An Ethic of Mutual Respect: The Covenant Chain and Aboriginal-Crown Relations by Bruce Morito (review)

The Covenant Chain relationship between the Iroquois confederacy and their neighboring English colonial governments proved an integral part of both American and Canadian colonial developments. Without a constitution, legal codification, or any defined infrastructure, the Chain relationship flourished for the better part of two centuries as an intercultural diplomatic device, but scholars have not fully defined the phenomenon, due in part to the Chain’s ever-evolving nature. Bruce Morito’s fresh approach attempts to get at the heart of the meanings of the Covenant Chain and how it functioned.

The late Francis Jennings, in his several geo-political studies of the Covenant Chain, circa 1960s-1980s, regarded the institution as historically and politically ambiguous, but Jennings also viewed it as a means of exploitation on the part of the colonizers who used the Iroquois to bring about certain diplomatic results by dominating lesser tributary tribes. No doubt there is some truth in Jennings’s conclusions, but in re-examining the Covenant Chain, Professor Morito offers a kinder, gentler version of its history. With a philosopher’s approach, Morito focuses on the ethics of the relationship, and by doing so has illuminated much of the inner-workings and finer points of the Chain. Many will be surprised to learn that it was replete with mutual dignity and guided by a deep respect that often escapes today’s historians and students. A key point here is that not only Euro-Americans, but Iroquois as well, benefitted significantly from their membership in the Chain. Indeed, it would be difficult to imagine so many modern-day Haudenosaunee (i.e., Iroquois) peoples dwelling in their ancestral homelands as they do now, had it not been for this unique relationship. The special position that the Iroquois enjoyed with the British in the Covenant Chain gave them an edge over other Native peoples in terms of trade, warfare, and diplomacy; it can even be argued that this leverage and entrenched positioning in colonial times carried a ripple-effect that ultimately helped to prevent the eventual forced removal of the U.S.-dwelling Iroquois to the trans-Mississippi West, a fate that befell most eastern indigenous peoples in the United States.

According to Morito, this mutual Covenant Chain agreement emerged between the Iroquois and British, “as two peoples found each other useful and then learned that they needed to develop an institutional identity to order and protect their common interests and values […] in turn […] an intercultural identity was formed” (p. 35). In so doing, the participants evolved together into “a shared lifeworld,” thereafter interacting on a “common ground” or a foundational “set of beliefs, values, [and] ways of knowing,” through which they communicated (p. 94). While Morito’s readers may not be convinced of his statement that this unique Anglo-Iroquois relationship truly transcended that of the Franco-Algonquin one illuminated in Richard White’s paradigm-changing Middle Ground, he is, however, quite right in demonstrating that the Covenant Chain was so much more nuanced and complex than previous scholars have revealed. In borrowing a famous expression from the late British New Left historian, E. P. Thompson, Morito argues that it was the unwritten “moral economy” of this relationship that guided and governed all interactions that transpired between the peoples engaging on this common ground. In holding both sides in check, the moral economy compelled them to seek a common interest, a mutual, moral-good that Morito, in citing philosopher Charles Taylor, dubs a “hypergood” (p. 164). Time and again, the Covenant Chain relationship succeeded in producing such hypergoods for its constituent nations.

In the first chapter, the author treats the reader to the history, meanings, and significance of the Chain, before examining its inner-workings in the second. Here, Morito skillfully elaborates on the several functions and usages of wampum, including its power to create an awareness of obligations, invoke actions, and to sometimes even attempt to trigger spiritual forces...