Dan Budin's List: HRAF Exercise

• The general principles which will provide the frame of reference for the case are those of the application of general systems theory to social systems (Berrien 1968), the maintenance of social boundaries (Cohen 1969), and the valuable distinctions between the religious and political role networks in undifferentiated and differentiated states affecting “sanctified control hierarchies” (Rappaport 1971), applied to and described in terms of “contact communities” (Spicer 1961) as the basic systems of subsystems under examination.

• Although the cultural patterns, and probably the archaeological record, of the Lenape and their Jersey kin may have been indistinguishable in the main, ties of kinship and other behavioral concerns led these two peoples to trace very different courses through the historical record. The data on social organization and status ranking noted below are believed to be equally applicable to both populations, and one might predict that their material culture as well as belief systems were nearly indistinguishable. Thus, on some level, one could say that these people shared culture. However, how they differed in their implementation of the rules is the concern of this paper.

• The divisions in existence before the Revolution reappeared,and two factions fought for political control. Onthe one side were the warriors, pro-American in theRevolution, Christian, and favorably inclined towardWhite society. They were led by Chief Shenandoah. Onthe other side were the followers of Chief Cornelius, whosupported the traditional hereditary political and religious systems, opposed White contacts, and were pro-Britishin the Revolution. By 1805 the cleavage betweenthe factions was so intense that they signed articles dividing their territories around Oneida Lake into twoseparate reservations.

• In Southern Florida, the Seminole belong to one of three political groups controlling seven reservations. The largest of these is the Seminole Tribe of Florida. A smaller political grouping is the Miccosukee Tribe of Indians of Florida. A third group of Florida Seminole refuses to affiliate with these bodies and hold themselves independent of involvement with the U.S. government. This group is most often referred to as the Independent Seminole. All Florida Seminole derive from those families and individuals that evaded removal in the nineteenth century. The Seminole Nation includes citizens of African ancestry and there are also Afro-Seminole communities at Bracketville, Texas and Nacimiento de los Negros near Múzquiz, Coahuila, Mexico. The origins of these so-called Black Seminole goes back to the period of Seminole ethnogenesis in North Florida, when escaped slaves joined Seminole society and were integrated into its cultural fabric.

• This submode includes families and individuals who were in the process of becoming “White.” Moses Tatamy, a Jersey Indian, and his family are an example of this process. This transformation results from adoption of agrarian technology and acceptance, in some way, of Christianity. Along the frontier, such people would be enveloped by expanding settlement and absorbed into the developing community. This pattern is the variant in which the male or both partners in a couple are Lenape. Unions of European males and Lenape women appear to have been common among Scandinavian colonists after 1638, and probably continued to increase in frequency. The children of these couples, while not easily accepted, were on the road to being recognized as White. Although certain resistance by Whites to accepting these people may have existed for several generations, the process of change was in effect. Note should be made that this process must have become increasingly common after 1800 when Lenape bands, then forming loose “town” aggregates, began to practice some agriculture. This transformation had not yet taken place when Loskiel made his observations, but by the end of the nineteenth century even the “conservative” Lenape appear to have become agrarian.
• A second path of Lenape accommodation involves a process parallel to that of IIIA, but was directed toward becoming identified with the African descent population. Although Whites often infer that this process was easier, this assumption may reflect ethnocentric ideas regarding racial status differentials. Black colonists may have resisted Indian “intrusion” in a pattern similar to that of White colonists. However, this mode is one which continues to attract attention by scholars who assume that Lenape physiognomy differed from the Europeans to a degree easily detectable by the casual observer. Portraits of early Lenape, as well as all other native people on the east coast, show individuals indistinct from Europeans except in costume.

• In pre-contact times the Iroquois were a single society in which ritual fostered distributional equality. Distributive inequalities arose when a majority of the Iroquois adapted agararianism circa 1850-1860.
• Although a minority religion, the New Religion flourished in the face of the subtle totalitarianism of the state. The New Religion preserved the aboriginal redistributive ethic and various traditional rituals by integrating them within a curing complex. Class conflict arose when a segment of the Christian economic elite attempted to petition the Indian Department to abolish the hereditary form of government.
• They accomplished their objectives by establishing a form of theocracy when they condoled chiefs from Lower Cayuga Longhouse, a congregation that since the forties had allied itself with the elective forces. Today the Six Nations is internally a plural society, having two native administrative units: the Elected Council and Hereditary  Page: 321 Council. Although the Elective Council is backed by the authority of the state, its authority is not recognized by the bulk of the Longhouse people. The traditionalist sub-culture, is a corporate group, whose religious and political elite, e.g. Newhouse, David Skye, Deskaheh, continuously has evoluted the eighteenth century preachings of the native prophet in order to perpetuate aspects of traditional ideology, corporate structure and administration that date from the aboriginal era.

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• During this period, Dutch traders and Swedish colonists purchased small plots of land from the Lenape on which to establish several outposts. The Swedes erected a small village where Wilmington, Delaware, now stands. Swedish farmers spread throughout the lower half of the Lenape range, and many intermarried with Lenape. Owing to the low level of funding provided to the Swedish colonists, they could not compete in the fur trade, and they soon focused their attention on tobacco production. Swedish needs for food had stimulated the foraging Lenape, who usually gardened a bit of maize at their summer stations, to increase production for sale to the colonists. Between 1640 and 1660, maize became an important cash crop for the Lenape, providing access to European goods which other nations procured with furs. By 1660, imports of grain from other colonies had captured the local market.

• migrating north from the region of the Roanoke River in response to hostilities with White colonists. In the 1980s members of the 6 Iroquoian tribes lived in Quebec and Ontario, Canada and New York, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Oklahoma in the United States.
• On the eve of European contact the Iroquois territory extended from Lake Champlain and Lake George west to the Genesee River and Lake Ontario and from the St. Lawrence River south to the Susquehanna River. Within these boundaries each of the original 5 tribes occupied an north-south oblong strip of territory; from east to west, they were the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca. The region was primarily lake and hill country dissected by numerous rivers. Deciduous forests of birch, beech, maple and elm dominated the region, giving way to fir and spruce forests in the north and in the higher elevations of the Adirondack Mountains. In aboriginal times fish and animal species were diverse and abundant.
• In 1600 the population of the Five Nations is estimated to have been about 5,500 and that of the Tuscarora about 5,000. By 1904 the 6 Iroquois tribes numbered at least 16,000, not including several thousand persons of mixed blood. In the 1980s the total population of the 6 tribes was estimated to be over 20,000.
• The languages of the 6 tribes are classified in the Northern Iroquoian branch of the Iroquoian language family. The languages of all 6 tribes are still spoken.
• However, Iroquois aggression and expansion eventually brought them into conflict with the French and, at the same time, into closer alliance with the English. In 1687, 1693 and 1696 French military expeditions raided and burned Iroquois villages and fields. During Queen Anne's War (1702-1713) the Iroquois allied with the English and at the War's end were acknowledged to be British subjects, though they continued to aggressively maintain and extend their middleman role between English traders at Fort Orange (Albany) and native groups farther west. The victory of the English over the French in North America in 1763 weakened the power of the confederacy by undermining the strategic economic and political position of the tribes and by promoting the rapid expansion of White settlement. When the American Revolution broke out in 1775 neither the League as a whole nor even the tribes individually were able to agree on a common course of action. Most of the Iroquois allied with the British and as a result during and after the Revolution were forced from their homelands. In the period following the American Revolution the members of the Iroquois tribes settled on reservations in western New York state, southern Quebec and southern Ontario, where many of their descendants remain today.

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• n 1622 the uprising of the Potomac confederacy stimulated the Susquehannock to seek other outlets for their furs. The most convenient route ran from the head of the Chesapeake up the Elk River and, by a portage, down Minquas Creek through Lenape territory. This brought the Susquehannock to the lower end of the Delaware River where Dutch traders from New Amsterdam (New York) established a trading post. From the earliest records left by these traders, beginning in 1623, we have clear evidence that the Susquehannock abused and controlled the Lenape during this period, and the Lenape remained in their shadow for nearly forty years.