Post-revolutionary Iroquois diplomacy witnessed efforts to protect remaining homelands from the depredations of settler governments. Through the end of the American Revolution, the Iroquois engaged actively with competing empires on the periphery of their homelands, balancing skilled negotiations conducted by a large and experienced corps of diplomats with calibrated direct involvement in warfare that preserved their well-known reputation for military strength. After the arrival of Europeans in North America, two factors made Iroquois conventions pervasive in cross-cultural diplomacy in northeastern North America: the combination of Iroquois political acumen and the geographical location of their homelands astride key water routes linking the Atlantic to the continental interior. The Iroquois’s role in treaty-making figured centrally in directing the course of empire in the colonial and post-colonial periods. When taken together, these treaties provide a historical lens through which to consider how a sequence of actors (British, Iroquois, Congress and states like New York and Pennsylvania) played critical roles in westward expansion in the periods of late colonial and early United States history. ![]() These treaties include: the1768 Boundary Line Treaty, the 1784 Treaty of Fort Stanwix and the Pennsylvania-Six Nations Land Transaction, and four Treaties negotiated by the State of New York with the Oneida (1788), Onondaga (17) and Cayuga (1790) Nations. Fort Stanwix was the site of several treaties between the British and the Iroquois, and subsequently after the American Revolution, the Iroquois and the United States as well as the State of New York. The Fort Stanwix Treaties Ethnographic Study was designed to document the legacy of treaty-making at Fort Stanwix for Haudenosaunee peoples and its impact on Indian policy from the colonial period to the present. ![]() This interpretation raises a number of historical problems, mainly because it largely overlooks the colonial context in which the meeting took place and fails to take into account the actual nature of the discussions that occurred there, the goals of those who attended the gathering, the strategies they chose to use and the factual results of this “Indian Congress.” This “Indian Congress” has received special attention in Canada since the publication of an article by John Borrows in 1997 that developed the thesis that a single treaty was negotiated at Niagara, one that allegedly incorporated the Royal Proclamation. ![]() The Niagara Congress is mentioned in past and recent studies on the history of British-Aboriginal relations immediately after the Conquest of New France. ![]() This Congress, which took place at a time when the British were deploying hundreds of soldiers throughout the Niagara area, was the first important diplomatic step in the process leading to the pacification of the Great Lakes and Ohio Valley Aboriginal nations in the wake of Pontiac’s War in 1763. The 1764 Congress at Niagara, attended by Sir William Johnson, the British Superintendent of Indian Affairs, and several Aboriginal nations from the Great Lakes, lasted nearly a month.
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