The Storied Landscape of Iroquoia: History and Memory on the New York Frontier, 1750--1840

This dissertation examines the relationship between changes to the built and natural landscape of the New York frontier and the meaning attached to this landscape by the Haudenosaunee (the Iroquois Six Nations) and European-Americans, from approximately 1750 to 1840. During that period, Haudenosaunee control of the New York frontier, a region also known as Iroquoia, gave way to settlement by white Americans. Settlers imposed a new vision of the landscape on Iroquoia, invented new traditions associated with this transformation, and distorted the land's Indian past. This is a story of how through cultural reinvention and physical transformation of the landscape, non-natives became "neo-natives"---that is, how they created attachments to places by transforming the landscape and inventing their own understanding of the land's past and future. While settlers felt at home by rendering the landscape foreign to its original inhabitants, the Haudenosaunee adapted and maintained their own traditions that contested European-American accounts of their landscape's history.