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The Iroquois Six Nations and the
Canadian-American Borderland, 1785-1815
by
Alan Taylor
(University of California at Davis)
Mellon Distinguished Scholar-in-Residence, American Antiquarian Society
Friday, March 2, 2001, at 4:30 p.m.
Dodd Center, University of Connecticut, Storrs
PRÉCIS:
In recent years, historians have paid increasing attention to borders and
borderlands as fluid sites of both national formation and local
contestation. Geographic peripheries reveal nations and empires at their
most provisional in the difficult process of asserting power and defining
their identity (with no certainty of success). Nation-making was
especially tangled in the Americas, where empires and republics projected
their ambitions onto a geography occupied and defined by Indians. Imperial
or national visions ran up against the messy complexities of relationships
in a world of interdependent peoples, both native and invader. Indeed, the
contest of rival Euro-American regimes presented risky opportunities for
native peoples to play off the rivals to preserve native autonomy and
enhance their circumstances. Native peoples tried to prolong broad and
porous "borderlands," lest they become confined within the "borders" of
consolidated regimes imposed by invaders. This paper examines the
transition of one borderland into two bordered lands: the State of New
York in the American republic and the province of Upper Canada in the
British Empire. From the end of the American Revolution in 1783 to the War
of 1812, the British and the Americans contended to realize and master the
boundary imagined by the peace treaty that concluded the first conflict.
They competed primarily to subordinate the native peoples of the
borderland, principally the Iroquois Six Nations, who resided on both
sides of the Niagara River, which was supposed to serve as a border
between the Americans and the British. Paradoxically, in the short term,
the competition to control the Six Nations gave native leaders renewed
leverage. They exploited that leverage to advance to their own visions of
autonomy within a perpetual borderland. They hoped to remain always
between the British and Americans rather than divided and absorbed by
them.
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