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Chapter 6 Brokers and Politics: Iroquois and New Yorkers
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Chapter 6 Brokers and Politics: Iroquois and New Yorkers Building on the wreckage left by the departure of the Dutch West India Com‑ pany from North America in the late 1670s and early 1680s, English governors of New York and Haudenosaunee leaders of the Five Nations forged what was known as the Covenant Chain, an alliance that became the centerpiece of diplomatic relationships across much of eastern North America. Relying on these relationships, in the early 1690s the Iroquois and the English fought, independently but in concert, against New France and its Indian allies in the conflict colonials called King William’s War. Whether understood in terms of the patterns of the mourning‑ war, or of the nexus of exchange and power the Delaware leader Teedyuscung would later call Whish‑shicksy, or of the geopolitics of European diplomacy, for the Haudenosaunee the experience was an almost unmitigated military disaster. Although the Covenant Chain remained and would be reinterpreted in the eighteenth century, the New York– Iroquois alliance that was originally at its core mutated into a quite dif‑ ferent form at the turn of the eighteenth century, when neutrality rather than exclusive alliance became the dominant strategy of the Five (and later Six) Nations of the Haudenosaunee. From a distance, the story seems a simple tale of alliance and defeat, spiced with a touch of English betrayal. But, when the viewpoint shifts to the com‑ munity level of Albany and the Haudenosaunee villages, the image becomes a kaleidoscope of local and supra‑ local leaders working at cross purposes, struggles and alliances among competing interest groups, and tangled fam‑ ily quarrels on all sides. Far from comprising unitary polities, the Mohawks, Oneidas, Onondagas, Cayugas, and Senecas of the late seventeenth‑ century Haudenosaunee each were clusters of virtually autonomous kin‑ based, 114 Native Power and European Trade factionally divided communities. Within and among the diverse villages, cer‑ emonial gift exchanges among hereditary sachems and less highly structured personal alliances among charismatic local headmen provided a primary means of political integration and the mobilization of power.1 The province of New York as it emerged from conquered New Netherland was similarly a bundle of localized communities held together by intricate networks of per‑ sonal and familial political connections. In the late seventeenth century, it was less a single colony than three— one centered on the cosmopolitan but Dutch‑ dominated town on Manhattan Island, another on the almost exclu‑ sively Dutch fur trading outpost at Albany, and a third on the Long Island villages settled by immigrants from New England. Over all of these presided English governors charged with making the fractious province a cornerstone of imperial power in North America and somehow incorporating the Five Nations into that edifice. Thus, for both sides, large‑ scale diplomacy rested upon the internal poli‑ tics of diverse local communities. As anthropologists and political scientists have long understood, connections between large‑and small‑ scale politics often depend on highly personal relationships centered on individuals called, in the language of social network theory, brokers or mediators. Simultane‑ ously members of two or more interacting networks (kin groups, political factions, communities, or other formal or informal coalitions), brokers are nodes of communication; with respect to a community’s relations with the outside world, they “stand guard over the crucial junctures or synapses of relationships which connect the local system to the larger whole.” This inter‑ mediate position allows considerable room for maneuver. One step removed from final responsibility in decision making, brokers may occasionally prom‑ ise more than they can deliver. By using their maneuvering room to promote the aims of one group while protecting the interests of another, skillful me‑ diators can become nearly indispensable to all sides.2 In North America, bro‑ kers also served as the primary conduits for the exchanges of prestige goods and more mundane items that symbolized strong alliances. But, as the rise and fall of the late seventeenth‑ century Iroquois– New York Covenant Chain alliance illustrates, the relationships thus created were fragile for the same reasons they were functional. Much like a Mississippian prestige‑ good chief‑ dom, such an alliance cycled in and out of existence during the lifetimes of the individuals upon whom it depended. * * * :20 GMT) Brokers and Politics 115 For both New York and the Five Nations, basic patterns of personal connec‑ tions among brokers for kin groups, political factions, and local communities had been set long before the English conquered New Netherland. The key broker in the mid...