Appeals to Civilization and Customary “Forest Diplomacy”: Arguments against Removal in Letters Written by the Iroquois, 1830–1857

In this essay I argue that in order to try and persuade the U.S. government that it was unnecessary to exile them from their lands in the East to the west of the Mississippi under the removal policy, member tribes of the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Confederacy of the northeastern United States had to engage in the discourse of progress toward civilization that white Americans used to justify their policy. In their appeals to U.S. officials, the Iroquois invoked their peoples’ progress in agricultural pursuits and the existence of settlements, drawing attention to their progress in religion, morality, and educational achievements. Significantly, however, they did not limit themselves to mounting such an argument focused merely on white American political rhetoric.

Those Iroquois opposed to removal also drew from their own traditions to support their position. They devised a complex and multi-layered dialogue with the federal government.¹ A number of their written appeals followed in the tradition of wampum, strings of shell beads that had formerly been an essential element of diplomatic encounters in the Northeast. Iroquois representatives also used kinship terms of address reminiscent of those in use during the heyday of “forest diplomacy,” as anthropologist William Fenton and others have called the diplomatic encounters and conventions of the colonial era, which drew in large part on Native American traditions and of which the Iroquois had been masterful exponents.² The letters the Iroquois wrote in opposition to removal thus did not simply represent appeals to be spared removal and to remain on their lands, but also constituted Iroquois efforts to renew proper diplomatic relations with the U.S. government and to find compromises between their respective positions, as they had been able to do during the colonial era and into the early days of the white American republic. The senders of these letters continued to practice those impressive diplomatic skills that in the not-so-recent past had forced Euro-Americans to engage with Native diplomatic protocol, while stressing their determination to preserve their customary ways of living.

Even before the onset of their removal crisis, which lasted from the 1830s until well into the 1850s, the Iroquois Confederacy, comprised of the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, Seneca, and Tuscarora, had a long history of land cessions. In particular, the “treaty” of 1826 in which the Senecas under the authority of the federal government ceded all remaining Genesee valley lands to the Ogden Land Company, was controversial for its many irregularities and had cost them vast quantities of land.³ Through it the Ogden Land Company, which continuously agitated for Indian removal, had gained access to Iroquois lands for which it had previously purchased the preemption rights. A subsequent investigation arranged by President John Quincy Adams provided evidence for fraud, the use of terror of removal to bully Indians into signing, and the duplicity of interpreters. Still, this treaty, which was not ratified by Congress, was never actually rescinded.⁴

Reacting to their dwindling land base, many Iroquois had decided to not permit any further land losses. In spite of this resolve, which seems to have been shared by many, the 1820s to the 1840s brought more such losses, and these served to push the Confederacy to the brink of removal. Yet the majority of the Iroquois never resigned themselves to being completely parted from their ancestral lands. To fight this dreaded fate, the Iroquois, who in the colonial period had not only been considered a dominant power in the Northeast but had also won recognition for their skills in diplomacy, contested removal in a number of ways, including making legal appeals to the U.S. courts.⁵ This essay, however, will focus on just one aspect of this multifaceted resistance: what the Iroquois said in the letters they wrote to U.S. officials from the 1830s to the 1850s in opposition to removal.⁶

Native American letters from the removal period have received scant scholarly attention by historians although literary scholars have convincingly interpreted Native American alphabetic writing in terms of traditional...