The Woman Who Works for the Indians: Harriet Maxwell Converse, Adopted Seneca Chief

At the Tonawanda Seneca Reservation in 1886, Harriet Maxwell Converse, a wealthy white woman born to ancestral Scottish nobility, was adopted into the Seneca Iroquois Snipe clan. She committed her life to fighting against allotment and private land grabs, and in 1891 was rewarded for her service with an election by the Seneca council as a sachem, and later that year was appointed an honorary member of the Iroquois Six Nations council, a position never before or since given to an adoptee. This remarkable life held a different meaning for different people. As a Seneca sachem, she was a useful political agent for the Six Nations leadership. As an “authentic” adopted Indian, she proved to be a willing- if amateur- source of Iroquois material culture for academics due to her love of salvage ethnography. As the most famous Iroquois of the era, she was widely seen as the Iroquois’ sole representative and thus could, and did, rewrite Iroquois popular history. This paper looks closely at each of these roles. It reveals an important Iroquois political response to allotment, one that had the unintended consequence of fueling the growth of museums based on her salvage collections. Converse not only represented what the public knew of the Iroquois, her legacy represented an evolutionary moment in the multi-generational creation of an “exceptional” Iroquois history, one that made the Iroquois a household name and, for historians today, turned them into one of the “most studied” Indian nations.