Competing Pasts: Narratives of Haudenosaunee warfare in Ontario during the 1600s

Since the very first Haudenosaunee raids were recorded, the five nations of the Confederacy – Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, Seneca – and their neighbours – First Nation and European – have offered different explanations of why the Haudenosaunee waged war, and of what that said about their overall aims. The policy of the Haudenosaunee (or the Iroquois, as they’ve been known for so long) has engaged scholars in many fields for more than 200 years.

Some have suggested that warfare was the product of specific features of ‘traditional’ Haudenosaunee culture, such as the need for revenge, while others say that warfare was a result of a new culture and of new economic motives. There are no formal names for these narratives – each of which can be traced to its own historic period – but, for want of better labels, they can be identified as the Iroquois/Indigenous explanation, the Cultural Relativist view, and the Economic Determinist or Beaver Wars construction. A review of each of these narratives shows how boundaries – both national and intellectual – shaped them.

the Beaver Wars never happened

At the same time, statistical data allows us to move beyond the competing versions of the past and show that Haudenosaunee policy was to protect their culture and territory and had little to do with fighting for beaver pelts. In short, the Beaver Wars never happened as such. The name is an historiographical invention that ignores what the historical record reveals about Haudenosaunee foreign policy and its military expression.

1500s-1600s: Indigenous Traditions

Traditions recorded in the late 1500s and early 1600s all agree that the Wendat (the ‘Huron’ of the historical record) and Algonquin First Nations were the focus of Haudenosaunee aggression in the first half of the seventeenth century. Moreover, native oral traditions hint at, and are in agreement about, the reasons for the warfare between the Wendat, Algonquin and Haudenosaunee evident by 1600.

The wars were fought to avenge previous wrongs committed by one side against the other and the retributive nature of indigenous warfare accounts for the increase and enduring consequences of the initial encounters. As one Iroquois combatant observed matter of factly, “it is our Custome amongst Indians to warr with one another,” especially if a member of one group had been killed by that of another. At a conference in Detroit in 1704, a Seneca spokesman explained, without apparent irony, to a group of Wendat – whose nation had been destroyed – the Haudenosaunee philosophy of revenge: “You know, my brothers, our customs which are to avenge, or to perish in avenging our dead.”

It may, of course, be argued (and it has been) that these traditions are vague because the real cause is unknown. That, however, is an ethnocentric assessment based on modern writers’ willingness to accept as legitimate only causes that appear rational by modern standards. Rationality, however, is culturally defined, and what is rational is specific to both cultures and times. Moreover, oral histories served to account for and justify aspects of a group’s action.

Thus, if more important justifications could be found or invented, they would have been. The fact that the Haudenosaunee, Wendat and Algonquin felt that their traditions provided adequate explanation for the devastating wars in which they were engaged should be reason enough for us to take those accounts seriously. More importantly, the hostilities persisted, in part because those reasons continued to be viewed as valid.

1600s-1700s: European Cultural Relativists

Early French and English neighbours of the Haudenosaunee also noted the importance of revenge, honour and the taking of captives as motives for their warfare. These observers can be called early cultural relativists in that, even if they did not fully appreciate aspects of indigenous culture, they grounded their explanations of native actions based upon their understanding of indigenous cultures and native explanations thereof.

Pierre Boucher, a soldier and interpreter for the government of New France, noted in 1664 that the “war they wage against one another is not to conquer lands, nor to become great Lords, not even for gain, but purely for vengeance.” In his history of the Iroquois published in 1727, Cadwallader Colden, Lieutenant Governor of New York, wrote that it “is not for the Sake of Tribute … that they make War, but from Notions of Glory which they have ever most strongly imprinted on their Minds; and the farther they go to seek an Enemy, the greater the Glory they think they can.” General Thomas Gage, writing in 1772 to the Superintendent of Indian Affairs, William Johnson, echoed Boucher and Colden’s observations: “I never heard that Indians made War for the sake of Territory like Europeans, but that Revenge, and eager pursuit of Martial reputation were the motives which prompted one Nation to make War upon another.”

The French in Canada, allied to Haudenosaunee enemies and targets of Haudenosaunee warfare, had plenty of opportunity to contemplate the purposes behind Iroquois hostilities. In 1642 the French Jesuit priest Isaac Jogues, writing from among his Mohawk captors, informed his superiors at Quebec that the “design of the Iroquois, as far as I can see, is to take, if they can, all the Hurons; and, having put to death the most considerable ones and a good part of the other, to make of them but one people and only one hand.”

The reasons for capturing all these people are made clear in a 1641 document. In that year two French captives freed by the Mohawks reported that Mohawk desires for peace were designed to isolate the French from their native allies. The Mohawks, one said, wanted to eliminate French support “in order that they might take all the savages, our confederates, ruin the whole country, and make themselves masters of the great river.” Possibly the motivation for the Haudenosaunee is best summed up by that shrewd observer of life in New France, Marie de l’Incarnation. She had no doubt that the “design of the Iroquois” was to drive the French out of Canada. The reason was, she wrote, that they desired to be “alone in all these lands, in order to live without fear, and to have all the game to live off, and to give the pelts to the Dutch.” The French, she implies, were a threat to this future.

Thus, adding to other traditional motives for war, early European cultural relativists described Haudenosaunee policy as motivated by a desire to create a buffer zone around their lands. The campaigns against the French were intended to eliminate an important ally of their enemies. The Haudenosaunee made this abundantly clear to the French in 1670. As one Seneca leader – using an honorific given to all the French governors – put it to Daniel de Rémy de Courcelle:

They repeatedly expressed their concerns about the threats posed to their lands

For whom does Onnontio take us?… He is vexed because we go to war, and wishes us to lower our hatchets and leave his allies undisturbed. Who are his allies? How would he have us recognize them when he claims to take under his protection all the peoples discovered by the bearers of God’s word through all these regions; and when every day, as we learn from our people who escape from the cruelty of the stake, they make new discoveries, and enter nations which have ever been hostile to us – which, even while receiving notification of peace from Onnontio, set out from their own country to make war upon us, and to come and slay us under our very palisades?

The Haudenosaunee also complained about French encroachments on land they claimed as their own. Between 1666 and 1701 the French built nearly 30 forts and fortified posts in the St. Lawrence-Great Lakes Basin. Of these, at least seven were located around lakes Ontario and Erie – lands claimed by the Haudenosaunee and used by them for hunting.

They repeatedly expressed their concerns about the threats posed to their lands, their livelihood and security by the string of French forts. The French, they said, “build forts around us and penn us up.” They felt trapped, as if they were “in prison so long as they are standing,” and saw the forts as the first step to the eventual French usurpation of all their lands.

1800s: Cultural Relativists & Economic Determinists

In the 1800s French Canadian nationalist historians offered explanations for Haudenosaunee warfare that combined the views of the early French cultural relativists with the words of the Iroquois and other natives as recorded in French documents. However, their views came to be largely ignored. These historians had all used the Iroquois wars to serve their own nationalist ends (applauding the French and Catholic nature of New France, deploring the pursuit of commerce at the expense of farming) and their concerns did not extend to the larger academic communities of either Canada or the United States. It was Francis Parkman’s novel Beaver Wars interpretation that became accepted by most scholars as the explanation for Haudenosaunee policy and wars in general, including those against New France.

Economic Determinists: The Beaver Wars

Francis Parkman was an American historian from Boston who chose as his life’s work the writing of the history of the struggle between ‘feudal’ France and ‘liberal’ England for control of north-eastern North America. According to Parkman, Haudenosaunee culture was changed by contact with Europeans and as a consequence a new culture arose that became dependent upon European material goods. The Haudenosaunee quickly depleted their fur supply in their desire to obtain the new goods, and were then driven to raid neighbouring nations in order to plunder their furs and maintain the trade. The Iroquois waged war against New France in order to control the fur trade, which the French were trying to monopolize and which the Iroquois needed in order to gain much-required goods.

At the risk of belabouring the point, neither Parkman or his French Canadian contemporaries were interested in the history of the Haudenosaunee, their foreign policy or even their wars, in their own rights: the Haudenosaunee and their assaults were merely a means to enhance a gripping national story. That the Iroquois could be the bogeymen and cautionary examples in two national narratives is probably noteworthy in some sense, but this attention to them came at the expense of distorting their lived reality and history.

20th Century: Economic Warfare & Cultural Relativists

In 1915 American historian Charles McIlwain elaborated upon Parkman’s views, arguing that cultural change, the lack of furs and material necessity had driven the Haudenosaunee to become middlemen in the fur trade and that they fought to gain or maintain that position. In 1930 the Canadian economist Harold Innis used this explanation to account for native participation in the fur trade as part of his ground-breaking work outlining the staples theory of national economic development. In 1940 George Hunt, an American anthropologist, used it as the basis for explaining Haudenosaunee hostilities against a range of First Nations around the Great Lakes in his seminal The Wars of the Iroquois: A Study in Intertribal Trade Relations.

For these writers, all Iroquois wars were about them acting as rational twentieth-century capitalist beings – they were reduced, as one critic noted, to being “entrepreneurs in moccasins.” Parkman’s Whig and ethnocentric version of history (with its own form of economic and material determinism), updated according to the canons of modern scholarship by George Hunt, found fertile ground in a post-1940s Canada and United States where the Progressive and Economic schools of historical enquiry were popular.

Among such scholars of New France as Gustave Lanctot and Marcel Trudel, for whom the Iroquois wars were a major feature of the colony’s history, Hunt’s thesis was accepted without question or in only slightly modified form. William J. Eccles was the first historian of New France to fully reject the economic explanation of Haudenosaunee warfare and expansion. In its place Eccles argued, like his nineteenth-century predecessors, that Haudenosaunee warfare was part of a larger policy aimed at creating a buffer zone and maintaining political control over their territories. Following Eccles’ lead, Luca Codignola and Peter Moogk have downplayed the role of economic factors in explaining Haudenosaunee warfare in the colony.