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ix Preface At the Fiftieth Annual Conference on Iroquois Research in 1995, I found myself among some of the most important people in Native North American anthropology, archaeology, and history. Students with direct intellectual lineages to Franz Boas mingled with fledgling scholars and graduate students such as me. Fortunately, Laurence Hauptman had taken me under his wing, and he ushered me to meet various Iroquois scholars. Unlike the other graduate students, I was encouraged to sit at the dinner table with William Fenton, Floyd Lounsbury, Elisabeth Tooker, and William Sturtevant as well as the equally well-known generation of Iroquois scholars after them. I got to share a six-pack with Dean Snow and Bill Sturtevant in the dormitory of the Rennselaerville Institute, where the conference was held. Only now do I realize how fortunate I was to have access to such outstanding scholars for an entire weekend and how frequently I embarrassed myself with my naiveté and overconfidence in the importance of my own research. I presented a paper on the Seneca-Cayuga of Oklahoma and sought the consultation of Drs. Sturtevant and Tooker, who were among the few living scholars to have conducted ethnohistorical and ethnographic research with the Seneca-Cayuga. During my audience with Sturtevant and Tooker, they summarized what they had written about the community and gave me advice on where to look for documents. However, the spark for my research project came in the last few minutes of our conversation when Sturtevant said, to my best recollection, “Those Western people are not Iroquois as we think of the Six Nations. They have kinship, a longhouse, but they’re not actually Iroquois.” Throughout the weekend of papers and celebrations in honor of the fiftieth conference, a particular idea about what is Iroquois and what qualifies as legitimate Iroquois research began to emerge. x Preface Over the years I visited Sturtevant at the Smithsonian a few times and talked about the Seneca-Cayuga and other displaced Iroquois. I had the chance to talk with Fenton and Tooker about the project a few years after the conference as well. In all instances, the scholars I encountered wanted to understand more about the peoples to the west who count their cultural and historical origins among the Six Nations, but they were unwilling to put them socially, culturally, or politically on equal footing. In the course of the research leading to the publication of this book, I have become acutely aware of the ways in which Iroquois studies has invested in a kind of hegemonic control of “Iroquois,” “Six Nations,” and the content of those cultures. I am not implying a grand academic conspiracy meant to prevent new scholarship or the development of the field. Rather, I only experienced encouragement from these founding scholars. At the same time, after I completed the research on the Seneca of Sandusky, of whom the Oklahoma Seneca-Cayuga are descendent, I encountered numerous obstacles to publishing the work. Certainly my initial critiques of Iroquois studies reflected the immaturity of my scholarship, but the ethnohistorical evidence supported the probability of Iroquois studies’ unfortunate dismissal of the Western peoples. Reviewer critiques of my submissions to journals outright dismissed the possibility of an “authentic” Iroquois society in the Ohio Valley in the nineteenth century. Their argument against my interpretation was twofold : first, the Ohio Territory peoples were not engaged with the settler state as a nation or a “league”; and second, their movement west in the eighteenth century displaced them from the metaphorical longhouse that extended across New York. There was a clear interest in solidifying what could be called Iroquois despite the influence of exceptional scholarly works such as Richard White’s The Middle Ground and Michael McConnell’s A Country Between, which provide an alternative interpretation for the sociopolitical relevance of the Western Iroquois and Algonquian peoples. Discouraged by the reception of my ethnohistorical work, I abandoned the Seneca of Sandusky project for over a decade until reading the introduction to Jon Parmenter’s The Edge of the Woods, which was ironically the subtitle for the fiftieth anniversary Iroquois conference I first attended.1 Parmenter eloquently and meticulously presents many of the issues that have long bothered scholars of Native America about Iroquois studies , such as its provincialism and unwillingness to incorporate itself into broader conceptualizations of native studies. The arguments in The Edge of the Woods center on the Iroquois sociopolitical tendency to use tran- [18.191.135.224] Project MUSE (2024-04-26...

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