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In the latter half of the 19th century, a new culture of big business and big machines sought possession of the forests of New York. Wage laborers in massive forest clearing projects supplanted independent woodsmen who had traditionally cleared land for their small family farms. The management ethos of the canal, railroad and steel barons brought capitalist culture and the Protestant work ethic to the forests. Isolated among them on scattered reservations lived remnant communities of the once great Six Nations Confederacy of the Iroquois League, who had stewarded the forests in New York and in much of the area from the Atlantic Coast to the Mississippi for half a millenium. They now withstood a concentrated legal and moral assault on the integrity of their culture and its hereditary pagan chiefs, the peacekeepers of the Iroquois Law of the Great White Pine. The assailants were private corporations and the State of New York, along with the culture of Protestant capitalism which shaped them. Suprisingly, these interests attacked both the forests and the Iroquois in much the same way, for the same reasons, and to advance the same ends. Forests and Indian lands both stood in the way of canals, railroads, farms, and settlements; both had to be removed to permit progress. Both were seen as resources which needed to be transformed in order to feed industrial capitalism: living trees had to be transformed into firewood and lumber on the one hand, while traditional practitioners of ceremony and hunting-gathering must be made into farmers, housekeepers, and industrial laborers on the other. Both were religiously and culturally denigrated by promoters of the ecological and cultural depredations of mid 19th century industrialism. Both trees and the Iroquois were deliberately simplified in the minds of their exploiters: trees were envisioned in isolation from the ecologies which they critically supported, and Indians were viewed as mere individuals whose cultural roots were arbitrarily severable. Both occupied complex geographic and ecological contours, but needed to be assimilated into the drastically simplified system of survey grids and property boundaries which defined the Euro-American world view. Both communities suffered the phenomenon known in ecology as the "edge effect," a whittling away of integrity and soundness along boundaries where outside influences impinged. New York needed to remove both forests and the Indian culture which protected it from their property grids to promote agriculture, westward settlement, and industrialization. New Yorkers of the time themselves linked Indians to biota, usually in ways that suggested the undesirability of Indian reproduction. Nathaniel Sylvester's 1877 book informs us that Chief among the powers of Tryon county [New York], previous to the war of the Revolution, was the remarkable Indian league or confederacy, known as the Six Nations. . . Throughout the whole length of Tryon county, from the manor house of Sir William Johnson, at Johnstown, to the falls of Niagara, lay the castles of these fierce savages like so many dens of ravening wolves(Sylvester 123) while "The moral and social condition of the Indians on this [Onondaga] reservation is deplorable, . . . it is a nest of 'uncontrollable vice . . .' " (Legislature 43-44) and "The present tribal government . . . is a nest of abuses and an instrument of corruption." (Legislature 390-391)It was easy to attack a forest. Once an inroad into the land had been established, the methods of extraction, though ever more effective with the progress of mechanization and invention, were as simple to understand as the one-dimensional "timber stands" which industrialists substituted – in their minds – for forests. Though from an ecological perspective the forests were vastly complex living systems, the capitalist's "timber" cruisers and loggers saw only "stumpage," "density," and "board feet." Loggers physically simplified terrain wherever they struck the forest by building roads, splash dams, and flumes, and by indiscriminately leveling whatever biota lay in the path of their progress – blazing, flattening, burning and modeling the land into an approximation of the grid metaphor by which they perceived it. The nature of the attacks on the Six Nations was far more complex and prolonged and requires considerable explanation. To further complicate matters, where trees cannot systematically resist invaders, self-aware human cultures can. Most 19th-century whites in New York probably saw the Indians through simplified images of nobility, viciousness, or nostalgia. But a far richer understanding had advised the complex relations between New York and the Confederacy in the preceding centuries. Until the end of the 18th century, critical government-to-government negotiations between several European nations and the Six Nations of the Iroquois required subtle cultural understanding on all sides. The deep contacts between the League and both the French and the English, and later the American nationalists, were constant and necessary throughout that period. Even New York's 1888 "Special Committee to Investigate the Indian Problem", which steadily sought to demean and destroy the remaining culture and territory of the Iroquois League, referred to them as "this interesting people to whom the State of New York owes its northern boundary, and but for whose valor and steadfast friendship for our English forefathers the entire basin of the St. Lawrence would now be a Canadian possession." (Legislature 7) Historians have credibly advanced the theory that the unique and durable governmental system of the Iroquois League provided the model on which the American Articles of Confederation, and later, Constitution, were fashioned. Often cited is a 1751 quote from Benjamin Franklin, who felt It would be a very strange thing if Six Nations of Ignorant Savages should be capable of forming a Scheme for such an Union and be able to execute it in such a manner, as it has subsisted Ages, and appears indissoluble, and yet a like Union should be impracticable for ten or a dozen English colonies. (Johansen 56)In his 1877 book on the Adirondacks, Nathaniel Sylvester, who elsewhere refers to the Iroquois as "ravening wolves," flatly states that "This wild Indian league of the old savage wilderness, if it did not suggest, in many respects it formed the model after which was fashioned our more perfect union of many states in one republic." (20) More detailed support for this proposition can found throughout the work I’ve cited by Johansen, and in chapter 8 of Weatherford. It was only in the mid-19th century, once the threats to America from England and British Canada were settled, that members of the League, no longer useful as military allies for the new American nation, were coerced by the government of New York into surrendering much of their territory or leaving the state altogether. Meanwhile, amidst industrializing New York’s exploding commerce and its transportation system which was expanding to support westward settlement, the politicians of New York set themselves the task of destroying the heart of the Six Nations. Loggers know how to cut down a tree. But how do you take apart a culture? What constituted the heartwood of the Confederacy at which New York could level its ax? Today American cultures mix in complex ways, and Native Americans are among millions facing questions of identity. Arguments persist over the importance of traditionalism, complicated by ownership issues surrounding reservation property. Hundreds of thousands of individuals who identify with Indian culture through blood or culture must decide where to stand, how to be both an Indian and an American. Iroquois of the late 19th century faced similar questions of identity and property. However the culture of the Confederacy at that period may compare to that of its descendants of today, it was in many aspects quite distinct from the white culture around it. Though Iroquois culture had changed from the times of first contact with Europeans, many significant aspects were still operating in mid-to-late 19th century New York. A largely male representative central government of hereditary and elected pagan chiefs appointed by women was still in control. Much of the populace spoke their native language, in many cases to the exclusion of any English. Ancient ceremonies (referred to as "pagan" by Christians) were regularly practiced by the majority of the population. Animal totems represented clan divisions. Descent and property ownership followed matriarchal lines. Marriage was an informal compact of hearts, dissolvable without divorce. Property in large part was owned communally and allocated by laws of succession under the supervision of the chiefs' council. It was these features that were under attack by New York's government and its canal and railroad barons. Though some Indians of the time were becoming farmers in the manner of the whites, the traditional pagan chiefs held the greatest areas of tribal land intact. These traditional chiefs and the culture which surrounded them can be said to constitute the heart of the Confederacy. It was these that New York State of the mid to late 19th century was determined to extinguish in order to transform its Indians into industrial resources. Known from colonial times to the English as the Confederacy of the Six Nations, to the French as the Iroquois League, and to themselves as Ho-de-no-sau-nee, or "People of the Long House" (Sylvester 14), the Confederacy traced it roots to unknown antiquity, while European writers believe it was formed in the mid-15th century (Johansen, 28). According to Iroquois oral tradition, the League was founded by the legendary peacemaker Deganawidah. The original five nations - Seneca, Onondaga, Mohawk, Cayuga, and Oneida, later to be joined by the Tuscaroras - where perpetually at war with each other and with surrounding nations until Deganawidah, through the power of his oratory, united them consensually under a moral and political constitution which the League called the Law, or the Peace. Its symbol was a tree, a Great White Pine with its roots in the earth. White authors sometimes referred to the Iroquois as "the children of the forest," one of many terms by which their cultural and intellectual maturity was frequently denigrated. Among other purposes, the phrase denotes a people who, it was hoped, would disappear along with the forest and like it, be replaced by farms, towns, and transportation corridors. But the phrase accurately reflects the nature of the League as forest dwellers, and it was by the symbols of the forest that the Iroquois understood themselves. According to Wallace, The Iroquois fed their minds and guided their actions by means of symbols. . . Like the spires on our churches, the Great White Pine which 'pierces the sky' and 'reaches the sun,' lifted the thoughts of the Iroquois to the meanings of the peace. . . In general the Tree signified the Law, that is, the constitution, which expressed the terms of their union. But there were other important elements in the symbol. The Branches signified shelter, the protection and security that people found in union under the shadow of the Law. The Roots, which stretched to the four quarters of the earth, signified the extension of the Law, the Peace, to embrace all man kind. Other nations, not yet members of the League, would see these roots as they grew outward, and, if they were people of goodwill, would desire to follow them to their source and take shelter with others under the Tree. (7-8)As a round tree was severed by loggers, then milled and dimensioned into standard interchangeable shapes, so the Indian's body would be remade into a farmer or laborer who could productively fit into the capitalist economy. The New York report observed Here are in the State 5,000 [Seneca] people, the descendants of a hardy and intellectual race, with scarcely a single artisan or person following or learning a trade among them, excepting a very few unskillful carpenters or cobblers . . . something is at fault. A careful and conscientious examination of the whole question must result in charging such fault to the laws [of New York State], which respect and tolerate communistic ideas, Indian customs and tribal relations among these people. (Legislature 67-68)Further, The [Onondaga] Indians themselves, with but few exceptions, do not cultivate their land sufficiently to supply their own ordinary wants. In this productive region, with every advantage that nature could bestow, with no taxes to pay or other burdens to bear, these people have lived from hand to mouth for more than an hundred years. They seem to be wholly without ambition to work, and the present policy of the State does much to encourage them in doing nothing. (Legislature. 43)A century before, when nations of the Confederacy were wooed as allies critical to the security of a new American government, a separate "Indian way" was acknowledged. Benjamin Franklin noted that, "Having few artificial Wants, they [Indians] have abundance of Leisure for Improvement of conversation. Our laborious Manner of Life, compared with theirs, they esteem slavish and base." (Johansen 85) But the time for cultural understanding was over; the time for the Indian to become "civilized" was at hand. The New York legislature of 1888 had no sympathy with an anthropological understanding: In the district schools among the pagans (who are the predominating party), the work is particularly discouraging, while the tribal relations are continued. Few of them depend upon cultivating land for a livelihood, but roam around from place to place, picking berries, peeling bark, gathering herbs, etc., to gain a mere pittance for support. [J. H. Van Valkenberg, letter to the committee of 1888] (Legislature 396)The Iroquois were no longer an "interesting" community of hunter-gathers; they were simply recalcitrant producers and unfortunate paupers, as proven again and again by their failure to amass capital. The times when "Every savage to a great extent followed the dictates of his own wild will, controlled only by the customs of his people and a public sentiment that ran through their whole system of affairs, which was as inflexible as iron" (Sylvester 22) was over. It was time to pick up a hoe or an ax and start contributing to New York’s capital economy, just as it was time for tall pines to stop whispering to the clouds, time to be re-formed into uniformly square, stiff, useful posts. Far from mere reluctant capitalists, citizens of the Iroquois League were defenders of their traditional culture. Perhaps New York's white elite never made a conscious decision to live the life of Protestant capitalists – of wage-labor industrialization, intensely monocultural agriculture, mechanized resource harvesting, and transport-enabled resettlement. But only decades past, before the Industrial Revolution exploded around them, their grandfathers had been Jeffersonian subsistence farmers - part hunter-gatherer themselves, living within a cultural stone's throw of the traditional lives the Iroquois had lived from time immemorial. New York's industries had been comprised then of small shops where a craftsman's family and his family-like workers lived under one roof – an arrangement perhaps closer to the traditional multi-family Iroquois "long house" than to the arrangement in the new industrial towns, where the elite in private homes now kept distance from the boarding houses of their often itinerant wage laborers. But since the Protestant "second great awakening" in the early 1800's reconciled New York's elite with industrial capitalism and redefined moral life as a process of accumulating wealth, Protestant evangelical culture itself deliberately, with self-awareness, sought its own perpetuation – with capitalism and a legal system re-tuned to the needs of a capital market as its means. (Johnson) With equal self-awareness the heart of Iroquoia refused, by-and-large, to accept English, capital agriculture, wage labor, division of property, Christ, "divorce laws," and second-class status for women. It was this last distinction which the New York assembly appeared to most clearly misunderstand or ignore. Even earlier, The Iroquois' extension of liberty and political participation to women surprised some eighteenth-century Euro-American observers. An unsigned contemporary manuscript in the New York State Library reported that when Iroquois men returned from hunting, they turned everything they had caught over to the women. 'Indeed, every possession of the man except his horse and his rifle belong to the woman after marriage; she takes care of their Money and Gives it to her husband as she thinks his necessities require it,' the unnamed observer wrote. The writer sought to refute assumptions that Iroquois women were 'slaves of their husbands.' 'The truth is the Women are treated in a much more respectful manner than in England and that they possess a very superior power; this is to be attributed in a very great measure to their system of Education.' The women, in addition to their political power and control of allocation from the communal stores, acted as communicators of culture between generations. It was they who educated the young. (Johansen 40-41)Iroquois society was largely matriarchal. Though women on occasion represented themselves in the governing council of the Confederacy and always had representation, their principal power lay in raising and nominating the hereditary chiefs within their own clan matriarchy. To provide additional leadership, Paragraph 35 of the Great Law [of the Confederacy] outlined provisions for election of 'pine-tree chiefs' - those who held membership in the council because of their special abilities, rather than the hereditary titles of their extended families. The name 'pine-tree chief' was given to such individuals because they were said to have sprung, like the Great White Pine under which the council met. While the pine sprang from the earth, the pine-tree chiefs sprang from the body of the people. The nomination to the council came directly from the chiefs sitting on it. (Johansen, 28)The Confederacy remained united for many centuries through its multi-layered representative government and its tribal system with its interlocking dependencies. To prevent factions . . . a system of clans . . . overlapped each nations' political boundaries. . . . Each member of a particular clan recognized as a relative others of the same clan, even if they lived in different nations of the league. The clan structure . . . kept one nation from seeking to dominate others and helped to insure that consensus would arise from decisions of the council. (Johansen 28)Because the powerful hereditary chieftainships were owned by the female line, a standing chief’s son could never inherit his own chieftainship - and this same prohibition held for pine-tree chiefs. In addition, Iroquois property belonged to women and was also passed down through the female lineage. This was poorly understood by New Yorker legislators and courts – perhaps, for the sake of their own interests, conveniently so. From the Assembly report’s point of view, the "Indian custom of intestate succession from the mother, and not from the father" became a problem, which went eventually to the state Supreme Court, when "Certain Indian men occupying reservation lands had intermarried with white women and died, leaving children." Iroquois law stipulated that these children could not inherit property from their father’s tribe, but only from their mother’s. Since the children's mother was not from any Iroquois clan, they could not claim reservation land, and the children should rightfully inherit land from their mother’s family. Citing the fact that the mother was white, the state Supreme Court in its 1888 decision interpreted this standard application of Iroquois matriarchal succession law as refusal on the part of the pagan chiefs to grant land to half-whites. The Assembly report revealed the court’s Euro-centric bias by which It should be presumed that such lands had been lawfully set apart for the use of the father and his family, and after the father's death his family would still be entitled to the possession of them, as the statute does not distinguish between Indians of the half-blood and of the whole blood, and, therefore, the nation could not recover the possession of these lands. (Legislature 64, 383)As if the court judgement did not penetrate Iroquoia sufficiently, the assembly restated the ancient Iroquois matriarchal succession law as if it were a recent anti-white innovation, giving the assembly cause for regret that the learned judge was not able to find good reasons to brush away this tribal custom, which forbids an Indian to devise his property to his children, because their mother may have been so unfortunate as to be born white, and certainly it is to be hoped, if the courts cannot correct this wrong, the Legislature will. (Legislature 64, 383)This decision eroded the ability of the traditional Iroquois government to preserve its communal property from division and assimilation. It encouraged the diminishing of pagan control, perhaps pointedly to facilitate land-grabs by New York industrialists. But even if the righteous tone of the Assembly and Court were merely convenient covers for capitalist ends, they succeed because they pitted genuine sensibilities of Euro-American culture against those of the Iroquois. It could be just as easily said that the purpose of the ruling was to maintain the solidity of the dominant culture, particularly its institution of male supremacy in the ownership of property. Also targeted by the Assembly was the Iroquois "communist" tradition, since "no body of men ever prospered who held property in land in common. The Plan destroys individual effort, and takes away the desire and ambition to acquire and own rights in property separate from others, which is so important a factor in the progress of any race." (Legislature, 75) Just as the forests, now divided into smaller sections by lumbering, settlement, and the transportation corridors, were subject to increased "edge effects" – invasion of other species, predation on the nests of formerly deep-forested fauna, wind-throw by storms – so the Confederacy, increasingly surrounded culturally and physically by European culture, was being whittled at. The fact that among the Iroquois, legitimacy was extended from the mother by the fact of birth rather than from the father through a fact of marriage, was repeatedly used by New York as proof of the degenerate moral influence of tribal custom. The moral and social condition [on the Tonawanda reservation] is not so degraded as the Onondagas, nor as civilized as that of the Tuscaroras. There are but few who are regularly married and separations are frequent. When separations occur the children go with the mother and take her name. (Legislature 53)And Marriage ceremonies among them have been in the past the exception rather than the rule. The morals of the women in too many cases are bad. The trouble here is as with all the other tribes of the State, that marriage simply consists in intercourse for a shorter or longer period, as inclination suggests, and then separation. The offspring of such unions are legitimate and inherit from their parents, and this custom is indirectly sanctioned by the laws of the State. The low standard of morality existing seems directly and principally traceable to this Indian custom of marriage. The excuse for such unions is the 'Indian custom.' . . . The application to these people of the laws of the State regulating marriage and divorce is the only way to correct the evil. (Legislature 66)If the State could change legitimacy from the mother's to the father's line, it would at one blow de-legitimize all Iroquois children of traditional unions – thereby disrupting the Iroquois marriage system, the very fabric of the interlocking clans which made one people of Six Nations. (Turner 53-55) The Indians needed to be pruned and replanted before they could become pillars of the dominant social order. In the early to mid 19th century, New York had set up a system of reservation schools for just this purpose, so that By the 1840's there was . . . a clear design to 'make over' the Indians. This makeover did not consist simply of Albany's aim to extend its jurisdiction over the Indians and the Indians' lands. In 1846 the New York State Legislature enacted a law providing for school buildings and annual appropriations for the education of American Indians on four of the reservations . . . state-administered schools were specifically established . . in 1848 . .. 1855 . .. 1857 . .. 1875. One of the first enactments relating to American Indian education, passed in 1856, was entitled 'An Act to facilitate education and civilization among the Indians residing within this state.' (Hauptman 219)They would become productive at "The Thomas Asylum for Orphans, upon the Cattaraugus reservation . . . here are about one hundred and ten children from the ages of three to sixteen years. In addition to their school work the boys are taught farming and the girls sewing and housekeeping." (Legislature 60) Members of the League had long resisted white schooling for their children. In 1744, Virginia commissioners asked leaders of the Iroquois to send a few of their young men to a college in Williamsburg. They refused, responding in part that "the Indians are not inclined to give their Children Learning. We allow it to be good, and thank you for your Invitation; but our customs differing from yourse, you will be so good as to excuse us." Prior experience with sending children to white schools had shown them that "when they came back to us, they were bad Runners, ignorant of every means of living in the Woods, unable to bear either cold or hunger." (Johansen 86) New York’s attempt to establish schools was similarly resisted by Indian parents more than a century later, when The progress of Indian children, in matters educational and moral, is greatly retarded owing to their home influence. The majority of the Indians on this [Onondaga] reservation are unfriendly to the schools and as a result they do much to discourage the children in attending. The evidence of Superintendent Newman clearly establishes the existence of this unfriendly feeling among Indians. He testified that 'With six or more thousand acres of land upon the reservation, with not more than two-thirds of it under cultivation of any kind, we were unable to procure a site; with the title of all this land in the Indian council, we were unable to procure form the council an acre of land upon which there could be a school-house built.' (Legislature 41-42).Superintendent of Indian schools on the Tonawanda Reservation Paxton aims more directly at the heartwood: the majority "pagan" Indians - those maintaining traditional practices - when he says that "The influence of the pagan Indians is keenly felt against the schools here as elsewhere, and the home life of the children tends to undo much that is accomplished for their good during the day at school." The attendance rate at most government reservation schools was less than ¼ of the school-age population. Another reason for the failures of the government schools is noted elsewhere in the report, in that "Here [on the reservations of the Senecas], as upon most of the reservations, the wages paid are too low to secure the most suitable teachers. Persons of experience and good judgment are needed in these schools." (Legislature 60) Despite this obvious weakness in the government reservation schools, in every other passage in which the Legislature criticized the slow progress of Iroquois education it blamed Indian family resistance, not inadequate schools. A barrier to successfully assimilating the Iroquois was their native tongue. The Legislative report comments that on the St. Regis reservation "The Indians cannot understand much English. All the church-books as well as the singing-books are written in Indian; their singing is conducted in the Indian language, and the records of the nation are kept in Indian." (Legislature 56) As if hoping to reverse in a moment the habit of a thousand generations, reservation schools required children to speak only English. Reservations could obviously derive some benefits from learning about the white world around them. When given good facilities and non-coercive teachers - that is, teachers who let them remain Iroquois - parents lined up to have their children schooled. Such patient instruction was provide by the Quaker school. The Assembly report praised their success as educators, but decried them for failing to remove children from their culture. Even though, as in government schools, "The rule forbidding the children to use the Indian language is carefully enforced" and "The girls are instructed in sewing and housework and the boys in farming besides their usual studies," and though these "efforts and labors in their behalf have been productive of great good," still the Quakers seem, perhaps, too well satisfied to set an example and furnish good advice to the Indian, and do not look to it that the example and advice are accepted and followed; are too prone to excuse his faults and too much inclined to give him credit for good intentions in all he does, and to allow him, in all things, to have his own way, and are, at times, unable, and it almost appears unwilling, to consent that the Indian is ever immoral, lazy and worthless, and needs, in addition to kindness, forbearance and friendship, sometimes a little wholesome correction and coercion. Judging from this standpoint and measured by results, their work now for nearly ninety years is regarded by some as not as satisfactory as it might have been if they had mingled with their zeal and compassion and disinterestedness an occasional word of reproof, or rule of restraint, or law of compulsion. (Legislature 62)Without question, the dominant culture of New York saw "the Indian" as a vanishing people. For their own "good" they must be assimilated, made non-Indian as soon as possible. Subduing their traditions and the power of the pagan chiefs entailed also splitting up "in severalty" (into individually owned plots) the communal property of the reservations. The need for "severalty" of Iroquois property was the frequent mantra of the Legislative report, suggesting a severing not only of parcels from the communal territory, but of individuals from the communal heritage. Indians, like forests recast as timber, would become part of the grid, no longer ecologically interconnected to one another. The canopy of the "Long House" would be pierced, the succession would be broken, the White Pine would no longer dominate its hereditary land. The chiefs themselves must be broken. "Politically, these Indians . . . have two parties, pagan and Christian. The former is largely in the majority, and governs the tribe, as on nearly all the other reservations." (Legislature 52) Now, "If the government by chiefs among the Indians could be destroyed, and they could hold their lands in severalty, and be citizens, there is not a doubt but in a very few years they would be thoroughly respectable and enterprising people, and an honor to that part of the county where they live." (Legislature 48) Subduing paganism and destroying the power of the pagan chiefs were now critical to sustaining the drive to industrialization. It was the pagan government that sought recovery of land illegally taken in prior decades. The railroad shaped Indian policy within the state of New York from 1850 to 1875. . . Four days after the surrender at Appomatox [April 9, 1865], Thomas Wistar of the Society of Friends reported that the railroads, which were now crisscrossing the Allegany Reservation, had six stations on Seneca lands and that fifty acres of tribal lands were being used by the railroads . . . [which] led to a contemporary dispute, that was only resolved by a congressional act in November 1990. (Hauptman 217-218)For decades, even centuries, Christian missions had appealed to the Iroquois through both kindness and coercion, opposing a forest paganism which on one hand experienced spiritual forces within natural phenomena but "Yet . . . seem[ed] not only to acknowledge a deity, but even to worship him in unity and spirit." (Bertram 79) Sylvester understood that "Every object in nature was spiritualized by him, while over all things in dim and shadowy majesty, ruled the one Great Spirit, the supreme object of his fear and adoration, whom he called Ha-wen-ne-ya." (22) For missionaries, this presented a problem. The ignorant savages whom they were supposed to enlighten seemed already to share a common faith with them, a belief in a supreme being. It was necessary to recast the Indian religion enough to separate it from their own - easy enough to do to a culture that lived under the spell of nature and not that of the Protestant grid. That the Indian, without the aid of revelation, should have arrived at a fixed belief in the existence of one Supreme Being, has ever been matter of surprise and admiration. In the existence of the Great Spirit, an invisible but ever-present Deity, the universal red race believed. (Morgan 154)Yet the Indian's God obviously needed fixing, since its servants "did not escape the spell of superstition, which resulted from his imperfect knowledge of the Deity." (Morgan 154) Nevertheless, such a fortuitous confirmation of Christian monotheism by even these benighted forest "children" merited acknowledgement. "Such is the power of truth over the human mind, and the harmony of all truth, that the Indian, without the power of logic, reached some of the most important conclusions of philosophy, and drew down from heaven some of the highest truths of revelation," Morgan allowed. (155-156) But the best way to avoid granting self-revelation to the Iroquois was to deny their claim to an original forest-born supreme being altogether – The 'Great Spirit,' so popularly and poetically known as the god of the red man, . . . [is] but their ready conception of the white man's God . . . This is evident from a careful study of their past as gleaned from the numerous myths of their prehistoric existence. It may be true that many of the first missionaries found them in possession of such ideas, but the Indians had long been in contact with white men from whom those ideas were obtained. (Smith 53)– despite the Iroquois resistance to most aspects of white culture, especially at the time of original contact. Such a stretch made it much easier for New York's evangelistic elite to justify tearing down a culture, once its members were stripped of "real" spirituality. And it was also easier to tear down the forests if they were considered to be without spirit. For millennia people in all parts of the world - including the ancestors of New York's Protestant elite - held the tree to be the most sacred of objects. (Davies 36-41) The tree held metaphorical meanings, and in its great longevity it united generations and communities just as it did the Confederacy of the Law of the Great White Pine. European cathedrals were richly decorated with tree symbolism. The tree was God's talisman in the Garden of Eden, and it was on a symbolic "Tree of Life" – a wooden cross – that Christ ascended to the world of spirit. Writing in 1850, Susan Fenimore Cooper revealed our humanity reflected in trees: as patriarchs, she said, growing among their brethren, their companions. (202-218) Feelings of spirituality and kinship with trees are not inventions; they lie deeply within us all. The Kama Sutra refers to intimate embraces with a lover as if they were the acts of climbing or entwining about a tree. But as New York knew, our feelings of connection with trees could be overcome. Just as a Civil War soldier discovered that after he had destroyed one of his fellows on the battle lines, it was much easier to kill the second or third; so industrialization turned mass harvesting of "timber" into a simple habit, meriting no considerations beyond technical ones. In fact, both soldiering and logging had much in common: both were lethally dangerous, requiring muscular use of dangerous implements and a delight in risk-taking; both were most frequently performed by men who lacked the influence of a complete community; both involved carefully directed large-scale destruction. With the Iroquois stripped – in the eyes of New York's 1889 assembly – of his morality, maturity, legitimacy, intelligence, even his God – it was time to stop tolerating this heart of difference in their midst. The Special Committee to Investigate the Indian Problem recommended that all tribal lands should be divided amongst their residents in a solution that "ought not to be limited . . . but should comprise a radical uprooting of the whole tribal system" (78) and that "These Indian people . . . should now be educated to be men, not Indians." They presented invariably supporting testimony from New York and United States Indian agents, and the white teachers and physicians of Indians, at length. No word from the pagan chiefs, who constituted the appointed representatives of the majority of Iroquois, and no word from a Quaker, was presented. The agents said that Of course the only question that is vital is, "Is the Indian worth saving?" If he is susceptible to civilization and education, he is worth saving; if he is a wild beast he can never be civilized . . . They . . . should be made to obey the laws of the State of New York with reference to marriage. . . . The Indian will never be civilized until he ceases to be a communist. This tribal relationship is the bane of civilization, the strongest ally of savagery. (Legislature 68 - 69)From the time they first began colonizing North America, European political and religious leaders had feared, and sought to subdue, the forest and its inhabitants. The Industrial Revolution re-awakened evangelical Protestantism to a new ethic of work, wealth, wage labor, and capitalist agrarianism, cutting broad swathes through the heart of the forest, through the heart of Iroquoia in New York. In 1889, the number of Iroquois in New York had been reduced to 5,500. (Legislature 158) In 1995, they numbered 16,754, and "Every Iroquois nation except the Cayugas have at least a small foothold in their original territories." (Iroquois) On July 22, 1996, Leon Shenandoah, the chief of chiefs of the Six Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy, died at the age of 81. According to his obituary in the New York Times, his religious convictions, including a belief in a supreme being, "resembled the tenets of Christianity in some ways." In 1987, he and the other chiefs decreed that Fourth of July fireworks would no longer be sold from roadside stands. While providing sanctuary in 1975 for fugitive Indian leader Dennis Banks, Mr. Shenandoah declared of his people that "We are a separate nation and intend to govern our affairs without outside interference." (Stout) Where hayfields had replaced forests in late 19th
century New York, now rise suburban landscapes intentionally repopulated
with trees by their inhabitants. There is something they seem to like about
trees.
- Rob Weinberg (robw@spindrift.org)
Works CitedBartram, John. Observations on the inhabitants . . . 1751. Ann Arbor : Books on Demand, 1996Clinton, DeWitt. A Discourse Delivered Before the New York Historical Society at their Anniversary Meeting, 6th December 1811. New York: New York historical society, 1811-59 Cooper, Susan Fenimore. Rural Hours by a Lady. New York: George Putnam, 1850 Davies, Douglas. "The Evocative Symbolism of Trees" in The Iconography of Landscape, ed. D. Cosgrove and S. Daniels (Cambridge, n.d.), pp. 32-82. Hauptman, Laurence. M. Conspiracy of Interests - Iroquois Dispossession and the Rise of New York State. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1999 Iroquois Population in 1995 <http://www.ratical.com/many_worlds/6Nations/population95.html> Johansen, Bruce E. Forgotten Founders. Ipswich, Mass: Gambit Inc., 1982 Johnson, Paul E. A Shopkeeper's Millenium - Society and Revivals in Rochester, New York, 1815-1837. New York: Hill and Wang, 1978 Legislature of the State of New York. Report of Special Committee to Investigate the Indian Problem of the State of New York. Albany: The Troy Press Company, printers, 1889 McIntosh, R. P., 1962. "The Forest Cover of the Catskill Mountain Region, New York, as indicated by land survey records." American Midland Naturalist 68: 409-423. Morgan, Lewis Henry. League of the Iroquois. 1851. New York: Corinth Books, 1962 Nelson, Robert H. "The religion of forestry: Scientific management." Journal of Forestry 97 (11): 4-8 Porter, Robert P. Extra Census Bulletin - Indians - The Six Nations of New York. Washington, D.C.: United States Printing Office, 1892 Robinson, G. The Forest and the Trees. Covelo, CA: Island Press, 1988 Smith, Erminnie A. Myths of the Iroquois. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1883 Stout, David. "Leon Shenandoah, 81, Leader Of the Iroquois Confederacy." New York Times 23 Jul. 1996: B7 Sylvester, Nathaniel Bartlett: Historical Sketches of Northern New York and the Adirondack Wilderness: including Traditions of the Indians, Early Explorers, pioneer Settlers, Hermit Hunters, &c. Troy, N.Y.: William H. Young, 1877 Turner, Orsamus. Pioneer History of the Holland Purchase. Buffalo: Thomas Jewett and Co., 1849 Valtiala, Kaarle-Huhani (Nalle). James Fenimore Cooper's Landscapes in the Leather-Stocking Series and Other Forest Tales. Helsinki: Academia Scientiarum Fennica, 1998 Wallace, Paul A. W. The White Roots of Peace. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1946 Weatherford, Jack. Indian Givers. New York: Fawcett Columbine,
1988
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