Geographies of Solidarity in Iroquoia, 1534–1701

This paper explains how Iroquois people translated spatial concepts embedded in their traditional philosophy into actions which engaged new challenges and opportunities brought about by early European intrusions on the borders of their homelands.  While scholars have long identified fixed localities in clearly bounded spaces as the fundamental analytical units of Iroquois culture, this paper contends that extensive mobility on the part of precolonial Iroquois people established geographies of solidarity that linked supposedly "scattered" and "fragmented" Iroquois communities into an extensive yet interconnected indigenous polity; a polity that grew, from 1534 to 1701, farther and farther together.  The argument presented in this paper stands in stark contrast to the dominant narrative of early Native American history, which provides autopsies of indigenous nations surrounded and submerged by European nations shortly after first contact. Drawing on multilingual archival sources, archaeological data, and Iroquois oral traditions, the paper demonstrates how Iroquois society, as it expanded spatially after 1534 to include new places and new peoples, balanced core cultural values against the imperatives of lived experience, and sustained a hitherto-unrecognized degree of cohesion vis-à-vis the opportunities and impositions of North American settler colonialism.  Mobility not only embodied Iroquois values of hospitality and attentiveness to renewals of reciprocal human relationships, it created a vital spatial context for the exercise of Iroquois power.  Free Iroquois movement through extensive spaces negated colonizers' efforts to fix Iroquois nations into predictable administrative units and generated an enhanced repertoire of empirical knowledge of political and economic circumstances that Iroquois people employed to contest settler encroachments on Iroquois space.