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This chapter examines the importance of the intercultural alliance formed between the Susquehannocks and Virginia colonist William Claiborne in the 1630s, centered around Claiborne's base at Kent Island. It puts the alliance in context by considering the Susquehannocks' search for a suitable European ally and trading partner through the first three decades of the 17th century. The Susquehannocks sought European allies and trading partners as part of their strategy against the Five Nations Iroquois. In the end, the Susquehannock-Claiborne alliance was thwarted by intra-English colonial rivalries rather than by intercultural pressures. Maryland claimed Kent Island, expelled Claiborne, and unsuccessfully tried to ally with the Susquehannocks. Despite its relatively short life, the Susquehannock-Claiborne alliance held long-lasting and far-reaching consequences.

Eighteenth-century Europeans and eastern Indians of North America shared in how they structured international alliances as being either (1) between nations relatively equal in power, as in peace treaties that ended European wars and in “one dish and one spoon” alliances among Indians, or (2) between a strong and weak nation, transpiring usually when a weak and battered refugee people moved onto a stronger nation's territory and became tributary to them. German Protestants and French Huguenots, for example, settled in Anglo-America in distinct, autonomous communities but were subordinate in international affairs to whichever English colony their settlement was in. Similarly, the Iroquois Confederacy took in the Tuscaroras and many smaller refugee nations, and the Creek Confederacy included in its network the Yuchis, a self-governing people yet subject to the Muskogean-speaking peoples of the Creek Confederacy in their foreign relations. These arrangements are very similar to the concept of “domestic dependent nations,” a concept put into law by Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall's decisions in Cherokee Nation vs. Georgia (1831) and Worcester vs. Georgia (1832), suggesting that contemporary US Indian law has roots in the ancient traditions of international relations as practiced by both Indians and Europeans.

Exploring international alliances from another perspective, this chapter analyzes the use of metaphors of gender, sexuality, and kinship in international diplomacy. Soldiers and diplomats, whether Indian or European, used gender to articulate their relationships with other nations. They insulted enemies or peoples they wished to subordinate by calling them “old women” or “eunuchs” and used gendered kin terms to bind nations into alliances framed metaphorically as being between elder brothers and younger brothers, fathers and sons, and in the most famous incidence of gender metaphors in Indian diplomacy, the Delawares-as-women metaphor in Iroquois-Delaware relations, sister's nephews (the Delawares) to uncles (the Iroquois Confederacy). Europeans and Indians understood each other's gender metaphors, suggesting a shared sensibility about the rhetorical power of gender, age, and kin hierarchies as well as a shared anxiety about the “masculinity” of Indian and European nations joined in alliances.

The chapter opens with Swedish Professor Pehr Kalm exploring the wilderness between British and French America in 1749 which took him to Fort St. Frédéric which is a veritable fort whose offensive function was made apparent within days of his arrival when six warriors returned in triumph from an attack made in Charleston, New Hampshire, even though such a raid had been forbidden by the governor of Montreal. The chapter discusses the capture and suffering of the Johnson family, their adoption into the tribe, and the subsequent confusion as to their status within the community. The chapter also touches on the Iroquois neutrality and their relations with the Mohawks. The chapter discusses the events that transpired before the Battle of Lake George.

This chapter discusses Major General Edward Braddock's secret instructions involving the construction of various forts including one at the south end of Lac St. Sacrement which would protect New York from attacks emanating from St. Frédéric. This would later become Fort William Henry. This chapter also discusses the cooperation between William Johnson and the Indian communities of the Mohawk and the Iroquois against the French forces. The French force under the leadership of General Dieskau and his corps d'élite prepared to battle with Johnson's army. The chapter also touches on the events that transpired from the Lake George campaign to the Battle that ensued afterwards leaving hundreds of casualties, most of them Indians from both the Iroquois and Mohawk.

Along the routes traveled by adventurers such as Aaron Burr, a century of interaction between Europeans and Indians had made commonplace the appearance at treaty conferences of Cherokees and Muskogee chiefs named McQueen, McIntosh, MacGillivray, Ross, and Weatherford. However, there were no chiefs named Jefferson, Randolph, or Skipwith because the Scots, not the English, had a long history of merging clan to clan through marriage. Burr's middle ground, a composite culture of Indians and whites, had been formed during the 18th century around Stockbridge, in the Berkshire Mountains of Massachusetts. After 1770, a new middle ground formed between the Mississippi River and the Appalachians. Burr's experience with Indians was in the North, where the Iroquois Confederacy had broken apart during the Revolutionary War in a civil conflict contemporary to that between Whigs and Tories. Mohawks led by Joseph Brant sided with the British, joined by some Senecas and Cagas and by most of the Onondagas. After the war was over, George Washington and Burr did not form an alliance.

Members of the Seneca Nation of the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Confederacy resided in a surprising variety of settlement forms during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Seneca communities in what is now western New York State lived in sequentially occupied sites that ranged from nucleated to fully dispersed, with and without defensive palisades. The regional Seneca settlement pattern also changed from one with two large core sites and surrounding satellites to a network of evenly spaced smaller sites arrayed across their territory. While earlier scholars viewed these transformations as decline away from a precontact cultural climax, the changes were non-linear and corresponded quite tightly to the dynamics of the regional political economy known in detail from documentary sources. This chapter reviews the details of 1669-1779 changes in Seneca community forms, and examines the lived experience of community relocation as a dynamic time for negotiation, reimagination, assessment of political-economic conditions, and the exercise of power.

The years 1677–1754 provide a swath of time sufficient to observe long-term trends in Seneca history surrounding the period during which the Townley-Read site was occupied. This chapter deals with the regional and supra-regional political-economic context that would have affected the Townley-Read residents; it supplies a partial and thematic history of the Seneca homeland rather than a fully rounded picture of the Seneca, much less the Iroquois, situation. The 1677–1754 era is bracketed by the diplomatic visit of New York official Wentworth Greenhalgh to Seneca territory in 1677 and the beginning of the Seven Years' War in 1754. The chapter, like the period, is divided into four segments based on the chapter's interpretation of political-economic conditions within the Seneca homeland: the Twenty Years' War, 1677–1701; a period of uncertainty, 1701–1713; the “middleman” period, 1713–1724; and the Oswego era, 1724–1754. A separate, final section considers the overarching issue of migration and the possible shift in French and British focus to the Ohio region.

Celeste Tường Vy Sharpe and Timothy B. Powell describe how they use the design of digital platforms as teachable problems to engage students in a digital humanities course about the stories of Indigenous peoples and the Eurocentric “control over time.” Sharpe and Powell task students with creating a digital project that explores a more culturally specific and nuanced model of Iroquois or Haudenosaunee temporality. In the process, students and teachers alike imagine solutions that may enable digital humanities tools to more accurately represent how Indigenous peoples tell their histories.

Over time, Natives and settlers not only came to appreciate the political implications of treaties but also learned to manipulate each other’s legal concepts. Craig Yirush shows the Iroquois’ skill at sequentially deploying indigenous and English concepts during negotiations with delegates from Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Maryland in 1744. The Iroquois defended their claims to land in Maryland and Virginia by invoking their conquest of it and their long possession (prescription). Arguments from conquest and prescription, familiar in European colonial discourses, constituted part of the settlers’ case at the treaty negotiations. The Iroquois reworked these arguments to their own advantage, mixing them with appeals rooted in Native legal and rhetorical traditions. Switching between Native and English legal ideas was at once a mechanism for gaining advantages in negotiations, defending interests, outmaneuvering rivals, and enriching intermediaries.

Gallman and Taylor take up murder at the boundary zones between the Iroquois and British settlers and between Spanish Florida and the Lower Creeks and Seminoles. Despite contrasts between the legal systems of the empires—civil law and inquisitorial procedure on the Spanish side, common law and trial by jury on the British side—indigenous groups came to similar conclusions regarding murder. Specifically, Native leaders rejected execution of the guilty, as proposed by English law, or other punishments, from execution to imprisonment to exile, under Spanish law. They opted instead to resolve matters by “covering the grave,” or giving gifts by the culpable party to the aggrieved party in lieu of revenge. This practice was less likely to spark a blood feud and enabled indigenous groups to preserve corporate autonomy in the face of pressures to conform to imperial norms. Though reluctantly, imperial officials often went along with this in order to keep the peace.

This chapter studies the area around New York's Fort Niagara and the Western Senecas, called Chenussios by contemporaries, who sought to maintain their customary power in the Niagara River corridor after the Seven Years' War. During the Indian uprising of 1763 they allied themselves with Ohio Valley and Great Lakes Indians in defiance of the new British regime. The Chenussios dealt the British their worst military defeat of the Indian Uprising with an attack at a portage point called Devil's Hole. Then, within the year, they successfully negotiated their forgiveness by giving up territory that they had already ceded to the British military command twice before. Violence and humility at Niagara did not stem from Seneca desperation; rather, they were two parts of an undesired but necessary coexistence strategy.

Father Isaac Jogues, born in Orleans, France, in 1607, was about thirty-five years old when he came to the New World. He had been well educated in France, and was shy and introverted by nature. He was also very devout. When he heard of the Jesuit mission to Canada, he decided not to pursue the literary career that he had been contemplating, and instead offered himself to do whatever work might need to be done. Details on the Iroquois raids and the capture of Father Jogues are presented.