The Seneca Restoration, 1715-1754: An Iroquois Local Political Economy

The Iroquois nation, one of the most impressive Native American communities encountered by early European settlers, is commonly perceived as having plunged into a steep decline in the late seventeenth century due to colonial encroachment into the Great Lakes region. Kurt Jordan challenges long-standing interpretations that depict the Iroquois as defeated, colonized peoples by demonstrating that an important tribe of that confederacy, the Senecas, maintained an impressive political and economic autonomy and resisted colonialism with a high degree of success.By combining archaeological data grounded in the material culture of the Seneca Townley-Read site with historical documents, Jordan answers larger questions about the Seneca’s sustainability and durability in an era of intense colonial pressures. He offers a detailed reconstruction of daily life in the Seneca community and demonstrates that they were extremely selective about which aspects of European material culture, plant and animal species, and lifeways they allowed into their territory, even as the eastern Mohawk Iroquois populations were truly colonized.