A Seneca New Order, 1790-1855.

This dissertation examines Seneca power and authority, how it changed over time in multiple cultural dimensions and on the four largest Seneca reservations of the nineteenth century: Tonawanda, Cattaraugus, Buffalo Creek, and Allegany. This is the first ethnohistory that has studied all four communities in the proposed time period. This work argues that the Seneca revolution in national governance that began in 1848, when clan-appointed chiefs were replaced with a republican form of government, was the result of an over-century of cultural change, particularly at the local level to Seneca notions of power and authority. It traces how village chiefs once led by persuasion and spiritual powers in the early nineteenth century, the influences of civic institutions in schools and churches in the 1820s and 1830s, and the rise of a new group of leaders in the 1830s and 1840s. It then shifts to the level of the nation to explore the introduction of race, class, dominance, and coercion with the Treaty of Buffalo Creek period (1838-1842), all of which radically changed Seneca power and authority. Local chiefs, who were the arbiters between their ethnic polities and the outside world, took to coercion and stratification, and an emerging group of reservation intellectuals even used the language of race in political debates. This work draws on post-colonial theory, anthropology, and sociology to make sense of how Senecas carved out their sovereignty in New York. This work also provides a unique comparative perspective. Unlike Creeks, Choctaws, and Cherokees, a realm of symbolic power with missions for over a half-century ironically enabled Senecas until the 1840s to remain in state borders and fend off the change from a government of chiefs to a western political system. This study also addresses questions of race and Indian removal in the antebellum Northeast. Removal, and its tragic costs for Native Americans, is often only discussed within the context of the Southeast. Teasing out the Quaker Hicksite anti-removal argument from published sources and archival materials in the period of Indian removal, this work brings a new perspective to race and northern middle-class benevolence. Northern whites, often portrayed as the philanthropic counterweights to southern states-rights advocates and Jacksonian removalists, also wielded race in dealings with native peoples. Hicksite Quakers in Washington D.C. with an anti-removal campaign expressed their views in a racial language also used by supporters of removal. Seneca removal may have been avoided, but, in part because of the Hicksite racialization of the Seneca government, an Indian nation permanently divided was the end result. There was a fine line between how Jacksonians employed race for removal, and the ways northern reformers harnessed similar language for benevolent purposes. Race, as a destructive force against Indians, had no sectional and political boundaries. Another important history told here is how native peoples caught within the “free soil” North adapted the same unkind markers of a capitalist social order. At points, then, emphasis is placed on racial segregation and capitalism, and their corrosive effects on Seneca leadership within New York’s borders. Through such analyses, this book offers points of comparison between one United States’ tribal polity and “tribal” governing bodies caught in processes of state or nation making in places such as Africa and the South Pacific.