For centuries in a period known to Europeans as the Middle Ages, the Mohawk, Seneca, Cayuga, Oneida, and Onondaga nations fought bitterly. The earth was closing the book on the Medieval Warm Period, a time where the Northern Hemisphere was much warmer than today and opening the chapter known as “the Little Ice Age,” where the same region of the planet saw starkly colder temperatures than now.
At the same time as changing temperatures broke down the imperial drive of the Norsemen Vikings, it was leading to diminishing resources in what is now upper New York State. The aforementioned nations battled bitterly.
During a conference of those five Indian nations, according to later oral history, the Sun disappeared.
A figure perceived as a crazy crank and called Deganawida, or “Two Rivers Flowing Together, ” did here as he had most of his life, preaching alliance instead of war. When “the Sun disappeared,” he made the most of his opportunity, telling the assembled that he would bring the Sun back if those five groups merged their purpose and forged an alliance.
According to the oral histories of the Five Nations of the Iroquois League, all agreed to form an alliance. Deganawida never meant that such an agreement would lead to peaceful coexistence with the world, but would turn the vicious aggression used on each other against the outside world and build a mighty empire.
The Iroquois dominated the region for centuries, imposing their will through warfare, torture, and fear. Science says that the only total eclipse of the Sun visible in that region for centuries took place in 1451. Interestingly, same time period also saw Russia throw off the yoke of the Mongols, saw the fall of the final incarnation of the Roman Empire, saw England expelled from France, turning its expansionist eyes toward Ireland and the Atlantic, and a number of other historical signs of the start of the modern age.
Their violent conquests, their imperial designs, their use of cruelty against enemies, all of this made the Iroquois typical of American Indians – and humanity – in the same period of time. They amassed enough power and strength that the British Empire later treated them as they would have a mid-level European power, signing a treaty of alliance and friendship that bound the two governments for centuries.
The British, as the combined population of those Isles were called after the Scottish Stuart dynasty inherited the throne of England after the death of Elizabeth I, had a complicated relationship with the American Indians.
Virginia, settled first, represented an early center of British power in the mid Atlantic. Those who settled there pursued land, commerce, and economic development. Indians there eventually, from a combination of hate, fear, and even respect, called Virginia the Big Knife and its people the Long Knives.
Massachusetts Bay, Plymouth Plantation, and Salem, all centered around the growing hub of Boston, had a different approach for a time.
Two major groups originally settled this area. The Puritans, who wanted to cleanse the Church of England of its Roman Catholic trappings, came second. A more ambitious sect, the Separatists, came first. They came on the miniscule Mayflower and American history calls them the Pilgrims.
A generational divide exists in how the history of the first few years of the Pilgrims’ settlement is perceived. Generation X and before learned the story of heroism of the Pilgrims and help from neighboring Indians, all true. Those who had the misfortune to come after all too often heard the standard, but not entirely true, story of peaceful Indians suffering at the hands of cruel and oppressive American settlers.
In the first half-century of New England settlement, the British and Indians lived side by side. Puritans controlled both the government and the faith of the people, which served in many ways as a benefit to local Indian groups. According to the Bancroft Prize winning “The Name of War” by Jill Lepore, Puritans greatly feared losing their identity through their society aping the ways of others.
They looked with horror at many of the ways of area Indians. Puritans feared the influence of what they considered amoral personal behavior and also the tendency toward extreme cruelty against others of their kind during times of war. Some would have preferred to follow the Virginia example and gradually, but violently, drive them from the land, but Puritan leaders concluded that would make their kind too much like the despised Spanish in their colonies.
As Lepore wrote, “and to behave as the Spanish had would again jeopardize the colonists’ identities as Englishmen.” An English account of Spanish behavior in the times stated “your Compassion must’ve necessity turned into Astonishment: The tears of Men can hardly suffice”
Instead, the Puritans worked diligently to use their “City on a Hill” model to inspire the Indians to be better. They also saw it as an opportunity to distinguish themselves from other European societies and even British colonies. Given a chance to live peaceably, many Indians converted to Christianity, constructed villages in and among those of the Puritans, and embraced an identity as “praying Indians.”
Puritan leaders also clung to their ideals and identity because they saw too many of their own finding the Indian lifestyle, including torture and cruelty, fascinating. They acted to set what they saw as the true example in a cultural conflict.
Indians who stuck to their traditions feared the rising power and allure of their British neighbors. Metacomet, a chief known better to the British as “King Philip,” as Lepore wrote “believed that too many Indians had become Anglicized and Christianized, praying to an English God and even learning how to read and write.”
To King Philip, only a war of what the world would later call genocide would suffice. He built an alliance of New England nations and launched an all out war in 1676. The devastation and loss would set the region back so far that many historians say they did not fully recover until the eve of the War of Independence one year shy of a century later.
Indian warriors only spared fellow Indians who completely renounced British culture and religion, and even that came after the horrific torture of some who had lived among the Puritans.
New England eventually prevailed and the main cost beyond the human and property was cultural. Not for another 200 years would those in what became the United States of America envision a world where American Indians and those of European descent could share the same space. The trauma and scars of King Philip’s War meant that the ideal of coexistence in the same places would not be seriously contemplated by American leaders until the presidency of Ulysses S. Grant.
One of the reasons New England narrowly averted complete annihilation was King Philip’s concern about the Iroquois who tended to favor the British and resided close to their western border.
Why share this story on the heels of the Thanksgiving holiday?
History requires that those who examine it go deeper than surface and simple platitudes. The long history of relations with Indian peoples resists the desire to paint one side as entirely heroic and just and the other as entirely demonic and evil. For every story of the infamous murder of Chief Logan’s family by British traders comes a tale with similar details to Chief Cornstalk and a band of warriors massacring Greenbrier Valley settlers led by Archibald Clendenin. Their mistake was naively inviting the Indians to join a large community party – only to be murdered cruelly so Chief Cornstalk could bring iron tools back across the Ohio River to his Shawnee people.
Humanity’s story contains the best of the good, the worst of the bad, and everything in between. No society has a monopoly on either justice or injustice. Those who teach all of the wrongs and none of the rights of the long history of any people, or vice versa, do both students and history itself an extreme disservice.
