The Edge of the Woods: Iroquoia, 1534-1701

Introduction

introduction How then can your mind continue to be well? You were seeing here and there the footprints of our ancestors; and people are sorrowful as long as the smoke continues to rise. How then can your mind continue to be well when you are going along in tears? —Excerpt from translated Mohawk text of the “Edge of the Woods” ceremony At the “Edge of the Woods,” visitors to an Iroquois community are greeted, ritually cleansed and healed, and escorted from the “forest” (the space of warfare, hunting, spirits, and danger) to the “village” (the space of residence , agriculture, security, and peace councils). Originating prior to European intrusion as a component of the Iroquois Condolence ceremony, the “Edge of the Woods” occurs when “clear-minded” people travel to towns mourning the death of a leader. ere, after a formal reception from the mourning community’s representatives, the visitors initiate procedures of grieving and reviving the leader’s title in the person of a living successor. Considered historically, the ceremony represented a rite of passage that at once remade individuals through acts of physical, social, and spiritual purification and restored order to the larger collective polity. On a pragmatic level, it worked to reassert structures of affiliation between Iroquois people while also allowing them to dictate the terms of movement between different communities. e ritualized regulation of the human movement in space manifested in the “Edge of the Woods” phase of the Condolence ceremony (twentieth-century observers documented as many as forty-five separate acts of reciprocal movement by its participants ) demonstrates just how crucial the Iroquois considered spatial mobility to the maintenance of balanced human relationships. is book analyzes the history of Iroquois movement from  to  in an effort to explain the dramatic growth in the spatial domain of Iroquoia during this time and to understand how Iroquois people perceived their changing spatial environment and functioned within it. e book’s structure follows that of the Iroquois  xxvii xxviii  introduction Condolence ceremony as a means of demonstrating the centrality of that ritual event to the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Iroquois experience. e “Edge of the Woods,” as a public social drama that at once recognized and contained a moment of formal transformation in Iroquois polities, constituted a critical symbolic prototype for innovative cultural change insofar as it rationalized and legitimized the creation of new practices from extant patterns of human movement. e six chapters that follow offer a new interpretation of this vital era of Iroquois history, one that illuminates the conceptual structures that informed the actions of Iroquois people and emphasizes the role of spatial mobility in precolonial Iroquois culture in order to elucidate processes of cultural innovation and transformation. Reconstructing Iroquois movements through a vast extent of space during almost two centuries of time represents an undeniably complex exercise, and problems with the nature of the available evidence persist. We have only fragments available to us: documentary sources written by European cultural outsiders, material remains analyzed by archaeologists, and a limited amount of Iroquois oral tradition. In order to recover the experience of the Iroquois as historical actors in their own right, e Edge of the Woods combines an unprecedented comprehensive examination of new and in some cases overlooked historical data, archaeological and ethnographic evidence, as well as social theory pertaining to research questions on human mobility, settlement patterns, sociopolitical organization, and interregional exchange. Taken together, this expanded evidentiary base facilitates a systematic study of the patterns and contexts of historic Iroquois spatial mobility. Representations of Iroquois movement in these diverse sources—previously considered in isolation as random, fleeting, and incoherent —when subjected to comprehensive and integrative analysis, yield a picture of Iroquois movements that are deliberate, strategic, and often very clever. Employing an understanding of the Condolence ceremony as a “rite of passage” at once spiritual and spatial, the book argues that mobility enabled successful Iroquois engagements with the pressures and opportunities generated by settler colonialism on the borders of their homelands. By reassessing the history of Iroquois spatial mobility, this study offers new insights into the history of Iroquois identity construction and the structure and function of Iroquois governance. By emphasizing the experience of Iroquois historical actors in the context of their own times rather than as harbingers of a known future, it restores complexity and contingency to historical analysis of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century North American history. By attending to meanings and metaphors associated with movement in Iroquois epistemology...