✦✧✦✧✦✧✦✧✦✧✦✧✦✧✦✧✦✧✦✧✦✧✦✧✦✧✦✧✦✧✦✧✦✧✦ Becoming a “Nation of Statesmen”: The Mohicans’ Incorporation into the Iroquois League, 1671–1675 evan haefeli HE 1670s were a pivotal period for the Indigenous his- T tory of New England and the eastern woodlands more generally. Most important was the war called King Philip’s or Metacomet’s that devastated the Indigenous communities of southern New England between 1675 and 1676 and contin- ued in Maine until the spring of 1678. The English victory owed more than a little to the intervention of the Mohawks of the Iroquois League, who struck an alliance with the New Englanders, prevented Metacomet’s people from resupplying themselves at Albany, and then forced them back to their na- tive country, weakened and lacking gunpowder. The Covenant Chain alliance that followed in 1677, mediated by the governor of New York, has dominated accounts of colonial Indian rela- tions as it reinforced the bond between the English colonists and the Iroquois League and guaranteed the subordination of the peoples who had fought with Metacomet. Having secured peace on their eastern border, the League could quickly van- quish the Susquehannocks and then proceed to attack Indige- nous nations further south. By 1680 the diplomatic landscape For their helpful comments on earlier versions of this article, I would like to thank my colleagues in Texas A&M University’s Caribbean and Atlantic Studies work- ing group, especially Ray Batchelor, Cynthia Bouton, and April Hatfield, as well as Side Emre, an anonymous reviewer, and Jonathan Chu. I would also like to thank the Texas A&M Arts and Humanities Fellowship, which made the archival research pos- sible, and the National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship that gave me the time to write. The New England Quarterly, vol. XCIII, no. 3 (September 2020). C 2020 by The New England Quarterly. All rights reserved. https://doi.org/10.1162/tneq_a_00845. 414 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq_a_00845 by guest on 02 October 2021 THE MOHICANS AND THE IROQUOIS LEAGUE 415 of the eastern woodlands had been radically transformed, set- ting the pattern for the next century.1 Oddly, the Mohicans are largely absent from our accounts of these transformations, even though their country, comprising the upper Hudson and Housatonic river valleys, sat right in the middle of them. They, together with their Munsee neighbors in the Hudson River Valley, “satt still” while the Mohawks routed Metacomet’s people.2 This inaction seems especially strange because just a few years before, in 1669, the Mohicans had been part of a massive alliance including almost every other Indigenous group in what is now New England. It had been strong enough to invade the Mohawk country and almost cap- ture one of its towns. The Mohicans’ apparent inaction sits un- comfortably with recent efforts to portray them as “a nation of statesmen.” James Oberly, historian of the modern Stockbridge- Munsee Mohican Community in Wisconsin, claims the Mohi- cans have “produced generations of leaders who have engaged in every form of politics.” The community’s website insists the Mohicans are “an Indian nation of firsts not lasts,” that proudly pioneered a path to surviving the challenges brought on by European colonization with the help of the diplomatic savvy of outstanding leaders like Hendrick Aupaumut (1757–1830), who led the Mohicans to learn English, adopt Christianity, and cope with Federal Indian policy.3 Aupaumut, born and raised at the Congregational mission to the Mohicans in Stockbridge, 1Francis Jennings, The Ambiguous Iroquois Empire: The Covenant Chain Confed- eration of Indian Tribes with English Colonies (New York: W.W. Norton, 1984); Daniel K. Richter, The Ordeal of the Longhouse: The Peoples of the Iroquois League in the Era of European Colonization (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1992); Stephen Saunders Webb, 1676: The End of American Independence (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1995), and the various histories of Metacomet’s war including Lisa Brooks, Our Beloved Kin: A New History of King Philip’s War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018). The most recent account of the Susquehannocks’ fate is Matthew Kruer, “Bloody Minds and Peoples Undone: Emotion, Family, and Political Order in the Susquehannock-Virginia War,” William and Mary Quarterly 74 (2017): 401–36. 2Lawrence H. Leder, ed. The Livingston Indian Records, 1666–1723 (Gettysburg: The Pennsylvania Historical Association, 1956), 37–39; 128. 3James Warren Oberly, A Nation of Statesmen: The Political Culture of the Stockbridge-Munsee Mohicans, 1815–1972 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2005), 17–18 and the community’s current website: https://www.mohican.com. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq_a_00845 by guest on 02 October 2021 416 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY Massachusetts, fought on the American side in the Revolution then served as a United States diplomat to the Indigenous na- tions of the old Northwest in the 1790s before being forced to move west with his people, first to Oneida country and then in the 1820s to Wisconsin where he died.4 Aupaumut never explained why the Mohicans sat out Meta- comet’s war, but he provided an important clue in several short texts he composed in English around the turn of the nineteenth century.5 Setting his diplomatic work within the deeper his- tory of his people, Aupaumut strikingly and repeatedly char- acterizes the Mohican relationship to other Indigenous nations in kinship terms. He refers to the Delawares as “our Grand- fathers,” the Shawnees as “our younger brothers,” and the Miamis and other Western Algonquian nations as “our grand- children.” Meanwhile, the Iroquois call the Mohicans as well as the Delawares “nephews.” Mark Rifkin sees in these terms a map of “Indigenous geo-politics” structured “around a kinship imaginary” where “Native political formations and epistemolo- gies” were based on diplomatic interrelatedness rather than an existence as separate and isolated nations as US Indian policy wanted them to be. Still, no one quite knows what the terms mean or where they came from. Aupaumut sheds little light on these issues apart from vaguely dating their origin back to an “ancient covenant” made “near 200 years ago” that has been faithfully kept ever since.6 4Jeanne Ronda and James P. Ronda, “‘As they were faithful’: Chief Hendrick Au- paumut and the struggle for Stockbridge Survival, 1757–1830,” American Indian Cul- ture and Research Journal 3 (1979): 43–55; Alan Taylor, “Captain Hendrick Aupaumut: The Dilemmas of an Intercultural Broker,” Ethnohistory 43 (1996): 431–57; Rachel Wheeler, “Hendrick Aupaumut: Christian-Mahican Prophet,” Journal of the Early Re- public 25 (2005): 187–220. 5The texts have recently been reprinted: Hendrick Aupaumut, “History of the Muh- He-Con-Nuk Indians (ca. 1790),” in American Indian Nonfiction: An Anthology of Writings, 1760s–1930s, ed. Brend C. Peyer (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2007), 63–70 and Hendrick Aupaumut (Mahican/Stockbridge), “A Short narration of my last Journey to the western Contry,” in Early Native Literacies in New England: A Documentary and Critical Anthology, ed. Kristina Bross and Hilary E. Wyss (Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2008), 223–37. 6Hendrick Aupaumut, “A Short narration of my last Journey to the western Contry,” in “A Narrative of an Embassy to the Western Indians from the Original Manuscript of Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq_a_00845 by guest on 02 October 2021 THE MOHICANS AND THE IROQUOIS LEAGUE 417 Scholars have assumed that Aupaumut is referring to events that took place before the arrival of Europeans, but in fact he was talking about the 1670s. Drawing on a variety of sources from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century, ranging from official colonial documents to Delaware, Iroquois, and Mohican oral traditions, one can trace the origin of this particular “kin- ship imaginary” to a peace treaty made between the Mohicans and the Iroquois League between 1671 and 1675. Historians have been aware of its existence but not its full significance.7 In these years, the Mohicans were being incorporated, in fits and starts but to lasting effect, into the Iroquois Confederacy’s Great League of Peace. This attachment to the League then provided the framework of Mohican diplomacy for the next century and a half: Aupaumut’s kinship terms represent the language of membership within the League. The diversity of terms represents an oral record of the different paths through which each nation found its attachment to the League, at least partly through Mohican mediation. The absence of other In- digenous New England nations in Aupaumut’s account hints at the turbulent and uncertain process through which the Mohi- cans managed to secure a peace, but their former allies did not, leaving them tragically vulnerable when their relationship with their English neighbors suddenly fell apart. In several important ways, the borderland condition of Mo- hican country complicates efforts to reconstruct their early Hendrick Aupaumut with Prefatory Remarks by Dr. B. H. Coates,” Historical Society of Pennsylvania: Memoirs, vol. 2, pt. 1 (Philadelphia: Carey, Lea & Carey, 1827), 61– 131, quotations on 76–77, 80–83, 87, 90–95, 107, 115, 118, 130; Mark Rifkin, “Remap- ping the Family of Nations: The Geopolitics of Kinship in Hendrick Aupaumut’s ‘A Short Narration,”’ Studies in American Indian Literatures 22 (2010): 1–31, quotations on 3 and 7. See also Sandra Gustafson, “Historical Introduction to Hendrick Aupau- mut’s Short Narration,” and “Hendrick Aupaumut and the Cultural Middle Ground,” in Early Native Literacies in New England, 237–41 and 242–50. 7Jason Sellers picks up on many of the incidents discussed here but interprets them in terms of Mohicans relations with the English, “History, Memory, and the Indian Struggle for Autonomy in the Seventeenth-Century Hudson Valley,” Early American Studies 13 (2015): 714–42.