The Haudenosaunee Confederacy

Kelly  0:00  
This is Unsung History, the podcast where we discuss people and events in American history that haven't always received a lot of attention. I'm your host, Kelly Therese Pollock. I'll start each episode with a brief introduction to the topic, and then talk to someone who knows a lot more than I do. Be sure to subscribe to Unsung History on your favorite podcasting app, so you never miss an episode. And please, tell your friends, family, neighbors, colleagues, maybe even strangers to listen too. Before Europeans arrived in North America, five Indigenous nations around what would later become New York State, had come together to form the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, "the people of the long house." When the Europeans arrived, the French called them the Iroquois Confederacy, and the English called them the League of Five Nations. Those five nations were the Mohawks, Oneidas, Onondagas, Cayugas, and Senecas. In 1722, the Tuscarora, who had been displaced from their homes in North Carolina and Virginia, by English colonists, joined the Confederacy as the sixth nation, having been sponsored by the Oneida. In addition to their individual national councils, a grand council, made up of representatives from each nation, oversees common decision making. On September 16, 1987, the United States Senate recognized the influence of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy on the US Constitution, and a resolution acknowledging that the principles of the Iroquois Confederacy were incorporated into the US Constitution, and stating, "The original framers of the Constitution, including most notably George Washington and Benjamin Franklin, are known to have greatly admired the concepts, principles, and governmental practices of the Six Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy." Today, we're going to look at the relationship between the Haudenosaunee and the United States through the stories of four individuals: Red Jacket, Ely S. Parker, Harriet Maxwell Converse, and Arthur C. Parker. Red Jacket was born into the Wolf Clan of the Seneca, sometime around 1758, in the Finger Lakes region of what is now New York State. He went by several different names during his life, the oldest of which historians have found is Otetiani, meaning something like always ready. When the American Revolution began, Otetiani argued for non intervention on the part of the Haudenosaunee. The British, however, appealed to their Iroquois allies, both with rhetoric and with money to join their side, and the Mohawks, Cayugas, Senecas and the Onondaga had signed on. Although Otetiani was a reluctant warrior, and widely considered a coward, the Haudenosaunee still appreciated his political abilities, and elected him as a chief. A few British officers gave him an officer's jacket in honor of his service to them, and they dubbed him Red Jacket, a name that would stick for the rest of his life. Red Jacket, who became known for his oratorical skills, led a delegation of 50 Haudenosaunee leaders to Philadelphia, which was then the US Capitol, where George Washington greeted them. At the end of the summit, Washington presented Red Jacket with a peace medal, that he would prize and regularly display throughout his life. Red Jacket continued to represent his people, speaking often in diplomatic summits and councils, and his speeches were often reprinted in New York newspapers. In one famous speech in 1805, Red Jacket responded to a proposed Baptist mission, asking why Haudenosaunee should follow white people's religion, when the white people themselves did not even agree on how to worship, bitterly complaining, "You have our country, but are not satisfied. Now, you want to force your religion upon us."  Red Jacket died in Buffalo in 1830. In 1884, his body was reinterred by the Buffalo Historical Society in a lavish ceremony, at which a statue for him was unveiled. Among the speeches at the memorial ceremony, was one given by Ely S. Parker, a nephew of Red Jacket. Ely Parker was born on the Tonawanda Reservation in Indian Falls, New York, in 1828, the sixth of seven children born to Elizabeth and William Parker, who were both from prominent Seneca families. Parker studied law, but was not permitted to take the bar examination, because he was not a US citizen. So he instead became a civil engineer after studying at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York. During the Civil War, Parker served as an Army engineer, a position he obtained via his acquaintance with Ulysses S. Grant. Later, Parker was appointed to be Grant's Military Secretary. In that role, Parker helped draft the surrender documents at Appomattox. After Grant was elected president, he appointed Parker to be the first Native American Commissioner of Indian Affairs in 1869. Parker died in poverty in 1895, survived by his wife, and also by his good friend, Harriet Maxwell Converse. Harriet Maxwell was born in 1836, in Elmira, New York. Although she had no Native ancestry, both her grandfather and father had been ritually adopted by the Seneca Nation. Harriet, who inherited wealth from both her father and from her first husband, married a wealthy musician named Frank Converse, who was known as the father of the banjo. The couple, who had no kids, traveled extensively. Harriet Maxwell Converse met Ely Parker in 1881, when they were both living in New York City, and with Parker's assistance, she began to research the Haudenosaunee, eventually traveling to reservations to collect wampum belts and many other artifacts. Converse also advocated for the Seneca people, with the state government and with the federal government, for instance, traveling to Albany to help defeat the Whipple Bill, which would have forced allotment of communal land. In 1884, the Seneca Snipe Clan adopted Converse. She was sponsored by Ely's sister, Carolyn Parker Mount Pleasant. In September of 1891, the Haudenosaunee named Converse a league chief, the first white woman to receive the honorary title. Converse died in 1903. Her last written work, "Myths and Legends of the New York State Iroquois," was published after her death, edited by Ely Parker's grandnephew, Arthur C. Parker. Arthur Parker was born on the Cattaraugus Seneca Reservation in 1881, to a white mother and a half Seneca father, whose own father had been an influential Seneca leader. Because the Seneca are a matrilineal nation, Parker did not hold birthright membership as a Seneca, but he was adopted into the Bear Clan in 1903, and given the name "Gawaso Wanneh," meaning big snowflake. Anthropologist Frederick Ward Putnam invited Parker to intern at the American Museum of Natural History In 1899. Within a few years he had joined a dig on the Cattaraugus reservation, an important step in his professional career, the one that was not welcome among the Seneca still living on the reservation. Parker was offered the opportunity to study for a PhD in anthropology at Columbia University, under Franz Boas, but chose instead to continue museum work. In 1906, Parker became the first archaeologist at the New York State Museum, giving himself the title New York State Archaeologist. After co founding the Society of American Indians, Parker served as its first secretary, and then as its president, from 1914 to 1915. Parker was appointed to the New York State Draft Commission, after the United States entered World War I in 1917, and he encouraged Haudenosaunee men to enlist in the draft, using the opportunity to highlight the patriotism of the Haudenosaunee. From 1929 to 1945, Parker served as director of the Rochester Museum, during which time he published "A Manual for History Museums," and became one of the United States premier museologists, a title he invented. Parker died in 1955. Joining me now is Dr. John C. Winters, Assistant Professor of History at the University of Southern Mississippi, and author of, "The Amazing Iroquois and the Invention of the Empire State."

Hi, John, thanks so much for speaking with me today.

Dr. John C. Winters  12:12  
Thank you for having me on. It's a pleasure to be here.

Kelly  12:14  
Yes, I would love to hear how you were inspired to write this book. Why this topic and how you kind of got into this?

Dr. John C. Winters  12:22  
Sure. So this book actually began as an entirely different project. I had started thinking about the Iroquois and thinking about ideas about empire and what it meant for colonial powers to meet Indigenous power and what happens when the two of those things meet. And then those definitions of who the other person is shifts and changes and warps over time. So I was thinking about the Iroquois, long thought about the Iroquois, a number of the formative books that got me interested in Indigenous history were about the Iroquois. So it seemed very natural to me at the time. And so this project actually began as a as an exploration of the origins of Iroquoian empire. But as I got further and further into that project, I realized that Francis Jennings had already answered all of those questions that I was trying to find an answer to. But, one thing that I did encounter in my research is that I kept coming across the same names over and over and over again. If I'm looking at the anthropological record, if I'm looking at historians, if I'm looking at the most prominent political players in the Revolutionary Era, I'm seeing Red Jacket, I'm seeing Ely Parker, I'm seeing Arthur Parker, I'm seeing Harriet Converse and her network of people. And I realized that they are, for some reason looming, far larger than than anyone else I was I was finding. So I turned to them. And I tried to figure out exactly why they were so interested in this question of empire and why they were so interested in the Iroquois and why they seem to be these ubiquitous names in the people who were studying, or at least talking publicly about the Iroquois. And then I realized, here's the dissertation that, you know, the thing that turned into the book was, was these people who were asking the same questions that I was, asking the same questions, for instance, Jennings was, just 100 plus years earlier. So they they became the subject of this book.

Kelly  14:32  
So you started to mention kind of the the sources, the types of sources that you're looking at. I wonder if you could talk about that a little bit. You know, I know that's always an interesting tension when you're thinking about Indigenous history is who has written this history? Where are these sources coming from? What what perspective are they and that's part of what you're dealing with in this book, as you know, who is framing our conception of the Iroquois? So I wonder if you could talk a little bit about the sources you used, and how that in and of itself is sort of part of the topic we're looking at here.

Dr. John C. Winters  15:09  
Sure. So this was just really changed depending on the chapter. If there's any unifying and a theme with the sources that are that are in this book is that each of the people that I'm looking at, Red Jacket, Ely Parker, Harriet Maxwell Converse and Arthur C. Parker, Ely Parker's nephew, is that they were all, these all famous people. So they actually have a fairly extensive written record either about them or produced by them. So with Red Jacket, we're talking about a RevolutionaryEra, he passed away and in 1830, so it's a much more diplomatic record. All of his speeches are catalogued, and there are ample sort of correspondents written about meeting with Red Jacket, former federal Indian agents and state agents from New York and Pennsylvania are meeting with Red Jacket and then reporting back to the governor, or reporting back to the Superintendent of Indian Affairs, and are talking about Red Jacket. So a lot of this in the early years is very diplomatic. But that diplomacy kind of changes over the course of his life because at a certain point, his speeches become less about diplomacy, and they become much more about entertainment and literature. And this new kind of new phenomenon of the eloquent Indian took shape. So we begin to find Red Jacket manifest in newspapers and literary journals and people commenting on the speeches of Red Jacket and his eloquence and all these different things. But the others, with Ely Parker, he's, he was one of Ulysses S. Grant's, assistants. He was a secretary during the Civil War. He was at the courthouse at Appomattox. He's the one who drafted the terms of surrender that was handed to Robert E.Lee. So his correspondence and his a federal record and his he's an extremely public figure. So with him, it was actually a lot easier, I think, to find them than some of the other ones because he is everywhere in newspapers, and he's everywhere in federal record, and he has his own voluminous correspondence. So we really, we can really find a really, we have a really good idea of who Ely Parker was through through all of those records. Ely Parker also was working in and was thinking about the Haudenosaunee, the Iroquois, the Haudenosaunee, and was framing his idea of Iroquois exceptionalism. Also in an age when newspapers tended to repeat themselves, production capacity exploded by the mid to late 19th century. So he also had this added benefit of being nearly everywhere in newspapers as they were just constantly reprinting and repeating his words and his language and stories about him.  You couldn't avoid him. You always knew about either Ely Parker, Grant's Indian Secretary, however the press decided to talk about him. So he was he was really everywhere. Harriet Converse very, very good friend of Ely Parker, was eventually adopted into the Seneca Snipe Clan by Ely Parker's sister or at least sponsored by Ely Parker's sister, enjoying the same kind of fame. She was in newspapers all the time, she was also a very accomplished poet. So she was a fairly well known commodity amongst the white New York population, as well as in literary circles. So her story space is quite similar. She has pretty extensive correspondence, but not all of it was kept. So it's more about other collections, other people that have received Converse's correspondence and have responded to that on that correspondence, but Converse's letters themselves are, are surprisingly thin. So it's really about relying on other people who are talking about Converse who can give us a direct insight into how and who she's actually communicating with. But beyond that, she wrote a pretty decent amount in newspapers. She was representing Iroquoian politics and she was a chosen representative of Iroquoian leadership to represent them in federal court, and to the United States Senate, and to think about, you know, to be sort of this person who is the face of Iroquois country to federal Indian agents. So she is frequently in newspapers and she's frequently talking to people about politics. So that's, that's really kind of a through line with her. And with Arthur Parker, he he kept everything he ever wrote. He also published extensively, I mean dozens and dozens of articles in scholarly journals. He was also the director of two major museums in New York state. So his correspondence there is everything from the extremely dry day to day stuff about the construction of an exhibition to the really big mission statement, reformation of mission, museum mission statements, kind of stuff that you find in those institutions. So the sources, it really depends on it really depends on the chapter. But I had kind of an advantage in the fact that all all four of them were quite famous in their day. So while I was looking, you really didn't have to look super far to find them and to hear their voices.

Kelly  20:45  
So this is also a story in some ways of history of material objects. So one of the most important of those, of course, is Red Jacket's Peace Medal. So I wonder if you could talk through the Peace Medal, the significance of it, both to Red Jacket at the time, but then the continuing significance of it?

Dr. John C. Winters  21:06  
Yes, the Peace Medal is is the cover image of the book. It is also, you can sort of imagine it as almost the book ends to "The Amazing Iroquois." It was really began as as a federal as the United States as an American federal project. When George Washington was elected president in 1789, he had this very clear vision about federalizing Indian policy, the future of the United States, our westward expansion, our territorial growth, all of these things. A really important aspect of how the United States is going to grow into the future is rooted in Indian Country. He had a pretty clear idea of what this would actually look like. And part of this was the creation of these peace medals. It was an old diplomatic reality. European empires, the French, the British, Spanish, were borrowing from their own historic medieval precedent in giving these metals, right, as diplomatic objects to foreign powers. So when the United States came into being, when Washington's administration is thinking about how to treat with Native peoples from across a continent, they immediately fell into lockstep with their with their forebears, and they started to produce these peace medals. Well, Washington decided to take sort of a different tack, because the original peace medal had the image of Columbia on it. He decided to put himself on the front an image of himself on the front of the peace medal and began to distribute those into Indian country. And of course, the idea being if an Indigenous leader or faith leader is carrying these objects, the word of the federal government will spread far beyond where the human being be it Indigenous agent, a trader, a soldier, whatever, be able to go and it can penetrate further into Indian country than the federal government itself, might be able to. Red Jacket, when he receives one of these medals in Philadelphia in 1792, however, is not alone in receiving one of these medals. We know lots of these were produced artifacts, some of  Red Jacket's contemporaries said they never let it go. They never put it down. They really you know, they carried these medals with them because it was a symbol. It was a promise on the part of the Washington administration to treat with the Iroquois fairly and evenly. Of course, that was not ultimately the case, as we know from federal Indian policy, as well as New York and and Pennsylvania Indian policy. However, it was a symbol of this promise and that promise was extremely important. Red Jacket took it to a different level because he was always a proponent of peace, but he was never one to shy away from deeply criticizing federal Indian agents as well as the states for their predatory policies, for violating treaty rights. He was always he was selected by the Senecas, as well as the Iroquois right the Six Nations the League of Nations to represent their political interests and to be their spokesperson, right, one of their foremost diplomats who was always basically on call to treat with the United States. And every single time that he would meet with a federal official during and well after Washington's administration, he would be wearing this peace medal, and it was constantly a reminder of the promises that George Washington had made. It was a reminder of the treaty obligations that the United States had promised to fulfill and to honor but ultimately did not in the long run, and it was this call for this for the US to recognize the morality of the treaty violations that had occurred over these years and Red Jacket was doing this over decades. So he's never appearing in public without this peace medal. He's identifying and he's shaping and he's through his speeches and his coastal tours at the end of his life. He's traveling from New England, all the way to the south in the Carolinas speaking to sold out audiences, in the Seneca language, wearing this peace medal, talking about what Haudenosaunee sovereignty means and what and why the United States has failed in their obligations to the Iroquoian Empire and to this to this Indigenous political entity. So Red Jacket really kind of shapes why this thing has power. In a way a modern scholars talk about decolonization, and we talk about Indigenous perspectives in either white spaces or deconstructing those narratives where white erasure has made Indigenous voices removed or silenced, or siloed, in one of these ways. Red Jacket is really, he's really doing this at the time, he's reclaiming this objects that was supposed to be an expression of federal power, and he's actually transforming it into an object of Indigenous power, because it's this permanent reminder of the federal government's obligations to a fellow sovereign and powerful nation. And over time, after Red Jacket passes away, it moves back into Seneca country. Eventually it ends up in the hands of Ely Parker, who, when he's first elected chief, and when he goes to Washington, DC in the middle of the Era of Indian Removal in the 1830s and 1840s, and he's representing the Senecas. He's representing his people. He's wearing of course, Red Jacket's Peace Medal, and it's the first thing he does in his first mission to Washington, DC, is bear this memory of Red Jacket with him to the federal government. Eventually the the peace medal is sold after Ely Parker passes away. It's sold to a museum, unfortunately, the financial constraints of his wife and his pension didn't allow her to, to belong to it anymore. She was forced to sell some of these objects. Eventually, it then moved into the Buffalo History Museum, where it set in a prominent way right, but it basically sat on the shelf more or less gathering dust and was this remnant right. This Red Jacket Peace Medal was a remnant of George Washington's time. And it's almost as if, in those exhibitions, the Red Jacket was a part of, of that history, of course, because it's called Red Jacket's Peace Medal. He's not the only one who received one of these, of course, but Red Jacket's memory and his influence and his infusion of indigeneity into this object had been, it's kind of faded into the background, until the 21st century, when the Seneca Iroquois National Museum, the Onohsagwe: de Cultural Center repatriated the peace medal, and through speeches and the president of the Seneca Nation gave a speech to this effect, and showcased how this object, once it was repatriated to the museum, still has this political power, still has this capacity and this ability to showcase an identity and Iroquoian, or at least the Seneca identity. Right. And it is this piece of national history that had been that had been taken and is but has now come back home. So the peace medal was really the bookend for this, it talks about empire, but it also wraps up in a museum in one of his very public spaces and shows just how powerful that legacy of the infusion of Red Jacket's and the rest of the generations, this story of Iroquois exceptionalism and the amazing Iroquois into into that history and how important that was.

Kelly  29:01  
So there is throughout this story, this tension between being a sovereign nation, as we're talking about the peace medal is because this is you know, the Federal US federal government with a sovereign nation, but then also trying to be sort of as American as possible, trying to be the, you know, in sort of, we see this with Ely Parker, of course, working with Grant, wanting to assimilate to fit in and later, you know, with the draft, getting the Iroquois to enroll in the draft to fight for Americans, you know, but there's this sort of constant tension. Are these patriotic Americans? Are they quintessential examples of what America becomes? You know, this is the model on which the America is founded, but also being a sovereign nation wanting their own sovereignty, wanting these treaties to be upheld. And this is not of course, unusual in Indigenous history. But I wonder if you could talk a little bit about this tension that's happening, the ways that they're working through it, how they might not all agree. There's of course not a sort of single Iroquois or Seneca vision of what that should look like.

Dr. John C. Winters  30:12  
Sure, yes. It's, it's remarkable tension and and it persists right for for this is 200 years, the scope, that tension certainly persists. But that tension is also their power. There is some ambiguity here, particularly with somebody like Ely Parker, who one, was an assimilationist. He thought the future of the Iroquois, he thought the future of Indian country, from coast to coast was to integrate in some way, to assimilate with white American culture with aspects of colonial culture. He was certainly not against keeping aspects of Indigenous culture. He himself did. His family, actually more than him, became representatives of the Iroquois, representatives of the Haudenosaunee to the federal government, right. So they became, his family became the primary spokesmen for Iroquoian rights and Iroquoian sovereignty. But he represents that tension in a really big way. But that was also part of his power, because he, while he was aiming to be accepted into white society, he held, you know, professionally, he held a number of federal positions. He was France's Military Secretary. But he was also the first Indigenous Commissioner of Indian Affairs. Today, it's the Bureau of Indian Affairs. He was he was its first Indigenous commissioner. And so he was out west. And he was dealing with the diplomacy between the federal government and western Indigenous nations during the Indian wars of the 1870s. He eventually moved away from his home reservation in Tonawanda. in New York, moved to New York City. His neighbor was was Harriet Maxwell Converse, and he was very, very interested in being accepted, being embraced and integrating into white, elite white society in ways that would not only help his career, but would help him personally for a myriad of other reasons. But that was also the very reason why white audience listened to him, that he represented two things in these moments. Regardless of whether or not the Seneca were actually all that interested in keeping him on board as a spokesman for the Haudenosaunee, which formally they didn't really. He still claimed to speak for them, but they basically turned to his family members, the people who stayed on the reservations, who stayed to defend their people, did not flee to New York City and did not flee to hold all of these, you know, high level federal positions and try to make, try to integrate into white society. But he was constantly present at Iroquoian events, at Iroquois corn festivals. He was forever talking about indigeneity and forever talking about why it was so important for the federal government to treat with Indian people on their own terms and why fairness in Indian diplomacy was such an important part of America's future. And because of his heritage, because he was actually a chief of the Seneca Indian, that's a title he never really, he never really lost until he had passed away. White audience were seeing him, were seeing his use of the peace medal, were seeing his brand of Indian assimilation mixed with white acceptance as something authentic, because they saw this Indian chief speaking in ways and speaking to white audiences in white spaces that they understood, inherently and they were, therefore more of a mind to listen to these conversations. So funnily enough, his the most important part of his career was actually when he retires. Right? He's this very famous person for much of his life, but when he retires, here's where he really begins to infuse Iroquoian stories into the public. He's giving speeches at Civil War dedications. One of them is the Tammany Regiment from New Jersey. And so he speaks to this historic Indian figure of Tammany, but ties it not only to Indian rights, but also to Iroquoian precedent. He also wants to reclaim a pretty sizable section of downtown Philadelphia, because of a treaty signed with William Penn's sons a few 100 years earlier. So he's making these overtures and he's making these efforts to reclaim aspects of Iroquoian identity and sovereignty in these big splashy public waves. And people are willing to listen and they're watching this all go and they say, "Whoa, there must be something here, right? Because here's an assimilated Indian. Here's a model stand up American. Oh, yeah, he also happens to be Iroquoian. And he's saying these things. They must matter." 

Kelly  35:23  
So,I want to talk about Harriet Maxwell Converse. She is a fascinating figure. And it's really interesting. You know, we're in the midst of this few years where there's constantly being pretendians exposed, as you know, actually white people and, you know, to think about what it meant back then for a white woman, she's a white woman, she's has in no way blood related to the Iroquois, but to be adopted to be considered sort of a representative of them, while also being you know, as you point out, really kind of harmful in her in a lot of her actions, but in a way that perhaps wasn't considered harmful at the time. So I wonder if you could tease out a little bit what what's going on with her? How do we think about her in the context of her own life, which might be very different than the way she would be viewed today?

Dr. John C. Winters  36:17  
Yeah, you're absolutely right. Today, she's actually a pretty dark figure in the story. She she's a salvage ethnographer. That is her, rather that was her entree into being interested in the Iroquois. Her father and grandfather were Indian traders in upstate New York. So they worked at these facilities that was that were the primary economic contact points between New York City merchants and then in an Indian country, but her interest in the Iroquois really comes from collecting. She is one of this group of salvage ethnographers, people who made their living, buying, selling trading objects of Indigenous material culture, often by dubious means. Theft is not a small part of salvage ethnography for many salvage ethnographers. And the end result of all of this collecting, and she really ran this ethnography trading empire out of her townhome, turn into museum in New York City. And the end result of all of that trading, right is selling either to the highest bidder, private collectors or museums who put these things on display to study what are supposed to be these quote, unquote, vanished Indian cultures, right? It's this massive effort to preserve and that preservation was rooted in, in academics, right was rooted in scholarship. Anthropology was a fairly new academic discipline at a university. Arthur Parker actually turned down an opportunity to become a PhD. He was right at this moment at the turn of the 20th century where it wasn't entirely clear whether anthropology and archeology was going to be a professional field or if it was going to be this more museum, local, kind of kind of career kind of field. So when Congress is when Congress is doing all of this, she's, she's really hard to, she's really hard to like, and she's because the salvage ethnographers, and her in particular, I mean, she, she bought and sold so much Iroquoian material culture and was building museums left and right because of the scale of her collections. She was she was one of these people who's responsible for cultural genocide of Indigenous peoples and flat out, right, hands down, she's absolutely one of these people. She also, however, had this extraordinary talent for public communication and for politicking. Her "in" was not only her interest in the Iroquois, so she was kind of broadly regarded by people who are paying attention to her career as an expert on the Iroquois. This becomes really important when she's adopted into the Seneca Snipe Clan, and her sponsor is Ely Parker's sister. Ely Parker and Harriet Converse were extremely close with one another. At the American Philosophical Society, there's actually a whole corpus of letters back and forth and they are very familiar and they're very loving. They clearly have this very close relationship with with one another. So she had this she had a connection and she had this "in" so when Ely Parker's sister, adopts her, at least sponsors her adoption, she does actually become a member of the Seneca Snipe Clan. Once she becomes in effect, an Iroquois, as you might imagine, the white public are seeing her as this now truly authentic Indian, right. So her her eloquence and her ability to speak to the public and her mastery really of of the mediascape, she was very, very good at creating narratives that the public wanted to listen to, and that would take off and become sort of cannon, public cannon. But once she's once she's in the Iroquois, then realize what an effective tool she could be. I describe her as, as a loose cannon. And that's that's kind of exactly what it was. It was this recognition that she's doing the salvage ethnography which is doing I mean irreparable damage to Iroquois material culture. In fact, she wants to move all of, in the 1890s, Congress wants to move all the wampum belts from the Onondaga Nation Onondaga Nation to the state of New York, and to move ownership of the Iroquois physical material and political history to the ownership of New York State. Right she wants to completely remove material culture from from the Iroquois. But Iroquois leadership are recognizing that, that has given her gravitas amongst the white pop public that is making her an expert. She's already been adopted into the Seneca Snipe Clan, so let's give her these artificial political titles. The highest one being that Converse was given this, again, with it doesn't lacks any power, there's no real, there's no real influence that she carries within the Iroquoian circles, but they give her the title of a league chief, a fake title, but they give her the title of a league chief, which means that she is now a representative of all the Six Nations. With that title, right, anthropologists and people who study what it means for a colonizer to interact with people who have been colonized, but modern day, present day, anthropologists, who work on this, find that these titles are actually pretty motivating. It, it makes a person who is adopted or is given a title, concerned about the fate of the people that they're actually working with. And we see that happen with Converse, despite her efforts to what she thinks as preservation, preservation of Iroquoian history, but the reality is cultural genocide. She is also deeply concerned about the political fate of the Haudenoshaunee, and  ultimately the legacy of the Iroquois. So she turns all of her talents, all of her political ability and all of her influence amongst the American public, she basically turns that authenticity towards the project of swatting away as often as she can, a credit or a federal government who is very interested in imposing not only citizenship, but also allotment on Iroquois country and she does a very effective job of it. And she builds these coalitions of people who are able to either slow down the works in Washington, DC as best they can, or who make a very big and public fight about why it is so important to preserve Iroquoian sovereignty based on past treaties, but also just the fundamental morality, or rather immorality of these federal efforts to either take Iroquois  lands or to allot them and thus destroy the fabric of Iroquoian politics altogether, right through this whole process. So she's this really complicated figure. And she's really, as I mentioned, she was a dark figure in this story, but she becomes this weapon for the Iroquois that is powerful. And despite that, that legacy at the end of her life, she is achieved as a fairly large accusation of permitting or allowing or supporting the sale of alcohol in Iroquois country, which is illegal at the time. And it's got not only a legal element, but also a moral and sort of historic element bound to the sale of alcohol in Iroquois country. And Iroquois  leadership defend her and they go to bat for her like  she's such a valuable tool. She's effectively the spokesman. She's chosen almost as the spokesman of the Iroquois. So she represents these in these really complicated ways where colonization and decolonization meet. But I think she's also a showcase of Haudenosaunee power and political savvy. Right. And it's this long standing through line where, embodied by Congress, she thinks the Iroquois have long gone, she thinks their history is over. She thinks now the point is to preserve as much as we can, because the Iroquois are basically dead, even as she's standing there speaking about the importance of maintaining and respecting Iroquoian sovereignty. She hits at just this moment, at the end of the 19th century where those two things, those two things can coexist in this in these really, really fascinating, complicated, and potentially dangerous ways.

Kelly  45:24  
So I know that you care a lot about public history, have thought about it have taught public history. And so I wonder if we could talk about public history and Arthur Parker and the way that he is not just using public history, but really in a lot of ways sort of creating what public history could be should be in the future and the way he's using that then to talk about his own people, but to talk about Native people more generally. So I wonder if you could talk a little bit about that. You mentioned that he turned down the chance to get a PhD and instead is very much embedded in this museum culture, but not just embedded in it really kind of creating it.

Dr. John C. Winters  46:05  
Yes, yes, he is. He is. He's really a father of, of the Modern History Museum. We see, we see museums today as spaces where scholarship, of course, meets the public. But museums today also have this expectation of being spaces where the public can explore, they can be informed. But there's also this underlying assumption that good museum work is, in and of itself, activist. Museums are trusted institutions. We know from Converse and even Ely Parker's experience, also Arthur Parker's experience, the collecting and the salvage ethnography has done irreparable damage. So what do we do with this stuff in the future? How do we reconcile the fact of a museum's standing collections with its origins and its predatory origins of theft, of sale, of taking advantage basically, of communities of Indigenous communities everywhere. So Arthur Parker is certainly a part of that history. He seeks to build collections, he begins his career as an archaeologist, actually gives himself the title of state archaeologist and creates some of the largest archaeological digs in Iroquois country that had had existed and still exist today. He was using his knowledge because he was born and raised in Iroquois country. He's using his knowledge to find these places where the most fruitful archeological digs can happen. And he has all these connections in Iroquois country that he's basically using to further his own career, and also to build the museum. But behind that are, why he's actually doing these things. He's building his career because he believes very strongly, he is an assimilationist, like his uncle. There's, there's no doubt about it. But he believes, unlike Harriet Converse, that the Iroquois are not vanished. He himself is a living example of this. And he takes very seriously this idea that the Haudenosaunee must be able to speak for themselves, must be able to write their own histories. And those things are fundamentally important to the understanding of New York's own history. He's really kind of this embodiment of Iroquois exceptionalism where he says, "New Yorkers, if you really think that you are the best thing since sliced bread, you must understand that the Iroquois are fundamental to that conception of your own self." So he dedicates his career to this idea. So when he's building these collections at the New York State Museum, yes, he's doing these salvage ethnography things. He's doing these archeological digs. And he's taking so much out of Indian country and putting it onto the shelves of the museum to be studied in these very sterile environments. But he's doing this in order to turn the New York State Museum into a full fledged research institution, something that is not just a cabinet of curiosities, as a lot of museums at the time are, but something that is focused on New York history, something that's focused on local history, something that's focused on community growth, and something that is of ultimately capturing the voice of the Haudenosaunee and exposing why this was so formative and so fundamental in New Yorkers' own conception of self. So he does all of this in these museum spaces, right, so I'm saying he writes manuals, a manual for history museums, which if you read this thing, you will say every single page is like, Oh, yep, yep, absolutely, absolutely. It's just one of these books that have become so rote, and so baked into how museologists today are operating and how they think about their own collections, their own museums and their own strategies for exhibition. Arthur Parker literally wrote the book on modern museums. In addition to that, he was very sensitive and very careful about infusing Indigenous stories and Iroquoian stories into his exhibitions, not in ways that necessarily relied exclusively on outside scholarship, in other words on white scholarship about the Iroquois. But that brought in people from Indian country, from from Seneca from the Senecas, from the other nations of the Haudenosaunee, but brought them into the museum to tell their own stories. And then he would use his platform of the museum to elevate those stories and to make it a permanent fixture of New York culture and, and identity.

Kelly  51:15  
So I really encourage everyone to read this book. I think these stories are just absolutely fascinating in this, you know, it's really kind of a meta story, right about how do we think about history? And how do we think about memory? So how can everybody get a copy of the book?

Dr. John C. Winters  51:32  
You can go to your favorite online retailer. You can go also go to Oxford University Press' own website. They sell copies of it there, and also go to your local bookstore, and ask them to order a copy for you, probably the best way to get this. It's also available on ebook as well, for people who, people who prefer that.

Kelly  51:53  
Is there anything else you wanted to make sure we talked about?

Dr. John C. Winters  51:57  
I'd strongly encourage everyone who has not already been, well, New Yorkers, in particular, because these, these facilities are local to you. Also, people who are visiting upstate New York and visiting these areas that are, that are the lands, and are the sovereign territory of the Haudenosaunee, to visit cultural centers, to visit these museums. I receive so much inspiration, and these cultural centers are doing incredible work not only in elevating voices and stories that have been intentionally silenced by museums and white New Yorkers for centuries at this point, but they really show the importance of these institutions, the importance of these stories. And whenever I visited, I found echoes of everybody from Red Jacket to Arthur C. Parker, embedded in these museums and in these in this museum history. So I strongly encourage people to, of course, read the book to get kind of a an idea of where these museums exist. But also if in your travels, if you're passing by one of these Haudenosaunee cultural institutions, visit. They are, they're wonderful institutions that are doing extraordinary work, and you will, you will get a lot from them, and it will greatly enrich you.

Kelly  53:26  
John, thank you so much for speaking with me. I really enjoyed this conversation and I just loved learning this history.

Dr. John C. Winters  53:33  
Thank you. And thank you very much for having me. It was it was a wonderful conversation.

Teddy  53:51  
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