Site of Dispossession, Site of Persistence: The Haudenosaunee (Six Nations) at the Grand River Territory in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries

Abstract

Described as ‘one of the most important accounts’ of late-eighteenth-century British North America, Patrick Campbell’s 1793 Travels in the Interior Inhabited Parts of North America was written to assure curious — and perhaps nervous — Britons that these colonies would be suitable places in which to create new homes. As well as assessing colonial topographies, economic conditions, and New Brunswick’s settlements for disbanded soldiers, Campbell also was struck by the community created by the Haudenosaunee people, those members of the Iroquois Confederacy who had moved to British territory in the wake of the American Revolution.² At the Grand River Campbell was struck by the charm, politeness and hospitality afforded him by Captain Joseph Brant and his family, not to mention the good looks of the ‘handsome young squaws’ whom, it seems, he met wherever he went (but who also refused his offers of Madeira and rum during a vigorous after-supper dance).³ What is most striking about Campbell’s account is his impression of a community in which Haudenosaunee practices and material culture existed alongside those of the Confederacy’s British allies. War and Serpentine dances were followed by Scotch reels, calumets could be found with double-barrelled pistols, older men farmed while young men hunted deer, and Captain Brant’s ‘European manners’ were offered to his guests in the presence of his wife, who was ’superbly dressed in the Indian fashion’ and whom Campbell found so striking that she eclipsed the other women present, whether Indian or European.⁴

It appears to me to be the finest country I have yet as seen … The habitations of the Indians are pretty close on each side of the river as far as I could see, with a very few white people interspersed among them, married to squaws and others of half blood, their offspring. The church in the village is elegant, the school house commodious, both built by the British government, who annually order a great many presents to be distributed among the natives; ammunition and warlike stores of all the necessary kinds; saddles, bridles, kettles, cloth, blankets, tomahawks, with tobacco pipes in the end of them; other things, and trinkets innumerable, provisions and stores; so that they may live, and really be, as the saying goes, as happy as the day is long.¹