Ethnohistory and Iroquoia

What is ethnohistory? Scholars have pondered that question for decades. The American Society for Ethnohistory published its first issues of Ethnohistory in 1954, and its editor, the anthropologist Erminie W. Voegelin, defined it as "the study of identities, location, contacts, movements, numbers, and cultural activities of primitive peoples from the earliest written records concerning them, onward in point of time."¹ Those affiliated with the society have come up with increasingly sophisticated definitions since then, paying rigorous attention to the problems of epistemology, subjectivity, language, and power.

Some emphasize its subject matter of American Indians, non-Western peoples, or those who did not produce their own written documents. Others (including the society's website) emphasize a method that goes "beyond the standard use of books and manuscripts" to "maps, music, paintings, photography, folklore, oral tradition, ecology, site exploration, archaeological materials, museum collections, enduring customs, language, and place names . . . in ways that make for a more in-depth analysis than the average historian is capable of doing based solely on written documents produced by and for one group."² Finally, many others emphasize a combination of the two. Defining the term proved so vexing that, in the 1980s, the society, at least officially, gave up.³

Certainly, thinking about the two works under review only accentuates this confusion over what ethnohistory is and what the term is supposed to do for us today. Both books, at first glance from the average historian or anthropologist, seem ethnohistorical. Both books focus on a venerable Indian group in ethnohistorical scholarship: the Iroquois Confederacy, or Six Nations, of what is now upstate New York. (After all, Lewis Henry Morgan's The League of the Ho-de-no-sau-ee, or Iroquois came out in 1851).⁴ And both books attempt to revise a general narrative of eighteenth-century Iroquois decline, which had been a feature of much of the previous scholarship. But in other respects these two works seem far apart. One is a narrowly focused work on the political history of the Oneidas, the other a broad archaeological/anthropological/historical monograph on the Senecas. Their similarities and differences provide us with a fruitful example of the epistemological problems raised by defining ethnohistory at all.

David Norton's work on the Oneida focuses on politics. Norton argues that the Oneidas maintained a unique vision within the Iroquois Confederacy that at times dovetailed, and at times clashed, with its other tribes (the Mohawks, Onondagas, Cayugas, Senecas, and, after 1713, the Tuscaroras). The Oneidas faced unprecedented challenges after 1750, he claims, but had "utilitarian reasons" (p. 4) for their political calculations, including their decision to leave the Confederacy to join the Americans during the American Revolution and become the Six Nations' "rebellious younger brothers" (p. 4).

Each nation in the Confederacy, whether an Elder Brother (the Senecas, Onondagas, and Mohawks) or a Younger Brother (the Cayugas and the Oneidas), had a specific role to play. The Senecas on the western boundary and the Mohawks on the eastern were responsible for "trade, security, and diplomacy" (p. 6). The Onondagas, with lands in the center of Iroquoia, kept the council fires lit and the ceremonies intact. And the Cayugas and Oneidas received and conveyed information throughout the Confederacy for the "reflection and reaction required to make informed decisions" (p. 6). As the Oneidas were central to diplomacy, Norton argues, paying close attention to Oneida politics with other groups "provides evidence indicating that the resilience and adaptability of their leaders in the face of constantly changing conditions negates the theory that they, and their Iroquois confederates, were spiraling with their people into political oblivion" (p. 13).

The Oneidas' task was not easy, however. In the 1750s, they found themselves the spokespeople at conferences for...