. Imbued with cultural erudition and diplomatic insight, Calloway's study sequences perfectly with Fred Anderson's War That Made America (2005). Gilbert Taylor Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved




Treaty Of Canandaigua 1794 by G. Peter Jemison (Editor), Anna M. Schein (Editor), Irving Powless (Editor)

From Library Journal
These books provide current commentary and thought on Iroquois-United States relationships from the perspective of key leaders within the Iroquois Nations. These relationships are framed in terms of Iroquois cultural mores and traditions and the importance of personal honor and trustworthiness. George-Kanentiio, a journalist and member of the board of trustees of the National Museum of the American Indian, provides a detailed opinion and history of family values, spiritual and traditional knowledge, politics and sovereignty, natural law, and traditional spiritual and political leaders within the Iroquois Nations. He also initiates a critical dialog about and provides background for understanding previous treaties and Iroquois views of these documents. The Treaty of Canandaigua provides a tightly focused examination of one of the most important treaties between the United States and the Iroquois Confederacy. In accord with the Treaty of Canandaigua, signed in 1794, the various Iroquois Nations of the Onondaga, Oneida, Mohawk, Seneca, Tuscarora, and Cayuga were observed to have full legal title to their lands. This treaty was formalized by President George Washington and ratified by Congress. This book represents a forum for Iroquois scholars and leaders to speak candidly about a number of issues related to treaty politics, treaty relations, and sovereignty. The bulk of the text is in the form of addresses, speeches, and essaysAa number of which commemorate the treaty and what it has symbolized to the Iroquois. Ironically, even after more than 200 years of neglect and U.S. abuse of the treaty, the Iroquois see it as one of their best hopes for retaining sovereignty and establishing strong moral and legal claims to traditional tribal lands. The sentiment and views expressed by George-Kanentiio blend elegantly with these pieces, serving as an excellent reference point for understanding the latter. Both books fill a definite need for written expressions of traditional Native American views and impressions regarding over 200 years of political interaction with Europeans and Americans in North America. Both books also serve as an important and critical vantage point concerning sovereignty and self-determinism among indigenous populations.AJohn E. Dockall, Bernice P. Bishop Museum, Honolulu
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.




White Savage: William Johnson and the Invention of America by Fintan O'Toole

From Publishers Weekly
At the center of drama critic O'Toole's new book is an Irishman who migrated to New York in the 1730s. William Johnson began to trade with nearby Indians and quickly became knowledgeable about and beloved by the Mohawks, who adopted him as a sachem. Johnson, who became a key figure in the coexistence between Mohawks and Europeans, emerges as charismatic, a tad vain and very libidinous. He took a paramour, a German servant girl named Catharine Weisenberg, with whom he had children and whom he may or may not have married. Before Catharine's death, Johnson took Mohawk lovers and fathered Mohawk children; after her death, he married an Indian woman, Molly Brant. O'Toole reads Johnson's 1774 death as a turning point in Anglo-Indian relations; within three years, the Mohawks were siding with Brits in the American Revolution. Johnson, O'Toole argues, embodied the colonists' fantasies about the Indians—i.e., that their barbarity could be civilized and diluted by contact with enlightened colonists. O'Toole (A Traitor's Kiss) brings together great man history and real analytical rigor; this book should be a winner with academics and history hobbyists alike.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist
Over the span of two centuries, the relationship between native North Americans and British colonists evolved into a curious mix of antagonism and symbiosis. There were, of course, vast cultural differences, sporadic violence, and sometimes all-out warfare, but there were also frequent interactions, friendships, and a web of mutually beneficial trade relations and cultural exchanges. The contradictions in this relationship were personified in the figure of William Johnson, who served for decades as an intermediary between the British and the Iroquois Confederacy. O'Toole, a columnist and drama critic for the Irish Times, traces the life of Johnson from his youth in Ireland to his death on the eve of the American Revolution. As the descendant of disenfranchised Irish Catholics, the role of an outsider seemed to come naturally to Johnson. So when he immigrated to America at the age of 23, he comfortably navigated the cultural divide between colonists and Native Americans. In the end, Johnson's efforts to live in both worlds ended sadly; his is a fascinating account nevertheless. Jay Freeman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved




Indians and Colonists at the Crossroads of Empire: The Albany Congress of 1754 by Timothy J. Shannon

Book Description
On the eve of the Seven Years' War in North America, the British crown convened the Albany Congress, an Anglo-Iroquois treaty conference, in response to a crisis that threatened imperial expansion. British authorities hoped to address the impending collapse of Indian trade and diplomacy in the northern colonies, a problem exacerbated by uncooperative, resistant colonial governments.
In the first book on the subject in more than forty-five years, Timothy J. Shannon definitively rewrites the historical record on the Albany Congress. Challenging the received wisdom that has equated the Congress and the plan of colonial union it produced with the origins of American independence, Shannon demonstrates conclusively the Congress's importance in the wider context of Britain's eighteenth-century Atlantic empire. In the process, the author poses a formidable challenge to the Iroquois Influence Thesis. The Six Nations, he writes, had nothing to do with the drafting of the Albany Plan, which borrowed its model of constitutional union not from the Iroquois but from the colonial delegates' British cousins.

Far from serving as a dress rehearsal for the Constitutional Convention, the Albany Congress marked, for colonists and Iroquois alike, a passage from an independent, commercial pattern of intercultural relations to a hierarchical, bureaucratic imperialism wielded by a distant authority.



The Divided Ground: Indians, Settlers, and the Northern Borderland of the American Revolution by Alan Taylor.

From Publishers Weekly
The study of borderlands is hot; Pulitzer and Bancroft prize–winning historian Taylor (William Cooper's Town) offers a rich, sprawling history focusing on the Iroquois Six Nations of New York and Upper Canada during the era of the American Revolution. Taylor examines Indians' wise but unsuccessful attempts to hold onto their land as colonists encroached on it. One of Taylor's great insights is that historians have taken at face value what European settlers said about the "preemption rights" by which colonists and imperial governments claimed Indian territory. Taylor recovers Indians' reactions to those "rights." Many Indian leaders, recognizing that they couldn't reverse European settlement, tried to at least dictate how that settlement would unfold—they wished to lease, rather than sell, their land, and they hoped to pick their neighbors. Giving narrative shape to the depressing and potentially unwieldy saga is the tale of a 50-year relationship between Joseph Brant, a Mohawk who exploited his ability to shift "between European gentility and Indian culture" in an effort to preserve native land rights, and Samuel Kirkland, a pious Calvinist who was both an evangelist and government agent among the Indians. This complex history told by a master of the trade will repay close reading. 48 b&w illus., 4 maps. (Mar.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com
With The Divided Ground, historian Alan Taylor revisits his special province, the frontier country of 18th-century New York, which he evoked so trenchantly in his Pulitzer Prize-winning William Cooper's Town. Few historians know this terrain better than Taylor, who has marshaled a staggering amount of material -- his 100 pages of notes showcase a dazzling variety of sources and cutting-edge scholarship -- for this fascinating if ungainly account of the Iroquois Indians and their fate during the American Revolution.
It's not a pretty story. With the birth of American democracy, the Six Nations Iroquois, a once-powerful confederation of the Oneida, Tuscarora, Onondaga, Cayuga, Seneca and Mohawk tribes, saw their lands parceled off in a series of bad deals and outright betrayals. Taylor is no Howard Zinn -- he is far too subtle a scholar to reduce history to a heavy-handed polemic -- but he is hardly starry-eyed about the Spirit of '76. The Founding Fathers, he contends, established "an independent republic dedicated to facilitating white settlement and Indian dispossession." The British were a notch less rapacious in their dealings with the Indians but still didn't hesitate to sell out the Iroquois. Nobody with white skin comes off very well in The Divided Ground.

The British, led by chief negotiator Sir William Johnson, a legendary frontiersman and honorary Mohawk, tended to treat the Six Nations respectfully, observing diplomatic protocols such as the bestowal of gifts on tribal sachems. The Patriot -- Taylor's term for the American side -- victory, however, drastically changed the tenor of white-Iroquois relations. Because the Six Nations (Oneidas and Tuscaroras excepted) remained neutral or sided with the British during the Revolution, vengeful and suspicious Americans were in no mood to emulate their former masters. Instead, they ratcheted up the pressure in their dealings with the Iroquois.

After the conclusion of the peace in 1783, the British withdrew into Canada, and the already tattered bonds between the Six Nations frayed even further from relentless settlement. The Iroquois were squeezed between a new, land-hungry nation and a Britain that needed them as a buffer from their enemies. It was a lose-lose situation. Add cunning speculators to the mix, and the Iroquois had little room to maneuver.

Still, Taylor doesn't see the encounter between colonists and Indians as a saga of inevitable defeat, with Indians playing the role of helpless victim before an onslaught of conquering settlers. Indeed, the Six Nations found themselves in a peculiar position in these years, diminished in numbers -- by 1784, there were 6,000 Iroquois against some 240,000 New Yorkers -- yet rightly feared as a military threat. Both the British and the Patriots coveted tactical allegiances with the Indians, who were hardly going to sit back and let colonists encroach on their lands without extracting concessions. We meet plenty of white speculators, but there were wheeler-dealers on the Iroquois side, too. Consider the Mohawk Joseph Brant: One of Taylor's central characters, he was determined to make both the British and Americans submit to Iroquois domination, with the Mohawks running the show.

But in the end, the Iroquois had to settle for a much less ambitious goal, that of maintaining their embattled sovereignty. The Seneca chief Red Jacket mused to the Americans, We "do not give ourselves entirely up to them [the British], nor lean altogether upon you. We mean to stand upright as we live between both." This sentiment is at the crux of Taylor's account: Just how would the Iroquois "stand upright and live between both"? As Taylor writes, "by exploiting the rivalry between the republic and the empire, [the Iroquois] hoped to remain intermediate and autonomous." Brant and Red Jacket were canny operators, but their hustling became increasingly fruitless in the aftermath of the revolution.

The Divided Ground is a superbly researched work of history, but it does make enormous demands on the reader. For one thing, the book could use more maps; for another, it has structural and stylistic defects: Taylor's stiff prose is buttoned up to a fare-thee-well, while characters such as Brant flit in and out of the narrative as Taylor doubles back on his tracks. Yet these objections should not detract from his overall achievement. Taylor forces us to look anew at the American Revolution from a tragic -- and necessary -- perspective. Reviewed by Matthew Price Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

Enhance your symposium experience

Register for an optional conference package that enables you to attend a pre-symposium reception at Johnson Hall State Historic Site on Friday night and includes a box lunch on Saturday, a printed copy of all symposium presentations, guaranteed theater seating (up to 15 minutes before opening) and a special conference bag – all for $45.00. Pre-registration for this package is required. Use attached form.

Enjoy an 18th Century Dinner

A limited number of tickets are available for an 18th Century Dinner at Union Hall in Johnstown, Saturday Oct 20, 7:30-9:00 pm. Eighteenth century attire is optional. Menu will feature local specialties typical of Sir William Johnson’s hospitality. $35 per person. Pre-registration is required. Use attached form.