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  Epilogue e territory once exhibited on the map as the “Country of the Iroquois,” comprising almost the entire state of New York, is now the seat of a highly intelligent, Christian civilization, teeming with populous cities, beautiful villages, highly cultivated farms, mills, manufactories, schools, churches, and everything that denotes enterprise, intelligence, and universal prosperity. When it is considered that this change in western New York has been wrought within the space of less than one hundred years—yes, within the life-time of many now living—it will be admitted that the change is most extraordinary, wonderful. —Historian William Ketchum, writing in  This account of the geography of solidarity constructed in Iroquoia during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries has been written in the midst of numerous postcolonial struggles between contemporary Iroquois people and the settler governments of the United States and Canada—all of which stem from starkly contrasting ideas of Iroquois people’s relation to spatial mobility. Over the past decade, increasing public calls for cash-strapped New York State to collect taxes on the sale of cigarettes and gasoline to non-Native customers at Iroquoisowned reservation establishments have elicited retaliatory threats of Iroquois tolls and blockades on several of the state’s major highways. e Supreme Court of Canada, in its landmark  ruling in Mitchell v. Minister of National Revenue, placed severe restrictions on the rights of Iroquois people to transfer goods across the U.S.–Canada border for purposes of trade. Most recently, in January  the U.S. Department of the Interior rejected the St. Regis Mohawk tribe’s petition for an off-reservation casino in the Catskills region of New York State on the grounds that the distance of the proposed casino from the reservation would result in “negative impacts on tribal life.” e cultural impasse on the relationship between spatial mobility and Iroquois identity has changed little since the early nineteenth century, when Iroquois people were first confined to reservations.   epilogue Much of the history of early America written since the nineteenth century has reflected a particular view of space as a surface: mere territory to be traversed, mapped, conquered, and integrated by Europeans into various systems of imperial governance. Yet such a passive conception of space is not, as geographer Doreen Massey has argued, an “innocent manoeuvre.” It promotes an understanding of nonEuropean peoples, places, or cultures “simply as phenomena ‘on’ this surface” and thereby deprives them of their deep and distinctive histories. Previous treatments of precolonial Iroquois history have held their indigenous subjects largely immobile, “on space, in place,” awaiting the arrival of European colonizers and succeeding generations of ethnographers and historians to tell the story of Iroquois decline. In contrast, this study has attempted to reconstruct the histories lived and created by Iroquois people from within their own conceptions of space from  to  . In doing so, it calls attention to the ways in which persistent conceptions of early American space as a surface upon which Europeans acted and Native peoples reacted have yielded narratives that obscure the contemporaneous temporalities and heterogeneities of space for non-European actors. Such accounts fail to acknowledge the coeval yet vastly different experience of the Iroquois (and other indigenous) peoples. Subordinated to the self-producing narrative of the emergence of the United States, the Iroquois have been denied their own historical trajectories and effectively (though artificially) held still while others have done the moving. From its origins as an inquiry into the spatial correlates of precolonial Iroquois social organization, this study has mapped the extensive terrain of Iroquois activity throughout eastern North America from  to  . By focusing on the thematic structure of the Condolence ceremony, it has demonstrated the degree to which mobility was imperative to Iroquois cultural integrity insofar as it facilitated a broadening sense of Iroquois identity construction during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Multiple lines of documentary, archaeological, and oral evidence—ranging from the first glimpses of spatial consciousness and protocols during the earliestdocumented Iroquois engagements with European colonizers to the comprehensive diplomacy of  —reveal the significance of active mobility to precolonial Iroquois culture and militate against notions of its ostensibly locally minded and sedentary character. Freedom of movement on the part of precolonial Iroquois people bore a direct relationship to the degree of economic and political independence from European colonizers they enjoyed before and after  . e map dictated by Onondaga leaders to Robert Livingston in  offers a fleeting, but critical glimpse of the extensive Iroquois spatial...

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