Outside the Rules: Invisible American Indians in New York State

Discussions and histories of American Indian peoples in New York State in popular culture (and even sometimes in academia) generally begin and often end with a review of the long and varied history of the Haudenosaunee (also known as the Five Nations or the Iroquois). This can be viewed as creating a distorted narrative that serves to essentially equate American Indian history in New York with Iroquois history. However, this idea is highly problematic in at least two major ways. For one, Iroquois peoples, both historically and contemporarily, are not bound simply to New York, as there are Iroquois people living on and off reservations in several states and Canadian provinces. Secondly, there are other indigenous populations that have lived and continue to live in New York, although their histories are less known.

After the relocation of much, but arguably not all, of the Tuscarora in the early eighteenth century from the Carolinas to New York, the Haudenosaunee became the Six Nations. Even this name is less than accurate, as by this time there were other American Indian populations that had moved into Central New York and had varying degrees of alliance and partnership with the Iroquois, including Stockbridge-Munsees, Brothertown Indians, and Mahicans (though these groups would be relocated westward to Wisconsin).¹ It is important to acknowledge that there are those Iroquois and Algonquin peoples who, while historically residing in New York State, currently reside in Canada, Oklahoma, Wisconsin, or elsewhere. The turmoil of the American Revolution and the subsequent state engineered land transfers of the nineteenth century, combined with larger U.S. national policies of Americanization and forced relocation,² resulted in Iroquois history taking on the character of a story involving multiple countries, multiple states, and multiple tribal governments. If this were the entire story of American Indian peoples in New York, this alone would be a fascinating and compelling story worthy of both academic and policy study.

However, there are many other stories of American Indians in New York State, outside of the greater Iroquois Confederacy, that have existed in scattered and obscure references in academic literature, and in all but forgotten community and family histories. Therefore, one purpose of this essay is to bring together much of this information so that these generally invisible, obscured, or forgotten American Indian peoples still living in New York may be part of the larger dialogue of indigenous people in North America. Through an examination of the academic literature we will try to showcase what indigenous populations are known to have existed in New York in the twentieth century (and may still exist in some form) in addition to the federally recognized tribes of the Haudenosaunee (Saint Regis Mohawk, Seneca Nation of Indians, Tonawanda Band of Seneca, Onondaga Nation, Cayuga Nation, Oneida Nation of New York, and Tuscarora Nation), the recently federally recognized Shinnecock Indian Nation, and the state- recognized Unkechaug Nation. The goal here is not simply to explore the commonly known populations, but also to examine those indigenous people whose tribal identity, tribal rights, and right to a future as an indigenous people have so far been withheld or forgotten, or whose status is either ambiguous or indefinite. We will also discuss how the notion of race and of racial purity contributed to the non-recognition and delegitimization of certain populations as American Indian by outsiders, including government bureaucrats and scholars. While this review may not be exhaustive, it does serve to bring back into the discussion of indigenous people in New York those communities that for so many years have existed outside of mainstream discourse and outside of the existing colonial legal structure and its processes of recognition (and thus in our view exist “outside the rules”).

This article places a particular focus on the role that scholars have in shaping indigenous identity. While indigenous identity is commonly understood in the United States and in other settler colonial nation- states to be shaped and policed by governmental policy, the role that scholars have had in shaping and informing the intellectual basis and rationale...